Recent reviews by k5

The game maintains the polished semblance of a deeper idle game, but doesn't particularly satisfy on any metric.

However, it's great value for the price.

Blue Prince takes the format of the board game "Betrayal at House on Hill" and warps it into a puzzle roguelike point and click adventure in first person. Many of the puzzles play nicely within their respective rooms, and the overarching map puzzle slots together, pardon the pun, nicely as you play.

While bad RNG does often lead to a reset in the house, there is ample documentation strewn around the various rooms, giving players hints as to how to progress if they're stuck, suggesting that they try new rooms whenever they can rather than trying to force it through with some half-informed strategy they came up earlier in the game.

The game offers a plethora of rooms at base for the player to find, and all the more splendidly, also offers just as many rooms to unlock during the game. There always seems to be something to do, at least for the first twelve hours of the game. After that, your goals start to blend together as they come toward their singular purpose.

The gameplay distils the concept of 'collect resource, expand' to its essence. While I'd prefer a minecraft skyblock run any day, the forward momentum of this game is pretty compelling, and the amount of content makes up for the pitiful breadth of gameplay.

Playing this game will waste around 40 hours of your life. Less, if you let your stickman afk upgrade resources in the background.

Price is a little steep for what it provides, but not outrageous.

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop, despite what every fibre of my being believed when I first comprehended the 'roguelite fix'em'up' tagline, delivers on its promise solidly.

In the early game, when you're not used to the rules and modules, there's a distinct KTANOE feeling as you jump around the manual trying to get a grasp on each module as you fix them. But the modules aren't that complicated and eventually you can repair most off of memory, with the remaining few usually being a big enough job that the refresher isn't that big a deal.

While I'm sure the game can be beaten without them by someone with palms sweatier than mine, a handful of the permanent upgrades are practically necessary to win. Particularly the floodlights (allow you to buy time), and the instant free power tools (together worth 200 coins). The temporal storage is mandatory, so far as I can tell, for the 'true' ending. The repair storage might also be, but I think the temporal can be used to get around that.

The only complaints I have are that the lategame modules are too simple, too few and too rare; that one of the side quest hooks demands you speak to an npc that offers you 'a solution' if you can't make R.E.N.T. - which I could effortlessly make at that point in my run; and that a different side quest is just a tiny bit too irritating to start.

8.5/10 strong recommend if a slightly tedious gameplay loop can be excused for an interesting little story. Short, sweet and not too silly.

The fact that I'm this late to reviewing Factorio speaks to both my forgetfulness and the power of the steam award badges.

Factorio is top notch. It is the epitome of "the devs think of everything" and it embodies the factory builder game to its very essence. Unlike in Satisfactory, the closest comparable game, every single building has to be built from parts, and then, every single building can be produced through automation. Building manually can become building with construction bots, which becomes building remotely with construction bots once the logistics network is set up, and eventually evolves into blueprints that take one click to stamp down an entire factory, anywhere you want, from anywhere in the world.

2.0 brings in so much quality of life and improvements in general that it almost feels as though everything before it was just a late-stage early access release. And though we miss our purple boi, his sacrifice was not in vain.

If even a fraction of the screenshots entices you, and you have a few hundred hours to spare, don't even question it. Just buy the game. There aren't any sales on the game ever, so just do it immediately. Buy the game. Play it. Build the factory. The factory must grow.

Blending the format of Among Us and the board game Secret Hitler, as well as a smattering of the party game Mafia, Killer Within manages to pull off the social deduction genre in a heart-pumping and exciting way.

On the killer's side, the ability to murder at a distance is well balanced by the need for prior contact, and every possible suspicious action is directly balanced by the investigators having a task that directly looks like the suspicious action. Being caught red-handed is a little bit too strong a disadvantage, however, because the very tasks obscuring your action may lead investigators directly to you.

On the investigators' side, completing tasks with more fervour directly serves to muddy the waters, giving them progress in the investigation meter at the cost of obscuring the very crimes that would let them arrest the killer. The risky events that can be triggered by the killer's side are difficult to coordinate resolving, and the chief investigator (obscured among the others) tends to only make a small difference in their favour even under the best of circumstances, leading to not inconsistent frustration and a difficulty in prioritising success over self-preservation (especially among the younger-sounding players), especially when it's difficult to expect your contribution to an event will count for anything.

The Good:
Every role has its own heart pumping moments. Investigators must balance approaching someone with the risk they'll lose their ID and eventually be killed. The chief investigator has to avoid the tasks others will flock to, making them seem more suspicious, but also keeping them safe from the instant loss condition that their death will lead to. The killer can do his deed anywhere, but must be careful not to be witnessed, and his helper's role in sabotaging the lives of the investigators directly is contingent on disposing of the evidence before being caught with it.

Because being captured without evidence only leads to a temporary disadvantage, and swapping the notebook is possible, being eliminated as a member of the killer team is avoidable with good predictions.

