Recent reviews by [QCG] Aaron

Not enjoyable in its current state. The game successfully transports you into Chornobyl visually, but whatever immersion it earns is immediately squandered by poor, clunky mechanics. In-game actions like using your shovel to move radioactive rubble are floaty and imprecise (be ready to see a lot your shovel clipping through the level geometry as you fail to pick up radioactive rocks) and the inventory system is sticky and unintuitive (press I to open inventory, assign bandage to hotbar slot, close inventory, select inventory slot using number key, let click to use bandage).

The game also suffers from dissonance between its intent and its gameplay. It's possible I just haven't done enough research, but I don't recall ever hearing about how the Chornobly firefighters completed elaborate jumping/exploration puzzles as part of their attempts to quell the initial flames. And when you fail those puzzles on account of the aforementioned floaty mechanics, be ready to spend a lot of time in save/load screens.

These factors combine to ruin what would otherwise be an incredibly interesting and immersive walking simulator. The mechanics aren't enough to carry the experience, and the constant bugs/frustration prevent you from immersing yourself in the premise. You can't ever stay fully in the mindset of a Liquidator, because you're constantly being reminded that you're playing a video game.

Mechanically convoluted, tonally dissonant, and lacking a clear vision of what it wants to be.

If you're looking for a gritty political simulator, you'll be irritated when the game asks you to devote your time to enhancing the reputation of a street drug bearing your Vice President's name, or when you lose reputation for not allowing a budget-driven sci fi blockbuster to shoot inside the White House.

If you're looking for a tongue-in-cheek Mad World presidency, you'll be irritated when the game asks you to tackle school shootings, terrorist incidents, and drug crime.

If you're looking for a competent strategy game, you'll be irritated when an option labeled "host a charity benefit for hurricane relief" actually means "host a charity benefit in the ruins of still-battered town, hindering the ongoing search and rescue efforts," or when voters disapprove of your banning gambling in apps for children.

Ultimately, it's not even clear to me what game the developers *wanted* to make -- only that they've failed to make *any* of those options, and you get to experience all of those failures, all at once.

Everyone is right when they call this game Ikea Simulator. Assembly Required is a suprisingly-deep take on the tower defense genre, set in your own nightmare maze of varnished-pine and laminate. The goal is simple enough: milk every last dime out of the fools who dare set foot in your temple to self-built furniture, lest they register a complaint with management.

The basic mechanics will be familiar to anyone interested in the genre. Customers take the place of creeps; displays take the place of towers. You layout your store using different furniture-themed puzzle pieces, each with their own dimensions and catchement areas. Customers come in four flavors (bachlor, couple, family, and grandmother), and three wealth levels. Given time and money, you can unlock new pieces and upgraded versions of old pieces, locked in an arms race with the increasingly-wealthy (and demanding) customers who saunter through your sliding glass doors.

In addition to the maze-making, you'll also manage your employees. Some are straightforward, adding durability to displays or increasing the amount of damage (called patience, in game) you heal between rounds. The interesting twist comes from managing your stock and sales-minions. This becomes important as the difficulty mounts: successfully deploying a sales-minion to the correct display (a futon for a bachelor, e.g.) can empty a wealthy patron's pockets when they might otherwise escape your maze. Given your limited supply of both warehouse stock and sales-homonculi, each wave takes on a tactical twinge as you search for children with mohawks or grandmas with fanny packs. These visual cues tell you who the moneybags are, and thus where you'll need to send your sales-cretins. Later on, special shoppers enter the fray, forcing you to reposition your pill-shaped personnel on the fly or suffer the consequences.

Of course, minions demand wages and inventory must be purcahsed, which means you'll be doing a bit of financial management between rounds. Do you hire another stock-urchin so you can pitch more sweet deals when it matters, or do you splurge on the upgraded version of that heart-shaped couples bed? Or maybe those pennies would be better pinched in service of a few more displays, lengthing the maze? The layers of decisions making are satisfying, indeed.

That said, there are a number of bugs and other technical issues, and the game does a poor job of tutorializing itself. To the developer's credit, they have acknowledged these shortcomings and appear to be working in earnest to iron out the kinks and deliver a properly-polished product. While irksome, it hasn't prevented me from enjoying the game as a whole.

