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There is so much heart in Wargroove 2. Soul, even. It's clear the developers wanted to do right, by everyone. They wanted to do right by the characters. They wanted to do right by the setting. They wanted to do right by the fanbase.

The storytelling on display here is, for lack of a better term, very socially-conscious. You have a very diverse cast, navigating emotionally-charged arcs and relationship dynamics. It's clear the game was written with the intent of not glorifying armed conflict. Aurania continues to feel like a real, tangible place. We can almost see the nations slowly rising and falling as events unfold. There's a very strong geopolitical narrative being established.

All that, and the game is a very humble $20 MSRP. No paid DLC, no microtransaction nonsense. Everything gamers claim to want, in a perfectly inexpensive little package! Sure to be a hit! Right? ...Right? ...Sigh...

Alright - what happened? For starters, it released in 2023 - given how strong of a year for gaming that was, that's already a disadvantage. But what about the game itself? Well... I can talk about my own experience.

When I started playing Wargroove 2, the first several hours were spent feeling... kind of icky, and often frustrated. Wargroove 1 ends with everything in a pretty good place, so the first order of business, narratively, is to muck that up. I'm probably more averse to this than most - I often couldn't stomach the "bad guy arcs" in Blizzard RTS games back in the day - but if you'd asked me how I was feeling a few hours in, I wouldn't have a great answer for you. I also couldn't believe you're still relying on a single checkpoint to revert bad moves - something as simple as mis-clicking a single unit can completely ruin a push. So a single level could take hours to complete if you wanted three stars, which wasn't great. Then I discovered that I had to go back and play Wargroove's 1 DLC to know who some characters were, ended up playing the co-op campaign solo which was a real hassle, then returned to Wargroove 2 once that was done.

But I did finish Wargroove 2's campaign, at which point I was feeling... fine...? Honestly, it ends on a bit of a downer note. So I tried Conquest mode, but the story there is a really confusing interquel type of story, and it's way too hard for how much fun you're getting out of it. So maybe try multiplayer? Well, a lot of the community seems to have stuck to Wargroove 1... Yeesh.

So, yeah... If all Wargroove 2 needed to be was "the next chapter of a story" it'd be great. But it's a videogame, and videogames are supposed to be fun. Wargroove 1 told a pretty simple story: Solid protag, immediate stakes, surprise villain, climactic battle, roll credits. Wargroove 2 gets a lot more complex and nuanced than that, and leaves things ominously open-ended instead of tying them up with a neat bow. Which is fine if the multiplayer has been improved on enough for the community to switch over, but Wargroove 1 was so well-balanced and playable after the DLC, why would they leave without a good reason?

Which leaves us... where, exactly? Conducting a post-mortem, I guess. I really hope Chucklefish takes another swing at this franchise. There are good bones here, but you need more than that to stand out in today's market. From an armchair quarterback's perspective, I would say to really focus on multiplayer and QoL with the next installment - the scope of the game feels, let's say, more than large enough at this point without packing more factions and units and buildings into it. But that's just the opinion of some internet rando.

All that said, do I still recommend Wargroove 2? Yes, absolutely. You should play Wargroove 1 first... and the DLC... And maybe try the Arcade mode... So, uh, yeah, after doing that for 80 hours, pick this game up! Hoo... boy. I'm sure that aspect doesn't help, either.

There's been some talk of Steam store tags lately; I nominate "Survivor-like" and "Survivor-lite" as potential genres.

20 Minutes Till Dawn (20MTD) has fewer characters and weapons than its progenitor, Vampire Survivors, but each of them feels far more distinct.

There is a triangle of sorts: bullets, summons, and elements. Each can synergize with the others in a number of ways, or can be doubled- and tripled-down on to maximize its own potential. But other synergies exist outside of this triangle.

As is so often the case, the sore points during gameplay are difficulty spikes and bad RNG. At the higher difficulty levels, the boss you encounter five minutes in effectively functions as a build check - by that point, if you can't outmaneuver them with move speed, or focus them down with freeze or raw DPS, your run will be quickly ended. More than once, it certainly felt to me that the necessary upgrades for this fight weren't presented to me in those five minutes. ("Git gud," I know.)

