Recent reviews by Zoomba

Sins 2 takes everything I loved about Sins 1, and builds upon it in really satisfying ways. It maintains that stately grand pace of the original, with visually epic fleet battles, and now just bigger everything thanks to the new engine, and modern PC hardware. A lot of long-awaited sequels tend towards re-imagining the whole game into something totally new, and in the process losing the essence of what made the series great. I'm very happy that Sins 2 held true to its roots.

Planet orbits force you to rethink your defenses and routes of attack continuously. And the minor factions actually have real gameplay boosting utilities that really can offer meaningful advantages in the mid/late game. And holy cow the new editor and mod tools! People did crazy things with limited tools in Sins 1, I can't wait to see what they come up with given everything IC has provided to radically change the game.

If I had one quibble, it would be the tech tree and the use of the scaled down header images as icons. Even at 125% UI scale, I find the images too busy when scaled down to be able to quickly scan the tree to know what's what. This holds true too for other image-as-icon UI sections like planetary and capital ship upgrades. I'd like cleaner, simpler iconic images for readability.

I've been playing the game through it's tech test, and have really high hopes that Sins 2 will evolve much like Sins 1 did over the years, going from an outstanding game, to a true GOAT of the genre.

Disclosure: I worked on the original Sins of a Solar Empire from the base game through the early development of Rebellion. However I have no connection to the developer/publisher anymore. I'm simply here as a fan of the franchise at last.

SimCity was one of the very first games I was ever really hooked on. I vividly remember building cities in black-and-white on my dad's office Macintosh. Since then I've jumped on pretty much any game that claims to be city-builder-ish.

And not since SimCity 4, over a decade ago, have I had this much fun building a city from scratch.

The scale of the space you can build in is great. Starting with 2km x 2km and eventually expanding out to 9km^2, you can build truly massive cities. What makes that scale even better is you can really divide up your metropolis in a number of ways. From districts that can have individualized govt policies (legal pot, smoke detector ditribution), to localized city services that aren't connected to the larger grid. The game gives you a ton of room to experiment.

The one big challenge though you'll face is transportation. Building an effecient city grid of roads, public transit, trains & subways that doesn't have terrible choke points is difficult. Use of elevated bypasses, rail corridors etc are difficult to plan as you don't get access to them until an hour or more into a game, so you may find yourself abandoning your initial city area to build up things "properly" in a newly opened plot of land, then going back and bulldozing your original downtown to start it over again.

Beyond the traffic challenge, it can at times be difficult to know why your city isn't growing. Sometimes demand drops to 0 for no apparant reason, then 5 minutes later skyrockets again. There's obviously something going on that's pushing down demand, but as a player it's hard to figure out some times. A few patches to improve UI and reporting will no doubt solve this issue.

In the end, the traffic planning and the simulation feedback issues are pretty minor in the face of what's probably the most fun city sim since the glory days of Maxis. And at what I'd consider a "budget" price point, if you're a fan of the genre, this is a must-buy game.

An incredibly fun solitaire game with a cool sports slant. The "Big Play" button is a huge gamble that draws me in every time and there's definite tension as the random text events are "revealed". I'm impressed by how the game captures the back-and-forth feel of football. I just had a terrific come-from-behind victory early in my league career that I felt like I really earned.

That's right. Earning it. Tension. Back-and-forth.... in a solitaire game. Not a bad accomplishment.

Quirky visuals and oddball crafting/descriptions paired with randomized worlds and seemingly limitless things to do, Don't Starve is one of my favorite games of 2013