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.

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

Dead by Daylight review

Dead By Daylight is a bit hard to describe fully, so I'll just keep it as short as is reasonable without leaving anything out

It's a decent game of 4v1 in which four survivors try to escape a killer. The survivors use teamwork to repair generators and avoid being hit by the killer while the killer hunts for the survivors and tries to put them on hooks as a sacrifice.
A simple setup with reasonably varied killers and survivors. The maps are generally decent enough for the survivors to be able to run away or hide if they know what they're doing, and there are enough different maps to not get stale too easily

But at the same time, it gets repetitive as every game has the same objectives, and the same ways to get to those objectives. For killers, you employ your special powers and try to outsmart the survivors. For survivors, you spend a while doing QTEs on a generator while someone else runs away, or you spend your time running from the killer while the rest does QTEs. Then the exit opens and everyone tries to walk out. Or you died to the killer before you fixed enough generators. Either way, time to move on to do more of the same.
Balance wise things are a bit messy, with some perks being almost mandatory and others not worth taking in the slightest. There is a massive amount of grinding to get to the good perks and addons, and there are a lot of completely useless things you pick up along the way. Plus what you get is entirely random, so you just have to keep on grinding until it happens to give you what you wanted.
If you want to play as killer, you will have to spend between 5 and 20 minutes queuing while waiting for survivors to join you. It sucks, but it is understandable given that there have to be four of them for every killer.
The fact that it uses QTEs and button mashing as a mechanic for survivors means it's hard to really say it's a good game as well, but at least it's not all the time and you can play killer without having to do any of that.

All things said, it isn't bad. I would say it is pretty reasonable. If you can get friends to join you in it it then you will have a much better time, but even just on your own it can be enjoyable every now and then. You get good value for the price, but remember that it will have its flaws and it will proudly display those flaws as intentional design choice

Pyre Review

Pyre is an enjoyable experience with a great story, music, and ideas behind it. But it comes with a somewhat large warning sign- The main gameplay matches are not the enjoyable part.

The game starts well with a great journey, intrigue, mystery, and characters who are interesting and make you want to learn more of them. With a massive amount of potential dialogue and many different stories to follow and uncover. There is an overarching plot, enough characters to matter without feeling like it's just a flood of names, and great stories for every character I've uncovered the story of.
I can't quite find the words to praise the story and characters enough, so I will keep it to that. Though as usual when there is a lot of good, there's also bad- And the bad I can put into words a lot easier. Don't let that discourage you too much- The good is excellent, and the bad is only disappointing, rather than truly bad.

The negative in an otherwise incredibly good experience is, sadly, the gameplay. There are two kinds, and both fall flat when playing for more than a few minutes. The first is the overworld, and traveling through the world. The overarching system of experience and gaining skills works well enough, but it seems talismans and gold is just sort of there- Once you equip a character with something good, you're probably not going to take it off again. And then you can't really use your gold on anything else either. The economy system is practically invisible, you get enough gold to afford anything you want as long as you don't want everything, and then gold is never actually used for anything of note. The overworld seems to be practically entirely for finding new opportunities to speak to the characters, without anything else you can do as a player to really matter. Vocations are nice, but they didn't feel impactful and it was never clear when they were available.

The second is the rites themselves- The main gameplay matches. The controls are at best clumsy and at worst they downright fight you and make it difficult to do what you want to do. The AI of course has no such issue. They will easily outmaneuver you and make plays that you can not intercept because the controls just won't allow you to do so half the time. The rest of the time, the AI will very clearly only pretend to have a defense or a plan and let you score uncontested. Most of the time, success seems to be not a matter of tactical positioning and skill, but more a matter of putting the fastest guy you have up front, swiping the ball before the opponents get there and then dunking it in before they can react. Any attempts at tactical positioning or pass-plays will just result in your tactical position being shot down or your pass sending the ball back to the side of the field where you don't want it to be. In the end, it will come down to luck more than anything else. And with 12 hours in the game I can safely say I am exactly as skilled at it now as I was when I first started it.
Thankfully, you can lose, and losing will not break any sort of plotline- It is flexible enough that I am fairly sure you can lose every single match in the game without breaking the plot or narratives

Pyre is a good game. But the disappointing gameplay aspects keeps it from being a great game. It is generously priced and well worth the money. Pyre doesn't really try hard in the gameplay department, but it is excellent at story, music, world and characters. It is certainly worth a look.

