Death Crown

Death Crown is a very simple Tower Defense RTS. It's played on a hex grid consisting of a grand total of a few dozen hexes. The general goal is to destroy the other team's castle, and for that you can: Build mines to increase your gold production, build spawners to spawn units that you can drag to path to whereever, and build towers that shoot nearby enemy units. There's also some areas on the map which act as powerups if you have control over their area, and some other minor mechanics, but for the most part, that's it.

Listen, I love the game's 1-bit aesthetic, and they did all they could with such a small map and so few mechanics, but at the end of the day, it's just an incredibly simple game. You play it for an hour, you experience it all. If you like it, you spend another couple of hours to complete it. However, it can't really captivate you or provide any sort of deep enjoyment - it was just never ambitious enough.
I can't really recommend anything this short and lacking in features.

Civilization VI

I have apparently already given my brief thoughts on Civilization VI back in 2016, but I figured I would do it again, now that I played a proper match to completion and got to experience the DLC as well. After all, Civilization V was not nearly as good without its DLC. I will be focusing a lot on the changes since Civilization V, as that is the closest game to it.

Civilization VI is a 4X Turn-Based Strategy game, much like its predecessor. You start off with a singular city and no idea of the world, and expand into a sprawling country, battling over your borders, your culture, and your religion, while keeping your technological progress on track, your coffers full, and your public opinion nice and tidy. Each of the listed six elements is a resource, and a victory condition, with the exception of gold, where the victory condition is instead points after a certain amount of time, if you want to enable a time limit.
Religion was added as a new victory condition, which is a welcome change. The culture tree is functionally a clone of the tech tree now, which I suppose is also nice, as it gives more options, despite being unimaginative as a clone. Diplomatic victory has been changed from public voting to collecting "good boy points", which makes it more of a race than a popularity contest, but also means it's now essentially a time victory like Points and Science.

The major change of course is the district system, and I think they went too far with it. Each district and world wonder consumes its own tile. Districts determine which buildings you can build, and wonders have restrictions on where they can be placed. The problem is that the world is crowded, and there isn't nearly enough room for all of these. I think it is a major problem, how you can really mess up your city layout by not planning ahead, or if you take someone else's city. With districts being limited by population as well, you could just get stuck, since there's no way to remove or replace districts. It adds strategic depth, I'm sure, but not enough to justify how damn frustrating it can be, and this really outweights all the small improvements they added.
But to quickly fire off a few positives as counterpoints for those who might care: Strategic resources now actually accumulate into stockpiles. City state influence is no longer decided by who's the richest, but has its own mechanic. You can't just plop a city next to someone's empire and expect it to stay up - the loyalty system ensures that large city clusters will convert owenership of any small or lone cities very near them. Great Persons (except Culture related ones) now have unique abilities instead of just being resource boosts.
Most of the rest of the game is the same though, so you won't have a fundamentally different experience either way.

Overall, I feel like Civilization VI goes multiple steps forward from its predecessor, but also as many steps plus one backward, ending at just a slightly less enjoyable experience, and that's not counting the unsightly cartoony artsyle. It's not a bad game, but I would expect something better after a decade or so. Would I recommend it? I guess if you really like Civ V and just want a slight change in scenery, but not in other cases. Just stick to Civilization V.

PS. For what it's worth, the match I played to completion wasn't actually called by the game. I had won the Culture victory, but the game refused to acknowledge it. Such a major bug has been in the game since launch.

RimWorld

The reason for my prolongened absence from any reviews is because I finally got around to playing RimWorld. As any sandbox game worth its salt, it took a long long time to experience it fully. I could estimate up to 200 hours went into trying it, but at least I can finally feel like I can give an informed opinion on it.

RimWorld is a Sandbox Colony Sim with a randomly generated map, world, and events. You control up to a few dozen characters who make up your colony, harvest resources, build buildings, defend from raids, natural disasters, trade with other colonies, accept quests from them, or be the one raiding them. The end goal is to research and launch a rocket (or acquire one by some other method), and get off the hellhole of a planet you crashed on. The various described events serve to hinder you and reign your colony from prospering too much, as simply farming and weathering the climate is generally not a difficult thing to do.

I can tell right off the bat that RimWorld has taken heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, more so than many other colony sims, and that makes my job easier, as I compare any such game to Dwarf Fortress anyways. From the tile-based building, to a fully generated world with biomes, mountains, rivers, temperature physics, to each entity having relatives, emotions, individual body parts being able to be damaged, to a lot more similarities, RimWorld really wanted to be Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible, I feel. Considering the enormous success on Steam, I would say it succeeded in its own right, but I am not going to be as lenient on it. If it wants to copy Dwarf Fortress, it is going to have to beat it.
Despite having an actual team behind the game, RimWorld is surprisingly lacking in content in comparison. There is less variety in jobs, fewer animal and plant types, fewer items, less combat depth, and most importantly, as a massive shortcoming - no 3rd dimension. Without a way to expand into the skies or delve into the depths, RimWorld is fatally lacking in the sandbox building aspect. The "endgame" of Dwarf Fortress is building crazy structures, which are only limited by one's imagination, but RimWorld lacks this long-term depth. One playthrough of it exposes you to most of what you would care to experience.

To compensate, RimWorld has put in more effort into the random event and quest system, offering the player a supposedly balanced challenge, culminating in escaping the planet. It's an intriguing system, sure, and for a while made me think of actually giving this game a positive recommendation, but as the time went on, it got tedious. See, the AI is well made, never throwing challenges at you that would exterminate your colony. However, you need many people to have the game not progress at a snail's pace, yet as soon as you get enough to feel like the colony really picks up, the AI hits you with a harder challenge. Some colonists may die, many get injured, some permanently. Morale is low for weeks as people mourn, suffer in agony from their wounds, and even throw tantrums, possibly wounding or killing more colonists. The game regresses back to a snail's pace, and just as people are finally recovering from it all, the loop begins anew. Sure, the big challenges are exciting and really make you fight for your life, but they do not outweigh this tedious back-and-forth. Another strength of Dwarf Fortress was really managing hundreds of units, and the scales in which events could unfold then. The same scales are simply never reached in RimWorld, because it sacrifices some player freedom for a forced challenge and an attempt to feed fun down your throat.

Despite the negative tone of this all, I don't think RimWorld is a bad game. Few games can say they've held my interest for over a hundred hours, and RimWorld is one of them. However, I would ultimately still not recommend the game. There is not enough room for many games as time-consuming as this, and in my eyes, the price RimWorld must pay for copying Dwarf Fortress, yet not ambitiously surpassing it, is that it is eclipsed by it. It has not managed to carve out a separate enough identity for itself, and I believe you could just have a superior experience with Dwarf Fortress, and for more hours than nigh anyone would care to play it. Thus, even if you need a UI, go get yourself a copy of Dwarf Fortress when it comes out, probably next year.