Omega Strikers

Covering a recent game for a change. Never know how long these online multiplayer games stay afloat, and they rarely get more popular after launch. Omega Strikers, too, has already started slightly dipping in popularity after a week, though it's holding remarkably strong. You can always check how many players are playing, at least on Steam (it's also available on mobile), and you probably should, for reasons I'll talk about shortly.

Omega Strikers is a 3v3 PvP... football? action game. It has heroes, or "strikers" with 3 unique abilities each, much like a moba, and a common "strike" ability, which always just kicks the ball, or, well, hoverdisk, towards where you're aiming. Kick the disk into the enemy goal and you win the round, easy as. Win 5 rounds and you win the game, which takes about 5 minutes.
There's more nuances to the game of course, with abilities being able to knock and stun enemy players, even knock them off the field for a little while, powerups that increase your level and speed for a short while, some different maps with mild passive differences and obstacles placed around the map, and a lot more... but none of that is too important. And I think it's important that these little additions are not important and are not able to elevate the game beyond just being about who's more skilled at shooting the ball to your own players and not letting enemies snatch it from you. The map is small, 95% of the abilities boil down to creating a short- or slightly-longer-term area which knocks the ball and enemies away from it and possibly moves you, and the games get pretty repetitive pretty fast.

I don't have any complaints about the quality of Omega Strikers, honestly. I think it's well made. I also think it isn't ambitious enough, and doesn't give enough to do in the game. There is no sense of progression within a match, no sub-goals to accomplish, and no variety in how the game plays out. There aren't really any counters as far as I could tell, no matchup-specific differences in play, or at least nothing that would come close to being as important as raw skill. Maybe there's some comparisons to make to fighting games, which also don't have any intermediate goals in a match and are very much about player skill instead of meta knowledge about the game. But I'm not big on fighting games, so I can't say much about this.
On the topic of raw skill, I want to make a quick note about matchmaking. Matchmaking is difficult, I understand. It's difficult to tell how good a player is. It's difficult to tell how much advantage a pre-made group gives. It's difficult to make balanced matches. But matchmaking seems to be a strong issue for players not in a pre-made group of 3. Matchmaking is all the more important in games where the outcome is more dependent on skill, less on variance of other factors. It's also more difficult with more players in one team, and more difficult with fewer players ready to pick from at any given time. What I'm saying is that Omega Strikers could start to have serious problems with its match quality if player numbers keep falling, which could lead into a downward spiral. Just... something to keep an eye out for.

Overall, I'd say Omega Strikers is an above average PvP game. It's certainly gained a larger-than-average playerbase, and has decent player retention (though the long-term outlook is unclear). Based on just that, if the game's still alive and kicking by the time you find it, it looks even mildly interesting to you, and you have 2 trustworthy allies to accompany you, give it a try. It's free and I certainly enjoyed it for a bit. The novelty wore off too quickly for me though, and the game became something of a grind with not too many exciting or new moments. So, based on that, I can't really recommend it. I think there's still plenty of deeper PvP games out there.

Loyalty and Blood: Viktor Origins

I can't believe the standards I had... Perhaps I just thought I had more time back then...
Viktor Origins is a simple side-scrolling platformer shooter. It's composed of a bunch of levels taking a few minutes each. The game's base difficulty is fairly low, but each level also comes with its own challenges and time limit that you may optionally abide by for extra rewards. Rewards which you can use to buy, craft, and upgrade your gear with. There's also a phase mechanic that allows you to dash a medium distance, going through walls and everything else. That's about all there is to the game.

To be blunt, there's really nothing special here. Before any gameplay it starts off with more story than it has any right to, since the quality of the writing isn't that good. The art isn't bad, but it feels weird. There's this medieval vibe, yet you're wielding modern or futuristic weapons. Also you play as some elf-looking creature who's super hunched over. Maybe it's because of the gun. And when it comes to the gameplay, it's just point, shoot... very bland. I would have hoped that maybe the challenges are at least imaginative, but it's usually just a timer, kill X, where X is something you'd kill anyways, and maybe some limit on your weapon choice.

There isn't much to elaborate on here. Nothing's offensively bad, but nothing's any good either. And again, mediocrity and doing some old thing that has been done a lot before is not going to make your little indie game stand out. I can't recommend Viktor Origins - it's too poorly made for having such an unimaginative concept.

Dragon Marked For Death

I have nothing against games made for consoles first. Yet all too often, they arrive on PC as something akin to an afterthought. I believe it's called a "bad port". In the case of Dragon Marked For Death, my attempts to play were stopped in their tracks by the game not wanting to support me playing on a keyboard. Sure, there were bindings, but they seemed arbitrary, and would have required 4 hands to access them all. None of the in-game prompts referred to the keyboard even as I was playing on it, nor did I have any way to check or change the bindings after I had started the game. So I struggled onward, tapping random buttons, hoping they would be what I need, until I wanted to rebind them, but realized I would need to forego my mission progress to do so. I figured that was enough of that.

Not much of a review of the game. I do sometimes consider if I should even make these, but as I was presently running low on my review backlog, I figured why not. I didn't play for long, but in what little I did experience, there doesn't seem to be anything super special about the game. It's a side-scrolling platforming action RPG. Movement and combat felt neither bad nor super good, perhaps a bit above average. It seems to be focused on co-op, but I did not reach the bit where I could get into a multiplayer game. Not to mention you'd need to find people to play with on your own.

