Seneste anmeldelser af Hobbes

Disregarding most of the issues concerning the developers behaviour (such as disregarding data from their testing group, their asinine pricing of hero skins, and assorted other misdemeanours that would likely hit the word limit of the review if I went into them in depth) the release of the Bandits FINALLY means I can now thumbs up the game as everyone has "Hero parity".

You can now, some year after the intended due date for delivery, get your hands on the Bandits, something League of Geeks assured us would happen back when the initial kerfuffle happened. This means you now have access to all the heroes that the KS backers have, and there is now less of a divide between backers and non backers.


I emphasise the "less" bit.

Backers are treated by LoG as a class above the proletariat, and that will always remain the case (unless they pull what one specific backer did, in which case LoG throws them under the bus.)

With full hero parity, I now fully recommend people buy the game.

Not the ludicrously overpriced skins though. These developers don't deserve *that* much of your money. If you need to see what I'm getting at, take a look at WordSlices responses in the thread below, recommend you pick up a good cheese to go with the whine.

Having skins that are basically price equivalent to the pack of Bandits should illustrate just how messed up the prioririties are with this bunch. They are not thinking with clear heads. With any luck they move on to another project, and avoid getting mixed up in crowdfunding of any kind (though my bet is they use Fig, because that way they don't have to worry about any form of commitment).


They did. They gave me a permanent ban not just here, but on every possible means of communication for get this - "Toxic behaviour", which in totality was me negatively reviewing the game on account of their behaviour, and not backing down over the matter. Nothing more. No racism, no swearing (trust me, you want to see me swear, go read my ducati world champ review, when I choose to let loose, it's special, I'll tell you how I really feel).

So yes, buy the game, it's good, play it with friends, and now with the Bandits, play it over the internet, but avoid the developers like the plague. This game succeeds in spite of, not because of them.

The TLDR: It's a bit better. Research is not the horrible mess that it was in the first release or the first major patch. However it's still some distance from ideal (and by the sounds of it the only way it will get to the ideal is with heavy use of modding, something that is promised for ES2), research has gone from "Terribad" to "Decent". However ship design is -ridiculously- simplistic compared to ES1, combat is so bad it actually requires community mods just to make it not entirely broken. Yes, it's in that bad shape, that's as of time of writing as of this edit.

Amplitude, you dun fscked up.

Okay.

So. Read the TLDR? Understand? Good. Because that's the most important part in a nutshell. Endless Space 2, if you wanted a very quick summation could be termed "Endless Legend + Endless Space + A few new features", no, I'm not joking, that's pretty much it. Smash the two games together, take some of the best of Endless Legends systems, marry them to the theme of Endless Space, take Endless Space's combat and make it worse (if that was somehow possible) and then call it a night.


Endless Legend practically tore a hole in the 4x Genre by redefining several core tenets of how the empire building phases worked, it introduced truly asymetric empires, it introduced the concept of regions and forced you to think carefully about city placement (a feature Civ VI has taken to heart), it made minor factions something more than just names and numbers, it gave them -life-, you actually put thought into the empire you were building, and which little empirefriends you were going to bring along.

Endless Space might not have pushed any real boundaries, but it did what it did with style, and with clean systems and a UI that's been praised up and down the MSM, and by people like myself. It didn't make things overcomplex, but there was a wealth of information when you went looking for it, galaxy view was a joy to work with, and the game itself just worked -well-. It was a good, solidly executed space 4X.

Dungeon of the endless was a gem. If you've not had the chance to play it - do so. Tower defence meets a sort of singleplayer MOBA arrangement meets CTF meets all kinds of strangeness, it was unique, it did so much -right- that it was easily one of my top picks to recommend to friends looking for something new and fresh. It still is. It's glorious.

SO WHY THEN AMPLITUDE HAVE YOU DECIDED TO DO WHAT I CAN KINDLY TERM AS A "BEYOND EARTH"


There's not anything terribly wrong with a lot of what Endless Space 2 -does-, but it patently refuses to do anything terribly new. There's ONE feature that stood out to me that was a "not gimmick", and that was the new political system which means you deal with factions who in turn determine which laws you can set within your empire, these laws in turn determine which bonuses you can impart empire wide.

Since everything you do, from the system exploitations you make to the ships you build to the diplomacy you partake in has an effect on the relative power of various factions, this has genuinely interesting repercussions, it means your empire is going to reflect your "personal playstyle" and it means you'll want to build your populace, and indeed your choice of race around that. Cravers are not going to do well as pacifists for example. Indeed, with the new options and developments concernining the internal diplomacy and tensions between the factions, now there's real meat to the gameplay in that sense. That's -good-.