So far, almost every idea I've had for altering the gameplay or balance has, upon further inspection, been solidly balanced by direct consequences to how other parts of the game have been affected, and I hope later updates will bring many of them to life.

The Bad:
Self preservation can lead to investigators directly sabotaging their own cause purely to stay alive. There are also cheaters out there who will outright send other players video captures of their games just to win. It's impossible so far to disable non-essential cutscenes to speed the game up.

Voice chat is practically mandatory to enjoy the game, but it's impossible for the host to mute someone after the round has begun if they're being disruptive, or abort the round entirely to remove them from the server - something necessary when a player is doing nothing but blaring toilet sounds to everyone's headsets. Some players will immediately quit a round after their role is assigned if they don't get the one they want, however this is being addressed by the developer.

Kira events need to be fully completed or will count as a failure, leading to most players abandoning any attempt at resolving the event unless they can fully trust the others will help. Events in general, while spicing up the round, need further development and rework to truly be more than an annoyance. In 12 hours of play, for example, the only time I've seen the Decoy event be completed in the killer's favour was when I was playing killer myself.

A few interfaces during the meeting could use some sprucing up - for example your own suspect list, as well as suspects of dead investigators (when you possess their death message), and also the joint investigators of that round, should be shown directly on the meeting screen without needing to open up other interfaces.

The Ugly:
The custom game settings are woefully inadequate and every time I have an idea I find it impossible to achieve. For example, there's no way to dead drop incriminating evidence (that could potentially be recovered by another investigator, but also lead to that investigator's imprisonment if they're suspected while possessing it) while potentially generating a witness report when done.

Even something as simple as scheduling which event cards become available at what level is impossible. Many settings are poorly labeled. For example, id theft mode explains nearly nothing in its description, but the setting determines whether it's possible to steal an ID card at the closer range of direct investigations, or at the larger 'item giving' range.

Despite being quite a compelling feature, the 'dark room' in the toy town map is universally hated - more so than the path blocking.

In conclusion,
this game is wonderful as is, and has lots of potential, but needs work to bring its beauty to the dazzling brilliance I know it can reach. Its simple depth is unmatched and the game's artistic vision is both true to the source DEATH NOTE while remaining compelling and comprehensible.

Strong recommend for everyone. Must Buy for DEATH NOTE fans.

P.S. This review was written without referring to lore-specific details. For those unaware, the chief investigator is known as L, and the English word "killer" is corrupted to the name "Kira".

Update: Playing Production Line reminded me of another game in my library called Big Pharma. And then I saw that they were both games by the same developer. PL is great if you love manufacturing in many steps, but Big Pharma is the superior game in most ways.

The following is the text of my review back when it was 'positive':

In my experience, this entire game is more or less entirely about keeping yourself afloat long enough to max out research, and then making the most high throughput factory you can.

A core mechanic that I haven't bothered interacting with at all is in mixing production. If there's a bottleneck at a facility somewhere, you can alleviate it by moving production of cars which don't use that facility for as long to said line. I get around it by just making luxury vehicles.

"But not yet."

It's not completely polished. The engine still clunks here and there, especially when it's time for the AI's turn and the whole thing freezes up on you. Features that, these days, would be considered essential are missing at launch, like online multiplayer. Customizing a game is possible but somewhat incomplete, especially when it comes to there being a single world generator. It's pretty obvious that they pulled the same thing as Cities Skylines 2: releasing it early to hit some sort of deadline rather than finishing it up.

The interface? Sucks. First thing's first it takes a solid second of hovering over something to see the info popup, which is infuriating. They're not always useful, either: in the mid to late game you unlock tier 2 production buildings. The first farm gives you one (or two) wheat and some food. The second farm's tooltip shows you that you just get that wheat when worked, and an arcane 'gather' line, while losing the bonus food. What that means is that you're now getting another set of the wheat, which is worth more than generic food, without having to work it. But to the untrained eye, it looks like a straight downgrade. The tiles in a region's work summary do not help. Nor does the fact you can't click the button to get into the production page from that unless the region isn't producing anything. The region production menu is a scrollfest, when built buildings could be shrunken, tucked off to the side and separated from the actual options I have.

But I obviously like the game otherwise I wouldn't have given it a nice 'yes' recommendation. While I'm sure the balance could be improved, every bit of investment into infrastructure is also a risk. The faster you build your cities the longer they'll be underdefended. The more you improve your regions the less flexibility you have when problems arise. But if you take the risk, you'll eventually come to a point where the cities have nothing to give but the very armies you've denied them. Regions will become full of bustle and life and let you integrate another region and move your attention to it. The trading and resource micromanagement is intense and gives you various options for shaping your empire around the resources you have, while filling in the gaps with imports from elsewhere.

Incremental games tend to live on drawing their play out while remaining enthralling the entire time. Sixty Four manages to be both a short experience while also dragging out for uncomfortably long. The only thing going for it is its art and music.

