Tenderfoot Tactics

Tenderfoot Tactics is a turn-based tactical RPG. You run around the overworld with your party of 6, and fight other, generally larger, parties, which in essence are comprised of the same units as yours. There's about a dozen different classes, each with about five different abilities with multiple levels. There's also an equipment system, but it's just two stat items (you only have two stats overall - health and damage/healing power) - nothing fancy. There's some mysterious quest you have to solve, but it's not really much of a gameplay element, other than forcing you to move around, and thus triggering more battles.

I actually played Tenderfoot Tactics for a relatively long time compared to its simplicity - about 5 hours. It seemed really interesting at first. For one, the art and the music are... memorable. The terrain is constantly shifting around visually, meaning you can kind of understand where obstacles are, or if you're going uphill or downhill, but any details are lost. It's hard to explain. Similarly, the music is a bit like someone's just banging pieces of metal together in a rhythmic fashion. It's all quite unpleasant, and I'd prefer if they made this stuff a bit more normal, even if it sacrifices the "artisticness" of it.
No, but, what really kept me in at first was the combat. I think Tenderfoot Tactics has a really good combat system. The terrain is tile-based, and each tile has a height, vegetation density, growth rate, water level and fire level. You can manipulate each of these variables, and in fact most attacks or abilities do. Having a high ground advantage can mean your ranged attacks do more damage, and the enemies have a harder time reaching you. Similarly, it is difficult to move through water or dense vegetation, and fire actively burns and spreads. Despite this already being a lot more than most turn-based combat games offer, I really wish they would have done more, because the rest of the combat was so bland. Trees and cliffs don't block line of sight, meaning there's no cover. Fire can kind of be shrugged off. There was more potential here in general, if they really wanted to distinguish their game with this deep elemental terrain manipulation gameplay.

I guess a big reason I got bored was the lack of content. While each class was pretty interesting in itself, the different classes didn't feel too different, and had too much horizontal progression. Sometimes I didn't even want to upgrade because I felt my character might get weaker. The battles started to play out the same, and the story wasn't existent enough to make me care about its resolution. I think there were also some balance problems, with some classes or abilities just being better, which further hurt diverse parties and trying out new things.

Overall, I like that Tenderfoot Tactics did something a bit new, but there wasn't enough content around this cool mechanic, nor was the content polished enough. After going through 15-30 battles, you will probably feel you've seen what the game has to offer, and get bored. I sure did. So, I think it might be worth just trying out for the experience, but not really. I wouldn't recommend actually getting into it.

Taur

Taur looked like an excellent game from the store page. Effective graphics, combat on a large scale with a lot of units, huge weaponry, multiple skill trees, trading, recruitment... So why were the reviews borderline bad?

Well, everything described is in the game, but... I think the best I could explain is that it just doesn't feel very rewarding to play. The game is advertised as a strategy and tower defense, and I'd say that's already a bit far from the truth. You literally are / have a giant tower that you must defend, which is a "tower defense" in a literal sense, but not as a game. There aren't any real-time strategy elements in the game, as your only action during gameplay is to fire this giant cannon. I'm sure there's some strategy involved in making the right decisions outside of combat - choosing the right upgrade paths, making sure your units don't die, picking the best missions - but they're not very complicated decisions, nor do they feel that impactful to the game. Most decisions are pretty good, so as long as you pick something, your war machine is getting stronger, and you just let it do its job, and fill the menial task of firing the cannon.
I say menial, because despite the cool lasers, energy shields, projectiles and explosions, the combat lacks the polish to really feel good. I'm firing a giant laser or huge mortar shells at enemies, but it doesn't feel like I am. It's a bit difficult to describe, because it's not that it doesn't have a numerical effect, it's just that the visual feedback is lacking.

I don't really have any big negatives to point out, but I think you'd understand why I say this game doesn't feel rewarding to play if you tried it. It feels lacking the mayhem you'd expect from such a scale, and it's definitely lacking in actual gameplay. Shooting the big turret feels the same in your first battle as your last, and I don't feel I'm executing any strategy as I upgrade my defences through the levels. With all that in mind, I can't recommend Taur.

The Supper

A short one for a change. The Supper took me about 20 minutes to complete, and it was an... interesting experience. It's a rather morbid point-and-click story. It wasn't the most interesting story one could tell in 20 minutes, and, of course, being 20 minutes kind of disqualifies it from having enough substance to have a deep enough narrative to really be good in the first place, but it was still an enjoyable 20 minutes.

It's free, so if you're looking to kill half an hour and feel like a short, slightly uneasy, tale would be your cup of tea, then you can give it a try. But don't expect too much.

Slime Rancher

If Slime Rancher isn't the cutest thing I've played in a long while, I don't know what is. Problem is, that's about the only thing it has going for it.

Slime Rancher is a mix between an adventure game and a farming simulator. The game essentially plays in two parts. First you go around the map, finding new slime types, and new types of food. Then you bring them back to your farm, combine the slimes into bigger, better, slimes, and plant their favorite foods to grow more locally. You feed the slimes to get valuable slime poop, which you sell to buy upgrades to your farm and your equipment. You progress by exploring the world and solving little puzzles, like feeding big slimes a bunch of some specific food to get a key to unlock a new area.

While there are a few hazards regarding leaving your slimes unfed, or accidentally combining more than two types of slimes, the game really isn't any difficult. It's more of a relaxation game, looking at all the adorable little slimes. Progress is extremely slow, mostly gated by the speed of waiting for food to grow, or how fast you can traverse back and forth through the map, again, and again, and again. See, your farm can't hold a lot of things, so you need to venture out to gather more from the nature, which is a lot larger. But you also have very limited storage space, meaning you can't collect a lot during one trip. Combine this with the game being rather repetitive, because new slimes, while maybe requiring new food or a new enclosure, don't require any fundamentally different approach to what you've already been doing, and I just felt I had seen everything after a couple of hours, and the rest was just a grind to unlock the rest of the slime skins.

All that said, while I don't like or recommend Slime Rancher personally, I think it's a pretty good casual game. It's easy, it's simple, it's nice to look at, and there's a lot to do as long as you don't abstract these activities away as a single repetitive thing. I can somewhat see the reason for this being one of the highest rated games on Steam, but, yeah, totally not a game for people such as myself.