Russian Fishing 4 Review

After a bit more than 400 hours, I suppose I can finally feel confident I know enough to review this game. I'll focus on the questions you might have when you see a free fishing game and the tags it has, or at least the questions I had when I first saw it. So without any more delay, here's my thoughts on Russian Fishing 4.

 

The big one- "Free". How free is it? I have not paid for over 400 hours now and I've enjoyed my time fishing. So I would say it is very viable to play for free. The price for premium is roughly on par with a normal MMO's subscription at 12 euro/month. You get a few perks out of it, but mostly it's just extra exp so you get to level up faster and get to unlock other areas and skills easier. 

 

As for the multiplayer aspect, I find this one just straight up weird. Only a few parts of this game appear to have any multiplayer to it. Aside from those parts it is essentially a single player game. These parts are a leaderboard and chat function. That one explains itself and makes sense. A competition system, but one that I've never found a use for since all the contests are in Chinese or Russian so I have no idea what they're asking, and they seem to be limited to higher level players anyway so for about 300 hours I never qualified to get in even if I could read it. The ability to send items to other players only if you have paid for premium, and lastly the shop inventory can be sold out if other players buy a lot of it in a short time period. 

You do not get to sit next to a friend when fishing, see others fishing, or even really see what other people. Your only interaction with others is through the chat window, and the occasional message in chat when someone catches a sizable fish. 

 

The gameplay- It's fishing. You cast lines and reel in fish. You can fish with bait both by float fishing and bottom fishing, and with lures both from the shore and by trolling. The way you fish seems to have an effect on how well you catch things, while time, temperature and weather matter as well. The detail is better than any I've seen before, and it feels like you can actually control what you catch and whether you're successful by paying attention to the circumstances. The gameplay itself is good. You sell fish you've caught for money or can release them for bonus experience, but that's not really an option. You need the money. 

 

The progression however is less good. I've spent a lot of time on it and I still use some of the beginner gear, and I've still not unlocked most of the areas. You never get enough money to buy anything, and I know you're thinking they want you to buy the premium currency for it to skip the grind, but they don't really support that. If you buy premium currency to get gear you will need to spend around the price of an actual physical fishing rod to get early to mid level gear. And that gear will deteriorate very quickly, requiring that you pay even more to get it repaired. It is honestly cheaper to just buy a fishing rod and go do actual fishing than it is to try to spend money on gear in this game. 

Your progression is limited mostly by money. You can unlock new places by leveling up, but what use do you have for a place known for fishing large carp if they'll destroy your gear with ease and then just swim away? Progression is very rough and there is no way to get around it. You will always be struggling for money and be limited by your gear. 

 

 In conclusion, while I find it very strange how they handled balancing just about anything I have enjoyed my time playing Russian Fishing 4 and would recommend giving it a try. If you enjoy the gameplay and just want to sit down and fish, you might enjoy it too. But don't expect to reel in huge fish, or even just somewhat big fish. You're going to be fishing in the same waters with your small rods for a very long time before you can unlock anything else.

Loop Hero Review

 Loop Hero blends a few gameplay ideas to create something that is almost an idle game, but still interactive enough that you have choices to make and things to do.

The game has you going in loops of increasing difficulty while you gradually fill out the world around your hero's path to give him challenges and enemies to fight, starting with an empty expanse until you have to retreat from the enemies, or encounter the boss. It is a nice, satisfying gameplay loop to build up the world in a way that it gives you the bonuses you need to take out the boss.

Once you retreat or have been defeated you can upgrade your campsite to unlock other tiles, classes, and bonuses for your hero. You get to optionally read up on parts of the forgotten world and have small bits of interaction between the hero and those at the camp to help motivate you on your quest. While simple, the progression has a good pace and does not become overpowered or overly grindy.

The combat is entirely automatic. You have no influence over ongoing combat aside from the preparations you've made- Gear equipped and environment set. Your hero will fight all on his own, leaving you perhaps wondering what there is for you to do. After a few hours even the increased speed setting ends up feeling slow, and the constant stopping and starting as you place new tiles after combat and then have nothing to do when combat starts again shortly after can be frustrating.

Even then it remains a good game. The progression does not take too long to make you lose interest in the simple gameplay and it is pleasant on the eyes and ears. Every part of the game shows that the creators loved what they were doing, and so as long you are okay with the unique gameplay loop you will find Loop Hero to be entertainment at great value.

Mr Prepper Review

 Mr Prepper combines resource management and building your bunker with old style adventure game questing where you need one specific item to continue the plot, and it does so very well.

Although the tutorial doesn't explain much, the game can be trusted to not screw you over- You can experiment and you won't paint yourself into a corner unless you ignore all warnings, and you have plenty of chance to come back from failures. This does make the game a little easy at times.

