Recent reviews by welbow

Balatro is a simply perfect single-player deck-based engine-builder, based on poker, with Jokers (the main engine building components) changing the winning power of the poker hands.

The game is at its best when you're creating a strategy on the fly, that pays off in a way you didn't see coming. Or making a comically massive mistake in removing a joker or going for the wrong hand. Other great moments are when winning hangs in the balance of just one more discard or hand.

The game has options for slight changes in difficulty and challenges and starting decks, with progress unlocking new Jokers and Vouchers along the way, and a list of challenges that change the entire game. So much content to win or try winning with to the point you could play this game for hundreds of hours.

The main minor flaw I rly see with the game design is perhaps the tedious beginning phase where you can essentially fail out of a valid strategy very quickly in early rounds due to bad luck, requiring resetting to try something new. (You can retry the same beginning phase, but you'd have to restart the seed which removes a lot of the randomness.) Thankfully this early tedious phase is quick to retry and allows seeing more options quickly. But still can take a few resets before you get something workable on the board. You could also argue this is a good thing for letting new players explore the core mechanics and get a hang of the basic hands, probabilities, and points required.

This game honestly has some of the tightest colony sim building placement game design I've seen yet. There's a lot of really clever design in challenging the player to optimize their base. BUT, it sucks that it's in a game without any personality.
(1) This game lacks the kind of big pay-off moments that good colony sims have where you see the immediate benefits of the big project you just finished. You finally tech up a level (there's only 3 tech levels, but once I saw the production requirements for the 3rd tech layer in campaign, I just quit the game), and your reward is having to re-optimize the colony and add a ton more supporting production buildings to fuel the next wave of production. If you like optimizing that kind of thing for a long time, this might be the game for you, but personally I finished campaign missions feeling unsatisfied.
(2) There's no underlying personality to the robots that build the base, i.e. every robot is essentially the same as every other robot, except for their job, removing any kind of story-crafting abt the colony for the player's imagination. The colony itself doesn't rly have anything other than your own building placement style to characterize it.
(3) There's combat, but I don't like it, and don't have much to say abt it.
(4) There's co-op and multiplayer, and these seem ok for a chill night with friends for Co-op. But it seems like competitive multiplayer would be a wash if you didn't understand the optimization equally well as opponents.

Got this in a humble bundle and was pleasantly surprised! This game is all the best parts of playing StarCraft 2 Zerg, and draws you in with its simplicity before turning up the complexity, and trying out different upgrade combos to try and beat levels.
The only negative I have for the game is that the middle part once you discover builder rapid hive building at the start of the level is kinda boring (a little empowering though), as you just slam the enemies with a lot of the most basic units at a rapid build rate. I think a lot of those levels could be cut, and their upgrade points moved to other levels, without losing anything and getting more interesting content in a shorter time.
This goes away by the end of the game, as you need to strategize more.

3D indie platformer that is definitely worth a play. It's fun puzzling out platforming challenges with limited moveset, (i got one of the final 5 bosskeys by essentially just jump dashing over to it), and the character design for the player character Sybil is amazing (good googly moogly!). It leans into its retro style and is short enough to not out-stay its welcome, being beatable in less than 6hrs easily.
I have only a few complaints.
(1) Going around in circles because you missed the one thing you didn't check closely enough. This game uses only level design and limited places to go to guide you around the map, so you can end up in frustrating backtrack circles where you retrace your steps to find path you missed. I like that the game doesn't hold your hand and you can honestly check everywhere you been in a relatively short amount of time. BUT it def needs some kind of clue system for important upgrades.
(2) Required upgrades and QoL upgrades need better signaling to the player. I rly like that you can get upgrades in whatever order you can achieve the path to reach them, but some are kinda dumb. Like, the green door barrier breaking upgrade is dumb, it's a charge attack which is cool, but it's a key for like 3 doors in the game, one being required. The QoL upgrades also need better signaling, even though conquering certain sections with clever movement instead of the intended ability is fun, the forward slide jump dash addition is too good to miss early on imo. The game proper doesn't start until you get that upgrade imo.
(3) The goat baddie sybil got me distracted at work and stuff. (quads for days)

build machine. feels good.

i wish it was less grindy. But i'm still having fun. Good game to play with friends while relaxing and not needing to focus too hard.

Probably one of the best simulation games I've ever played.
If you have any passing interest in space or rocketship engineering, then you will be entertained for hours and hours.
The loop of getting a new contract to build a new rocket to do some space experiment, and earning science and money to design and build bigger and better space rockets to go further and faster. It's just so satisfying and let's you learn space concepts by doing with trial and error.

For example of , I had a breakthrough revelation that instead of needing enough fuel to slow down my ship orbiting a planet enough to land safely; I could instead take short passes through the upper atmosphere of the planet, like a short series air brakes, and back into orbit to cool down, to slow my ship down enough to safely land without burning up in atmosphere going straightdown.
And there's dozens of moments like these, like learning to use maneuvers, or learning to land on the moon and bringing enough fuel to get back home again, or docking two spacecraft together very gently and slowly, or rescuing someone trapped by a previous experiment, lol.
And the whole game just makes for these great stories of experiments gone wrong, or forgetting the last thing you needed to complete a contract around the planet.