So, yeah, hard pass if you're a keyboard player. If not, I don't know, it might be decent, but there's probably better options.

Streets of Rogue

It's not every week or even month I get to play a game with "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, nor one of the few games I already wrote about back when I was still mentioning every game I was adding to my backlog. March 2017... how long ago it was that I found Streets of Rogue. Despite the review score, this never really seemed like my kind of game. But looks can be deceiving, and I've been wrong before...

Streets of Rogue describes itself as an action roguelike, but also an immersive sim. An interesting combination for sure, as those are on the opposite sides of the "seriousness" spectrum. Yet, I'd say it's kind of true. It's a rather lighthearted and goofy game. It makes many bad jokes, the missions are often nonsensical, like inflitrating someone's house to turn the lights off, or killing a bunch of people for a banana. Sure, it's just flavor, but this non-serious tone doesn't sit too well with me.
The game has some-dozen floors with a few missions on each. You're offered a lot of different ways to accomplish the missions. Stealth, trickery, violence... There's a lot of different classes, each with a wildly different playstyle, and besides completing the missions, you can scavenge around the level for money, items, and anything else that would help you on that floor or the ones to come. Sprinkle in co-op, random generation, status effects, level-ups, and a lot more, and you have a massive amount of theoretical variety in how the game plays.

Ultimately, the problem for me is that I don't care about this variety. Maybe I find an approach that works, and then I just use that over and over. I find little incentive to improvise some more creative solution or go out of my way to do something different. If you would consider fooling around in these small sandbox-like worlds to be fun, then I think you can get a lot more value out of this game. But if you're like me, and just want to complete the goals the game gives you, it might not be that interesting, as the variety does not actually mean that the game has any depth or is any good at keeping things interesting long-term. So no recommendation from me.

Monster Hunter: World

Y'know, I don't understand things sometimes. Various kinds of things. Things like, why are certain games massively popular. In the case of Monster Hunter: World, why was it one of the more popular games in the world for a whole two years or so after launch. I mean, even now, 4 years after release, it's got a very respectable player count. But I can try to make my guesses...

What are the first things I'd notice about the game? Well, it's developed by Capcom. So it's a AAA game, which would definitely contribute to its popularity. But also, it's a Japanese game. Normally that would mean that you could attribute some of the popularity to the anime artstyle being popular, but that's not the case here, as Monster Hunter has a much more realistic style, despite the oversized monsters and weapons. On a personal level, Japanese AAA developer = red flag. With a couple of exceptions, games from large developers from Japan (and Korea, although that's mostly "MMOs") tend to have many similar traits, and most of them are not so good. Continuing with remarks about artstyle, I would say that that's usually the strongest point of games from that region. Be it anime or not, I think some of the best looking games have come from Japan (but actually maybe mostly Korea). Sadly, Monster Hunter's characters look absolutely fucking abysmal. I think some of the facial expression are meme levels of terrible, and the overall visual fidelity just doesn't strike me as high at all for a 2018 AAA game. Okay, but, I've never been one to let the art dictate my feelings for a game, so what else is there?

Of definite note is that Monster Hunter is a franchise. Most definitely many people who picked it up already liked the series, so that increases both popularity and the positivity of the reception. I have not played any of the previous games, so that bias doesn't apply to me.
The last reason that might explain the popularity is that it's a multiplayer game. Your friends have a party of 2 or 3 together, and they need to fill out their group, so they try to persuade you to play. Multiplayer always increases the popularity, and from what I heard a couple of years back, friends inviting them was definitely a big reason people were playing. What strikes me as odd though, is that this game has vertical progression, meaning more experienced players couldn't really play together with newer ones. Cooperation is not necessary either, and I definitely wouldn't want someone with hundreds of hours of experience stepping into my game and trivializing my combat, so unless both I and my friends would play only with each other and never alone, I don't see how the multiplayer aspect could be sustained. Maybe I'm just missing something.

Okay, but I've rambled long enough about things that aren't important. Torn, what's game like?
Well, as I said, it's a big Japanese game, and that means it has lots of complexity, and (probably) not enough depth. I can vouch for the complexity bit, as the game did not ease me into its mechanics at all. The tutorials were largely unhelpful, and there were so many things to do from the get-go that I was completely overwhelmed. This time, I didn't put in the tens of hours needed to understand and assess all the systems, but from my previous experiences with system overloaded games just like this, they were not all necessary. Sure, each system, stat, option, whatever, does something, but unlike well designed systems, they were not all useful to care about. The real knowledge is knowing what's good, what's bad, and which is the 10% of the game's features that you should care about and invest into. And I don't know about you, but I consider that piss-poor game design.

Finally, the combat, which I thought would be the bread and butter of a game about fighting giant monsters... Is one of the worse ones I've experienced in an action RPG. Perhaps a more subjective problem was that it was slow. Even the fastest weapons took a good second or two to finish their attack animation, and you generally couldn't animation-cancel either. Sure, you could argue that this is a design choice that encourages committing to your attacks instead of just spamming them and then pressing dodge when the enemy is about to attack you. It's prediction-based, not reaction-based, you say. It's valid if you feel that way. But I don't. And I think that with the way games have been going, most people would agree that they prefer reaction-based too. It just feels bad to see an attack coming, or an enemy moving out of the way, and you being locked into an animation that you don't want to be in.
But what I found completely unexcusable was how you could not change your attack direction mid-combo. It just felt so miserable doing my attack string, the enemy moving out of the way, and my character not being able to turn their body unless I got my weapon into a neutral position first. The combat just felt so unsatisfying. Let me attack, or let me dodge/block. Don't make me do this song and dance where I attack, reset, then I get to attack again, then I gotta manually sheathe my weapon to pick something up, and ugh, it was the furthest thing from fluid.