You have a bunker you expand and build while keeping it hidden from the government inspections, letting you spend however long you want building your underground farms, kitchen, storage, and many other rooms. It is easy to find something to do, and you will always be able to find more things to change or expand upon in your underground lair. I've spend four months ingame building out a bunker capable of surviving for possibly years, just because I enjoyed building it and gathering resources.

The adventure-quest portion is mostly item hunting. Finding specific items to continue plotlines by earning the trust of NPCs. They're not difficult to find, you just need to look closely at certain locations. It isn't always clear what you can click to inspect or ask about, but you are not under time pressure to get these items so you can take your time and come back later if you can't find something, or check for hints at the journal.

Mr Prepper is certainly worth the price and can keep you entertained for a long time. It has a few flaws, but those won't get in the way of your enjoyment. You'll want to just do just one more thing and then hours later you're wondering where your time went.
It went into prepping. And it's time well spent

Until the Last Plane Review

Until the Last Plane is a casual minigame-game about running an airfield in ww2. Alongside the minigames you have an overall management phase where you do airplane maintenance, start the missions, and balance resources to keep everything operational.

The minigames are simple, but every campaign has special missions that change things up enough to keep things interesting. Sadly, many of the minigames are too simple or otherwise flawed- The opponent/AI in dogfighting seems to have only two pre-set scripts it follows and if you've found the solution to those you will always win. On the other hand, you will be hit by unavoidable damage that can lead to your pilots dying(On their second damage that mission) just from trying the bombing minigame, making the minigames very simple things you just get through rather than anything you need to think about.

The management aspect is interesting, showing much less flaws than the minigames. Managing pilot stress and fatigue along with airplane damage and spare parts can be a challenge in the harder campaigns, and every nation has mechanics just slightly different to make them feel fresh for just long enough to get through their campaign. There are events for each nation that give them enough character to feel interesting. The overall difficulty in my experience has been easy outside of the first day of any campaign.
The graphics are pleasant to look at for a longer time, both in the minigames and in the airbase. This is probably one of the strongest points for this game.

In the end, Until the Last Plane is a very short, and somewhat repetitive game. It doesn't take long to pick up and play a day or two out of the campaigns. And although the minigames are flawed, they are still good enough to entertain for a while after the novelty wears off.
The price is accurate- You are not going to get a large game if you buy this. But you are going to get something that will be worth your money if you're just looking for something nice to play every now and then.

Mars Horizon Review

Mars Horizon is a nice game about running a space program, doing important space missions and eventually landing humans on Mars. It tries to combine two genres and does so quite well. It is a turn based strategy where you decide your long term strategy for the space program and it is a puzzle game when you handle the individual missions.

The gameplay then consists of two parts.
First there is the space program management, where you get to plan launch dates, choose payloads, what rocket parts to use, research, and build out your headquarters. This part works very well, and it is good at making you want to go another turn as you race 4 other space programs to get to Mars first.
The second is a small resource management puzzle about gathering tokens while on a mission. You spend your resources to get more resources and try to get a certain amount of these tokens before you run out of turns. Though it tries to be varied by adding in more and different types of resource/token, it does get repetitive after your first playthrough and you've seen all the combinations it offers.

Both parts of the game rely partially on chance, and give you tools to at least partially negate bad luck. In the space program management, it is your choice of rocket parts, upgrades, and buildings constructed that will let you change the odds to be more favourable. Though the odds here are only for rocket launches. They don't come up often, but when they do it is more tense as a failure could mean your expensive rocket becomes expensive fireworks.
For the puzzle on a mission, you can spend one power point to turn a failure into a normal success. And you're expected to do this fairly often. Every action you take in this has a chance to fail based on the payload's reliability, and you take a lot of actions so some failures are just going to happen. Thankfully this won't explode your payload. A failure on a mission action will usually just inconvenience you with something such as the action giving less resources, or costing more.

The graphics are nothing amazing. They're good for what they show, but they aren't good enough to get people to play this just for its looks.

There are some light negatives. Mostly related to the mission solving minigame. It gets repetitive after a while, and doing many missions will get annoying as the variation isn't really enough to make every mission special. Most of the time they are easy enough to plan out from turn 1 and often things will not go wrong enough to make you reconsider.
There is an autoresolve for the mission part of the game, but it is not a good choice. It is much more likely to make your mission fail than if you were to do it yourself, and it will often fail to do bonus objectives even for the most easy of missions. Using the autoresolve is generally not worthwhile.
The AI cheats a little, but this only becomes noticeable on hard difficulty or above, and some things are unclear unless you double check everything.

Mars Horizon is well worth the asking price and will offer you a pleasant experience. Its flaws only begin to show on second or third playthroughs or if you raise the difficulty. As a whole, it might not be the most amazing game you've played.  But it is a good game, and I would recommend that you give it a try if you enjoy puzzles or games about long term planning.

