Recent reviews by Trotim

A theoretically great open source tactics game built on fundamentally flawed core gameplay that the developers have refused to address for decades.

Your units earn XP and carry over from mission to mission to the point where later levels can get extremely difficult unless you've progressed the right units. That's fine. Unfortunately, the average hit chance for attacks hovers around 40 to 60%. Based on that average hit chance, the actual damage per hit is actually very high.

But sometimes, 6 units surrounding an enemy simply won't hit a single time. Other times, 1 single enemy rolls crazy odds and snipes your leader... after minutes of you having carefully moved all your units. Some turns can go TERRIBLY wrong at no fault of your own. The game practically requires frequent reloading.

Sure, over many sessions, luck averages out just fine. But that's simply not how people play single player campaigns in tactics games. Using raw mathematical hit chance on top of low unit HP and unit permadeath is the perfect recipe for frustration.

There is an option for "Biased RNG" but it often makes campaign levels play even worse. Enemies occupy the better terrain most of the time, making the player's chance to hit lower than 50%. Therefore, biasing the RNG outcome towards the more likely result means your units will miss even more! Annoying flankers with high move speed and damage often have dodge chances of around 70%, making them even harder to deal with.

With enough mods, the game can live up to its potential and align with other popular turn based games. But then none of the campaign levels were designed around those mods and the difficulty curve goes totally out of whack.

Aesthetics and music are great. It is very moddable, has a nice editor, allows for all sorts of custom scripting. The factions have good variety. I especially like the (relatively new) Dunefolk.

A huge amount of work and attention to detail has gone into Battle for Wesnoth. Once a year or so, I get that craving for Wesnoth. It's so close to what I love. A few days later, I remember why I always stop playing it.

I've tried recommending this game to friends, even played multiplayer games with friends, and all of them came back upset. That makes me sad.

Underrated beat'em'up with randomly generated rooms and items.
Coop works great, even online (it saves your progress exactly where you disconnected, enemy health and all).
Star of the game is the best basic combat system I've seen in a while. Simple controls, surprisingly high depth.

We liked this game much better than Castle Crashers. Humour isn't as juvenile, there's many more things to unlock, rooms and items are more interesting. Great hidden gem

I really wish this game's modding scene had become more popular. Thankfully the ones that are there do improve gameplay enough for it to be a nice budget hack-and-slash.

It doesn't take full overhauls either. Simply grab some quality of life mods. Mods that improve item variety. A couple that add new terrain chunks for random generation.

I wouldn't recommend vanilla TL2 anymore. But as the only moddable ARPG it still has a niche I like coming back to.

Game got a lot of good reviews back then. I finally got it in a Steam sale to play with a friend of mine over the internet.

Constant FPS drops remained even after we took the ridiculous advice to switch to 800x600 resolution. Can't remap buttons. Annoyingly long unskippable cutscenes with puerile humor.

Gameplay is uninteresting. Hell I'd even call it grindy. You're stuck with the same class the entire campaign as switching to level 1 knights is suicide.
Enemy attacks aren't telegraphed well, felt impossible to avoid. Player combos are very limited.

By the time we got to the Panda village we couldn't make progress anymore. We tried leveling up in earlier levels but it simply wasn't fun.

I tried really hard to keep spirits up. But my friend had absolutely no motivation left.
Now it sits in my library forever unfinished. I played it a few more times, but, well... he's right.
It's kind of a crap game.

Promising "slice" of a polished puzzle game akin to Portal or Antichamber. Thought-provoking texts that if you aren't into philosophical themes are easy to ignore

Annoying trial & error minigame that made me feel stupid after the great Talos Principle demo managed to make me feel smart. The rewards are random messages that mean nothing to me