Graveyard Keeper Review

Graveyard keeper is a game similar to Harvest Moon(Or more recently Stardew Valley), giving you a small home and a vaguely defined objective to go and do stuff. Graveyard keeper is different in a few ways however, with more strongly defined quests and goals and an interesting medieval ish setting in which you are in charge of a graveyard, and the surrounding area.

While at first overwhelming with everything to do and days passing quickly, it is mainly a relaxed game where you do not have deadlines or a need to rush anything. Take as long as you want, the days will cycle and soon you'll get another chance. There is a lot to do, especially early on, but you can do it in any order, at your own pace, and in however many sessions you want. It makes sure to balance things out in such a way that the initial experience and middle game is excellent, which makes Graveyard Keeper at first seem like a gem. It has a lot of content, especially for the price, and a lot of thought has gone into making everything work right.

But of course, not everything is perfect. The game practically expects you to do immoral things to corpses, and does not react differently if you do not. At one point you will end up needing to grind up money, as the mid game does not go amazingly well into the later game, and alchemy is trial-and-error, without hints or systems on how to figure out which combination does what. With several hundreds and perhaps even a thousand or more possible combinations of ingredient- Some of which difficult to gather, expensive, or limited by time...And all lost when you try a combination that doesn't work, you will want a guide for alchemy or you're going to need to try every single combination one at a time.
A few areas are empty or inaccessible, somewhat large parts of the story/background are never quite resolved and a lot of things are slow and need quality of life improvements to not be a pain in the ass. The graveyard keeping itself is simple and can be ignored most of the time, they're not going anywhere anyway. It feels as though they ran out of time or funding to do all these things they had planned, and still tried their best. I would say it is still a gem, but after time you will notice that not everything is as amazing as it first seemed.

All that said, if you have enough patience to deal with the rough sections, are okay with some mild imperfections, and don't mind if your graveyard keeping experience is more along the lines of a farmer-smith-woodworker-miner-alchemist than about keeping graves, then Graveyard Keeper is a great game and very much worth the asking price.

Bomber Crew Review

Bomber Crew is a cute, arcade-y game about trying to manage a bomber and its crew as they complete missions. It looks nice, and has a few nice ideas, but at first I just couldn't figure out why I disliked it. So I kept playing, and playing some more until it became obvious- The difficulty feels forced in almost every way and the enjoyable parts of the game do not actually do that much.

You get to manage your crew and give them their own gear with a lot of different options, and manage your bomber's components using a moderately expansive system to customize several modules, individual engines, and hull sections. The damage model is quite good, with multiple subsystems that can be damaged as well as your armoured sections taking more hits before the holes begin to show. It has a promising implication of being able to bail out, survival chances after a crash and makes it seem like every choice you can make will matter at some point, and the feeling that you can really plan and customize your bomber.

But that is where the good ends, as you end up flying as a single bomber against large amounts of germans, completing missions on your own while the only real challenge is whether or not you can fight the interface well enough to make your crew actually do their jobs. Casualties and crashing your bomber hurts the first time, but you'll quickly learn it's not really your fault if things go poorly. The interface is designed to actively slow you down while the game seems to be made in such a way that it will make you do everything at once, with difficulty mostly coming from the simple fact that you're not given enough time to do everything you need to do thanks to an arbitrary 2-6 second wait every time you want your crew to do anything.
They will happily sit there and watch the bullets come in as the bomber gets shot, refusing to shoot back until you personally point at the fighters one at a time for about 2 seconds each. They will sit on an empty gun until you personally tell them to reload, they'll do nothing as far as navigation goes and they won't wipe their butt after using the toilet unless you tell them to do so. Along with this, I realized that if the crew actually did their job, the interface actually allowed me to do things at a reasonable speed or there were friendly aircraft in the sky with you, there would just be no difficulty.
The fact that every single option of note is locked until you've played for hours is just an extra, and you will have to re-do the same set of 2-3 missions again and again until you unlock necessary upgrades is just a small thing compared to the bigger problems.
There is no story either, and the campaign is just a string of random missions with an occasional bigger mission in it.

And so my conclusion,
Bomber Crew is a nice idea and looks nice. It has a few good ideas on managing the bomber, crew loadouts, and dealing with incoming damage. But in the end none of your own skill in managing things or reflexes matters. It is designed to overload you with things to do while actively fighting your ability to do any of them. This essentially just leads to frustration as you are not playing the game, you're fighting the interface and poor design choices.