The Amplified View is still a horrible gimmick, two patches in and it's still a gimmick in search of a problem to fix. It solves no gameplay element that really -helps- the player, and it just adds extra effort for the player to find information that could otherwise be presented in screens elsewhere with minimal effort. I fail to see the benefit.

The real issue is it ALSO detracts from the trademark excellence that Amplitude have managed to achieve both in UI and UX design, the new UI is a long way from ideal, with elements of the game needlessly obfuscated (System Upgrades is a good example) and other elements (Such as ship details during animated combat) being put into Amplified view JUST BECAUSE, rather than the neat icon view in ES1. These are all flat out regressions from just about every Amplitude title and feel like showboating than genuine improvement in UI design.

In short, this is Amplitude being as I put it - French, needlessly fiddly for the sake of it. Games operate at their best when they are clean, simple and easy to approach. A hidden view you have to switch between to get info that's better presented in various menus already to hand is not clean and simple, it's just being pretentious. Do better.

Scanning for curiosities is still busywork, and still badly handled, because you're still endlessly pinging little shiny buttons on planets. This could be much more elegantly handled with a "Scan system" option for exploration ships or having the ships burn a probe when they enter the system and autoscan for curiosities if the system hasn't already been discovered. The current system is well, horrible, and time consuming in the worst of ways.


NO. IT'S STILL ABYSMAL, IT STILL IS CATEGORICALLY WORSE THAN ES1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrH3XiMR3KA


Parts of it are getting there, the game as a whole has improved from the initial release which was frankly shooting for the miseries of the 4-6/10 mark, but this is still not a great effort from Amplitude, and even compared to ES1+Disharmony, this is still a weak entry. It shouldn't be, this is a company famed for doing great, original things and yet ES2 is the least original game they've come out with, it isn't even a good sequel to ES1 which would have been sufficient, it's just a game with solutions for problems that don't exist and ideas that have already been solved better elsewhere.

The appearance is drop dead gorgeous, that much is true, but it lacks a lot of the subtlety and a lot of the flavour that ES1 -had- and that's a crying shame. They DESPERATELY need to take a serious look at combat and ship micro, and make a final decision as to how they want to direct it, along with either fully building out or ditching certain remaining elements of the game altogether.

Amplitude - Stop using Endless Legend as putty to put in the gaps in Endless Space 2, you're doing ES2, and Endless Legend's fanbase an injustice. If you refuse to do that, then frankly you deserve poor press reviews (and I'll be one of those who finalises such a review) and this IP needs to be shot down, so you can learn from this and return to form with a new, fresh game. It seems to be your strong suit.

Verdict : Get it on sale, but not on full price.

Redout. It came from nowhere and screaming along at speeds that, in any sane world, would rack up speed tickets at the rate of pounds per second, be rightly dismissed as the sport of lunatics. Anti grav racing? But that died out with Wipeout? Wipeout HD and Fury on the Playstation 3 got that nailed and then Sony went and shuttered the studio, forever killing the dreams of futuristic racing! There's been pretenders to the crown, and there's been promise in the form of Formula Fusion, made by the very same people who developed Wipeout in the first place, but realistically? It ded. Dey killed it.

Then Redout appears. It blazes out of the gate with style, with a design and artistic approach all of it's own, rather than going for lots of visual noise it keeps things simple, but at the same time visually appealing, lots of flat, but colourful polygons, creating a sort of "Lo-fi" approach that will run at a very smooth framerate once you've figured out just what detail setting you can get away with. The first thing you notice is just how -fast- this thing goes, this isn't just floaty sleds on a track, this is doing loop the loops at closing on 1,000 k/mh, this is vaulting into the sky at speeds that shouldn't even be *possible*, and with turns that require you to react on near instinctual levels.


Redout doesn't really do weapons, there are some, such as a leech and an EMP, but critically you get to choose what your loadout is before you even begin the race. This means there's an element of tactics in the game, rather than praying to RNGesus you get a shockwave off of a weapons pad. This means you're wieghing up the choices before the race even begins, and working out what will best serve you in the race ahead, once you've a few actives and passives unlocked, you'll be changing loadouts around regularly.

