Recent reviews by Procedural Texture

Few games of any genre offer such replayability, and creit goes mostly to the clever level designs of most of the heists offered in Payday 2, and in particular the opportunities for stealth. Even after 1000+ hours, I still find new ways to get to my goals and still find a successful stealth heist rewarding.

A beautiful micromanagement sim crippled by a high-level-only interface and ineffective AI. See also: exercise in frustration.

Yes, I know, if you really understand the nuances of the colonists' "AI", it is possible to keep your colony functioning. Yes, I figured out how to work around some of their irrational quirks. Nowhere is this insight available in-game; only by frustrating trial and error, guesswork, and comparing notes with others in the player forums.

This isn't gameplay. This isn't fun. It's bad game design.

Put it this way: if you were recruiting astronauts to colonize another planet, you wouldn't invest billions in a crew of mood-disordered, scatterbrained slackers. You recruit those who are effective prioritizers who get ♥♥♥♥ done.

8/10, but could've been a 9.

A thoroughly polished and almost flawless tower defense + heroes game, with a dizzying array of ability upgrades and research trees, level variety and a decent story campaign. Worth at least a 2nd playthrough.

My complaints are minor:
- There's an annoying UI glitch where selecting a tower can also immediately place that tower if a free spot happens to be underneath the button. It doesn't come up often, but on a tight level it may necessitate a restart...or 12.
- A similar glitch also happens sometimes with the earthquake and meteor spells: selecting the spell can also cause it to be immediately applied at the location behind the button.
- The story ending is an abrupt cliffhanger. EDIT: this was fixed
- A level editor and Workshop features would be very welcome, at least after they've released any planned DLC content.
- The jumping zombie animations are laughably bad.

Pixel Poetry is ambitious in scope. It tackles a series of questions that have been asked many times, and places these discussions within a history of the medium. In this, it is competent but not original.

But what it does very well is more subtle. It relates the progress, milestones and growing pains of video games to the evolution of forms of human expression and authorship as a whole. I came away with a deeper sense of what kind of *thing* a video game is, as a cultural object, and also what unrealized potentials it has.

If you're just a consumer of games, there's a well produced hour+ of infotainment here. If you also like thinking deeply about games, or applying your creativity to making them, Pixel Poetry opens up a rich vein of ideas and hopefully sets you digging.

Short and sweet puzzler. Challenging but never frustrating. If there isn't already an expansion, sequel or means for users to create their own levels, there really should. I got my money's worth, but I didn't want it to be over, and there's not much replay value.

More than a decade after release, no other building game has managed to capture the same magic that keeps me coming back. I still play it from time to time.

While still lacking somewhat in mid-to-late game progression and goals, as an open-ended construction sandbox there really is nothing that comes close. A very active community of builders and modders offer loads of content to keep you inspired and fill in many of those gaps.

Ultimately you will want to be happy to set your own constructive goals, or derive motivation from multiplayer challenge. Veterans of Minecraft and other construction games will already be familiar with this almost inevitable aspect of the genre.

The initial learning curve is fairly high, but you'll be able to design drivable and flyable vehicles quite soon (once you've gathered enough material). The design possibilities are rich enough that you will find yourself continuing to improve and refine your skills over many hundreds of hours of gameplay, and you will never completely exhaust the game's creative potential. There is much more satisfaction than frustration, and again the community has a lot of help to offer.

Issues of engine performance and physics stability during development have been 95%+ dealt with, so don't be dissuaded if you read reviews with those complaints. Visually the game is swoon-worthy gorgeous, even on a low-end machine (more than 8GB RAM is strongly encouraged, though I am not unhappy with my 8GB on a very old i5 and GTX 760).

I freely admit that I bought this on a lark because bewbs, but it is a genuinely fun game in its own right.

Without a doubt, the best RTS/tower-offense game ever made. I don't even like the RTS genre, and this absolutely sucked me in.

If one dimensional tower defense games with their fixed paths and cookie cutter mechanics bore you and insult your intelligence, this is one of a handful of titles that rise above the genre. CW3 gives you real tactical options and flexibility, a unique enemy, and a decent storyline. But most of all it's the ability to mold the terrain and manage your infrastructure and supply lines that gives this title endless replay value.

The only criticism I can offer is that a few of the storyline missions are stupidly hard in a way that there's basically only one path to victory from which you can barely deviate. Aside from those couple of frustrating levels, this game is perfection. Worth it at full price. An instant buy if you catch it on sale.

This game has no right to be as good and fun as it is. It's tower defense. It's tower defense in 3D. So what?

The unusual satisfying twist is the ability to construct insane gantries at wacky angles that can turn a terrible gun post into a brutal wall of firepower with cunning coverage across tortured Escher landscapes.

Worth it at full price. Mandatory purchase if on sale.

Similar to how the tower defense genre distills the RTS down to its immobile defensive elements, Aeon Command simplifies the RTS into a 1-dimensional clash of mobile offensive units.

There is simplified resource gathering, there is a simplified research tree, but mostly this is about spending your resources wisely and, most critically, TIMING and COMBINING your deployments for maximum effectiveness.

If you find RTS games a little too overwhelming, if you like tower defense but need a change of pace, or for that matter if you like Gratuitous Space Battles but want to be slightly more hands-on, this is a light and fun game with a decent amount of replay value. I'll be coming back to this game periodcally for quite a while.

Short learning curve, lots of tactical variety, perfect lunch break game.

A no-brainer on sale. No regrets at full price. Frankly, worth more. I'd love to see an expansion pack.