Recent reviews by paperpancake

Fun, relaxing PvE game with a cool concept. Deckbuilding roguelike kind of like Slay the Spire, but the story and mechanics center on hope, despair, balance, relationships, courage, and fear rather than combat. I enjoyed playing it a few times. It looks like it's still receiving updates, and I look forward to playing it again in the future. :)

Oldie but a goodie

Throw asteroids, have fun.
Throw more asteroids, have more fun.

I love that this game has both PvP and PvE options. Gold 2v2 offers the greatest excitement, of course, but the Golem Challenge is a fun alternative game mode for when I feel like trying for solo perfectionist speedruns, or for when I want something more cooperative than competitive.

The gameplay is super fun and just what I've been looking for. It's a tug-of-war style game with some elements of Direct Strike or Art of War: Red Tides mixed with elements games like Clash Royale or Minion Masters. Individual games can last between 2 and 20 minutes, depending on how close the match is and whether one team is rushing.

The skins are a bit expensive, though I've splurged on a few. The good news is that even the free versions look great.

Edit: This game is getting relaunched soon with a new name, Crystal Clash, due to a change in ownership. (At least, that's what the announcements on Discord say.) The game is down in the meantime.

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I love that this game has a PvE option for both solo and coop called the Golem Challenge. I've spent many hours experimenting with different decks and strategies for speed-running the Golem Challenge at all five difficulty levels.

Rise of Legions is great if you bring friends to PvP with you, or if you enjoy the PvE challenges like I do. If you want to queue against random players, though, you might be disappointed. The player base is currently small and the PvP queues are fairly quiet. Because of this, matchmaking seems to be based just on deck tiers rather than something like MMR, and sometimes you might play against an AI anyway if there aren't enough players in the queue. I would love to see more people get into this game and make it more lively.

The gameplay is like a mix between Direct Strike (in Starcraft 2's arcade) and games like Clash Royale or Minion Masters. Individual games usually only take a few minutes, though hotly contested matches in gold tier can sometimes last almost 20. I feel like Rise of Legions does a good job introducing the different units, buildings, spells, and spawners. You unlock new ones by completing quests using the starting cards via something that looks like a skill tree or a tech tree. There were a few times it felt like a grind, but mostly I felt encouraged to learn how each of the cards work. You can use in-game currency to get the specific cards you want, but it's F2P friendly and not the endless grind that you'll find in some games (looking at you, Clash Royale). Rise of Legions has generous friend referral bonuses, introductory rewards, daily and weekly rewards, and so forth.

The download is relatively small and quick, and the game is free, so what do you have to lose? Rise of Legions is worth checking out.

The new multiplayer in the Butcher's Circus FreeLC is a fun addition, and I'm happy to have a chance to play this with family and friends. I'm not sure about the multiplayer's replayability, but for now I'm enjoying being devious and dealing stress damage for a change instead of just taking it all the time.

Most of my time in this game has been spent in the single-player campaign, which I thoroughly enjoy. The Lovecraftian themes in this game stick with you. The narration, the characters, and the enemies you face in turn-based combat are just the beginning. Darkest Dungeon has a stress mechanic can drive your characters to madness or cause their hearts to fail. Even the party-management system is on theme. You can care about your heroes and (try to) keep your adventurers mentally and physically healthy functional by encouraging religion or vice and subjecting them to questionable care in the sanatorium, or you can use your adventurers up and discard them when their minds and bodies break and they are no longer useful to you. You can walk with the relative safety of a well-lit torch and minimize the treatments you'll need to administer to your heroes when they return, or you can embrace the dark and inflict more suffering on your adventurers to gain more rewards.

If you have an SSD, install this game to your SSD. The loading times can be pretty long otherwise. (Things got much faster with the Dec 2019 Potion of Speed update, but load times still benefit from an SSD.)

The battle controls took some getting used to (this is the first Total War game I've played). Since individual battles are pretty fast-paced, I miss some shortcuts that other games have, like Find Idle Units, Attack Move, etc. In many battles, you can pause to give orders, but that doesn't help as much on legendary difficulty or in multiplayer. I ended up making a Find Idle Units mod.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1961243473
There's so much content, for both campaign maps and battles. The campaign map has a lot in common with 4X games like Civilizations, but the battles are in real-time (similar to the old Lords of the Realm or Lords of Magic games, but with much more detail and tactical options).

Most of my time so far has been spent in the vanilla Warhammer II game, so yes, you can enjoy hours and hours of gameplay with the base game alone. I got the first Warhammer game just last month, so now I'm excited to try out the Mortal Empires campaign that it unlocks. I'm also looking forward to trying popular mods like Boyz will be Boyz and SFO.

While I have some complaints about this game, there is much more that I love, so much so that this is one of my favorite games. I expect to spend many, many more hours having fun with Total War Warhammer.

Short game that's easy to learn and fun and relaxing to play. Hats off to the developers! Thanks for sharing it with us.