Each racer gets to pick one active and one passive, the passive can be simple stuff like a flat boost to a given stat, or it can be a conditional such as a bigger boost but only when in an opponents wake. Whereas the active is something you have to set off, and it takes from a shared "energy pool" that's also used for boosting, so you have to make discrete choices as to when it's time to use your active, and when it's time to get that extra kick of speed. (In the case of the Turbo, you get to choose whether to use some energy for a little boost, or to hold off and fill the bar to 360BLAZEIT for a giant whack out of the Turbo)

Repairing is done automatically, provided you didn't dink either the course or another racer after a few seconds, with the hull bar creeping up ever so slowly once the repair routines kick in, at the speeds you're charging around the track in, those precious few seconds of hull can often make the difference between life and death, occasionally you may even want to slow to draw out as much repair as possible, being mindful all the time of your opponents.

It's all very well thought out, with an eye to keeping you constantly focussed on the track and your opponents, because the speed at which the game goes is real "Blink and you'll miss it" stuff.


There's areas where I can, and will nitpick, being someone who deeply loved the Wipeout series. First and foremost is the fact the teams lack "definition" at this point, they're nice to unlock and they have different stats, but I don't really feel what sets them apart from one another, that might be something to delve into with more worldbuilding and background. There's bugs (such as the Top speed on vehicles plummeting when you buy the Acceleration upgrade) but those will get patched out). The multiplayer is a work in progress (but they know that), and the Career could do with more "structure" (There's a lot of it, but it's very flat in how it rolls out).

However, does any of this detract from what is an amazing game? Nope. Does any of this take away from the fact we've FINALLY GOT A WORTHY AG RACER ON PC? Nope.

About. Damn. Time. Thank you devs. We now have a proper AG racer.

Verdict : Highly Recommended

Fast recap time. No Man's Sky when it launched was a -mess- , it was an interesting mess to be sure, but it was a mess. One which showed both the potential and pitfalls of procedurally generated content. There was a game in there, somewhere, but it was buried under masses of bugs, and a lack of content beyond the concept that sure, there was a million planets, but much like Elite:Dangerous, it's not exactly saying much when many of those planets look and feel kinda the same. Ditto for the ships, and the wildlife, and the rocks, and the trees. It became a sortof homogeneous mush that didn't quite -work-.

Hello Games could have taken the money and run. Given the sheer backlash, it would have been easily the most sensible thing to do, shut down the studio, collect their fees from the game individually, and wait out the storm before reforming under a new name. Instead they did what Frontier has conclusively failed to do with Elite Dangerous and what CGI are threatening to fail to do with Star Citizen.

They've turned around a hot mess and created out of the raw materials a masterchef special.

Right now all it's missing is a knob of butter and a dash of salt (and you can throw those into your dish which you can cook for Space Gordon Ramsay who will then berate you for your substandard cooking efforts).


It's better than good. It's *excellent*. It's doing all the things that Elite Dangerous promised to do and it's doing them without charging you for them. Cosmetics? Free. You just need to do missions in game, scoop up some quicksilver for your efforts and visit the -in game- cosmetic shop and buy up whatever your greedy heart desires. In ship bobbleheads? You *pay* for those in other games. Here - Free. Same deal.

Freighters (a.k.a. Fleet Carriers), okay sure you can't run commodity shops out of them, but you can run fleet expeditions out of these, and you're not being hammered for weekly rental for your freighter, in fact, the reverse, you get REWARDED for visiting your frigates on a semi-regular basis. You get REWARDED for sending your fleets out to the distant bits of the galaxy.

Ships visit your hangar and you can trade with them or even buy them if you want to add them to your collection (and with the ability now to scrap and salvage ships you no longer need, you can keep your personal fleet very manageable, it's -fantastic-). You can find all sorts of freighters, from small junkers right the way through to massive capital ships bristling with defences (which will terrify you when they leap to you in VR).


Hello games have, incrementally and over time, got steadily closer to the original vision they presented in that hype trailer. They're not *quite* there yet, but they've gone from being miles and miles away to the point that if you squint, you can just about see it now. I always asserted if they got -to- the hype trailer levels of capability that it would be the game to "end them all" because it would be so far ahead of everything else that it would essentially redefine what a lot of games have to reach for to be worth playing. Naturally it never lived up to the hype so we never got to experience the whole genre-redefining fever-dream Sean Murray had, yet... here we are.


It needs actual threat. Not from other players, but from the universe itself. The aliens bursting from eggs if you have the temerity to mess with them is a good start, so is the underwater stuff, but now hello games needs to have more than just the sentinels to tie it together. There needs to be those massive capital ship fights that -you- can get involved with both either as an independent pilot or as a freighter pilot. There needs to be big, nasty creatures that are massive threats on extreme planets that can ruin your day. The aliens from the eggs need to coalesce into something that's more than just "WTF IS THAT" on the first encounter but then just a nuisance after that. It needs alien warriors, alien ranged mobs, and alien bosses.

