Paradox is especially interesting as a developer because they essentially make the same game over and over, adjusting mechanics to suit the setting, and it means that playing these games in release order you'll see more and more cross-pollination as systems and mechanics that work well in one series are placed into a new game from a sister series. Probably the best example of this is the "pops" system that is best known as being part of the Victoria series, initially designed to help simulate both economic and cultural changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution by bundling people with the same culture, religion, and job into a single demographic block. Paradox seems to think this was a hit, because they're putting it in everything now - they kept it for the release of Victoria 3 in 2022, they're putting them into their currently under-development "Definitely Not Europa Universalis 5", and they exist here in Imperator as well.

Imperator is most fascinating as a mishmash of interesting systems from Paradox's other series - after 2 years of tweaks turning this into a completely different game, it's fascinating to look at the final product and see what systems remained part of the developers' core vision for this game. It uses Victoria's pop system to represent the tendencies of the masses, it uses a stripped-back form of Crusader Kings' characters to represent the most influential nobles, its statecraft and military options are a mixture of so many other Paradox games that it'd be painful for both of us if I spelled it out. The result is a game that - for returning players - has a ton of familiar, easy-to-grasp elements that affect a truly absurd number of statistics and variables for states, provinces, and individual actors, some of which are more opaque than others.

It's not helped by Imperator's map, which is more granular than ever. Victoria 3's map divides territory into "states" and that's effectively all you have to worry about unless a state is split between two or more countries - even then, most modifers will only apply to the portion of the state that's under your control. States are large, they are chunky, and while the populations in them might be diverse, you almost never have to worry about fractions of a state. Imperator's map is broken into Territories (individual settlements), Provinces/Areas (collections of 10-15 territories), and Regions (groups of provinces that are generally of a similar cultural background). Buildings are built in a territory, provinces have loyalty separate from that of the person governing them, and when you unlock the ability to maintain a standing army then you typically are limited to one per region - so claiming a single village from a new region will be far less useful than consolidating your power within an area.

Provinces have local trade, loyalty, unrest, food, "civilization", infrastructure, taxes, and separate happiness values per population. Influential characters belong to families (with relationships and family trees) and have character traits, jobs, dynamic party affiliations, statesmanship, loyalty, popularity, prominence, corruption, personal income, and a powerbase that includes soldiers that may have loyalty to them over the state. The state has at least 9 core stats that can change or disappear entirely based on your forms of government. There's more I could mention, but I think I've driven the point home.

The point is that there's a LOT of moving parts and it can be tough to grasp even for longtime Paradox players. If you make someone play this as their first grand strategy game they will likely swear off the genre entirely. The reward for learning it, though, is a simulation that really nails the experience of holding together a vast, ancient empire with hope and duct tape, forced to use the stability of the entire country as a resource to keep the richest man in the empire from getting too ambitious. All of these mechanics let you roleplay through a vast variety of actions that few games would support: you can view the accomplishments of individual legions in a historical log, you can build up a tiny border town into a metropolis, you can award different cultural groups with increased status or expanded rights, you can play favorites among the influential families and use your leader's status to accrue as much personal wealth as possible. This game only received 2 years of post-launch support but it has depth comparable to Paradox's other games that have been in development for over a decade. The systems take time to learn but they weave together naturally, where the decision to remove a provincial governor involves smaller decisions on the relative value of his talents vs. his corruption and provincial loyalty, the happiness of his family vs. the happiness of the people in the province, and the relative costs of each approach you could use to solve the problem.

There are some valid criticisms, though, going beyond just the complexity. First is that the game's quite easy once you wrap your head around the systems - there are a lot of ways for factions of moderate starting power to get ahead and the game heavily rewards you for keeping your foot on the gas, so it's entirely possible (especially if you're playing Rome) that you crush a couple early factions and never look back. The game also has some obvious seams as a result of its reinvention over 2 years: it does a decent job of explaining most of its mechanics, but there will be a handful of times where you have to resort to googling something that doesn't have a tooltip, because the game has a lot of icons and not all of them are explained well. What are the effects of "prominence"? Where is this "divine sacrifice" button that I keep getting modifiers for? The law system also feels abnormally weak when compared to all the other systems, since changing a law typically means swapping one minor buff for another in a game where you're constantly racking up stat increases via research (Rome's military tech tree alone has 84 techs that all provide meaningful buffs).