Shop Titans Review

Before the review, the monetisation in detail:
Premium currency (Can be used to skip timers, buy cosmetics, pay for anything, or get upgrades before you are high enough level)
Monthly subscription
Lootboxes
Exclusive timed offers
Paywalls(Some that can not be bypassed through ingame means)
And a slot machine that can pay out some premium stuff if you're very lucky(But probably won't)
There is a lot of the above, and it constantly reminds you of it all on practically every screen

The game itself is very simple, consisting mainly of timers that you wait for as you craft things to sell. They start small at under a minute and then get longer. You can send out heroes to go gather resources for you using gear you give them, which is a simple timer after which they fight the monster. Combat is entirely automated, so you can not affect it after giving the order to go on the quest. Half of the game's main loop is about letting the timers run down and then collecting your crafts/loot.

The other half is selling your stuff, which is equally simplistic. Customers enter your store, look around, and then try to buy an item if it matches their class. There is no real reason why they would want the item outside of it being of their class, and they will happily downgrade to newbie gear if that's what you're selling. You can spend energy to raise the price, and they will never say no. Prices are fixed with that one exception, so you can not control how much money you get for something.
The main gameplay loop is similar to idle games, with the exception being that you need to poke it occasionally to keep the timers going. Numbers go up but nothing really changes for your shop.

Even then there are two things the game almost does right- The guild system encourages communicating with other players in your guild and helping eachother. You invest part of your money into the town which helps everyone in the guild. You get to be together doing...Not much, since the main gameplay is still waiting, but it is a good way to encourage people to help eachother. Except it's a very limited number of people, since your guild size is limited by the size of the town hall, and you will need to invest millions in gold each to get the guild size up to a level where you can afford to have some more casual players. They make a great system for cooperation, and then limit you from being able to bring in people to cooperate with.

The second is cosmetic, letting you customise your shop interior. Place/move furniture, wallpaper, and flooring. There's a few neat things someone can do with this, and with some time and effort you can make your shop look really nice.
But it's also incredibly limited with 2/3rd of the cosmetics and skins being premium currency only or very expensive, leaving you with very little choice

All things considered, I struggle to think of people who I would recommend this game to. Although the guild system is interesting in how it encourages you to work with others, the rest of the game is decidedly uninspiring and simple. It is about waiting for the timers to run down at its core, and it does not even offer you any real reward for doing it or more than token interaction.
You can pay to get your timers down faster or to skip some of them, but there is no point to it all except to watch your number get bigger. The number does nothing, and in the end everything feels like that is exactly what you achieved- Nothing

Mordhau Review

Mordhau is essentially similar to Chivalry and M&B warband's online mode, but does things better than both.
While it does have it's own problems which I will get into later, Mordhau does well at making melee combat feel like you are in control of your swings. Where other games like it only have preset swings and you pick from them, Mordhau allows you to aim your swing and stabs from any direction. Rather than a simple overhead strike, why not an overhead strike from a little to the left, far to the left, or anywhere to the right? Mordhau allows this control and that alone makes it an improvement over its competition.

While it may be hard to learn at first, it is rewarding when you end up capable of combat and notice that some people stop trying to engage you to go for easier prey. Similarly, if someone does engage you and you win against them one on one, or fight off multiple opponents without dying you know that you've actually become somewhat good at the game, and that is a feeling most games these days seem to be missing.

While generally good, with the main gameplay mode(Frontline/Invasion) full of people and allowing a lot of variety in combat, there are some things not as good as they can be. The only teams are red and blue, which renders most of your cosmetic customization pointless as you will be wearing red or blue to most players. It is possible to turn off team colours, but this is not practical in a game with 30 players on each team. The option to put a marker above teammates is not helpful enough to compensate for it either.
Similarly, at the highest levels of gameplay the mechanics that you are taught by the tutorial(Feint, morph, chamber, riposte, etc) are pointless, and it becomes more about twisting your hitbox and weapon hitbox into the enemy and around their blocks by staring at their toes or the sky while flicking your mouse around. Thankfully the people who enjoy this are given their own quarantined mode of ranked duels so you will probably not find them unless you go looking for them.
A few other light negatives include regenerating health making combat not feel like it matters half the time(Hits don't matter-Killing blows is all that counts, medkits are useless because you just wait 5-6 seconds and you're good to go), the map design being full of things and interesting places to fight that are ignored because only the (small and very centralized) objectives have players or a reason to be there, while the objectives themselves don't matter much anyway and horses being limited spawns that will always be taken by someone before you even load in, and some balance issues such as some weapons and their alternative modes not mattering(Notably the mordhau grip the game is named after never sees any use as it sucks in every way).

All these small things don't take away that Mordhau is very enjoyable and well worth the money. Sometimes things may feel a bit off, but more often than that it will be a good time during which you can feel like you're actually doing something rather than just controlling a character and telling it to go hit the HP sponge until something happens.
With the devs still working on it, it may get even better with the (many small) issues it has being addressed. But even if they were not I would recommend it at this state.
Mordhau lets you get into the combat like no titles before it seem to have managed, offering what is at this point a unique experience that is well worth investing your time in