Long post, let me conclude fast. Monster Hunter: World feels like a pretty standard, if perhaps sub-par action JRPG. While the idea of the game just being about killing large monsters instead of mostly trash mobs like most games is somewhat interesting, I found no gameplay aspect or game system actually worthy of praise. Despite the many flaws I listed, the baseline was well enough made (even on combat) that none of the systems were bad either, but a whole load of mediocrity does not add up to a good experience. I can somewhat understand the popularity, but I would not recommend it regardless.

Tower of Fantasy

I love making comparisons. Especially if we're talking games which have taken heavy inspiration from something else. It's important to see how a game holds up in comparison to something you could be playing instead. In the case of Tower of Fantasy, it's often called a Genshin clone, and I can definitely see where the comparison is coming from. That said, there are still significant differences in the two, and not just in terms of quality or thematic.

Most importantly, Tower of Fantasy is advertised as an MMO. It's of course one of those "modern MMOs", where the world is shared, but not cooperative nor competitive. "Raid" and "Dungeon" equivalents are instanced content, accessible via a random matchmaking system (because the party finder is full of people who will not let you in because all parties are public by default, including those who've gone AFK or whatever), and there are world bosses, but you won't join them by stumbling upon a fight while running around. No, you will very delibarately join them by observing the spam in global chat, and then teleporting to a party leader. It's not technically instanced content, but it might as well be.
So, if you're looking for an MMO, you won't find it here, although if you just want cooperative (or, heavens forbid, competitive) gameplay, then Tower of Fantasy does basically require you to interact with other players.
I'll just briefly mention, that yes, PvP exists, and there are leaderboards for PvE content, and yes, this part of the game is pay-to-win. The rewards aren't massive, and this content isn't necessary, but if you're competitive, and hate losing to someone just because they paid money, this might be a big red flag for you.

The combat is similarly action-based. Your "party" consists of three weapons, not characters, each having a different attack pattern, skill, and a discharge ability, which triggers if your energy is full and you switch to that weapon. The similarities to Genshin's combat are definitely noticeable, but Tower of Fantasy puts more emphasis on regular attacks, with almost every character (weapon) having a different move set, as well as the existance of aerial attacks, dodge attacks, and some more.
The combat is just as fluid, and might even look flashier than Genshin's, but it's missing the important detail of elemental reactions. There are also very few opportunities for buffing yourself with one weapon, then switching to another. This severely limits your desire to switch between weapons, or make optimal combinations of them, rather than just picking the 3 best ones, and maybe even having one as a stat stick you don't use. As combat is a central part of these games, I think this makes it all a lot more boring.

Genshin's artifact system is split into two systems here. There are matrices which equip to weapons in groups of 4 and have 2, 3, and 4-piece set effects. These have fixed stats, so two of the same matrix are identical. And then there is equipment, which only has rarity and a random combination of stats, so once you get an optimal SSR equipment, you're set.
You also have relics, which are kind of like reusable items that can deal damage or apply some CC or stuff like that. I found that system clumsy and forgot to use it in combat, though it does also have things like a hoverboard and a jetpack / glider, because of course we need the same climbing and gliding mechanics.
Note how I said your party consists of 3 weapons, not characters. The game definitely advertises its anime girls to you, but you really only get their weapon, as well as their skin you can put on. So if you were hoping to switch between multiple lovely characters, then that visual pleasure is deprived from you. You can, however, create your own perfect girl (or boy), and play as them, so maybe it's not all bad.
Oh, and on the topic of visual pleasure, I find the graphics and animations a significant step down from Genshin's level of quality.

And finally, what about the gacha / progression mechanics? Well, it's still story + exploration + dailies + weeklies, but Tower of Fantasy is a bit more generous with how much it gives you. They have deliberately tweaked their numbers to appear as if everything is just a little more cost-efficient than in Genshin. A pull is 150, not 160. A subscription gives you 100 a day, not 90. Pity is 80, not 90, and base probability is 0.75%, not 0.6%. (Although there is no soft pity, so the reality isn't as nice as they make it seem.) Etc... Sadly, there is not a 1-to-1 correlation between ToF's SSRs, and Genshin's 5*s. Each extra SSR duplicate you get gives you a massive boost, and it feels much more necessary to max out your SSRs, in comparison to Genshin, where's the benefits of duplicates are lesser.
I also found it a lot more annoying to do all your daily stuff. ToF wants more of your attention for a relatively lesser payoff. It also keeps pestering you to buy their battle pass, buy your limited first-time-buy packs, and even event gacha systems where you only get a taste of it, and then have to either spend premium currency or just not participate. It just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

It's been a long post, but then again, it's a large game, and I put over 50 hours into it already. I went to play it due to a momentary content dip in Genshin (which I'm sure they planned their release around), but from the combat, to the story, to the visuals... It just feels too much like Genshin, while clearly being inferior. As of the time of writing, Sumeru just came out in Genshin, so I didn't have anything left keeping me playing Tower of Fantasy. If you're reading this further in the future, I'm rather certain there is even less of a reason to play it over Genshin. It took a week for Genshin's popularity to peak, and it stabilized at 1/3 of the peak after a month. (This is an insanely high number to go stable at, to clarify.) Meanwhile, Tower of Fantasy has been dropping in popularity since launch, losing half in the first week, and another half in the second. Who knows where it will end up, but I don't see it having much longevity. My prediction is that it will be effectively dead in a matter of months. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend it.