Honestly, though, this is still better than Vampire Survivors waiting fourteen full minutes to execute a similar build check by throwing a stupid number of enemies at you. 20MTD also feels like it has a greater number of powerful builds; a few stinkers are still in there, but it generally strikes the right balance between demanding that you pay attention and providing flexibility to try something new.

I 100%'d 20MTD in about 28 hours, mostly on my Steam Deck. It's a great game to pick up, engage with, and not even think about once you've set it down. The "bullet heaven" feeling of gratuitously annihilating any hostile that dares enter your screen is fully intact once your build comes online. My largest complaint is about how runes are handled; I think this game could have been a tighter ~20 hour affair if the opportunity cost of early-to-mid game upgrade investment didn't punish you for expanding your roster of characters and weapons.

But - again - that's hardly an atypical complaint for this genre. Survivor-likes need to be shorter!

Easy recommendation at full MSRP, there's easily more than $5 worth of game here.

The biggest weakness of Islets is its competition. If you've played games like Hollow Knight and Bloodstained, and you come into this game expecting anywhere near that level of fidelity, you will be disappointed.

Islets is a fine Metroidvania. Good, even. Movement feels good. The map design is good. The boss design is good. It's a nice palette cleanser; you can probably burn through it in a high-single-digit number of hours, and move on to the next game without a second thought.

On the other hand... The room design is often bland, the character writing is mediocre, the teleportation arrow is such a mediocre upgrade, and what was the dev thinking with those "200 currency" upgrade options? At what point does "comfortably familiar" become "going through the motions?" Where's the line between "fine" and "underwhelming?"

There are no obvious, significant, flaws with Islets. And that - I suspect - has more to do with its Overwhelmingly Positive 95% review score, at time of writing, than its strengths.

I'm giving this a tepid thumbs-up. You can expect to like Islets, but you shouldn't expect to love it.

Man, remember when every other hit release of the 2010s was a "tough-as-nails" 2D platformer? At time of review, "Boomer-Shooters" are the current hotness. They are so much easier.

Super Puzzle Platformer combines block-breaking with zero-health frantic avoidance of obstacles. You can get into a really good rhythm with this game, spawning stars just as the hazards start showing up, destroying everything on the screen, then grabbing another star.

But you're never more than a small slip-up away from starting all over again, and sometimes the spawn locations are so capricious that you'd swear the game was deliberately ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with you.

Still, it's a good addition to your 2D library for sure. Recommended.

Biggest criticism first: The promotional anime cheesecake is embarrassing. I much would've preferred illustrations of the spacecraft themselves.

Aside from that, GUNFIELD is a fine mashing-together of the Shmup and Survivor-like genres. The weapon balance sucks, the difficulty spikes are obnoxious, and without a build focused around the few OP weapons you have almost no chance of winning.

So, yeah - it's a Survivor-like, all right. I 100%'d it in five-ish hours and generally enjoyed my time with it. I hope it actually gets additional development in Early Access instead of dying on the vine, which is partly why I'm reviewing it in the first place.

Recommended if you'd like to experience the Vampire Survivors progression system grafted onto a shmup game. C'mon, it's $3 and a successful run takes like half an hour! Give it a shot!

You will see many reviews for this game with <1 hour logged times. This is because you can beat the game - or rather, have a successful run - in as little at 10 minutes.

I'm 3 hours in, and I don't regret the purchase. I'm guessing that Vampire Survivors has wackier gameplay, but there's something to be said for strong fundamentals. I like the blue vs. red contrast of projectiles. I like the narrative inferences you can make about the setting based on the proper nouns involved. You get into a good flow with the enemy-fodder portions as well as most of the bullet-hell boss portions.

It's not flawless. Some of the SFX were so grating (looking at you, thunder blade) that I reduced the volume of it to like 30% and mostly vibed with the soundtrack, which is excellent. Some of the upgrades feel supremely pointless (why would anyone ever take slow cooker?) and as others have pointed out, speed upgrades are basically non-optional.

Still, it's good fun when you want something quick and simple.
Recommended.

I love base-builders; Planetbase is still in my Top 10 on Steam. As soon as I saw this game was available, it was an instant-buy. Just shy of 7 hours later, I've reached the win-state of the existing content and was pleased enough that I purchased the Collector's Edition.