All that being said, I'm pleasantly surprised with how much I like this game - I picked it up on release and played 15 hours or so before dropping it like a hot brick and refusing to touch it until this year. Even ignoring the complaints above it's hard to recommend, because I think it's a lot easier for players to hop into a game as "France" and pass "Agrarianism" than it is to play as Scordiscia and learn what it means to click "lex Caecilia de vectigalibus" but I think those who are passionate about the era or the genre could find this really rewarding. There's a surprising amount of room to "play tall" despite naming this game after a famously expansionist empire and it does a good job of making you think about the people and places you conquer, even after the deed is done. Far from perfect, but it's deeply interesting and I'm super interested to see what mechanics and systems they're going to use in their future games - they're already using a similarly granular map in EU5, and I think a lot of what's present here could be polished to a mirror shine in future games.

The joy of hectic co-op missions - where you're just as likely to die to a friendly mortar as an enemy rocket - is only stifled by a progression model that becomes punitive in the late game and the ludicrous frequency of glitches, the latter of which is mostly confined to the downtime between games. You are just as likely to run into an enormous bug in the missions as you are in the menus. With no glitches, though, it's a great game. The developers deserve a ton of praise for nailing the actual experience of playing at any given moment. Guns and explosions sound great, and all the things that could be a real nuisance in a game like this are balanced so well that they're never a concern - guns have just enough recoil to make it worth some attention, ammo and stamina feel plentiful as long as you're being somewhat mindful, you get the idea. When combined with the number of stratagems (providing airstrikes, additional equipment, and turrets from the sky) and equipment options, you can easily drop into a mission with a loadout that ensures you will never ever have to think about ammo, or about watching your back, or about dealing with heavily-armored enemies.

The difficulty, though, ramps up pretty steadily until you're constantly bottoming out on your "plentiful" ammo and stamina, with the cooldowns on those airstrikes becoming excruciatingly long despite the fact that they never actually changed. In terms of the actual effect this has on team strategy and camaraderie, it's up there with the best - it's hard to mind that your pal's airstrike nearly killed you when it saved you from five other things competing for the honor. A teammate finding the time to call in a much-needed resupply as everything is going to shit will make them your real-life hero.

Comparing this to similar shooters will undoubtedly let some folks down as the smaller (but still important) differences in strategic flavor between games can be a turn-off. For one thing, the game is very quick to throw out the periodic lulls in the action that are common in games like L4D, PD2, and DRG - unlock the first of 6 new difficulty levels and you'll find that lingering slightly too long in a level can put you in a situation where enemies are permanently spawning faster than you can kill them as your team starts hemorrhaging their limited revives. Helldivers is also rather generous in that all of your stratagems are very good as long as you actually tailor them to the situation, but part of the cost is that you have to immobilize yourself and enter between 3 and 9 directional inputs without making a mistake, and then throw a beacon that actually places the thing. This is how you call in the extraction shuttle, this is how you summon more ammo, this is how your friends are telling you to revive them as you dive into a crater with rockets flying past your head. Some people are going to hate this more than their actual job, I think it's fantastic. Part of the fantasy is becoming so good at entering these codes that you barely have to stop moving at all to get the entire team back in action, and finding these small windows to call in support contributes strongly to the impression of constant enemy pressure, but also to the satisfaction of actually pulling it off once the mission's over.

With a full squad, there are 4 different perspectives on a mission that all share the broad strokes but each of which has different details. A teammate's attempt to save one of your comrades from being maimed by a building-sized bug may not notice that they just gave you a haircut with a ricocheted autocannon projectile. A dead teammate who checks their phone for texts likely didn't see that the effort to bring them back involved a creatively used stim, a head-first dive off a cliff, and a respawn beacon tossed over a crowd of enemies as you draw the horde away from them. The team chuckles at the idea of throwing down a minefield behind you to cover your tracks, but only the player who deploys it will notice that they've killed an entire enemy dropship without firing a shot. A teammate operating the terminal at one of the objectives can't tell that your efforts to cover them involve frantically switching guns as you mag-dump at a horde of silhouettes through thick, black smoke. Everyone completed the same mission, but there's still plenty of clever and hilarious details to discuss once you arrive back at the destroyer. Including the other consequences of that minefield.

Does a couple things particularly well, but I think it's more of a base hit than a home run.

There's a lot that's worth praising - the animation, the attention to the environments, translating the core gameplay fantasy of champions between two different games, creating a Demacia where regular people can live their lives. Perhaps most praiseworthy through - since Riot themselves fuck this up constantly - is recognizing that Demacia is only capable of being an interesting setting if you dig into its fundamental contradictions as a genocidal anti-magic state whose most iconic symbols and heroes have their roots in that magic. My great fear upon first learning that this game was in development was that they would spend too much time on League's most popular boring-ass white bread champions but they've actually done a great job of drawing in characters who haven't traditionally been used to their fullest potential - Sylas is the primary beneficiary, of course (he's the main character after all), but tapping Morgana to play a big role in this story is a great choice as well.

