Straightforward combination of Tempest and bullet hell games. It's quite clever, and does a lot with the premise. Your movement is constrained to a circle, and you must dodge bullet patterns and moving bosses while grazing bullets for your laser and damage powerups.

My main criticism is the controls are a little finicky. In most bullet hell games, you can hold a button (usually fire) to slow your character movement, to make weaving the patterns easier. There's none of that here, it's just raw analog stick input, which means you have to be ~extremely~ precise in your thumb movements to properly graze (which gives you bomb and score). Perhaps it's because I'm getting older, but the tension in my thumb started to hurt my hand after a little bit.

Well worth it for people like me looking for a unique take on some well-trod arcade design.

Feudal colony sim akin to Rimworld or Songs of Syx that focuses on the politics / social interrelations of feudalism.

You aren't just an omniscient ruler with perfect control over your subjects or the direction of your kingdom; you have to actually engage with establishing households, families, lineages of artisans. Your resources are taxed from the holding families rather than fully controlled, and to establish new families or improve existing ones you have to enable them to trade with each other as well as help them directly with gifts of materials.

In that respect it's particularly unique. Pretty tough to get into though, with a long tutorial that still leaves you feeling a little adrift in the main part of the game.

Somewhere between Diablo and The Last Federation. Fly around killing generic pirates for a while, collect loot, and then eventually aid one of the factions. In the background, all the factions are playing a mini-4x game that you can influence by completing quests or just massacring the faction fleets. These factions research and improve where you can't, so picking the one making the parts you want for your ship is an interesting "specialization" choice with real ramifications and investment.

My main issues with it are it's ugly as orange piss and very stingy on bag space at the beginning. As such you have to push through the bad early game to start getting to the fun stuff. But once it clicks it's quite enjoyable!

Great engineering game about running a packet network through tunneled corridors to various bunkers. Use filters and splitters and other doodads to make your network more efficient and prevent packets from traveling to every endpoint in the network. Teaches the basic principles of network design!

If you're like me and just care about the puzzles and the lonely mood, you can turn off enemies. I'd recommend it, honestly, I don't think they add much.

Could use either an endless or rogue-like mode to add a little replayability.

It's pretty good, but they have had an issue since launch where lobbies won't backfill with players who leave, so if one person leaves a lobby during formation it completely fucks the whole thing up. There's also some extremely funny balance problems and the lead designer of the skills system is a moron high on huffing his own farts, judging by his response to people criticizing his (frankly stupid and terrible) implementation of skill trees. Nothing more frustrating than a designer who doesn't acknowledge that the player experience is different than he envisioned. Still fun when you can get a relatively even match with no leavers though.

Impossible to give a live service game that I both love and hate in equal measure an accurate rating so I'll split the difference at 3 stars.

Fun, frustrating, clever, idiotic, empowering, enraging; all of these are true about Dead by Daylight. A game where hundreds of hours means you're still a newbie, where players are constantly toxic to each other, where game balance is completely fucked and impossible to fix, and where you play it anyway because literally nothing else that has tried to strike this same balance hits the same way.

I love this game. I hate this game.

Clearly and directly aping Theme Hospital.

I quite like it, but the metaprogression element isn't to my taste. You earn meta-dollars to buy new items, or earn them via stars on a level. Earning stars on a level isn't about hitting specific goals in a time frame, or being judged on your ability to construct a well-run hospital, but rather a continuously-running goal check that you can and eventually will succeed at. Kind of a bummer.

Still great though, if you want to scratch that hospital administrator itch Bullfrog left in your blood (like they did mine) decades ago. I'm pretty sure the announcer lady is the same one from Theme Hospital lol