Generally enjoyable, if you're already a fan of the Lovecraft universe. Otherwise, avoid it.

Everything about Call of Cthulhu can be summed up as "a good start, falling off in the second half." Environments, characters, story, gameplay, all of it is great for the first few hours, after which it becomes apparent the developers ran out of time, money, or both. Somewhere around the four hour mark, the game goes screaming towards a conclusion, throwing aside all of the carefully-built suspense and atmosphere.

A good enough concept, but the gameplay and controls clash to the point of ruining the experience. On face, it tries to be a more-frenetic version of FTL. Same micromanagement, but at a faster pace. The problem comes when the controls get in the way. Switching between crew members, tasks, and modes is an unpleasant experience at the intereface level, which means every part of the core gameplay loop is affected.

If you're going to make me "tag" fighters before my gunners' brains switch on, then giving me a sluggish "tag" camera is either poor design or artificial difficulty. The same applies for waypoints, which must also be tagged lest your pilot derp in the same direction for eternity, except they offer even less information. Is that one north? A mandatory objective? Who knows! In theory, this is supposed to be part of the gameplay: your one brain is responsible for the tasks divided between seven brains in reality. But the lack of information presented in the interface, combined with the constant distraction of gummed-up controls, make this more of a chore than a challenge.

Spend 20 hours designing the perfect coaster. Forget to build park around your coaster. Doesn't matter.

I left this game with extremely mixed feelings. I enjoyed the art style, the diversity of characters, and the overall tone. Unfotunately, the story and mechanics rip apart what would have otherwise been a true gem of a game. The resource management is tough -- it's supposed to be -- and you do feel pressure to manage your survivors' needs vs. the demand for new materials, food, and water. It's just hard to find the will to continue when the game goes out of its way to hate you.

1. The story is a bite-for-bite rip off of Lost, from beginning to end. They've changed a few things, added a dash of mythology to spice up the soup, but you realize exactly how things are going to play out within the first twenty minutes of game time. It takes a lot of the meaning away, once you realize you're clicking through a story you already know.

2. Characters have relationship levels with one another, but it dosen't seem to matter. Each day ends with a vignette between two of your survivors. Most of these events are negative, which is a fine way to add tension into the game. Except one character decided to piss on another character's food despite being max relationship, doubling the amount she needed to be fed that day. Another started an argument with the entire group, again at max relationship, and tripled the amount of depression that needed fixing the next day.

Either relationships matter, in which case the code should care too, or they don't, in which case why are they in the game?

3. Holy Jesus the boss fight. There's only one boss in this game, and you will hate to fight it. The entire fight is a choose-your-own-adventure style, "decide what move to use now" click-a-thon. Except there is no choice, because your charater will only be high enough in one of three major stat areas, so you'll pick that one every time.

Failing at any part of the seven or eight even sequence starts you over, with the success rates falling each successive round. "Beating" the boss is essentially no more complicated (or easy) than rolling a dice six times, and getting six ones in a row. Uninteresting, repetitive, and wholly subject to the in-game RNG with no input from the player.

Buy it if you're willing to overlook those flaws, but wait until it's on sale.

Clockwork Empires had promise, but the developers have abandoned the project. The game is by no means finished. Just another example of a publisher cashing in on Early Access sales and walking away with the money.

Time hasn't been kind to the graphics, but this remains one of the best CRPGs to ever grace a hard drive. Amazing, interesting characters fill a dark and compelling setting brought to life by an incredible soundtrack. The story is brilliant and well-written: both the main story arc and sidequests are far beyond what most studios put out these days.

The game does suffer in the third act -- it was rushed out of production and it shows, painfully -- but the last levels are a small price to pay for the first three-quarters of the game. Be sure to look for the unofficial patch, as it remedies a number of bugs and salvages content cut from the final release.

Halcyon 6 wants to be a good game. And somewhere inside what you can buy right now, a good game no doubt exists. Unfortunately, minor annoyances, tedius gameplay, and an inexplicably sharp difficulty curve bring down what is otherwise an entertaining experience.

