Seneste anmeldelser af constantcompile

IMO, this is right around where the difficulty curve should be. The path to victory is narrow but it's definitely there, especially with the "Restart Level" option which is enabled by default.

Overland is basically Invisible Inc. by way of Into the Breach, in the style of Firewatch. Like the other games listed, it has quirks a-plenty. Early-game inventory is extremely restrictive, and even later in the game you'll be daisy-chaining your people to run a bucket line from a gas pump to your car.

What you have to understand is, this is less of a tactics game like XCOM, and more of a puzzle game like Into the Breach. The idea is to complete each level having retrieved as much "loot" (usually gas) as possible while killing as few enemies as possible and avoiding as much damage as possible, trading off those competing goals while appropriate.

It has a very tense, compelling atmosphere, with characters who are all trying to process what's happening while surviving one more day. I hope to 100% it.

Recommended.

EDIT: 100%'d it after ~40 hours. I save-scummed through Lonely Road and I am unashamed. Highly recommend this one.

As a general rule, if I ever complete a puzzle and think "damn, that's clever," I'll give a game a thumbs-up unless it otherwise has serious flaws.

I'm giving PUSH a thumbs-up.

Some of the rules can seem a bit obtuse at first, but once you get a sense of them - and especially when you start getting to the arrows - the game turns into a compelling three-dimensional visualization challenge. I completed it in about an hour.

Recommended.

I completed this game in about four hours. Very nice art, and the music is quite atmospheric. The puzzles are difficult, but not so much that I had to consult a guide.

Story-wise, what's there is very poignant, but there's not enough text to properly make sense of the who and when.

Recommended at whichever price point is worth four hours to you.

This feels like a Newgrounds Flash game, and not in a bad way. After getting a feel for the weird controller settings, you fly around dropping a ludicrous amount of ordinance on infantry, tanks, and buildings.

For 90% of the game, there are only four investments that matter: Damage upgrades, armor upgrades, repair kits, and cluster bombs. With these, you simply fly back and forth across the map, carpet-bombing any hostile areas until there are none left. The other bombs are comparatively far too expensive for their damage output, and using fuel to boost your speed is completely unnecessary.

I definitely would not recommend this game at full price, but I bought it at $3.99 and completed it in a little under three hours, and I feel pretty satisfied. YMMV.

There are four stages to HotDS:

1. Basic dogfighting, pew pew the bad guys
   
2. Woah, I've got quite a fleet, I can just order them around and sit back
   
3. Time to down some flagships, that means Kamikaze upgrade and ramming speed
   
4. Fleet's gone, game is harder, time to earn that 100%
   
   I completed House of the Dying Sun in under 12 hours and found it more or less enjoyable throughout. There are a few difficulty spikes here and there, but it's generally space combat goodness.
   
   Recommended.

A great pixel-art arena shooter that has just released a free single-player campaign update.

Recommended.

Many games have a playful game loop. Some games have playful narratives. Few games have playful mechanics.

The developer for Supraland seems to have taken a look at each facet of how a regular FPS plays and thought to themselves, "what could I do differently, here?" The movement is tweaked to be a little different. The shooting is tweaked to be a little different. If you think that games tend to feel too "samey," this game will delight you. At one point, I thought to myself, "well, this new ability kind of breaks the game, so I guess I'll just breeze though the rest." Only to be proven wrong, time and time again.

The fundamentals aren't lacking, either. The core loops of player progression and discovery are extremely well done. It's amazing how many little nooks and crannies the developer managed to stuff with rewards for the curious and the daring.

Is it flawless? Of course not. The enemies are probably the most mediocre part of the overall package, and the mid-game feels a bit sluggish - in particular, at one point I hit a wall where I couldn't progress and had no idea why, ultimately discovering with the help of guides that I had missed an upgrade far earlier.

That said, it took me about 19 hours to 100% Supraland, and I feel it was time very well spent. This game got me hooked, and I enjoyed myself more-or-less from beginning to end.

Recommended.

Jetstream looks great and sounds great. Very clean presentation.

Puzzle-wise, the problem is that it's a little too easy to resort to trial-and-error. The easy-undo with Z is great, but the number of possible movements that aren't obviously wrong is so finite that you can basically brute-force every puzzle. And the solutions are often so fiddly that you'll be strongly tempted sooner or later; even knowing what the solution would entail, I often found the required movements very unintuitive. Occasionally the correct answer "clicked," but I would say that was less than half of the time.

What's odd is brute-forcing like this might even be the intended gameplay loop. The pre-rendered gameplay features the easy-undo very heavily.

Or maybe I just suck at puzzle games, I dunno. I 100%'d it in less than four hours without the use of any guides, though I did look up the suggested level for completing a particular achievement. YMMV but I think this is a good way to fill five-to-fifteen-minute time gaps in your day.

Recommended.

Credit where it's due: Sumo Digital admirably mapped a snake to the physics and controls of a videogame. Snake Pass is very unique in terms of how it feels to control the player character, and I'm sure this was a welcome departure from their usual Sonic Racing titles.

Unfortunately, admirable doesn't mean flawless. Anyone familiar with snakes will find it confusing and irritating how the front 20% of your body weighs just as much as the rear 80%, and contains the vast majority of your gripping strength. Even using the "grip" button, I frequently found the rear half of the snakes body going completely limp in distinctly inconvenient situations. I think a "coil" button - where the rear half of the body firmly wraps itself around whatever is in reach - would have been far more useful, and probably more true to how real-life snakes behave.

Also, it's very strange how there's an achievement for completing every level without dying, but no indication of whether you've completed a given level without dying or not, or whether you've activated a totem for the relevant achievement. There's also no button for skipping cutscenes, even on subsequent playthroughs.

There's one more asterisk for my recommendation, which is that this is a snake-themed collectible game, not a collectible-themed snake game. If you don't like grabbing shinies, this game is not for you.

All that said, did I still enjoy my time with Snake Pass? Sure. It was a good experience to develop an intuitive feel, if an imperfect one, of how snakes use leverage and friction to move. Likewise, it was interesting to look at obstacles and environments from the point of view of "what can I wrap around" instead of simply "what can I jump on." I collected all the collectibles (but not all of the achievements) in a little under 9 hours; I'll update this review if I 100% the game.

Recommended.

How you feel about Rumu will entirely depend on how you feel about the game's story, as there's little else about the game which is very remarkable (aside from the stellar voice acting).

Fortunately, I found the story to be very well-done. It avoids common tropes that I've grown weary of.

I completed it in a little over two hours, which feels fair for the $2.49 I spent on it. I don't currently plan on 100%'ing it though.

Recommended.