The Trail: Frontier Challenge Review

The Trail: Frontier Challenge is literally a walking simulator- But this does not need to be bad. In fact, the walking combined with the physics-based inventory management that has your items almost bouncing around in your backpack is a good match, both relaxing enough to casually wander and with enough to think about that you won't be bored all the way.

However, it does come with flaws. There are a lot of bugs- Some of which gamebreaking, and the balance goes completely out the window after playing a few hours, after which it doesn't get any better. It has a few systems that look like they had great plans, and then only did the bare minimum to get it working, with the latter part of the game becoming near impossible to anyone who hasn't planned that far ahead, or consistently gets incredibly lucky.
For the first few hours, it is well worth it. An interesting game that is perhaps a bit too easy, but it gets noticeably harder once all the mechanics are introduced. After that there is a large part of the game that will be slow- A lot of walking, with a lot of interesting terrain. And a multiplayer section that is essentially mandatory while also being nearly impossible to use.
Finally, the last part of the game is teleporting around campsites hoping the npcs trade the one piece of gear or ingredient you need to progress, spending hours of prepwork to get the right outfit with the right resistances so that you can make a quick sprint from one campsite to the next, followed by more time gathering what you need to survive the next stretch. Ideally, and what it looks like the plan was all along, you would be working together with other players to make this gear and complete item gathering challenges, and then together you'll make it to the end of the trial with a nice build-up village.

In practice, out of the 5 players that will be randomly matched in a town, expect 2-3 to go offline and never log on, one of them to not know English, and one of them to be you- You will be essentially performing group tasks on your own, and unless you chose to be a tailor you will spend hours just teleporting around to find the clothing you need to not immediately pass out. And as extra, you will need to spend a lot of time and effort to be able to move to a town where the players might be active and talking, making it difficult to play with friends despite the design clearly calling for a group of people who are motivated, talk to eachother often and coordinate their needs and abilities together.

In the end, The Trail: Frontier Challenge is an interesting title. It has a good start, a strong middle section, and then it falls flat when the bugs and questionable design points build up and overwhelm the positives. It is certainly worth getting if it goes on sale, but be warned, it will take effort and motivation to get to the end of the trail, and a great deal more if you end up having to do so alone.

Brigador Review

It took me a long time to think about what I'd say about Brigador, as I usually list a negative first and I'm very judgemental when it comes to games. Brigador only had very mild negatives, along with some very strong positives that makes it difficult for me to say anything bad about it.

From an excellent soundtrack to the incredible gameplay, to the lore and graphics design, everything about Brigador appears to have been well made and shows great attention to detail. A gentle learning curve and a campaign that will teach you and then present you with ever increasing challenges followed with free play contracts that will let you go at the speed and difficulty you prefer means that you will always be able to customize your experience to tailor it to what you like and what you can handle.
The maps are designed well and pretty to look at, with everything inside except for the map boundaries being fully destructible. You are even encouraged to do so, and destroying things gives you a bonus.

A large selection of vehicles, weaponry and enemies ensures that there is a lot for you to choose from, with every piece of gear you pick having its use and using your gear well is usually the key to success. But with all that gear, you can pick and choose how you want to play. Stealth, guns blazing, or a mix is all possible with none of the weapons seeming overpowered or underpowered. And everything you see ingame is a thing you can take and use.

The only negative I've found was the control scheme, which doesn't always work well with every vehicle. But it is barely a negative as you can change your control scheme as needed. Out of all the things in game, everything works together amazingly well and handles great, both in the missions and with the overarching theme.

Brigador is one of those rare games where you do not regret any moment of your time playing it. Everything can be made to be the way you enjoy it the best while at the same time offering you challenges exactly the way you want them. It seems to do everything right and has no real negatives to it that I could find. Brigador tells you to enjoy yourself, and it gives you all the tools you need to do so.

Friday 13th: The Game Review

I was going to write a detailed review and put effort into it, but since the devs don't seem to care I won't care either. In Friday 13th, you can have a great time or a terrible time, depending on who you play with and the amount of bugs you run into. Generally from what I've found it's people who don't speak English, with those who do speak English either teamkilling you for fun or being excellent people.

The gameplay itself is pretty nice. You don't need to run scared all the time and you can actually fight back against Jason, though it's more of a way to buy time so you can get away than anything else. If you run, there are a large amount of invisible walls around the map, making it a risk to go anywhere that Jason won't look for you. Luckily, you do have the advantage around windows and cabins, and you are faster when you sprint.