The most important criticism I've got is that the game really assumes you're familiar with the setting. I am, because I'm a sick little freak who plays League of Legends and enjoys it, but I think most League players start and finish engaging with the lore by laughing at the loading screen tips. The Mageseeker kinda introduces its key figures and topics, but if you're coming into this because you watched Arcane (and don't want to pick up LoR or watch 200 Necrit videos) then you have some homework to do if you want the full experience. If you meet those requirements though, the game gives you a lot to chew on with tons of lore tidbits, a decent cast of side characters (despite some painfully on-the-nose dialogue on occasion), and champion cameos that feel consistent with their established histories and personalities.

The good news is failing to "do your homework" with the lore cannot stop you from enjoying the combat, which does a pretty good job of porting Sylas over into a different game - he still likes to linger at medium-ish range before flinging himself at enemies to begin brawling, and having a bunch of enemies to steal spells from allows you to feel like a genius during the fights even if it's a bit silly that they keep sending in enemies who have contradictory elements at the same time. The only thing that gets in the way of the gameplay mid-fight is the wonky lock-on for your chains, which is actually more important when you're not stealing spells. Flinging yourself towards an enemy is your most versatile tool and the game seems to get confused from time to time about which enemy you're actually trying to target (or if you're trying to target anyone at all) and it'll lead to a handful of moments across your time with the game that break your flow. The combat is still well-designed and is by far the best part of the game, but the fact that it feels so basic even at its best meant that I was never seeking out the side missions to extend my time with the game - by the time the game was done, so was I.

I suppose for a bottom line, I should make things clear: I think this is hard to recommend for the vast majority of people out there unless you already have a better than average understanding of League's lore, or if you're willing to donate some extra time so the game can educate you. The combat is good but this really is "a League of Legends story" with the emphasis on "story". Ultimately I'm happy with this, but I'm mostly happy because it means we have an official Riot-approved story that actually cares about giving Sylas the screentime he needs to be an actual character. I've heard dreadful things about some of the other Riot Forge titles and have been apprehensive about even the most well-regarded media set in Runeterra, but I had a decent time with this title and I think it's convinced me to relax and be a little less wary.

Just some quick thoughts for this one, apologies if it's a little scatterbrained.

As a game this is probably the most ""content"" for your dollar that you could possibly get out of a scripted game and I'm truly blown away by how much effort it must have been to put this whole thing together. Dondoko Island is a minigame with more mechanics than 98% of the games I play each month. If that were all there is to say then I'd be giving it a 10/10 - and I understand that everything after this point is going to make me sound like an insane person to 85% of people playing this - but the truth is that this game (like Y7) is so hell-bent on being silly at all times that it often undercuts itself when it comes to dramatic tension or consistency of plot/characters - again! Genuinely, if the Ichiban games just knew how to solve their tonal issues then I'd be giving this game an extra star, if not more. Classic Yakuza goofiness works best as a break from the drama - it's less effective when the cutscene establishes a legitimate, serious threat to your loved ones and then immediately warps to your female party member decked out in a coconut bra and maracas strumming a ukulele at a guy with a beach ball for a torso.

Some things (the combat and chain attacks, Hawaii, every non-Sujimon minigame) are miles better than they were in Y7, but the game also loves to tell the same jokes over and over so things that are initially endearing (seonhee fangirling over kiryu) become extremely grating by the end. I also think Yakuza Gaiden works better as a farewell tour for Kiryu because it's not just crammed into a game about someone else in a city he's barely been to - having Kiryu reminisce can be fun at points but so many of the locations are completely arbitrary and having Kiryu go "Remember all the times Date rescued me in a helicopter?" because he walked into a cafe feels dry and artificial, not fun. I'm almost resentful that so much of the focus is placed on him in this story when his main purpose for most (not all) of it is to be a cool friend who people on the street constantly recognize. The big Kiryu checklist wavers between being interesting (reflecting on basic things Kiryu never got to enjoy because of his insane life of constant fighting) and mind-numbing (do you remember the dancing minigame in Y0? how about the fishing minigame?). Ultimately though, it's part of a larger push to make these characters feel like they have lives outside of Ichiban's adventures (Ichiban included) and it works wonders... when it works at all. Tomizawa shines particularly brightly as someone whose drink links highlight a life that's been uprooted in a way that ties into the main plot while remaining personal to him and exposing more of his character. Saeko and the other women, however, mostly get these nothingburger chats that are about Ichiban or how cool Kiryu is or how stressful it is to run a business.

Also: It needs to be better about signposting when you're about to switch protagonists. At one point it splits your group between two locations and warns you that you're going to need good gear because there's some combat coming up, but it doesn't tell you that it's going to switch you to the other group first, leading me to 75 straight minutes of fighting with a party that is severely underpowered because I read the warning and assumed I'd be fighting with the group I was currently controlling.