Zombotron

I think the person behind Zombotron did good on the marketing front. I do not personally remember any of his past works, but supposedly he made relatively popular Flash games in the past, and even a Flash game by the same name 7 years prior. Most of the reviews were reminiscing about that, but I can't say I had the same experience.

Zombotron feels like a very run-on-the-mill platformer shooter. You traverse levels, shoot some enemies, fight a few bosses, oh and you have physics to kill enemies with too... Definitely gave Flash game vibes, and I don't say that in a positive way. The characters are big (which means less fits on the screen) and cartoony (which I just don't like, but I guess seeing their joints is objectively bad) and just uninteresting. There's a level up system, but it's just small numerical upgrades and feels enitrely uninpactful. There's different weapons, but they don't really change anything. You still just run, jump, shoot, maybe melee. The game touts all these methods to kill the enemies, but I think they're all pretty boring. The whole game's just... unremarkable.

I don't have a lot to say. Zombotron is the very basics of a platformer shooter with no cool hook, and even then the execution is sub-par. I've definitely played more interesting and more polished platformer shooters (like Seraph or sth.), and still forgotten about them. Zombotron in no way deserves my time nor my recommendation.

Subsurface Circular

While I did read that Subsurface Circular was a text-based game, I still wasn't fully expecting what I got. You know those games where you're tending a bar or some other establishment, and you get customers coming in, telling you about their day and their lives? Subsurface Circular is a bit like that, but instead of a bar, you're sitting in the titular Subsurface Circular - a metro line exclusively for robots, trying to figure out why some robots are going missing, and maybe something more.

Listen, it's a short game, about 2 hours long, and while I'd love to tell you all about it, that would rob you of the experience of playing it yourself. So instead, let me tell you not about the story, but rather my experiences with the story. First off, it's well written. I still don't know how to describe it, but with some stories (it's not a super rare trait) you can just tell it feels nice to read the words, whatever the story actually is. But luckily, the story's also good. I don't think it's amazingly good or original either, just... good. Probably the strongest bit is the presentation, as you have to kind of get the details of things out of the other robots. You're a detective, see, so you gotta ask the right questions. It's... not really possible to fail or fall off course though, I'm afraid, which somewhat lessens the impact of your actions. The game's kind of linear, and that's something I wish could have been improved. That and the length.

So, what are my opinions overall? Eh... I'd play it if it was free. It's short enough to not really waste my time, but I don't feel I got some profound experience either. The story was nice, I'm happy I experienced it, but I will probably forget it in not too long. So I guess it's a partial recommendation. Won't make my list, but I liked it nontheless.

City of Brass

Sometimes I play a game and wonder how I was tricked into believing it's any semblence of good. I just want to get City of Brass out of my head as fast as possible, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. It feels like a student game. You got your standard first-person view, enemies run straight towards you, you slash them with your sword a few times until they die... Environmental hazards blend into the scenery, except for an icon when you hover over them, but then everything has an icon when you hover over it - it's a mess. Treasure chests open to a cardboard cutout of coins, you can accidentally use your whip to grab a potion that instakills you, because of course missing an enemy and hitting a potion next to them means you wanted to grab and chug that... You don't even get anything for killing enemies, or well... doing much anything at all really.

Agh, I didn't play it a lot, but City of Brass really feels like it wasted my time. You just spam your sword, braindead enemies fall down, you run in the direction of the arrow... There's nothing interesting in the slightest about it. Hard pass. Not recommended. Go next.

Katana Zero

Mostly unrelated, but I had a small breakdown trying to figure out how to classify games, particularly action games, after I finished playing this game. Katana Zero is no doubt an action game, but that's so broad... It's a platformer, because you jump from platform to platform, but that's by no means what the game is about... I guess it's a hack and slash, since that is mainly what the game is about, but then I looked at all the other hack and slash games, and how different they, too, are, and I just don't know anymore. To go into more detail, Katana Zero is a level-based side-scrolling hack and slash, with the catch being a bullet time / time rewind mechanic.
It's a fun game by the gameplay alone, as restarting the level is quite rapid, so it can give you very difficult scenarios to overcome. It starts off easy enough, but the difficulty ramps up alongside your skill, giving a very nice feeling of progression as you look back at levels that used to give you trouble, and notice how easy they are compared to what you can handle towards the end. And yet, were it just the gameplay, I wouldn't mark this game as anything too special...

What really lifts Katana Zero above the rest is the story it tells. It could have just been a nice arcade game, where you have the ability to restart the level because it's a video game, but Katana Zero went further, and wrote a whole story, history, psychological aspects - everything around it. I think the story is very memorable indeed, and it's well-integrated with the gameplay where it's actually interfering with how you play the game, not just something you experience between levels. There are also a lot of choices, which appear to have an impact on the rest of the story, but, minor spoiler, mostly do not. Still, I think it's applaudable that it made me care about the decisions I made, and fooled me to believe that the game may have gone significantly differently based on those choices. (There is actually one important choice as well as a hidden boss fight.)
But that's about all I want to say about the story, lest I spoil something larger. Do experience it for yourself.