The best part about this game, in my opinion, is that you can talk to eachother and Jason while playing. Trash talk, pleading, and misdirection brings a lot to the game. Telling Jason that the others are escaping in a car will make him usually pull out his map to see if the car moved, buying you precious time. And not just once did I hear someone plead for their life and told them I'll save them for last. Out of everything, being able to meaningfully interact with people the rare few times they know English is what makes it fun.

But then the bad is plentiful as well. Only three maps, many councilors being just terrible in general, a kickstarter-only Jason that is just flat out better than any other Jason you can ever hope to get and bugs+exploits still in the game long after launch leads to a feeling that this is not very well managed or planned out, and ultimately combining these factors with the devs being ban-happy at the wrong people and ignoring the people who do need to be at least warned leads to me concluding that this deserves a negative as it stands right now. At the very least until the devs bring about a serious effort to address everything they've been ignoring now.

Friday 13th is a nice idea, that was almost there. It's massively overpriced for what it does and would have been great if it was done by someone who actually gave a shit. Wait for a substantial sale if you do want to get it, because what they're asking for now is too much.

Predynastic Egypt Review

Predynastic Egypt is a resource management and optimization game in which you overcome trials and ordeals and establish Egypt as unified kingdom.
From humble beginnings with simple decisions to make to managing a large amount of workers while planning several turns ahead, Predynastic Egypt offers a pleasant if a bit simple of an experience. There aren't a lot of different mechanics involved, but they do not need to be. With a simple foundation and easily controlled, intuitive basic gameplay you'll be able to manage your tribe and deal with what Egypt has to offer. Multiple difficulty options allow you to customize the game to your liking while everything is explained in enough detail that you will not have to worry about not knowing what is going on, though it still doesn't give you more information than you really need.

One concern is replayability. As it is the same map every time, with the same ordeals every time at the same turns it becomes predictable and later playthroughs will feel repetitive. At the highest difficulties, it's all about solving everything perfectly, with perfect timing on everything and good luck on the random events. If you enjoy achievement hunting, you will get plenty of replayability out of it, but otherwise there isn't much reason to play it a second time.

As for the trials and ordeals, they are challenging when you first go through them, but fair. With a bit of planning and forward thinking you can win the game on your first try. Playthroughs after the first will make it a lot easier and unless you actively avoid doing them it is difficult to really fail at any of them.

A relaxed atmosphere and simple base mechanic means this is mostly a casual game, pleasant to play and worth the time to get it, Predynastic Egypt does what it tells you it does, does it very well, and overall delivers a good experience at a good price.

Carrier Deck Review

Carrier Deck is a simple management game where you control the deck of a carrier, select mission loadouts and manage who flies and where. Don't be fooled by the suggestion of a simulation game. It is definitely not one of those.

While it isn't the most detailed by far, and certainly not hard, it is capable of occasionally providing decent challenges and keeping the action up at a decent flow in the campaign. There are however several issues with it that make it difficult to really get into it.
(Campaign) Missions feel too small, and don't seem to really present a challenge except for the last few. But they are decent enough and enjoyable to play. On the contrary, 'quick' missions and endless mode are not really enjoyable as there is a large amount of waiting and when things do happen they seem to be randomly throwing things at you regardless of whether it's possible to succeed. This makes the endless mode more about luck than actually managing your carrier.

The other flaws include the hitbox for clicking on things being just too small on many things, leading to clicking off something and wasting time, and the airplane/heli pathing being terrible. They only move in pre-determined paths, and when they run into one another they wait for only a second or two before deciding to turn around and go back to where they were before you ordered them. This in turn makes managing any more than two or three things at the same time a huge pain in the ass, as you need to babysit almost everything or risk them deciding they don't really want to do what you told them to.

Yet with all that, it's still decent. It's certainly not amazing, but it does what it tells you it will do, and it does so well enough to entertain. But it doesn't go past that, or try anything special, but it isn't bad at least. It's worth the price it asks for, but I wouldn't recommend it if you weren't into any kind of management game. For those that are, Carrier Deck is worthwhile enough to try out.

Orbt XL Review

Orbt XL is a small game about orbiting a black hole and not crashing into things

It's simple, cheap, and a pretty decent price. The control scheme is simple(Left mouse button to go further, let go to go closer) and the gameplay itself is varied enough to be entertaining.
A few special cases mix things up, the obstacles are varied enough to be entertaining, and the gameplay simple enough to be easy to understand.