Also also: I'm still not a fan of the enemies they cook up in the Ichiban games. A lot of them are creative and fun and a lot of them really, truly are not - it's cool to see what attacks they assign to random day jobs, it's not funny or interesting when the fat guy in ill-fitting clothes hits you with a big hot dog or the Chinese mafioso performs acupuncture in the middle of a fight. That shit is so fucking boring, dog. Ichiban could really use a better imagination.

I realize that this might seem overly negative for the rating I've given. I enjoyed myself for the vast majority of its runtime, but so much of this just collapses in on itself for me when I give it any thought at all. I'm still in awe at the production value here - this game blows my mind in much the same way that 2D mode in Dragon Quest XI did - they simply did not need to go so hard in crafting a big video game buffet. Combat has only seen a few changes but the changes that have been made take it from something I tolerated in Y7 to something I truly enjoy (as long as I'm not underleveled). Y8 addresses so many of the concerns I had with Y7 but about once an hour I'm reminded that the Daidoji faction is transparently complete nonsense (in the same way the Florist used to be), that the Drink Links still insist on having One Big Problem that each character must solve that ends in a fight (which means each character only gets to talk about a single thing during their moments in the spotlight), that both the English and the Japanese dubs feel inappropriate for the setting at least 50% of the time. There's a lot to like about this game and for significant chunks of it - mostly while I was ignoring the story - I was considering just giving it 5 stars and calling it a day, but the more I think about it, the less appropriate that feels.

This thing can be hard as nails if you're used to games that automate everything away and reduce the level of control you have over your settlement. Even something like Dwarf Fortress can be a bit easier to pick up if you limit the scope of your operation, because your control over your dwarves is actually pretty limited and you need a manager to do anything in bulk. Ratopia gives you total control and it can be a real challenge, even on the easiest difficulties.

A brand new Ratopia player will probably do fine with the basics - it's pretty easy to maintain a stockpile of the essentials at the beginning - but your rats have emotional needs too and the game is constantly pushing you to operate on an increasingly large scale while making sure you have the infrastructure in place to support a settlement of that size. It's really easy to make quick decisions that will inconvenience you in the long run, and correcting mistakes can be costly - every task that you are not personally completing requires that you pay someone, right from the start of the game. No freebies. Not farming, not construction, and certainly not mining. The rats have to pay for services too, though, and now there's a whole ecosystem at play - a rat without a job is going to have a hard time eating or filling their entertainment need, and now you've gotta set up the infrastructure that allows you to collect taxes (because you've gotta pay rats to do some really expensive jobs) and subsidize certain goods/provide welfare for rats that are struggling.

The whole game requires this same level of diligence - it's very easy to find yourself in a situation where you don't have enough grass because you've got workshops that are just eating up the supply in huge quantities as soon as any arrives in storage, so if you don't set conditions under which certain goods can be produced - and do so early on - you're probably digging yourself a huge hole without even noticing.

On the flip side though, this means that it's really hard to compete with the satisfaction this game provides when everything is going smoothly. It's impossible to be confused about why your colony failed unless you're just wholesale ignoring all the information the game gives to you. Each failure is an obvious lesson in scalability, teaching you how and when to prioritize certain tasks, structures, and resources. Building a little rat empire where you've got a stable supply of core goods and your rats aren't filthy or hungry is a reward for perfect planning that encourages you to go just a little further out of your comfort zone.

It's gotta be the economy/political systems that make the game shine, though. Colony sims tend to be more focused on the material aspects of running a settlement, the logistics of producing enough things and getting them where they need to go. It's rare (but not unheard of) for these games to try their hand at incorporating the economics and administrative tasks of a more traditional city builder into the mix, but it rarely feels so essential to the experience as it does here. I think some players will wish the devs had leaned a little more into that side of things - the administrative services you provide are relatively basic - but this project shows a lot of focus and restraint and I think that's a tremendous strength, even if I occasionally find myself wishing for more complex production conditions on my workshops.

After finishing this, I'm completely at a loss for what I should rate it. On the one hand, by committing so hard to making a game about Fucked Up Shit, you're going all-in on your jokes landing with the audience and they definitely do not always land. It's pretty easy to see why people are comparing this to Always Sunny (especially early IASIP) but one of IASIP's big strengths is weaving together A- and B-plots while peppering in other jokes, and the truth is that Class of '09 never has as much going on as IASIP does in any given episode, so you kinda gotta be on board with whatever sociopathic shit Nicole is getting up to. There are entire endings whose comedic premise just did not work, leaving us grimacing for 15-30 minutes straight as Nicole accidentally gets roped into an actual hate crime. It's got some clever jokes but you're just as likely to run into a 5-minute bit where the entire joke is "this person is being horrendously mean for literally no reason". (Note: I haven't played the first game, so I've almost certainly got some misplaced sympathy)

I gotta admit, though, it was a blast to stream this thing in a Discord call. It's got some really solid voice acting and the auto-text does a lot for comedic timing that could've easily been ruined if you let players click through this at their own pace. The game loves presenting you with some wild-ass choices too, so a lot of the fun is clicking shit like "commit charity fraud" or "skip school with the violent alt girl" and watching things immediately spiral out of control into "multiple felonies" territory. Emily is the greatest character of all time.