It needs a world that introduces both danger and opportunity. That's the last remaining step. Everything else is there, all the building blocks have been assembled, you now have pretty much all the tools to engage with the universe, now all that's left is for the universe to say to you "Fite me, if you think you can".

With that, this game will have a universe that is going to last you into the thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of hours.

All for forty quid.

Give that some thought. Warframe requires significant grind to get into some of the really interesting stuff. Elite Dangerous is more a second job (and the endgame stuff even moreso), Star Citizen - who *knows* where that's going.


This game is literally one significant development step off of being able to convincingly be ahead of *the lot*.

The launch should be remembered, but perhaps now it should be time to forgive it. The game we have on our hands now is not the game that was dropped on us at launch. What we have now is -worth- getting into.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. But good god Hello Games, you had to really turn this boat around...

EDIT : Will update for the Origins patch. JESUS CHRIST HELLO GAMES. I GET IT. THE GAME GETS UPDATED EVERY YEAR WITH NEW THINGS. PRETTY PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU FOR THE SAKE OF MY REVIEW. WARN US BEFORE YOU DROP A MASSIVE PATCH.

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

Welcome to the wonderful world of Renowned Explorers : International Society, best described as a very warm and charming take on "The Curious Expedition" but do not confuse that for "Simple or shallow", no. Nonono. This game is, underneath the big fluffy cuddly exterior, much like a house cat, and like any house cat, it has paws made up of TEENY TINY KNIVES which will dig their way in and cause much horrible pain if you're not paying attention to the various mechanics at work.

If you've never had the joy of living with a house cat, it's the most wonderful experience, and they'll slowly destroy everything you own, but you'll never be able to get upset with them, because they're made of fur, and wuv. Even when it comes to cleaning their ears and they rake nice red lines into your forearm so you look like you've been on a self harm trip.

This game is very much like a house cat, you don't own it. It owns you. Often as a matter of fact. I've played the better end of hm, fifty attempts, often getting to 4* or 5* difficulty expeditions and then it all goes horribly horribly wrong. Oh it's call cute and cuddly in the beginning with nice scottish highlands and pirates treasure out in the carribean but just you wait, wait until you're knee deep in Transylvania, hungry wolves and digging into the legends of one Mr. Dracul who turns out to be a real charmer with the speech and can WRECK a diplomatically inclined team in seconds because as it turns out, your strength just became a phenomenal weakness.


Okay, let's pull the camera back and do a breakdown of the game. It runs in three distinct "beats", first and foremost is the World Map, this serves as your transition between various adventures, it's where you kit out your explorers, spend insight and convert that into "Useful materials" for expeditions ahead, and then spend gold, status, and research on "Things that will help" such as equipment upgrades (armour helps a LOT, so do trinkets), your entourage (who acts as a force multiplier and offers special conditions in the case of the named entourage members), and unlocking areas of the research tree that yields additional supplies, and other useful benefits, again, making the ride through the game that much smoother. It's your HQ in effect, but there's a lot to do between adventures, and a lot of discrete choices to make as to how you want to "build your team", so it's not like a case of "Click click done".


Second beat comes in the form of the "local adventure" map, which once you've selected WHERE you want to go, is then a zoomed up version of the location, say, an area of land or an island, part fogged in and part visible depending on how much terrain you've covered, each map has points of interest (think FTL) and the idea is you move around the points of interest, solving challenges.

Most of these are "Roll" challenges where a % chance to succeed is based on the skills of the team, more skills mean more prizes, in some cases simply having ENOUGH skills in a specific tree will unlock whole new options, which are coloured in and take you down new routes with additional rewards. The limit on simply being able to clean the map is "Supplies", the cap is soft, you can go below zero, but each point that you do, imposes a very steep penalty on your ability to fight. You can get away with one or two points, but more than this is just -begging- for a game over.

The stories for each area are well written and the narrative is cohesive, it's good enough that you'll be able to get a feel for what goes on in each area and you'll pay some attention to the choices presented (there's usually clues in the text as to what's a good choice and what's a bad one), sometimes you'll end up with a case of "Best of the worst" options which can be a tad irritating but that's RNG for you when you don't know what you're going to draw from the story deck for a given area.


Finally, there's the turn based fighting sequence, which kicks in on an encounter. This is not just a case of move and shoot. You have three options, one agressive, one devious, one friendly, the game KINDA works like rock paper scissors, however, there's more than just the fight atmosphere to consider, because if you want the optimal rewards you may have to finish a fight in a specific manner.