It represents a good price to value ratio, and it is pleasant to play for a while but it is certainly just a short thing to spend some time on and then move on. Worth picking up if you run across it bored or otherwise have a euro laying around doing nothing.

Take on Mars Review

Take on Mars is more simulation than game, and clearly showing that the goal was a simulation first, and a game second. That said, it remains very interesting and works quite well as a game, when you can figure out how to do things and get it to work.

And that is one of the problems. The biggest problem however is the complete lack of time acceleration and slow speeds. I understand wanting realistic speeds in your simulation game, but this is not an experience that any but the most patient people are willing to go through. For reference, to complete the unmanned campaign you will need to travel ~50,000m at speeds between 1.5m/s and 2m/s, or in more understandable terms, your rovers go at the speed of an old man with a walking aid and you need to travel roughly a small country's length. The game does helpfully offer you a realistic wheel speeds option, which will bring your speed down to around 0.6m/s, or roughly the speed of that old man if he had to stop to take a breather after every step. I firmly believe that I am one of the most patient people in the world and submit this game as proof for that.

With the biggest problem out of the way, the smaller problems are still noticable. It essentially does not tell you how to do or use most things. When starting a campaign, the first thing I had to do was push every button on my keyboard in the hopes that it would move along the interactive first landing of an historical Russian lander. It worked eventually, and I could play the game after that. After that, you are never told how to use specific instruments, and you aren't told what technologies actually do for you as a player. But that is something you can figure out as well with a lot of looking for things, so eventually it will work out.
There also still appear to be a fair amount of bugs in the game, including random missions asking you to take microscope pictures of the atmosphere, and one that makes it so missions do not spawn when they should so the game literally becomes unfinishable. With the last one in mind, I had to stop my playthrough before I could get to the manned stage, as the missions I needed to complete did not ever show up. The physics at times become a large problem in that your science instruments need to be held still to do science, but the physics tries to make your rovers almost dance, which makes it nearly impossible to use your instruments unless you forcibly jam them against the rock or sand you are trying to perform experiments on.

Even then, Mars is a nice and often varied place, with a lot of interesting terrain and good looking locations, with missions placed so that they show you to all the good places with almost scenic tours. The economic part of the game- Getting your funding, is very rough early on and practically doesn't exist in the later stages. This may be to save up money for the manned missions, but I never actually reached that part, so I wouldn't know.

All things said, Take on Mars needs work. It is not an unpleasant experience for one with a lot of patience, but I struggle to see what would draw in anyone other than the most scientific minded people who at the same time don't mind gameplay. For anyone else, it is a nice novelty, but very repetitive and slow. There does not seem to be that much here, at least not in the unmanned campaign.

There is also a multiplayer mode, but I've yet to be able to motivate anyone into playing it with me. I will update this review whenever I get people into a server with it.

Killers and Thieves Review

Since I've only just gotten it, I'll play further at a later point and edit this review as needed. For now, I will say that I enjoyed my time with Killers and Thieves, and while it has issues(Mainly the lack of tutorial, questionable controls, and civilian/guards being incredibly simple), it is still decent, though very much overpriced for what it does at this point.

Edit: Further playing reveals a much greater problem still- A complete lack of replayability. Once you've seen one or two randomly generated maps, you've seen it all. There doesn't seem to be much more than that, not even story wise.
After a few more hours of trying, it feels very much like a flash game with a great concept and no substance. it's neat and has potential, but it will never realize that potential and become great. Quite sad, but that's how many great concepts go.

My time with it is best summed up by analogy;
You get yourself a new bathtub installed, paid for it and finally want to use it to relax. You step in and the bathtub is too small for you to fit in it, so you awkwardly stand in it trying to take a shower. Then you get a phonecall. The shower was nice, but it only just started and now you're interupted. The phone call was someone trying to order a pizza with the wrong number. You go back to your shower and try to enjoy it when you get called again. someone else trying to order a pizza. This repeats for a few hours and you never get the water to heat up so you have to just take a cold shower and then you turn it off and go do something else. All the while you're left thinking about the wonderful warm bath you've been promised.

Original review follows;
Killers and Thieves puts the player in control of a medieval thieves' guild, an interesting idea that might have needed a bit more explaining and working out. As it stands, it is still worth looking at, but it does feel like it could have used a bit more thought at a lot of points.

