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

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.