Recent reviews by Sidewalker_42

I want to like this game, but it's more buggy than a Louisiana swamp. You have to save after every combat just to advance the game and the game sometimes gets weird in the middle of combat, too, so any progress you made is liable to be worthless since you can't save when the bug emerges.

Defenders of Mainframe is a good indie tactical RPG. While some people might complain about the lack of cute characters or rich sound effects, the game looks, sounds, and plays exactly as advertised. Challenges are layered and enemies become more difficult to beat gradually. There is very little RNG. Keep in mind that, other than upgrade capabilities, all of your robots are fully modular, meaning you can switch weapons, utility boosts, etc. from one to another between combat runs. This is a strong point in favor of the strategic complexity and replayability.

In summary:
The Good
* Clean and usually very responsive UI.
* Solid turn-based tactical combat.
* Replayable many times because of fully swappable add-ons to your units.
* Challenging.
* Good value for money paid if the above is what you care about.

The Not Great
* A bit buggy at times (usu not game-breaking).
* Almost bare bones graphic experience.
* Not all units are balanced well (or perhaps need very specific builds to perform to similar caliber).
* So-so variety in maps and mission types.
* Lack of Glossary or other descriptions for certain game terms.

The Bad
* Nothing.

Thanks for reading. Now go on and wreck some 'bots.

Moonring is basically old school Ultima with one party member. However, that one party member can mix different powers that they get from different gods. And it's *Free*, which i was surprised by because the content in this game should easily be worth as much as a DVD nowadays.

An easier-to-master version of Capcom's Street Fighter series with hilariously mediocre graphics and no Campaign mode.

5/5 Stars. Would gladly cast fire-hot glances of rivalry and desire with Edgey Boi again (to boss music)!

Star Traders es un "RPG" de estrategia de largo plazo en lo que puede jugar y ganar por diferentes vias. Puede jugar como un pirata, un comerciate, una espia, un diplomatico, o cualquiera combinacion de estos.

Importantisimo: Hay mucho que necesita aprender para sobrevivir el combate de astronaves. Al comenzar, su astronave es muy fragil y el tutorial no lo explica bien. Pues, el tutorial es terrible para la modalidad de combate especial y el proceso de escoger las naves. Los dos son los aspecto mas complicados.

Y la gran mayoria del texto no esta traducido. Entonces, hay que leer mucho de ingles para saber como ganar. :(

Por todas maneras, Star Traders tiene muchos vias de ganar, PERO necesita algunas actualizaciones. Actualizaciones de las lenguajes, especificamente.

INTRODUCTION
Recommended with Caveats. "The Magister" is an unusual deck-building game in that Whodunnit type of murder mystery is at the center of it all. There are a fair amount of powers that you can acquire as well, which sort of makes it a limited computer RPG. The question is: how well does it execute on these themes and mechanics?

DECK-BUILDING
Depending on the Magister you pick (they are semi-randomized), you start off with slightly different starter decks. Yes, DECKS. You get one deck for combat and one deck for social confrontations. The social confrontation deck is more basic and harder to optimize, but is important cause getting information out of certain people for free is always useful and you don't always have enough health fight all the time. The combat deck varies more based on your starting Magister, is easier to buy cards for, and is slightly more important since some combat is unavoidable.

Deck-building in The Magister is okay. You tend to cycle through cards faster in combat, but there is also more potential to expand that deck. Some of the best combat cards, though, are only available based on luck, since certain quests are randomly generated. The powers you pick might also add cards to your deck. This is not always for the best, as not all powers have equal influence on your likelihood of success. I wish that you could pass the game with next to no combat, but that's not really the case. 3 out of 5 stars.

MURDER MYSTERY
As in any murder mystery, you need to find clues and narrow down possibilities of who the murderer might be until you are down to only one person. Most people in town will not give you a direct answer about where they were on the night of the murder unless you do 2 favors for them, buy 2 units of their service, or force the truth out of them by winning a difficult social confrontation. This is well and good, BUT this narrows the field of role-playing. For example, you must kill some cultists to get on the good side of the Priestess so that you can even get her to give you an alibi and you must do some hunting with the Hunter to get her to give you an alibi as well. So you see how the game forces you into combat situations, some of which impinge on the degree of choices you can effectively make. The other issues with the Murder Mystery angle of this game is that too many of the clues are the same. Certain people will always say the same thing or the same thing with very slight variation. This speeds up the run times but it hurts the "mystery" if you can predict after 2 playthroughs what some people will say over and over again. 4 out of 5 stars.

ROLE-PLAYING?
How does the The Magister compare to other computer role-playing games? This is probably where it is weakest. The powers you have available to pick from are far from equal. Some powers are just a lot more likely to be useful overall than other powers. "Lore," for example, gives you a bit more information about the world of the The Magister, which slightly increases your experience point gain, but since none of this lore is useful for cracking the Mystery aspect, and doesn't help you with combat, it's very weak compared to powers like Authority or Charisma. "Thievery" is the only power that lets you open treasure chests you find without a hit to your hp, but you have the choice of finding more treasure chests as one of the random powers you can pick from when leveling up BUT Thievery might be locked based on some kind of random prohibition if you play at Difficulty II or Difficulty III. Time is also a factor in this game, so powers that save you time are valuable, but there are only one or two powers that do this. Lastly, you don't have much ability to influence the game world itself. As mentioned earlier, you basically must fight certain people to progress in the game, even if fighting them should logically influence the direction your character might otherwise take. As such, The Magister feels like a RPG on rails, where there is often only 1 right story choice (aside from who to accuse of the murder), but lacks the emotional drama you would expect from a JRPG, I don't feel that this limitation of choice is particularly rewarding from a story perspective. 2 out of 5 stars.

Overall: 3 out of 5 stars. Worth buying at discount, but not at full price.

Yes, over 100 hours played. (I was waiting for the Climate Expansion to be published on Steam before I gave my review.)

A visually stunning game with mostly easy to learn mechanics but not easily mastered, esp when adding on the Climate DLC. If you have the board game, it's pretty good. There used to be a lot of bugs with multiplayer and the major ones have been patched, I think. The best things about this digital implementation :
* Smooth UI.
* User chat function.
* Asynch play.

A free-mium collectable card game that that uses the MIddle Ages as its rough historical setting? Haven't we seen this before? What distinguishes War of Omens is the depth of world-building that clearly went into it. The load screens between games provide snippets of it, so there is no information dump. There is also a significant amount of depth to this game, which includes four factions you can build from, as well as multiple characters who all have their own strength.

The one minus for this title is that it was abandoned at some point, some less than 1/2 of the Campaign mode is finished. Nevertheless, there is so much variety to the cards and so much attention paid to the backstory of this game that you could play it for hours and barely care whether there is a Campaign mode or not. And at the price of Free, it's very much worth it.

If you are looking for an 8-bit strategy game with high replayability, GET THIS. What it lacks in visual polish, it makes up for in sheer variety.

While there are no character-specific tech trees or turn-by-turn tactical control abilities, the huge amount of items that are unlocked from winning games creates room for new top-tier tag teams between your party members. The characters that might look or play like Trash in some stages of the become better at later stages with the unlocked items. In other words, there is NO Trash tier. This is a game that rewards experimenting with builds and you can speed run once you get the hang of how items work with characters.