The story seems pretty good, but the day to day business of robbing places, training your thieves and selling loot feels like it is lacking a bit and often feels clumsy and obtuse. The controls for your thieves are not very intuitive, and the stealth system not regenerating any points once you've lost them makes it impossible to enter stealth again after being spotted.

But that is just one of the systems that feels too simple to me. Perhaps I just expected too much, but so far I've not yet found any unique looking maps. Everything appears to be randomised, even the story missions I've found thus far. While it seems like a lot of effort was put in the presentation, into looks and mood, into the story itself and the concept, it doesn't seem like this effort was placed on connecting the story to the game. An early example is a story mission telling me to rob a place to put pressure on someone, the map was randomly generated, so I just went in and stole a bunch of stuff. With multiple houses there, I had no idea where I was supposed to go. But it turned out the answer was "Anywhere", as stealing from any of the houses counted. Then in a the story afterward the man's house was robbed, yet I couldn't picture the house as everything seemed to just be randomly generated.

While the graphics are good with a consistent, pleasant to look at style that isn't difficult to tell guards and loot apart from the background, the sound is maybe a bit too simple, with music and soundbites seemingly repeated over and over. This got a bit annoying after a while, which I found to detract from the general experience. They can certainly use more variety for the audio.

Guard AI, for a stealth based game, is fairly important. It is then sad that it is so simplistic. Guards seem to move at random, and stand still at random. This means that if you're unlucky, you're going to be stuck in a room for a long time waiting for the guards to move away. They often patrol in buildings randomly, wandering through bedrooms of slums and standing at random staircases in the middle of a house. There doesn't seem to be any sense, which leads me to believe the guard patrols are probably also randomly generated.

The RPG elements are slow, and you will need to level up a lot in order to get the training points needed to make your thieves capable of doing their job properly, and even then there are often not many ways you can use the skills in the maps as they are, even if you actively look for them. I like the idea of growing my band of thieves from poorly skilled randoms from the street to a group of elite heisters, but the leveling up, learning of skills and trying to make thieves better just doesn't seem to matter most of the time. Not to mention that it takes forever to get even the slightest upgrade.

It feels like they've had a great idea, but didn't really know how to turn it into a great game. So they got a story that seems good so far, and they've made some gameplay for it. But they don't seem to have really made it fit well together with the story, and the gameplay elements often appear to conflict in their goals. The numerous flaws in the game seem to break immersion quite often, and the sheer randomness of everything makes planning impossible. Controlling four thieves at the same time with the clumsy controls means you're likely to just leave three outside and use one at a time.

I like the idea, I like the art, and it seems like a lot of work went into the story. But the gameplay feels lacking in many ways. It is essentially the looting and exploration part of This War of Mine with slight changes to it, randomly generated every time and with an overworld system that doesn't seem to really do much anyway. Many things regarding the gameplay feel like they've not been thought about, leading to what feels like a patchwork of mechanics and systems that interact at times, but never truly work together to provide a great immersive and challenging experience.
It is worth getting and playing at some point, and you may very well end up enjoying it like I do. But I can see that it has big issues that would make it a frustrating and poor experience for many, so definitely do not get it at full price.

Battle Brothers Review

Battle Brothers puts you in command of a small mercenary band seeking to make a name for itself, and to earn money.
You control individual soldiers, their loadout, their skill growth, and their moves in battle. It is a pretty interesting tactical game, but it quickly gets repetitive as there isn't a lot of variation to be had and most of your experience will be walking around and occasional bandit fights. That said, what content is there works well and is enjoyable.

Your loadout matters most of the time, with different weapons giving different options in battle, leading to easy to understand choices that you can easily see impact your battles along with most of the time it being easy to see where and how you made mistakes.
A lot of Battle Brothers is about survival, as the real enemy isn't the bandits, greenskins or undead, though they all provide a different challenge, but attrition. As you need to level up your mercenaries, you'll end up having to protect them. And it then feels unfair when you have to level up every one of your brothers from nearly nothing while the game generates enemies for you at higher levels with the idea that you should be able to take them by then. Once you fall behind on the curve and lose a few more fights to now-superior opponents there is no real coming back as there is practically nothing left to fight that won't just murder everyone in your group. If you did not earn enough money to buy good equipment, or you couldn't find the better equipment, you just fell behind on the curve and it will be more and more difficult to catch back up. Assuming it is at all possible.