Overall, between an amazing story, well-executed, although not incredibly unique, gameplay, and an all around solid experience in every other aspect, Katana Zero is one of best games I've played in a while, as well as a contender for the best arcade game I've ever played. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Gloomhaven

I've always been at least moderately suspicious of video games that have been made from board games. Not that I have anything against board games, far from it, but a board game has a set of limitations on it (simple enough rules to be memorized and applied by humans, limited board sizes, no information hidden from all players, etc.) that a video game does not. So I usually leave board games to be played in person, and stick to video games while online. I was, however, willing to make an exception for Gloomhaven, not just because it's the highest rated board game, but because I was asked to. So, having played it, I might as well review it, but keep my overall stance on board games in mind, if you wish.

Gloomhaven is a tactical, deck-based RPG. You choose a class, assemble a party of up to 4 characeters / players, and set off to a scenario, possibly as part of a longer campaign during which you can upgrade your character with new cards, new equipment, and even a slightly more beneficial RNG. Each scenario has you accomplishing some goal, usually killing all enemies. Unlike most RPGs, Gloomhaven places much greater stakes on each action. You are limited by your deck size, and will lose if you run out of cards, placing you on a turn limit. Additionally, you may choose to burn some cards instead of recycling them in order to get a more powerful effect - bringing forward the time of your inevitable demise, but potentially making up for it by clearing enemies or preventing them doing a lot of damage to you.
Enemies usually hit for a lot, and you're expected to know how the AI works and abuse that knowledge to the fullest by manipulating your turn order, unit placement, and whatever else you can to exploit the specifically-dumb AI. This works well in a board game, but I find it makes the game unnecessarily slow online. This is an addition to the already commonly slow pace of board games that stems from generally being played one turn at a time, one player at a time. Further, there is a widespread problem with turn-based PvE games in general, where it's usually more efficient for one person to call the shots and coordinate everything, than everyone making their own decisions. This of course means that unless everyone is on an equal skill level, either the better players have to bottle up their knowledge and stay silent, watching less experienced players make mistakes and bring the party down. Or the less experienced players don't get much autonomy, and thus not much fun out of the game. This is not something inherent to Gloomhaven, but Gloomhaven also isn't exempt from this.

I think that's most of it. Not much specific about Gloomhaven. In fact, I quite like the idea that you're more solving open-ended puzzles than playing an RPG, and I bet Gloomhaven would be quite nice to play in person. But mainly due to the high amount of time spent waiting, I just can't give the game a recommendation over something designed for a computer first and foremost.

Noita

It's rare to see a game with a truly unique concept. I suppose it's usually that innovation is difficult - it's much easier to make something you've already seen. But also that there is risk in innovation - if no one's done it before, there's no telling how fun it might be. I can't say Noita is completely unique, because it heavily reminds me of the various powder toys I liked to play around with a decade or so ago, except Noita has many more elements, many more interactions, an immensely larger world, and the whole thing is gamified into an action roguelike.

I find it an absoute technical feat, creating such a large world where every little block, basically every pixel, is simulated in realtime. I think Noita deserves recognition for this alone. They've further managed to add an exploration element into the game, tasking you with learning how things react, what are the effects of various substances on you and your enemies, and figuring out good combinations of spells and tactics.
I was very excited for the first few hours, being a small floaty wizard in a large cave filled with unknown things. Sure, I died often, but each new run I started off with slightly different spells, found new wands, new things, and the game was constantly fresh. I set fire to things, zapped water and metal with electricity, and a particular highlight was conjuring up enough water to create a shield that slowed incoming projectiles to a standstill before they could hit me. There was a lot to see and a lot to do, but my experiences were somewhat disjointed...

On one hand there was this amazing physics simulator that was asking to be explored. On the other, there were these shooty bad guys trying to get you to die and not explore the former. A particular place of conflict was the permadeath nature of the game combined with it taking a while before you could get to the really fun stuff. I felt my exploration stifled by the nagging "don't do anything too crazy, lest we take these fun tools away from you" feeling. Indeed, after the starting options became familiar, most of my game time was spent just shooting at enemies and flying, maybe sometimes digging, through the levels. I found an interesting interaction every now and then, but they rarely performed better than just "shoot more inert bullets at them".

So, yeah, a shame. I don't even know what they could do to improve these problems. Just removing the physics part would leave us a not-too-unique shooter, which I find to be the main gameplay of this game already. Removing the shooting bits would leave us with not a game, but just a larger version of the powder toys of old. While Noita is a technical feat, the two main components that make it up fail to be used harmoniously together. Apart, they just fail to keep my attention for too long.
But hey, even if I can't personally recommend it, the 95% positive reviews on Steam are not to be laughed at. If what I described feels a bit like what you'd want to experience, you don't have to take my word for the game not being so fun.

GTFO

GTFO had a free weekend recently, so I got together with a few friends, and we gave it a shot. They had just released a new "Rundown" alongside the free weekend, which is a series of missions that is... the whole game, I guess. Seems to happen twice a year to try to keep the game fresh, which is nice. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What's the game like?

