Kinetic, expressive, subtle; full of all the joys and terrors you could want from a game like this. Most easily described as "Metal Gear Solid V as a roguelite", but I think that does the game a huge disservice.

It truly understands the slapstick comedy potential of teamkilling and ragdolls. Like accidentally fragging your friends with a 500kg bomb you dropped at your feet when a bug knocked you over. Or diving off a ledge slightly too high and colliding headfirst with the ground in what I like to call "the concussion special".

And it also has the nuance for different approaches, like silently dispatching a whole outpost beyond their range to sense you. Then there's all the details enabled by its structure, like watching other squads' ships help with stratagems while you're in space. Clearing an entire map of its enemies is both fun and rewarding, even though missions are procgen. It can be as hard or as easy as you like it, and the higher difficulty content is very fun even when you're fucking up and dying constantly. Helldivers 2 has a near endless capacity to surprise you with its wit and playfulness, if you let it.

Really glad I picked this up and played it before my friends group moved on from it. I play it an hour or so a day, I'm 50 hours deep with everything unlocked, and I'm excited to see where they take it.

I love Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours quite a bit on their technical and design merits; a blend of idle game and adventure game, where you build up your abilities through "time spend" choices. I think this one is better than Cultist Sim in many respects too.

Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?

So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.

This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.

On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.

Actually that's probably Pentiment lol

Nostalgic for sure - I loved this back in the day - but the rose-colored glasses have fallen off.

A bad interface and awkward base-building hinder it from its full potential. It also has poor faction / unit design where more expensive units (particularly barrage units) are simply outright better, and there's none of the clarity or direction of similar games like Warcraft or Command and Conquer, where every unit has an obvious role in your composition. Instead you mostly just throw together whatever you can produce and hurl it at the enemy in increasingly large waves.

It does have funny tongue-in-cheek cutscenes, but that's the only real highlight. Watch for all the sly jokes in the fake-computer-crawl before every mission. I appreciate getting a bunch of goofy Australians together to make The Apocalypse But Stupid FMVs for an otherwise extremely mid RTS.

Interesting for people like me who grew up with the genre, or those who want a glimpse into history, but that's it. Very funny that these guys also developed Shadowrun SNES!

Achingly mid. Sure, it ~resembles~ Hotline Miami, in a very shallow sort of way, but it lacks that special touch.

Where Hotline Miami (1, anyway) is bold, shocking, beautiful, transgressive, and lovely, this game is completely rote. It lacks so much of what I love about that game, and instead replaces it with a drab monochrome roguelike. A game about careful positioning and clever engagement reduced to slo-mo and dodge rolls. You can't kick a guy into a wall and bash his skull in with a hammer, or use doors as improvisational weapons, or ride the tense razor's edge of a single hit. The mildly intriguing premise quickly gives way to tedium. And the music sucks.

I might return to this later, but where I voraciously devoured Hotline Miami in an afternoon, I have been procrastinating playing more of this. I'm going to take that as the sign it should be and shelve it for later.

Tetris Attack but instead of being some abstract block-swapping demigod you're a tiny spiderbot who has to manually move resources around. Match said resources to add them to your pool, then spend your pool to make turrets and other base-defense items. Gradually expand your efforts as the waves of enemy attacks increase in quantity and duration. Don't let them make off with your blocks!

Really love this one. It was difficult at first but once I got into the groove of all the little tricks and how to build my tower defense setup, the game clicked and hours flew by. The sprite work is really cute and the variety of blocks and how you collect them is well-done.

My only real criticism is that moving around is pretty clunky, even once you understand advanced strategies like kicking off solid towers and such. It takes a lot of getting used to, and even once you do it never feels great. Were it smoothed out a little, this would be a perfect game. Instead it's "just" extremely good.

A mix of Tetris and a god game. Align blocks adjacent to each other in groups of 2 or more to create combinations, which are added to the top of your block draw. Continue doing this until you can create all the different block types, then start matching rows to get DNA, which creates living things when placed on different block types. Create humans, provide them with all the resources they need, and watch them fly to space!

Unfortunately it's just not very good. The actual god game part is super finicky thanks to the tiny play space, many block properties, odd Tetris shapes, and row-matching destroying your setup. Humans require multiple kinds of resources to actually survive, much less make it off the planet. Oxygen gets erased if you drop any block on it. There's no block hold. It's just endless frustration in what could've been a really unique and engaging game.

It's a shame because I was really liking this one until I got far enough to actually start taking on the final objective. Once I started to aim to get humans off my little block tower, I quickly realized how much luck and bullshit was involved, and how little control I had, which is bad for both genres this game is taking from.

Might revisit in the future but just way too annoying for me to continue playing now.