(this whole thing has me wondering what we're in for when that 20-year nostalgia cycle really hits)

a buffet of gorgeous animations and sound effects, just a feast for the eyes and ears. whoever is doing the marketing for this game needs to stop drowning everything in music because the one video the game has on its YouTube channel that showcases the sounds is the best sales pitch they've got. listen to how chunky those energy weapons are!

it's been fine-tuned mechanically, too - the key to avoiding damage is rapidly and constantly repositioning around your enemies' predictable attacks. they're varied in a way that continually adds to the challenge without ever making you feel like you died to bullshit: lots of attacks that limit the playable space in different ways keep you dancing around while you dodge more direct, heavy-hitting attacks, so if you're surprised that you died then you probably missed the tell. healing is doled out frequently but in small amounts that expire quickly, so you can only benefit from it if you're willing to risk your skin to grab it. a more skilled player than i might turn this into a really impressive montage seamlessly blending jumping, strafing, goomba stomping some guys, and using the rails to skate out of there, but that ain't me. in fact, the rails are a cool idea that i find mostly useless, since they're finicky enough and enemies are straightforward enough for most of a run that the rails are more trouble than they're worth. in any case, if you feel like getting creative with your movement then you'll likely be rewarded for doing so, since the game challenges you very early to start thinking about each combat arena as a 3d space.

i don't think the game strikes out on any particular element, either - even my harshest criticisms boil down to "this works, but I want something more interesting from you guys". the classes are your action roguelite staples: a pet class, a stealth/assassin class, the works. there are a variety of good builds, but they tend to fall into a few categories (auto-crit, elemental application, marking enemies, a few gimmicks based around your class abilities) and once you settle into one comfortable build, the game will do very little to make you change it. the quest items push you to revisit old areas but i just do not like receiving an item deep into a run that does nothing until i die and reach chapter 3 again. i wish these things gave some kind of buff for the run in which you pick them up, even if its a trivial one.

it's good though, it's a well-crafted game and i'm finishing this review now because i started writing last night and stayed up way too late actually playing the thing instead. starts out pathetic baby easy mode and ramps up pretty significantly until you're convinced that you could have a pro Overwatch career, playing first-person ikaruga as you melt your screen with ricocheting crits and a grenade launcher that carpet bombs them with ever-changing elemental damage. i can't really give a stronger endorsement than that. you get to feel like the best soldier 76 player in the world and you don't even have to play overwatch. that's a pretty good deal if you ask me

close enough to being "single player Hunt: Showdown" that i'm eating it right up.

you can't even call this a roguelite anymore. so little is randomized here! even when you're researching things, you still get the weapons in a fixed order. this is just a single-player extraction shooter with meta-progression and souls-style levelling (where your XP is a tangible currency that you drop on death).

anyway, these devs generally have a very good sense for what makes something feel good - the animations and effects are obvious examples of this, the guns all feel great - but they do miss in a couple places, especially notable where they seem to have deliberately prioritized difficulty over QOL. unfortunately for them i am also the person who complains about tutorialization and information availability in every game, and this game's issues did not escape my gaze. it's entirely possible that you'll learn about core game mechanics from a loading screen tip instead of the tutorial, and the description for every single weapon lies to you by describing what the weapon does when fully upgraded even if you've just picked it up for the first time.

those upgrades for each weapon are unlocked by completing challenges (getting kills & using its special perks) and i really love their execution of this idea. they've broken the upgrades up so each stage is a satisfying increase in a weapon's power, with each tier building on previous upgrades until your plain-jane bolt-action rifle becomes an AOE machine, clearing an entire village in a couple shots. when combined with the research system - unlocks that take a fixed amount of playtime(?) - i think they've struck a nice balance in allowing the player to make forward progress from failed runs without incentivizing them to grind out garbage runs for the sake of meta-progression.

on a different note, it's a breath of fresh air to have a game where gear feels so meaningful. each piece of equipment feels like adding a new legendary to your build in diablo. they've all got exactly one effect and it'll always be meaningful enough to change how you play. this is not a game about gear and you're not gonna be staring at menus optimizing your loadout for an 8% buff to reload speed. all gear comes directly from the research system and all of it is unlocked in a fixed order, so you won't be grinding out runs trying to get the right "drop" either.