Rundown is described as a horror shooter, but there isn't much horror aside from the grotesque enemies, and there's not that much shooting unless you want to run out of ammo and lose the game. Instead, the levels rely on exploring the area, making optimal decisions on where to go, and a little bit of teamwork that includes sneaking past enemies or sneaking up to them and clubbing them in the head while they're taking a nap. A lot of the latter really, and it plays like a game of Red Light, Green Light (AKA Statues), which really makes it quite slow, especially if other players are just on standby in case things go south.
The gunplay isn't bad, but there's nothing noteworthy about it either. Equipment you can find is quite boring (another set of glowsticks no one wants, anyone?), and there isn't a lot of variety in the gameplay, at least as far as the missions I got to. Top that off with having to re-do large parts of the game if you lose and no adjustable difficulty, and you don't really have much of a case to make in favor of this game. For what it's worth, I found the atmosphere quite immersive and well-executed, but that is by no means enough to keep me interested in the game.

So, after the initial feeling of discovery wore off and the gameplay started to fall into more of a rut of just waiting for periods of time (having to repeat a part of the game 5 times didn't help either), I wasn't having any more of it. I can't even imagine what it must be like playing with randoms, where someone running off, getting frustrated, or just being incompetent will simply ruin everything. Overall, play with a group of people you know, for sure, but even then I find the whole thing difficult to recommend.

DungeonTop

DungeonTop is a roguelike deckbuilder. You grab a starter hero, a starter deck, and venture into the dungeon to beat opponents who have little decks of their own. The gameplay isn't completely unique, but I don't know any game that's very similar to DungeonTop either.
Your hero and the enemy hero start in opposite corners of a small 4x6 or so grid and take turns summoning minions next to existing friendly units, moving, attacking, and casting spells. You get a few cards and a few mana to cast these cards, and then dicard and redraw the whole hand the next turn. You get a selection of cards to add at the end of each battle, and occasionally the chance to remove some. If you run out of cards, you just reshuffle and go for another round.

Perhaps some have already realized that this system is a bit basic and perhaps flawed. Because decks are small (<20), the draw speed is massive (initially 5), and there's no penalty for running out of cards, you're going to thin your deck to be fairly small, and consistently execute whatever combo you want. I didn't play for too long so I don't know all the different strategies, but for example I summoned like 5 minions every turn, completely encircling the enemy on my second or third turn, leaving them with no room to play any new cards. I'd then just shuffle my units around and inveitably beat the enemy. The board was not nearly big enough to fit all my units if I didn't kill their hero in the first few turns. I hear other strategies were similarly powerful, and that overall, the game was far far too easy, to the point you would never lose if you had any idea what you were doing. I can vouch that in my couple of hours of playing, every battle was completely one-sided. They had 16 levels of difficulty at the start, but they were sadly disabled until some unknown point, so I couldn't even make it more difficult. After 2 or so hours of the game getting only easier, and reading that it wasn't going to get better, I gave up.

I feel I didn't even get a good feel for the game. The idea felt kind of interesting but it was just mindlessly easy. I could not care less about what my enemy was doing, or what mechanics the game wanted to throw at me. If you can just do the same thing and win, then what's the incentive to try? In any case, it's not as if the game was super interesting behind its lackluster difficulty. I might have had fun if it was properly balanced, but it's not that the balance ruined a masterpiece or anything. Overall, a shame, but nothing of value lost in not being able to recommend DungeonTop.

Swords & Souls: Neverseen

I feel like I've expressed these thoughts before, but... I'm really glad I got to play Flash games growing up, instead of the current state of "free" games that is the mobile game industry. But the quality has gone up in the years as well, so if you want to start charging money, you best step up your games a lot from what they were back in the day.
Apparently Swords & Souls: Neverseen is a sequel to a 7 year old Flash game (which I never played), and it does feel very much like a Flash game, except with more content and quality.

Swords & Souls consists of a three part game loop. First, you train your character through five different minigames, one for each stat. Second, you go fight enemies to collect coins and items. Third, you use the gathered coins to upgrade the town, including the training area, allowing you to progress further. Rotate back around to training, and keep at this cycle.
Upgrading the town isn't really gameplay and offers only minimal choice in deciding what you want to prioritize. Fighting enemies is mostly a stat check. Most encounters are either so easy you don't have to do anything, or so hard there's nothing you can do, with perhaps only one to two encounters each cycle that depend on when you use your skills. So, all that's really left are the minigames, and your enjoyment will depend nigh entirely on whether you like them. Personally, I did not. Even though the minigames change a little as you do them more, they're still very basic games of "press the right direction key at the right time" or "aim and maybe click in the right direction at the right time". They were somewhat fun for the first 5-10 minutes each, but they're very far from what I'd call quality gameplay.

Perhaps my verdict is a bit unpolite, but I feel this game is suitable for children at best, or if you want to do some coordination / reaction time / aiming excercises. It falls deep into the casual game territory for me and has no appealing aspects whatsoever. There is no way I could recommend this.

LiEat

Unlike most publishers whose games I've played before, I never know if I'm getting a good game when playing something from Playism. I think they exclusively publish Japanese indie games, so there's a lot of RPGMaker stuff and JRPGs. I played through one by the name of LiEat today. Seems to be this particular developer's most successful release, despite later releasing two more story games of similar size. (The later releases also did really well for indie games, but just not as massively well as LiEat.) But I'll get around to those some other time. This post is about LiEat.