In other cases you may face opponents who change their own approach when you munchkin the game mechanics (in other words, attempt to game the boss and the boss games YOU), and each of the RE:IS members have their own specific strengths and weaknesses meaning some just don't work out that well for a specific strategy in one way, but are great when used in a different approach. Using a one dimensional "Oh I am gonna stack the board with speakers" seems great in principle, but then Mr. Dracul comes along and "OH GOD I'M GOING TO GET MY FACE TORN OFF", so it's not always the greatest plan to put all the eggs in one basket.


In fact you'll probably have so much fun with the various boss encounters and the foes like the Smuggler Boss (who you can reduce to tears) and Mr. Dracul that the real goal, beating the obnoxious champion of the International Society will take the back seat as the moment to moment stories you find yourself in matter more, Riveleaux can wait, I've a vampire to convince.


So here's the big question "Curious Expedition" or "Renowned explorers" - Me? I'd say both. They're wonderful games both of them, but if I had to make a choice? I'd take the house cat over the darker sibling, and ONLY JUST. Because it's the house cat, and it's "Heartwarming" (and yes, that's something you can DO to your foes in this game).

I love my cats. I love this game so very dearly. Get it.

Verdict : Essential

If it were not for the fact that this game has been ported in such a way that it makes No Man's Sky look competent (and that's a really low bar to set), this would be getting praise from me as possibly the sleeper Tower Defence hit of 2016, it's really "that" good. There's a genuinely brilliant twist on the TD genre that makes it well worth a look, combined with a lot of personality and heart that brings the game to life and actually makes it feel like you're fighting in some kind of "Attack on Titan" anime of sorts. Where your job is to protect a city by maneuvering giant guns on rotating city rings to face off against huge kaijus that are bent on destroying the last vestiges of humanity.

But the programmers clearly decided that pressing Unity "Output to PC" *BLAP* was good enough, dumped it out on the PC and walked away. The game doesn't even have an exit button. I... wat.


WAI U DO DIS TO ME. U MAEK AMAZE TOWER DEFENS AND THEN U POO ALL OVER IT WITH TERRIBLE POGAMMING. WAI U DO DIS TO MEEEEEE.

There's a blood vessel, I can feel it, it's sat at the base of my neck, and it runs into the back of my skull, and it tenses up every time I run into a game like this, a game that has all the materials of greatness, but is sabotaged by programmer laziness and sloppiness. THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SOLID GOLD IF ONLY YOU HAD PAID A LITTLE BIT MORE ATTENTION. Instead you absolutely need an xbox controller to make the game work properly (gods help you poor souls on mouse and keyboard, you have my sympathies), and even then the game lacks so many basic features that I'm sat here rocking back and forth on my chair going "HOW DID THIS MAKE IT ONTO STEAM WITHOUT QA GOING NOPE.JPG"

... and yet I love it to bits, because it's on the same token this wonderful slice of anime TD that has over the top voice acting, terrible Engrish dubbing (seriously, it's so cheesy it should be labelled "Extra Mature"), but it does manage somehow to convey a perfect sense of atmosphere and the game, once you get your head around it, is genuinely good. It's great -fun-, I've played non stop and I've had a grin on my face all the way along.


BUT IT'S A HORRIBLE PIECE OF PROGRAMMING THAT DESERVES TO DIE IN A FIRE. THE FIRE SHOULD THEN BE COATED IN COMBUSTIBLE DUST, WHICH SHOULD THEN CATCH FIRE, AND THEN EVERYTHING SHOULD BE FIRE.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH OF A HEADACHE YOU HAVE CAUSED ME, DEVELOPERS?

I WANT TO GIVE A THUMB UP, DOWN, SIDEWAYS AND I WANT TO RAM MY FIST THROUGH MY SCREEN INTO YOUR FACE REPEATEDLY FOR THE TRAVESTY OF CODE YOU HAVE VISITED UPON STEAM. EVEN AIR CONTROL HAD A QUIT OPTION.

...

*inhale* Calm, little book of calm, everything is calm, I am calm, the world is calm, all is calm...

I WILL SKIN THE PERSON WHO FORGOT TO CODE AN EXIT BUTTON ALIVE, AND I WILL SOAK THEIR BODY IN LEMON JUICE AND RECORD THEIR SCREAMS SO I CAN SLEEP TO THOSE SCREAMS EVERY NIGHT.

...

Yeah. Crimes against code. Don't do it.

The game is great, but any game which forces you to alt tab and then force close the game from THE TASK MANAGER or by ALT-F4 automatically loses.

IF you need to ask what it lost, then you too, have lost.

That is all.

