Senaste recensioner av constantcompile

I wanted to like this game - the music in the trailer is amazing, the setting is a rarely seen one, and the characters seemed unique.

Unfortunately, the in-game music is less remarkable, the dialogue is railroaded so tightly that the characters feel one-dimensional instead of complex, and the branching story paths feel completely arbitrary - it seems at least half of them require you to unceremoniously ditch your passenger. Also, even if you've seen a cutscene before, you can't skip it, or even speed it up - this makes unintentional trips down the same story path boring and frustrating, and there's no real way to tell which turns will and won't uncover new content.

All of that could be forgiven if the gameplay were fun, but... it just isn't. The collision geometries will often have you colliding with invisible hitboxes, the "autopilot" doesn't work well enough for you to rely on it, and the frequently obscured road means you will often rear-end unseen traffic.

The car's velocity occupies the distinct territory of "too fast to stay in the right lane, too slow to pass in the oncoming lane reliably," and there are no brakes. You can stop for passengers, but the controls don't give you any way to slow the car. So if you have three cars in front of you in the right lane and three cars coming at you in the left lane, you're either going to rear-end the car in front of you or sideswipe multiple cars while lane-sharing.

The result is a buggy, unsatisfying game that seems to fail at everything it sets out to do. The setting is interesting, to be sure, but I feel that exploring it isn't worth sinking several hours into such frustrating gameplay.

A competent but very flawed CCG that takes too many missteps for me to recommend it.

The core mechanic of stringing together combos is undercut by several cards like bombs, potions, and barriers that, in a single turn, can invalidate three or more turns' worth of effort. These broken cards are pointed out in a Community Guide.

As a result, few strategies appear to be meaningfully better than simply spamming disables to your opponent's cards and filling their board, so that they can't play a card. Because the game is single-player, there's no "meta" as such, and this strategy works for >95% of the game's opponents.

The lack of real strategy involved makes for a game that is occasionally amusing or satisfying, but largely dull.

I feel bad not recommending this game, but it really cranked the difficulty past the point of being fun for me.

Many levels have "bottlenecks" where there are only one or two moves you can deduce as being risk-free, and these sections feel deliberately, artificially hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is such that you feel like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

I feel no shame in stating that I had to consult a guide (which had so many pictures that it frequently crashed the Steam browser) just to know which column or blue hex I should focus on to deduce my next move - there's no option to save your progress and resume later, and real-world obligations meant that being stuck for tens of minutes on a single move would mean the difference between finishing the level or starting over from the beginning the next day.

Even then, it took me 11 hours(!) to complete Hexcells Plus, versus just 2 hours for Hexcells. And that says it all, really. I had fun, overall, with Hexcells Plus, but it felt too tedious too often for me to recommend it in good conscience.

A competently done submarine-metroidvania game with great scenery and music.

It isn't flawless, but I also wouldn't say it does anything poorly. It's mostly "very good" and is occassionally just "acceptable."

After 10 hours, I'm ready to put it down even though I haven't unlocked all the content, but I'm satisfied with the time I've spent with it. There are no frustrating "collect all the trinkets" or "speedrun" achievements, so the game doesn't overstay its welcome.

Your price point will mainly depend on how much you feel ten-ish hours of satisfying content is worth.

Everything that made Grow Home good, and more.

Nitpicks include fiddly physics and an occasionally annoying partner.

I would recommend playing "Grow Home" first to get familiar with things, though it's not essential.

If you've held off on buying this game because of concerns about length, now's a good time to dive in. The new challenges are difficult but rarely unreasonable, and the tutorial tracks are a great way to learn the mechanics.

The mechanics really are the star of this game, and they are a joy. This is one of the few games I've spent hours in after 100%ing, just because it feels so nice to play.

Zen is a good descriptor. Something about controlling your momentum while getting the right curve just feels right. The minimalist asthetic is also very well done.

Even if you don't care for the idea of "drifting," I highly recommend you grab a controller and give this one a shot. You'll know within two hours whether or not it's for you.

A buggy, flawed 3D runner that still manages to be just entertaining enough for a recommendation - if only due to its price tag.

If you ever feel like games are too same-y these days, give this game a shot. Competitive deck-based city planning. C'mon, just try and tell me you've seen that before.

The mechanics are superbly well-tuned, with this game being a spiritual sequel to an earlier game by its creator. The characters are quite well-balanced, especially considering early- vs. late-game strengths and weaknesses.

It also does a great job of building narrative through gameplay. You really get a sense of the characters not just from their dialogue (which admittedly is hit-or-miss) but through their abilities nudging you toward a particular type of gameplay. The fact that this game has over half a dozen characters, each with a distinct play style, is a testament to how technically superb the game mechanics are.

The achievements are all reasonable, though occasionally quite challenging, with very little grind. I unlocked all in-game content by the time I finished the story.

This game released nearly a year ago, and I only just recently learned of it. This makes me feel like it didn't get nearly the level of attention or fanfare it should have, for how good it is. Highly recommended.

A short, atmospheric romp with fluid controls, despite the ledge detection being a bit finicky. Great music, too.

In a way, this is a sort of real-time puzzle game, not unlike Tetris. You lay a finite amount of track, attempt to make the best use of the limited space to deliver the most trains in the shortest time, and revise your track configuration as necessary.

The satisfaction of finding the right configuration is hard to describe. Let me put it this way: If you're the type of person who likes optimizing processes, such that an unexpectedly high workload can still be managed with nothing going wrong, you will find much to like in this game.

It is a heuristics development and revision game where learning the optimal layout for each situation is half the fun, and the other half is guiding trains through that layout with nothing exploding.

Though it usually has little bearing on gameplay, I should also say that this game uses locations and times from history rarely seen in videogames, especially the DLC.