LiEat is an RPGMaker game about a travelling liar and a little dragon girl (named Efina) who eats lies. The game part isn't really important, despite there being some combat, and I'd go as far as to say it's quite badly made, even for RPGMaker story game standards. The story is told as three smaller stories about the duo solving some mystery or problem in a village, a resort, and a mansion. The maps are small, each story takes an hour or two, and there's about 8 characters in each, 4 of whom repeat. Apart from uncovering the mystery of that particular place, each story also uncovers a piece of information about our main duo. The stories weren't bad. They were enjoyable to read through and didn't drag on due to their short length, but they were also nothing particularly memorable.
I think the main selling point was how darn cute Efina was. Both in the conversation dynamics between the characters, as well as the artstyle (not the pixel art), which looked somewhat amateurish, almost like crayon drawings by children, but all the more fitting for it. Personally, I also found the music to be much to my liking.

Now, as a whole, I don't really know what to say. I definitely liked the story, and found it was 4 hours well spent. But the stories weren't that good, there were some plot holes like Efina's power to make lies manifest being a bit arbitrary and made to suit the plot, and you had to run around far too much, checking every place again and again, as new discoverable items and ways to progress the story plopped up as you found the last. It was a bit of an annoyance. I think I'd give it like a half-recommendation. Play it if you like cute little anime dragon girls with a small side of actual story and mysteries, but steer clear if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea. For me, it just barely won't be making it into my best games list.

Airships: Conquer the Skies

I'm somewhat surprised that Airships has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. I must admit it's very well made for a small indie game, but it's far from perfectly executed.

Airships is primarily a sandbox for designing steampunk airships and pitting them against other airships. There's also landships and bases which use the same parts but different methods of movement. I spent most of my time in a conquer-the-world style scenario mode, which adds a tech tree for unlocking parts and adds bases to fight over that generate income, thus limiting your ship designs. But you really just care about the ships and the combat, and there's quite a few flaws with that part. Allow me to list off some that come to me, in no particular order:

The research is far too slow, taking tens if not hundreds of hours to finish in its entirety. Getting even a single upgrade takes a while, and sometimes gives only one new block. The research tree does not specifically tell you what each node unlocks.
Combat is neither manual nor automatic enough. You can only give rudimentary commands to your ships, being 80% movement, and 15% who to target. The movement is terrible at understanding whether something is in the way, sometimes ramming into stuff, and sometimes stopping even if it wouldn't ram into anything. There's no navigating around obstacles, chained movement commands, no option to follow a target and keep it at range, no way to target specific systems (weapons, crew, repairs, ammo, etc.) on the enemy...
The battle maps are far too small for the epic scale this game promises, and even almost enables. There is no room to manouver or position your ships most of the time, leading to piles of wreckage blocking the way. If larger maps could be combined with autonomous AI (that works better than current enemy AI, which rams into its own units and gets stuck) and larger budgets for designing ships, we could actually get a lot of entertainment value from watching massive fights - not the case right now.
The battles are about twice too fast at normal speed, and about twice too slow at the next slowest, 1/4 speed.
Aside from research not being transparent, a lot of other systems aren't either. How does armor work? How is accuracy calculated over range? How much damage am I actually doing to the enemy? Or how much are they doing to me, for that matter? If I don't know if my weapons scale better or worse over range than the enemy's, I don't get to make a decision of whether to fight up close or far. This isn't just a strategic problem, it's also unfun to not understand what is going on.
And honestly, there's more problems, most related to not enough polish, not necessarily bad ideas.

Overall, I did play Airships for nearly ten hours, definitely proving it has some appeal. But once you build a few cool ships with the parts you have, there isn't too much incentive to build even more, so that part of the game falls off. The overworld RTS game is very slow and bare-bones, so that was never exciting to start with. And finally, the combat despite offering some awe at larger-than-usual scale fights, and watching the dynamic destruction of both fleets, eers more on the frustrating than the fun side for the reasons listed above.
I'm left wondering what could have caused people to like this game so much. Perhaps there is a shortage of games that let you build your own armaments and then offer a meaningful battleground. I can't help but feel that maybe even Gratuitous Space Battles did it better. In any case, I can't recommend a game I didn't ultimately enjoy, so I can't recommend Airships.

Daemon X Machina

Mecha games always looks so cool from the screenshots. The idea of flying around at high speeds with a lot of firepower sounds cool, but that doesn't necessarily translate to reality. I guess you could say the same about Daemon X Machina, which I just played.

See, the problem with being really strong, and really maneuverable, and really fast is that... Well, there's a lot of problems. Being strong means others are weak, and that makes things easy. Being maneuverable, like a mech, not like a plane, means that you can essentially aim anywhere you want. Combine that with being airborne, and there's often nothing obscuring your view either, making it truly an excercise in clicking on targets as they come close from any direction. And being fast means everything is really damn small because they're so far. So you're going to need some sort of auto-targetting to make sure you can keep living out your power fantasy of eliminating a lot of enemies, lest you feel like a fool, missing all your shots.
These are roughly my problems with this game, which can be summed up in it being too easy and too simple. You go from scenario to scenario, suffering dialogue and story that doesn't seem to be heading anywhere for a while, then fly to targets and hold down your mouse buttons while aiming in their general direction, and then wait for more to arrive until the mission is over and you get to do it all over again.