Now I shall go back, play and hatelove this game sometime later, as a means of catharsis. This game and I have relationship issues.

Starbound is a tricky beast to nail down. It's not Terraria, it's not as simple as saying that it's got a world where you kill progressively nastier bosses and work your way through crazier and crazier biomes, because it's much wider than that. The best way I can describe it is as "Sci fi fantasy : The game", it has a lot of different activities, all of which can be explored to a reasonable depth, and all of which complement each other to a decent enough extent that regardless of HOW you want to approach Starbound, you're going to find something to like in it. Want to go on a pokemon style pet battle hunt through the galaxy? Starbound has that. Want to become an iron chef and cook up all kinds of alien cuisine? Got that too. Want to go spelunking through alien ruins for phat loot? In spades. Want a reasonably okay story that gives you a reason to go exploring the big wide universe? It even has that.

You can even build a massive colony and become an administrator of a planet, with your own vendors, NPC quests, income, housing, all that jazz. There's so many ways to play Starbound that frankly you're almost lost for choice, to the point some people are going to get turned off. The overarching quest I mentioned is the thing that probably will keep most people playing for a while, but past that you really need to supply the imagination and the goals as to what you want to achieve and get out of Starbound. This doesn't even count the mod scene, which thanks to Chucklefish having the foresight to build in -really- good mod support, is likely to become a very long term and integrated part of the Starbound scene.


There's lots of content here, especially if you add in a few key mods like Frackin' Universe, you're going to need to go out there and take a peek though, spend some time getting around and figuring out just what parts of it you want to invest into. When you -do- find something that hooks you though, it's almost Minecraft levels of addictive, you'll blow past the tens of hours and easily into the hundreds. Starbound is that kind of a game. As a value proposition, it's unmatched. There's questing, there's exploration, crafting, pets, crew, colonies, cooking, farming, vehicles, the list goes on and on and on.

Each individual area isn't *stupidly* deep, but because it covers such a wide number of activities, it doesn't need to, they're all executed competently enough that they all work together and form something that's greater than the sum of it's parts. That's pleasing, the whole game feels cohesive, and everything from the music to the lighting to the artwork just "fits".


This could have, and perhaps should have been the next Duke Nukem Forever, another object lesson of what happens when a game gets trapped in development hell, but Chucklefish has proved damn near everyone wrong, including me. That makes me happy, because it proves that sometimes being cynical and jaded isn't a guarantee of being right, instead Chucklefish put their heads down, got the development up to a phenomenal speed and created something that is truly worthy of a 1.0 release, even if *nothing* more was added by the official developers, they've created a platform for modders to paint their own ideas onto a wonderful galaxy, and one I'm more than happy to call home. If you have any interest in Terraria, Minecraft or similar games, Starbound should already be in your library. Even if you're not, this is one of those few games where you definitely should go and check it out.

Verdict : Essential

(Disclaimer : Review key recieved from developer)


Bored of those gritty zombie games where you're stuck with relentless brown and green? Tired of those endless drudges through gore and misery only to wind up going from day to day rooting out tins of cold baked beans? Sick and tired of having to scavenge hundreds of planks to make fences for your little survivor camp? Hacked off at seeing the same identikit survivors which stories which all blend into each other and just make you reach for the booze?

Fret no longer, for I present the Happiest Zombie Apocalypse in America

Death Road to Canada is possibly one of the most lighthearted zombie murder games I've run into in a long while, ostensibly taking it's inspiration from the Organ Trail, and FTL, you're put in charge of two survivors, and a car. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to drive to Canada, or to die trying. Hint, you're going to die a fair few times before you get there, but that's all part of the learning experience. You can either take some random survivors in a default game setting, or you can create your own survivors, be they friends or people you want to see turned into zombie chow, and set off with your own choice of team, with the intent of picking up more friends along the way.

Combat is a little bit loose, but that's intended by design, you are after all, survivors, not trained soldiers, so you tend to waff your melee weapons in the general direction of whatever is closest to you, said weapons ranging from spatulas (no, no joke) right the way through to sledgehammers, hockeysticks, nailboards, and baseball bats. Then you've the proper shootybang stuff with revolvers, pistols, shotguns and so on. The stats of your survivor play a significant part in how many swings they'll get in before they become "winded", or in the case of firearms, just how accurate they're prone to be (shotguns you can get away with giving to anyone, other guns you'll want to be a bit more careful with).