-------

1. Base Management
The game draws parallels to XCOM with its ant-farm base building. You clear rooms. You put stuff in the rooms. You research new stuff. You clear new rooms. You put new stuff in new rooms. With rare exception, you can assign officers to the rooms to generate resources, conduct research, or upgrade ships.

Unfortunately, this devolves into a click-fest micromanagement hell. Officers assigned to generate resources must be reassigned every few days -- a minute or so, real time -- with each assignment dragging you away from whatever you were doing to click through four layers of menus. Want more dark matter? Click the base menu. Click the dark matter converter. Click the mission. Assign the officer. Click to confirm. Click back out of the base menu. Go back to what you were doing. Then repeat this process every 60-90 seconds, multiplied by the number of dark matter/mineral/crew missions you want to run concurrently.

I'm not sure why the designers didn't allow for an auto-repeat option, or set rooms to passively generate resources if an officer is assigned. Instead, base management feels like a grindy clicker game.

2. The Galaxy Map
Your station sits in a neat galaxy, populated with a few different factions and colonies that can provide resources if you keep them alive. The Big Bad occasionally sends monsters to eat your colonies; fight off the monsters or lose the colonies. Here again, the game descends into tedium. Different colonies generate different resources, and each has a storage cap. Collecting them means sending a fleet to each colony, every time they're full. Click to send fleet. Click to collect resource. Click to confirm collecting. Click to return to galaxy map. Click to send fleet. Repeat up to a dozen times, depending on how many colonies are alive.

The caps are small enough that you lose significant production by not constantly circling through your delivery route. The cap for crew colonies is around two dozen, and they generate two per day. Every five minutes, go and pick up your crew. And your dark matter. And your materials. And also fight off the 3-5 enemy fleets that appear semi-regularly.

Manual harvesting doesn't add anything to the experience. An automated system, even if it meant investing in shuttles or whatever in-universe gimmick would explain it, would remove the tedium but allow the player to choose and manage. Instead, it's like playing an iOS game; better log in every ten minutes to tap the farm, or else it's not going to generate any more melons!

3. Combat
Both ground and space combat are turn-based JRPG style. The primary mechanic is applying and exploiting different effects for bonus damage. Knock out an enemy's sensors by uploading a virus from your science ship, and your tactical ship's next hasass attack hits twice as hard. Effectively executing this cycle is mandatory: you will lose battles if you mash attacks without planning. Pulling off combos feels good, and reward smart play.

Unfortunately, there are only so many workable combos. Each ship type has a pre-set list of attacks; each officer has a randomly generated list of attacks. Once you've figured out which combination the random character generator has blessed you with, every battle plays out in the same loop. After your 50th round of (breach hull) + (portal gun) = damage, it stops feeling fun.

Critical hits and dodges mix things up, but not in a good way. In more difficult fights, an early crit from the enemy means saving and reloading. Resources are too tight to spam ships, and experienced officers cannot be easily replaced. God forbid you lose a Legendary Officer -- who have special, extremely powerful skills -- because that's gone forever now. Moreover, retreating from a losing battle applies permanent debuffs to the survivors. It feels like a squad-wipe in XCOM: it's not worth fighting forward.

4. Difficulty Curve
This deserves special mention. Through the first few hours, the game is tough but fair. At a certain point, doing thing X will trigger event Y and summon boss Z. You'll get a 50-day warning until Boss Z arrives at your station and murderates everyone. Fighting Boss Z requires fully-upgraded T3 ships, though, which isn't mentioned at any point along the way. If you don't have them when you trigger the event, stop your game and start over.

It's a bizarre punishment. The game actively encourages you to do Thing X, which can be accomplished easily with T2 ships. Then, presumably with a cruel smirk on its face, the game mentions you should spend thousands of units of resources building and upgrading a proper defense fleet within a strict time limit, or lose.

-------

I don't want to sound too down on the game, because I enjoyed large parts of it. The story is fairly generic but well-written and engaging, the NPC races are fun to interact with, and the combat feels tense but (minus absurd crits) skill-based. If the developer patches in some kind of automation and softens the difficult curve, Halcyon 6 will be the great game it so desperately wants to be.

Until then? I'd recommend buying something else.