if there's one thing that i think seriously holds this game back at the moment it's that the level-ups are pathetic. the cost increases so rapidly and your returns diminish even more rapidly. i know the game is supposed to be hard as nails but spending 1000% more souls witchfire for a level and getting +2 max health in exchange feels like a slap in the face when you've only been playing for a couple hours. as it stands i barely see the point in engaging with this system, since it adds new enemies to the game at a rate that outpaces any gains you're making. this is the kind of thing that seems like it should be pretty important but it's by far the least consequential set of upgrades in the game while also being the hardest to obtain. this is actually pretty similar to the kind of rewards a dark souls game offers for levelling up but the pacing and structure of the two games is so different that it ends up being frustrating, especially in an extraction shooter where making it back in one piece is part of the challenge. you could probably solve this by making each level-up a little chunkier while reducing the payout for killing easy enemies.




last second edit: i totally forgot to mention this because i was only really thinking in terms of broader systems here but man the way that the witch punishes mistakes is fantastic. it creates this tension where your game of cat and mouse feels like it's constantly flipping on its head as you clear a camp with ease, only to reach for a health potion that isn't there and have the air become sour around you as the witch learns about your new vulnerability. i'm really eager to see what they do with this in future updates. it's rare to see games that have that demon's souls mentality of punishing a player that is already struggling and this one does it in ways that are really immediate and memorable, making you better at the game in the process. reach for that non-existent health potion once and you probably won't make that mistake again, but the witch has other ways of learning about you...

Short version: If you adopt a stray cat it'll come and sit on the headmaster's desk.

Long version:

This game is not unique in having the player create a character, it is not unique in letting them click on students and read their thoughts, it is not unique in asking you to balance said students' happiness and their grades and the school's budget.

What makes Let's School unique is that its elements come together to create a traditional management sim that frequently has the texture of a life sim, working off its systems in place of a script - a game in which you'll hand-craft a curriculum for each class, period by period, and then sit back and watch as your students go cloudgazing at recess, develop crushes and try to sneak video games into the classroom - apologies to Janet Lewis, who has had her GBA personally confiscated by me on four separate occasions. I am simply too powerful, and you are not.

In playing the game it's easy to see that its developers have genuine admiration for a child's earnestness and enthusiasm, as the game is chock-full of little things for the kids and faculty to do that make your school feel lived-in. These are undoubtedly nice features that add flavor to the game, but more importantly they turn the consequences of any managerial decisions into something more real than just lines on a spreadsheet and a stick figure with a frowny face above their head. In theory, this shouldn't be too uncommon for the genre. In practice, though, Let's School ends up way at the top of the pack by leaning wholeheartedly into its theme. It is unmistakably a game about being the headmaster of a school, about crafting organizational charts, arranging field trips, training staff, balancing budgets, and building a facility that (hopefully) ensures your students are cared-for and comfortable enough to be kids instead of little machines that pay tuition and fill out Scantrons. Perhaps talking about things this way makes me sound like a blowhard, but I emphasize the illusion of NPC interiority because this is the game, this is why you buy Let's School over something like Two Point Campus. Its specialty lies in building your attachment to those kids to the point where - when it comes time to start spending that tuition money - you stop thinking about that "Satisfaction" value like a min-maxer and start thinking like a teacher.

----

Please stop bringing frogs into the classroom.

Walked right up to my favorite city builders and claimed a spot among them like it was nothing.

This game (the real "TF2") pulls off several impressive tricks, but the most striking is the scale. I hate to be the guy who talks about The Graphics right off the bat but I am perpetually in awe that this game will let me zoom out to a level that could believably be an entire province/country(/etc) before zooming all the way down to individual lots that look far less sterile than any prefab from Cities Skylines, all without any visible changes in LOD or any hitches due to loading. Especially impressive is the countryside between the cities, which feels sufficiently vast from a birds-eye view without making your first-person train ride feel like a trip through a diorama. It's an imperfect illusion, but it works from so many different angles that I have to assume any critiques levelled at this particular element of the game are coming from the most steadfast of sticklers.

Being a transport management game, though, you don't actually need any of that to enjoy yourself. The game allows the rail freaks out there to work their magic, of course, but the gameplay is only ever as complex as you want it to be, and there's a lot of quick 'n' easy satisfaction to be found in a city builder where you're not doing the "heavy lifting" of zoning, determining the fire department budget, providing wastewater service, etc. If you don't feel like futzing around with train signals, you can usually keep your company in the black by cleverly placing some very simple routes: place two truck stops, buy some trucks, click both destinations and - as long as you're linking supply and demand - the vehicles will handle the rest. The half-star missing from my current rating is largely due to small quirks like the way the game displays profitability, which can occasionally be misleading if you're not paying close attention. Specifically, it seems to list the total balance for each vehicle/route over a relatively short amount of time, leading to situations in which an especially lengthy train route seems to be losing two million dollars only to complete its route, correctly display that it's actually making five times that amount in profit, and then go back to displaying a negative total moments later. The game gives you everything you need to figure out the real balance of the line, but 1. I'm not always trying to do those calculations myself, and 2. there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the intervals it's using to calculate this - you just gotta deal with it.