I could talk about other bits, like how the upgrade and customization system is kind of nice with salvaging equipment from enemies, requiring specific equipment for specific upgrades, and such, but it doesn't matter. It comes down to slightly different damage or defense numbers, or a faster firing gun, but the core gameplay stays the same boring way. They got full English voice acting, but 10 missions in, I still couldn't piece together where the story was going, and they'd already introduced like 20 characters. Speaking of characters, I don't know if the lighting messed up or what, but they had really unsightly streaks of light shades moving across their faces. Ruined that bit too.
I quit after failing a mission because I got tired of the last enemy sitting outside the playable area and decided to fly after it, only to be instantly killed by the map boundary as I ran into it, failing the mission. I wasn't going to re-do one of these missions from the start, so I quit.

I feel like I'm being very harsh on a game that kind of delivered its premise. You fly around and you shoot enemies, even if there's nothing complicated or challenging about it. I'm not sure what better I expected, but as I was actually falling asleep during it, I have no personal reason to give it any sort of recommendation.

Hand of Fate 2

It's been over 5 years since I completed the original Hand of Fate. I left quite the positive review of it, and added it to my favorite games list, albeit at a rather low position, somewhat contrasting the tone in the review. I remember what the game was about, but not the details, nor anything that particularly stood out to me. In hindsight, it feels as if the game was unremarkable. Who's to say if I've simply forgotten, if my preferences have changed, or if the bar I've set for games has gotten higher over the past 5 years. This review is of course about Hand of Fate 2, but I would like to pretend I remember the first game well enough to make comparisons to it. They are, overall, very similar games.

Hand of Fate 2 is mostly a turn-based rougelike. You have your basic stats - health, food, gold. You have some equipment with attack, defense, and passive abilities. And you have a goal in the scenario which you must accomplish. What they changed is that instead of the game being one large scenario with checkpoints, it is now a more loosely connected collection of smaller scenarios without a fixed order. This feels like a slight downgrade.
Most of what happens in the game is based on decks. You step into a new "room" - it's a random card from the deck dictating the encounter. You gain a new equipment - it's random from the equipment deck. You gain a positive or negative effect - same story. You can customize the decks to a degree by adding your own cards in addition to the dealer's cards, which is a very nice idea in theory, but I would criticize the execution. There are a lot of cards, but not a lot of cards you can put in a deck. Making a good deck becomes a secondary or tertiary objective, because you want to prioritize cards which can unlock new cards, or cards which you haven't used yet, and thus have not yet identified, despite having obtained them. In the end, I'm making very few strategical decisions about my deck building, instead being half-forced to pick the cards which unlock new things. And, as another downgrade, I feel like they have reduced the amount of agency the player has over the decks as well.
I can't say I feel I have a lot of choice anyways. I go through all the rooms, I pick the usually obviously correct choices, hope the RNG doesn't fuck me over, and repeat the process until I win or lose. I definitely don't feel the exciment I felt during the first game.

The second half of the game is in fact action-based, being any combat encounter. This continues to be the worst part of the game, and I would be much harsher on it this time around. The combat is actually dead-easy if you have reasonable awareness and reaction times. Your equipment is inconsequential (making the bits about obtaining it matter less). Every encounter is just spamming attack (or shield break, or finishers) until a red or green arrow appears near you indicating to either dodge or block. Press the correct button of the two, and you're fine. Throw in a shield bash or weapon ability if those are ready. There is no strategy to the combat, no thinking.
This time sink is made worse by a tediously long transition from the game board to the battle, as well as some flexing animations at the start of combat from either side. I am adamant in my opinion this time, that they should have never added action combat to Hand of Fate. The card game aspect is far superior.

Speaking of time sinks, the dealer is ever chatty, but with the amount of text in the game, he somewhat wastes my time by forcing me to wait until he's done talking to start reading. Perhaps it's me, or perhaps the overall storytelling quality has gone down, as the dealer does not feel as enchanting as he once did.

Overall, a definite step down from the previous game, even if I factor in that I possibly have some nostalgia for the original Hand of Fate. That said, I still don't think it's a bad game. I think I got about 25% through the campaign. That's half as long as I played the original, but the campaign is now twice as long too. The first hours definitely passed very fast, as I was enjoying myself. The magic faded far faster this time around though.
I'm demoting the original Hand of Fate to a "below the line" recommendation, but I would still recommend you play that, and not this sequel. Despite it being newer, there is little innovation, and what there is, is not better.

Grimm's Hollow

I spent the evening playing through a short free game by the name of Grimm's Hollow. It takes about 3 hours to get all the endings, and it's a cute little RPG / Adventure game. I could tell you more about the gameplay, and how and why it was not balanced, was too easy, or why the real-time / turn-based hybrid system was somewhat frustrating. I won't. It's not important. You'll be playing for 3 hours, only half of that will be combat - you don't need a great system there. What was was good enough.

Grimm's Hollow is about the story. You wake up, you're dead, and you want to find your brother. It touches on things like coming to terms with your own death, the death of others, the afterlife, and other somewhat heavy topics, while also throwing in lighter moments to stop the mood from falling too far down. I don't want to spoil anything of course, so I won't go into details. It's nothing too deep, nothing incredible, but I found the story well-written and charming, and just short enough to keep me entertained throughout.

Overall, Grimm's Hollow is a short yet enjoyable Adventure RPG which I hope would not leave you indifferent. I find the quality comparable to another well-received game, Eternal Senia, and I would recommend both roughly equally. That is, they're good enough to earn a spot on my best games list, but a "below the line" spot, meaning they're not incredible or unparalleled. Still, Grimm's Hollow will only take you a few hours, and I think it's time well spent.