14 June, 2016

Space Food Truck Review

Space Food Truck is a game about traveling the universe cooking food and staying alive. This is as is usual with games something that involves a lot of risks and dangers. That said, it is doable on a first try if you're somewhat experienced with risk-management games.



You play as a crew of four, each with their own job on the ship. The engineer to repair and upgrade the ship, the chef to cook the ingredients, the scientist to research, and the captain to pilot the ship. You can be one of these in multiplayer, or all four in singleplayer. Either way, you're going to have to work together to get through things safely. With that said, it's not actually that hard, at least on normal difficulty. It's very forgiving and you can handle most things just fine unless you've messed up your card deck building.

Speaking of which, you handle your options through a card based system, with cards being your available actions and the fuel to use on these actions. In some cases litterally, with the captain's card to move the ship taking cards with power points to fill up the FTL engine. At the end of your turn, you have to buy a new card to add to your deck. As such, it is important to find ways to trim your deck, or you will be left with useless or lesser quality cards. Several ways to do this exist, and as such you can usually keep your deck under control.


Then there is the actual cooking. Gather ingredients, have the chef cook them up and then deliver the dish to its destination. It seems easy, but it can get a bit more complex. Some ingredients are much more rare, some need to be unlocked by the scientist. And then you have to actually get them cooking too, which again costs you time to find the right cards. After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same.

After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same. Very few things will ever change and in one or two playthroughs you will have likely seen everything it has to offer. You can stabilise safely and last almost endlessly as long as you have the right cards and did your deck work right. Science becomes mostly useless after they finish researching, and engineering turns into 'play all your cards to fix everything, end turn'. Especially if you play multiplayer, it may begin to feel like your turn is automated where the rest of the crew actually does things.

With a fitting graphical style, simple but functional animations, and what I would definitely say is above average humour with simple but not unthinking or boring gameplay, Space Food Truck rounds out to be a decent game with some replayability troubles. While I would certainly recommend it if it were half price, 20 euro is pretty steep for what you get out of it.

05 June, 2016

Turmoil Review

Getting right to it, Turmoil is a time-constrained pipe building optimisation puzzle game. Your main goal, and main problems will resolve around getting all the oil in a level out of the ground and sold within one year. It does what it does and it does it fairly well. The pipe building is intuitive(Simply drag the mouse to where you want it), and everything makes sense. Oil only flows as fast as the smallest pipe, thus you need to make sure you don't have a bottleneck in your system. And if you pump oil up faster than you can carry it away then you spill it, incurring a fine. The game explains mechanics well and there are enough upgrades and level varieties where it does not become a chore or too similar to other levels.

A solid foundation, improved upon by hazards such as rocks and natural gas which can be used for profit as well, with the right upgrades, or just by adding it to your regular oil pipes so the pressure brings the oil up faster. As before, you may spill some if you bring oil up too fast, so be careful about what you drill.
To further the gameplay there is a solid campaign that last just long enough to be a good experience without overstaying its welcome. You need to buy the upgrades, lease land you think has a good amount of oil in it, and compete with 3 AI players trying the same. Eventually leading to auctions for shares which allow you to win the campaign once you have a majority share. Even if you are not into optimising things, the base gameplay is well enough and the game forgiving enough that you can get away with a profit just drilling for oil, though you may have difficulty making large profit margins.


Turmoil is a simple but solid game, build on a good concept with good execution at a competitive price. If you're looking for a few days worth of entertainment, Turmoil is a good choice at a good price.