I could speak more about its allure (e.g. I'm a mark for the way the cities slowly evolve as the eras march on) but I think that realistically, your gut reaction to "city builder where you build the infrastructure, not the buildings" will be accurate enough to decide whether you should play this. You don't have to be passionate about vehicles, you don't have to worry about configuring the logic each vehicle runs on, you uh... I just gotta find someone else to play this game so my coworkers won't think I'm strange for spending all my vacation days creating horsie traffic jams.

an extremely good attempt - much better than you'd expect at a glance - at recreating the mind games of fighting games without requiring that you grind your bones into dust against the controller to practice combos. it's a little opaque (would be nice if the game told me how to identify when the next turn happens instead of a steam guide) but is extremely rewarding nonetheless.

i understand why people keep throwing around the word "chess" when discussing this but i think for non-players this makes it sound like a game that lacks immediacy. you might spend a full 30 seconds planning for a "turn" that lasts 4 frames but those 4 frames can still be more rewarding than any single turn in normal chess would ever be, thanks to some chunky, bitcrushed sound effects. this kinda arrangement extends the satisfaction of a well-executed combo as long as possible and it rocks. game's funny too. nothing better than ending a turn, watching some completely innocuous shit happen for a whopping 6 frames, and then getting a message that just says "shit".

uh, play it with friends though, the playerbase is small enough that people don't always respect the "beginners only" lobby

An improvement over previous Payday games in most aspects, but it wouldn't be an Overkill game without some baffling missteps. That the game exists in a "real engine" should presumably receive partial credit for obvious improvements to moving and shooting, but the developers themselves deserve the rest (obviously): They have clearly been paying attention to how missions are played and received during Payday 2's ten-year lifespan and used that knowledge to craft 8 heists that are - any way you slice them - more interesting than Payday 2's base game offerings. They're further enhanced by changes to stealth that make it feel like a worthwhile approach in its own right instead of a shortcut you take to level up without playing the game. All of this forms a solid base for future growth, and it does need some future growth: Overkill have been a bit too aggressive when it comes to trimming features from their last game and seem to have thrown some important QOL features out with the bathwater.

Pre-game lobby chat is non-existent, which can be pretty important for coordinating strategies and loadouts. Similarly important for team play are ammo indicators for your teammates - I don't even need exact numbers (Deep Rock has it figured out), but I'd like to drop an ammo bag at the right time without relying on my teammates to ask. These are the most obvious ones, but problems like this start to pop up everywhere as you start looking for information you would have if you fired up Payday 2 right now. I say "right now" because they've made these mistakes before: Payday 2 had serious information issues at launch, especially when it came to knowing how much a skill increases a value and for what duration. Making these numbers visible in Payday 3 is a complete layup when it comes to balancing development effort with player appreciation, given that any long-time PD2 player can probably name 2 or 3 major HUD mods (even if they didn't use them!) dedicated to slathering the screen in even more hideous timers.

It needs work, but it's a decent game. I'll admit that I came into this one fully expecting to love it so it should be little surprise that I do, but I think that the most dated parts of Payday 2 (wonky gameplay systems and some uninspired mission design) have seen the greatest glow-up and I think the differences will be obvious and greatly appreciated by the vast majority of people who are coming from the old games.

genuinely delightful. i think it's possible to compare this unfavorably to JSRF but realistically i think it trims a lot of what doesn't work about that game (too many weak, mostly linear levels; finicky platforming) and keeps most of what does, with large-ish zones (expanding outward with completion) and a compelling sense of style even if your favorite bit of stylistic flair from JSRF isn't represented here. i do think it could benefit from a slight increase to speed, especially on the ground where even boosting feels somewhat limp, but otherwise? i think this rocks. probably could use some tutorialization too. nobody seems to know how to get that one graffiti spot in mataan without googling

Almost certainly the best these Survivors-style games have to offer right now. It's too familiar to produce any converts from the genre's most ardent haters, but if you're convinced that this genre is so close to producing something really, truly good then this entry might give you some additional hope.