This is a game about stewardship. You need to care for the needs of not only your villagers, but the creature they reside upon, as well. You need to keep an eye on your stocks of food and water, and have the patience to only ramp up when you have the capacity to do so.

That said - the guy who said he was constantly running out of food had to be doing something wrong. I had so many hundreds of berries and beets during my game that I picked up every stray nomad I could. I was playing on Normal difficulty, too.

That said - highly recommended if you think its price point is worth 6-7 hours of solid basebuilding (with the potential for more as it gets to 1.0, naturally). I really enjoyed my time with it.

Into the Breach deserves every GOTY award it's ever earned, and this latest FREE expansion (with every aspect optional, every run!) only adds to its value.

Worth every penny of its asking price and more. Highly recommended.

Two weeks, ~130 logged hours (only a tiny fraction of which was active play), and 83% of its achievements later, I think I'm done with Cookie Clicker. I'm at the point where progression is hard-locked behind a daily login incentive mechanic, as well as unlocks that have very small percentage chances to spawn.

If not for my awareness of crypto mining's environmental impact, I probably wouldn't mind letting the game run in my absence, but my PC has a 500w power supply. Between supply and distribution charges, I pay about sixteen and a half cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Granted, my PSU is not running at full throttle while the PC is on (in fact, it now occurs to me I could probably save a non-negligible amount of electricity by making sure Google Chrome is closed when I'm not using it), but I'd still be wasting money by letting AutoHotKey do its thing while I sleep.

"That's cheating," you say. Fine, sure. If you value your time so little that you feel mouse-button actuating is the best use of it, be my guest. Nevertheless, you will always earn more cookies with the game actively running than not. That means leaving your computer on, which means using more electricity, which costs money. If you're looking at logging multiple hundreds or thousands of hours in this game, that's actually a pretty decent chunk of change - to say nothing of the unneeded additional burden, however slight, it places on the power grid.

Before anyone accuses me of being a tree-hugging hypocrite - I purchase renewable energy credits for 100% of my electrical use from wind energy suppliers. (You should look into that, if you haven't.) So in my case, it's purely a cost issue. I don't feel like spending any additional money, whatever its amount, to continue progressing at an efficient pace, I don't feel like opening it every day to get the daily login bonus, and I'm tired of waiting for Bakeberries to spawn in my garden.

If you want a different game with the same feel, but without the absurd time requirements, I recommend SPACEPLAN.

Do I recommend this game? Eh... I had some fun with it, the first ten ascensions or so were good, but...

Nah.

Take the hard sci-fi of Tacoma, mix in the menial-labor simulator feel of Viscera: Cleanup Detail, give the whole thing Descent's 6 DOF movement in microgravity, and throw in just a dash of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes style flowchart-following, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how Hardspace: Shipbreaker feels to play.

I really, really appreciate that the devs made the difficulty constraints optional. You can have unlimited time, unlimited lives and even unlimited oxygen to disassemble the ships safely. Having played with the 15-minute time limit in Early Access, it always struck me as arbitrary and kind of immersion-breaking.

Having no time limit makes the gameplay relaxed yet tense, because you're still trying to not die while you're pulling apart spaceships. It also means that your logged hours can really sneak up on you; I 100%'d this game in a little under 30 hours (remember I logged several in Early Access) but I think I could have managed fewer if I'd stuck to the smaller ships instead of the leviathans. It's also possible that a minor bug was blocking my story progression, so let's talk about those.

This game... does still have a few problems, at time of writing. Objects will occasionally still be "connected" even if they visibly shouldn't be. Certain components, pipes especially, will get snagged on geometry and refuse to come loose. The atmosphere regulators are often more trouble to deal with than just incinerating the airlock doors from a safe distance and being done with it. And, yes, (very minor non-story spoiler to discuss a possible glitch) the final level became available one shift after I'd re-read all of my emails, after seeing that suggestion in the forums.

Oh, and the writing can be a little on-the-nose sometimes.

That said, I enjoyed my time with this game, and despite its issues it'll probably be one of my top games of 2022.

Highly recommended.