For a game that seems to take hints from X-com and similar hard games, it feels arbitrary. You are always limited to at most 12 men in your combat formation, while you will quickly find enemies do not have such a limit. Enemies do not need to worry about losing their highly trained men, so they just throw themselves at you- After all, they just get generated from nothing to give you a fight and they don't care if they survive. Then you notice the world feels empty and artificial, as things are generated just to fight you and nothing else seems to happen without you explicitly making it happen by accepting a contract. The fact that the world is randomly generated and seems to not be too interested in making roads and villages fit the terrain doesn't help it either. While I like the idea of the map being randomly generated and it occasionally seems to come up with a good map, it feels like the majority of them are pretty poor in many aspects, though thankfully no map seed is terrible to the point it can't be dealt with by a tactics and strategy change.

There are no fights outside of nature, even if you accept a contract to fight in a siege and the text says you push through the gate of the citadel, only to find it is a grassy plain just like every other plain out there. You may be asked to enter a mausoleum for an artifact, or a graveyard to get rid of grave robbers, but these too are just empty grassy plains and maybe hills.
Without a doubt, it feels like they did not pay attention to the details, and things weren't really worked out that well, leading to it feeling frustrating and what should have been a climax- A siege on a stone citadel during a war between noble houses- Instead just became a disappointment as it was just another fight on a field of grass.

But all that said, it remains a positive experience. being able to name your mercenaries and build them in the way you like(Though most of them will be pretty standard simply because the reality of combat makes some things highly impractical), the flavour text and random events are amusing and interesting. Armour and weapons can be looted from the enemy after combat, and the looks of your men change with their injuries and equipment.

Battle Brothers is a flawed but still enjoyable game, if you are okay with being frustrated often and a lot of doing battles that feel the same over and over. What is there is pretty good, but it feels like there is definitely too much of the same and it never seems to go anywhere. It's worth getting if you are interested in team management and fighting against attrition, but for everyone that isn't a big fan of turn based tactical combat I'd say wait for a sale. Or you're just going to end up frustrated and annoyed.

PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS Review

ALL CAPITAL LETTERS GAME is about landing on an island with up to 99 other people and being the last team(Or person) standing. If that interests you, you're probably going to enjoy this game. I was somewhat surprised to find this to be an entire subgenre of FPS (And third person shooters too), and from what I can tell it seems to be the best in it at the moment.

For everyone who hasn't been convinced yet or doesn't know anything about it, I would say it's...Alright, I suppose.

I'm not really impressed by it, but it certainly does what it says it will. A typical round lasts at most about 25 minutes and starts with you jumping out of a plane over the island. You then land and you have to find gear for yourself- Which essentially means guns, ammo and medical supplies. Technically melee weaponry exists but unless you and someone else are in the same building in the first minute of the game you're going to not use anything except guns.
Once everyone has landed the playable area starts becoming smaller, forcing players into conflict as the playable area reduces in size until the game ends with a winner.
There is no penalty for losing or leaving the game, matches are quick to hop in and quick to leave, and it has a very quick format for those who are low on time. It does get somewhat repetitive, and most rounds go roughly the same in my experience, you get your stuff, you try to not die, and then either you end up killing the other people or you get shot and die.

The actual gunplay is solid enough, and aiming with a scope is not unpleasant. A large amount of the tactics involved are about flanking your opponent. As almost everything is very powerful and capable of killing someone in just a few good shots you will want to use cover to your advantage and deny it for your opponents. The controls are sometimes a bit rough, with some odd input lag for things like entering vehicles or opening doors, but this is probably because it is still early access.
Sound design seems good, and you can often hear someone before you see them.

You may have noticed the 'survival' tag on the steam store. The goal is survival, I suppose. But you're in the wrong place if you're looking for somewhere that you'll need to find food and drink, build shelter, and similar things to actually survive in the long term. There is no long term in this game, for better or worse. In the same way, I suppose it is technically an open world, you can go anywhere you want. But you're going to take damage and get limited to a smaller area really quickly.

I'm having trouble finding other things to say about it. I am not really impressed by it, it does what it says it does, and it does them pretty well. But it doesnt say it will do much either. It had its origins as a mod for an other game, and it still feels like it is just that right now- A mod for some other game. A good mod, for sure. Enjoyable for a while, certainly. But not what I'd call a full game worth 30€
At least not in its current state. Unless you are really into this kind of game, in which case you're going to probably spend over 100 hours in it as it is the best one of its kind at the moment