For what could have been a fairly simple pick up and play game, there's a lot of statistical complexity under the hood, with weapons having their own "drain" on player stamina, weapons having their own fire rate, accuracy and spread, and vehicles having their own consumption rate, and durability. Characters too have their own personality traits and benefits, meaning that it's unlikely you'll run across two survivors that are exactly the same in a given playthrough, as a direct result, DRtC becomes a far stronger game than the Organ Trail and actually elevates itself up to the company of games like Death ♥♥♥♥ Marks, which shares the same kind of irreverant humour and sense of fun about it.

This doesn't even touch on the fact there's pets you can bring into the team (Dogs and Cats, though as yet I've not been successful at grabbing either), there's choose your own adventure style events, though these are more simplistic than say, FTL, they are stat based in terms of the choices you get with differing chances of success, and depending on your survivors, you may get presented with different options from one playthrough to the next.


Death Road to Canada -could- have been a throwaway title, or something that would have been fun for a pick up and play but ultimately not something that would stand up to repeated scrutiny. I'm glad to report that this definitely is not the case, there's real longevity here, and there's a definite gem of a game here. One that has managed to emerge as another Kickstarter success (which is a bit of a rarity these days) and one the devs rightly should be quite happy about.

Verdict : Highly recommended, with one caveat which I'll discuss below.

However, I do not feel that it significantly detracts from the game itself as this is a single player experience,

it would be nice to see it resolved somewhen though.

There -is- one unanswered question which I'll update my review with as time progresses, and that concerns a KS exclusive piece of content which whilst not *vast*, is game affecting. As is normal for any review I do, I do "due dilligence" on all games that go through Kickstarter, and I highlight such things because in the interests of being thorough, that's my job.

One of the reward tiers ($50) provided backers with a specific game unlock, allowing them to have the option of a kitten or puppy as a "morale booster" who would grow into a full team member over time, at the cost of an additional food drain. This would be something in the -longer term- I'd like to see added as purchasable DLC of some sort, as it would be nice to have the full game made "content complete", however, as I state above, because this game is predominantly a singleplayer experience, this isn't something that will affect players beyond their personal preference.

This element will be removed or revised as more information is made available.

Played Enter the Gungeon? Felt like it was a bit too slow? Needed things ramped up to eleven? Wanted more *thump* to your soundtrack? Maybe add a bit of persistence to the mix as well? Void Raiders has your back. This crazy Russian infused twinstick roguelite takes a lot of the core concepts and then just turns *everything* up to eleven, visual effects, colours, music, screenshake, you name it.

It's a bit like if someone decided Pacman and Enter the Gungeon needed some time in a hotel room with LSD and Viagra, and a "Best of Barry White" album, and this is the result. It's mayhem, beautiful, barely controlled mayhem, and it's entirely hilarious. You have next to no idea what's going on half the time as there's a ridiculous number of projectiles whizzing about in the later levels, you're reacting quite literally on instinct as you simply go "KILL EVERYTHING!", and well, that's about the size of it.

There's lockers you pilfer using credits that rain down from the sky like it's AdVenture Capitalist, giving you various statistical buffs to keep you more or less alive as you work your way through the ever increasing levels of madness, eventually running into bosses who SUDDENLY require some level of thought because their guns go from "Slightly dangerous" to "OW OW OW MY FACE". I was going to compare this to another game that uses the same kind of stat system - Hero Siege - but that game is NOWHERE near as crazy, or fast paced. This thing is in a league which sits near things like Ubermosh and proper bullet hell type arrangements.


Between runs there's a simple talent tree setup to steadily increase the starting power of each of the three Void Runners (I'm not sure if there's more you can unlock, or more planned, there needs to be, this game deserves ongoing support), there's a relic vault you can unlock persistent buffs for your runners once you've kekked a few bosses, the bar allows you to choose starting buffs or tweak what kind of things you get out of the supply drops, and the whole thing has this wonderful sense of ongoing growth and expansion that keeps you coming back for "Just one more try", because you'll always be getting stronger, even when you lose.

The enemies are simple bullet sponges, but they fit the themes, and they're definitely not to be underestimated, there's some that are deliberate "Wolf in mook clothing" types that WILL near as damnit one shot you if you're dumb enough to not pay attention to their wind up animations. The Bosses demand respect, naturally, and health and ammo is not as frequent as the credit rain that comes along through the levels.


This game is a gem that deserves your attention. It's a russian infused, vodka laden gem that's entirely bonkers, and if you love twinsticks, well, this one will certainly grab you hard and not let go, just be ready for a fast and furious ride, because good grief, it hits top gear right out of the gate, and then it gets *faster*. If you like sedate games, run, run fast, this game is anything BUT sedate.