The early game has some exciting discovery but it fails to land right. Even this early, you can see the beginnings of the bad cost scaling that makes you stare at what you have rather than heading off to make more. It's like if in factorio, growing the factory became prohibitively expensive after you had just enough stuff to build a mall.

Midgame turns what you already had into a slog by limiting one of the resources to a certain amount. As things grow, the game becomes a painfully slow whack-a-mole where you can't really leave the game on idle, but poking the thing you need to poke is infrequent enough that you just get infuriated.

Endgame unlocks automation, which spares you that clicking, but slows down to an even slower crawl as that earlier limitation (plus another limitation that is at least executed well) basically completely dominates your progression until you unlock the final mining tool, at which point you'd be better off saying the game is done because the remaining four hours are going to be nothing more than the game stalling.

The controls and widgets are also painful. The building panel has the slowest scrolling and most painful organization, and that's in compact mode. Full mode with the text description of every building is even worse. The buildings don't even tell you what resources you still need to acquire them, so you're stuck flicking your eyes between the top left and the right to compare what you have to what you need.

Deconstruction is utterly agonizing, as there's no area or click-drag deconstruction - you have to click on every building one by one, and worse still, if you click on an empty tile with the deconstruct tool selected, it unselects and you have to enable it again - thankfully a single key press, but still an annoying interruption.

When you upgrade a building, it refunds the lesser version as though it was deconstructed. Nevertheless, you can't build the upgrade unless the lesser version is there. Early on, the game touts how you can hover over a machine and press a button to be able to select it and build it. The moment all your machines are upgraded, you can no longer use this feature because you need the base versions to start from. In other words, the game has a feature that spares you from the agony of using the construction panel, which becomes useless the moment you reach midgame and sends you right back to scrolling through that terrible thing.

There's no way to move stuff around. If you want to expand a build and another build is too close, you just need to deconstruct it in its entirety and rebuild it elsewhere. Because of the cost scaling, you can't build it and then delete the original. Because two resources are capped, even deconstructing first means waiting for those capped resources to renew when rebuilding.

There's an object a ten-second scroll up on the map. Or ten screens worth of right-click dragging. On a map that is completely blank and featureless except for the one machine you start with, said object, and anything you've built. This is not hinted at in any way I can tell, except the faux-dialog box in the bottom left. After a certain point in the game, ignoring that object will cause annoying effects that slow down the entire game's pace. If you do get this game, move all your buildings up there the moment you unlock the recycling building - having to click-drag once every time you load in is better than having to zip back and forth every time another cube spawns.

Pros: art's nice, sound design is pleasant, the core idea behind the game is great despite the execution in this particular entry. The minor story-exposition thing in the bottom left corner is nice but mostly meaningless.

The end credits screen tells you to close the game and play cookie clicker. I recommend not even opening this game and just going straight to cookie clicker.

tl;dr:
too many interruptions to be a chill idle game
too surreal to be a train builder game
too much gaminess to be a trading game

Tiny Rails is very much a mobile game retrofitted to remove the mtx. If you like watching sprites of scenery roll past your train, it's for you. If you're more of a railway logistics or realism person, you'll find this game creatively bankrupt.

In practice, it's one of those occasional interaction games. Sometimes you need to press the cleanup buttons. Sometimes you need to trigger the train to leave the station. Sometimes you need to click on the cash-producing railcars to clear them out. You can skip most of that by just keeping the game closed and letting the number passively go up.

The story is pretty much textbook "Evil Megacorporation tries to Purchase Your Business and will go so far as to Crush You if you refuse so go do your Business to Show those Bad Businessmen that You're Real." It serves the purpose of keeping you going whenever you get bored of watching numbers go up, or a cash influx in the early stages when you're not making money hand over fist and moving at mach 3 speed.

But the above isn't enough to make this a negative. In fact, it's quite nice for train ASMR and such in the background. In terms of price it's hard to justify. Ten (Canadian) dollars of content? Sure, but most of it is watching sprites repeat in the background, and whatever effort it took to make them transition in the right place. The lower level railcar sprites which you'll never see again once you upgrade that car to the maximum level.

As for quality of life, there are a good number of annoyances. If you enable auto-departure, your train's menu will vanish at stops until you leave. The auto-repair and auto-clean buttons feel as though they would have used the Premium Currency in the mobile incarnation, so that you didn't have to click every car to fix and freshen them, and could easily be combined into a single button (or better yet, automated with employee services along with auto-collecting revenue from the railcars that generate it). Finally, there's no way to cancel auto-departure once you reach a station: disabling the setting only takes effect on the next station and leaves you with the annoying task of having to reenable it afterward.

The above also highlights my lie in the first paragraph: if you like watching sprites of scenery roll past your train, this game could be for you, if it weren't for all the constant attention it demanded. I'm still 'playing' it but I know at some point I'm going to uninstall it and never remember it exists again.