Despite its awful title and repulsive soundfont, it manages to dodge all the big pitfalls that every game in its genre seems to fall victim to, with an art style that preserves readability in its most chaotic moments and a slew of gameplay changes that prevent dominant strategies from emerging. Its huge cast of playable characters is justified in how wildly they differ from one another, and a large pool of available stats means that you can get creative with how you build around characters who can't equip weapons, or who deal damage to enemies when they heal. It's a more creative endeavor than most of its cousins, showing a greater willingness to break with genre convention. Round-based gameplay doesn't feel that different from the 20-30 minute marathon most of these games work with, but it means that the game's pacifist characters aren't sacrificing the ability to grab upgrades mid-run. Its weapon system seems to take inspiration from Teamfight Tactics and other auto-battlers: players receive a small bonus for using weapons from the same category, and multiple copies of the same weapon can be combined into a more powerful version with better stats - meaning that you'll still be evaluating your build after filling that last weapon slot, instead of twiddling your thumbs as you wait for the game to play itself.

If this genre's got anything better at the moment I'd love to hear about it - really - but this is the only game I've found that understands and recreates the core gameplay fantasy of the "original" Vampire Survivors without tripping over its own feet due to overwhelming visuals, meta-progression issues, or strategic stagnation.

Not particularly enamored with this one although I can certainly understand why many are, since it allows for those kinds of conversations that frequently feel impossible in 2023, the kind where you and your friends or coworkers come together to talk for hours about the choices you made at a particular juncture and what happens if you pick option C instead of option B, you know what I mean - conversations that are much rarer when a modern game's sense of mystery can be completely dispelled within 10 hours by front page reddit posts and scores of "articles" reducing each dialogue prompt to Baldur's Gate 3: How To Get THE BEST Companion Cutscenes. The #general chat in my Discord server has people I haven't spoken to in years coming out of the woodwork to talk about the results of character creation, about the companions they've romanced and killed, about all the ways their characters lost an eye, and they all seem pretty content with the breadth of discoveries that this game enables.

For my first 20 hours, I was basically the same - there's a lot of fun to be had in poking around these early areas with the horniest party of all time (despite that fact) and chatting with rats, cats, and dead guys. In these early chapters the game best supports my preferred playstyle: a big circuitous route around the map, looking at everything as I drive past but only stopping to drink deeply from a select few side stories. Push further into the main story, though, and find yourself woefully underleveled because you grew tired of these fights 10 hours ago. It's never so difficult as to completely block you from progressing, but it's easy to feel that your punishment for not seeking out each and every side quest is being forced to initiate every fight from the (admittedly cumbersome) stealth or spend the whole fight herding enemies into a big circle so you can use your Level 3 AOE Spell of choice to meme the encounters until they're finished. I have no experience with D&D or this particular ruleset aside from other video games, but the adherence to such a system and its limits are obvious when you spend forty hours playing this game just to unlock a single cast of a spell that these developers would've given you immediately in their last game. It's a pace that works pretty well for weekly tabletop adventures with a group of IRL friends, but feels a bit too slow and unrewarding when I'm sitting alone, staring at a menu of unappetizing "roll advantage"/"create difficult terrain" spells as a reward for my once-nightly level-up.

What's kept me playing are the settings and companions - the mind flayers are arguably the least interesting part of this whole deal, so while it sucks that the main plot so prominently revolves around them, the side quests are generally well-crafted enough that one or two of them would be a satisfying enough adventure to fill the entire night on their own. I do wish that the companions would Talk Normally for five minutes but they've done well enough in telling some of the companion stories (Gale is a particular standout) that they can create genuinely affecting moments if you look in the right places. Not all of them are told so well, and some of the companions feel deeply artificial as a result, but generally speaking I can understand why a player might recruit any given companion not named Lae'zel to their party. For the most part, I'm also fond of the party chatter - every once in a while you'll get a nice bit of banter that feels like the result of actual role-playing with friends, whether it's a joke or a short flavorful exchange revealing how two companions interact or a story that fleshes out someone's background. It's not as personal as it could be if it were your real friends bantering with you, but it's a fun approximation and it's deployed tastefully.

Ultimately my grade for the experience is a big ol' shrug and the word "Sure?" written exactly like so. I think the lipstick looks fantastic even if it fails to produce miracles for the pig that is 5th edition rules, with its awkward magic system and glacial level progression and a litany of boring buffs. Compared to the average person I'd be considered a "hater" of Divinity Original Sin 2 but it felt so colorful compared to this! I love killing bosses by shoving them into a pit as much as the next guy, but much of this experience feels like the developers are skillfully wringing every drop of charisma that they can from the source material and hoping that the player doesn't notice that "the chill druid left and now the mean druid is being mean, go fetch the chill druid" feels a little trite. I'll be doing my best to hit the end credits, but if I don't make it, know that I'm probably out there starting a new save on Tyranny instead.