Verdict : Highly Recommended

A lot of people who read my reviews will know that my stance towards kickstarter exclusive content is one where I'm firmly against it with the sole exception of cosmetics (and even then I'm of the opinion that they should be timed, eventually they should be open to all, because it's a little unfair to sell a game which isn't entirely "complete" in a material sense), in some cases such as Armello, the damage caused by Kickstarter promises has been real and significant (see the Bandit mess), in others it's been more one of perception (such as Skyshine's Bedlam).

Thankfully here we're talking about skins. I'll let this one slide. At some point down the line it'd be -nice- to see those skins come out in some way shape or form for the public, but I'm not going to rake the game over the coals beyond what I've said here and now.

More to the point, the Flame in the Flood is one of the rare breed of Kickstarter games that has not only delivered on it's promises, but achieved the rare accolade of being fun to play, and an interesting twist on the "roguelite" formula that's been doing the rounds in various guises. Flame (what I'll shorthand it to from hereon out) uses quite significant and intricate survival mechanics involving diseases, injuries, thirst, starvation, hypothermia, and sleep management whilst at the same time propelling you down an ever changing, proc-gen river that really takes no prisoners. I mean it, the river is a horrible, uncaring creature, it will happily smash your TEENY TINY raft into flotsam any opportunity it gets.

The game splits itself into two distinct beats, the first being a more sedate "Run around the island you're on, hoover up anything you think looks useful, and run like hell from anything that has bigger teeth than you", it's a bit like Don't Starve but without easy access to weaponry that levels the playing field, so you're going to spend the vast bulk of your time fleeing angry black wolves until you've got access to poisoned bait or spike traps or similar.

The other half is where the game really throws you about, putting you on a flimsy raft in the middle of what might be the worlds lousiest Kayaking course. It's half rocks, half rapids and all horrible, and it wants to kill you. Not just passively sits there going "Meh, I don't like you." No, the river generator is set to "Imma mess you up", and it will, many times. Do not expect to complete the campaign first try, particularly on the permadeath difficulty.


The brew is interesting, particularly on the harder difficulty, because it forces you to spend more time dodging dangerous things and making tough decisions about your resources, what you take and leave on your puny raft (even with your loyal dog, you're going to be playing some severe inventory Tetris at the best of times), and it's definitely engaging if you're up for a twist on the roguelite genre. However, there's a but coming...

.. it suffers the same flaws as a lot of the roguelites, except perhaps more severely so, in so much as you are at the whims of RNGesus for your initial starting items, you'll need flints, oh boy do you need flints, and you need LOTS of them, and the buggers can refuse to turn up in sufficient quantities for a long, long time.

This can make getting a foothold in the game all but impossible as you're forced to scavenge and live off the land munching frantically on wild garlic as you're locked out of the bulk of the crafting tree for want of a stone knife and stone hammer. Having this lynch pin that's entirely at the mercy of lady luck is a real issue, because at the roll of a dice you could be hamstrung for as much as two or even three zones before you get a real grip on your run, by which point you're too far behind and you're dealing with threats FAR ahead of your ability to manage them.


Making flints more available in the opening areas would go a long way to alleviating a lot of the random frustrations that people get, seeing as most of the crafting is absolutely contingent on the basic pair of tools you require to get started, it seems a bit nutty that you're very heavily at the whims of lady luck, even if you do manage to hit the bulk of settlements on each run, run after run. In the end the only option tends to be to have the flints stack up on the Dog so you can die and then with the next run, have a chance at creating the tools you'll need to -live-.

Despite that nasty fly in the ointment, this is a genuinely pretty and atmospheric game, and there's a lot to love here, it's an original take on the roguelite / survival approach, and if you can live with the dice not falling your way from time to time, there's a good game to be had.

Verdict : Recommended, if they sort the flint issue, bump it to Highly Recommended

UPDATE : After some more playthroughs, yes, flints are needed in bulk, and as a result, they need to tune the number of flints you get in campaign mode, there needs to be more of them, I'd estimate at least about 50% more by droprate from where they are now, for you to have a reasonable shot at finishing things, because you end up eating flints for just about everything of importance, and they do not turn up in nearly enough quantities.

You get -some- in the early zones, and then they'll dry out nearly completely as you move through the "towns and industry" areas. This is a design fault due to the RNG not being properly balanced, and needs investigating. This applies much more strictly to the "higher" difficulty than the lower, where flints come in good enough supply that as long as you're not wasteful, you should be fine.

I'm assuming like most games it uses LCG, Ministd or Pregenerated LCG, this may be a good candidate for ugpgrading to PCG to resolve these kinds of inconsistencies.