There's only a few drawbacks to this that have brought me to a point where I kinda want to stop playing, and a lot of them have to do with just how long things can take sometimes.
You can't fastforward the game if you are accelerating in orbit, and if you try fastforwarding (only up to x4 speed) in atmosphere, you might spontaneously destroy the rocket or aircraft. And these things can take tens of minutes sometimes. It takes a lot of patience. Even planning maneuvers, which save tons of trial and error, can be a lot of finnicky guesswork when moving the thrust vectors to try and intersect the predicted path with a target.
Aircraft for in-atmosphere contracts on the home planet have a tendency to be incredibly unstable and easy to break, and are just kind of a pain to fly around the planet, even at slow speeds. Then sometimes you have to land and drive around, and you don't unlock good wheels for terrain until wayyy later, so you just have to go rly slow and quicksave often, or else risk exploding ur wheels and being limited to running the little guy across the surface and back, which takes wayyy longer.

All those qualms being said, I did play this game for almost 200hrs before writing this, and I'm happily awaiting Kerbal Space Program 2, and might even come back to this game if it takes too long.

Just finished Nightmare mode, and I gotta say I still love this game, and while I haven't tried OMD3, the sequel to this OMD2 just does not give the same satisfaction as the original. I come back to this game to feel out what a great Tower Defense Game is rly all about: Building a kill box and seeing what could actually possibly survive it, and then making a better kill box to eliminate the remainder.

If i had to guess what gives this one so much more magic compared to the sequel... I just think that the sequels rely too heavily on simply making the levels bigger or longer. Instead of figuring out how to best use the features of the room/building to put traps/towers on to defend, the Sequel has you filling too much of the damage with your own character's attacks. And when you design more of the levels to be longer, the design starts to be more about making more DPS per area as opposed to solving a room's limitations by using different traps. I.e. There's no walls, so you have to rely on ceiling and floor traps, or there's not much flat ground for floor traps, so you have to use ceiling traps. And don't get me wrong, the sequel has a little of that, but every trap feels so much weaker and that you have to add way more traps and add more character damage to compensate. The 1st game has levels designed like puzzles to be solved approximately with traps, with some room for error that you can cover with weapons, and the 2nd game feels like needing to cram as much damage on the field to kill incoming enemies, and if you don't use your weapons and weapon abilities everytime, you will lose.

Orcs Must Die! (the original) makes you feel powerful when you place your traps, and the second game, traps feel so weak.

I sincerely hope that the team behind these games changes their design philosophy. I want to change the room to solve a tower defense puzzle, not figure out how to best use my character's attack abilities to pair with the towers.

- Just play the original Subnautica. Play this only if you're desperate for more Subnautica world to explore. -
I love love love the first Subnautica game, but this one feels like it moved in a wrong lateral direction.
NEW LAND AREA: There's more to do on land and it's fun to drive the snowmobile vehicle around and the snow worms are cool, but that wasn't what i wanted from a Subnautica game. The land section meshes terribly with the ocean activities and objectives. The game feels wider instead of deeper, and more shallow as a result.
STORY: Margarite and AL-AN never interact in the plot despite being the two (living) main non-player characters as far as I know. The separate story threads are decent, but they all mesh TERRIBLY. The Margarite plot seems to have very little impact on the story. I was not all that attached to AL-AN by the end of the game, because he rly isn't that helpful and the alien artifacts don't feel like they reveal any new interesting lore unlike the first game alien facilities reveals.
FINAL THOUGHTS: I miss the big submarine you put one of your smaller vehicles in, and the sea truck is like that but does not feel nearly as good. I like the new creatures, but wish there were some even bigger scarier ones in there, or that more of the creatures could be tamed or utilized in newer interesting ways like the Sea Monkeys. The sunken crashed ship exploration, while a decent change of pace for places to explore, feels tacked on from the last game to give the laser cutter a reason to exist. All the basic stuff from the first game is there, so again, if you liked Subnautica 1, you'll like this Subnautica: BZ. But i just could not recommend this game to someone. While I highly recommend you the original Subnautica, you yourself have to want to play MORE Subnautica to play Subnautica: BZ.

MY RE-DESIGN THOUGHTS (Additions not in the original or this game, but i think would've made for a better sequel.) : IMO the game should start on land, and you have to work your way to the deep ocean floor caves, or the reverse of starting near the ocean floor and having to work your way up to the surface. Bouncing between the two feels like a waste of the new main feature of the NEW big open land area. ORRR, throw out the land area altogether, and just make an even more terrifyingly deep ocean. And as for vehicles, I wish there was an even bigger submarine to park my submarine in, like straight up Disney's Atlantis up in there. And then a creature even bigger than THAT submarine. And as for the story, make AL-AN the cause of SOMETHING besides the lore for why the MC's sister is on the planet, or interact with Margarite. Also, Margarite has such a big splash at the start of the story only to do almost nothing the rest of the game. Maybe there's a twist where AL-AN turns on the player and Margarite has to intervene, just SOMETHING. The first half of the plot is so much, and the back half of the plot is so basic like, "Yep, nothing has changed, thanks for doing all the collecting and exploring, here's the end cutscene."

it is rly hard and requires good action platformer skills, but i have fun trying to improve at it.