Recent reviews by Existellar

Circadian Dice is a fun and innovative dicebuiler roguelike. The gameplay loop is compact and great for coffee break gaming, with an average level taking 5 - 10 minutes to play. Each level will take you through several waves of mobs. You roll dice, get the resources on their faces, and fight the mobs. As you level up, you gain health, dice, and special abilities. Don't let looks deceive you, this one is fresh and fun. Many of the mechanics feel genuinely new, and your choices feel meaningful and rewarding. Recommended strongly for those who enjoy roguelikes, and for those who look for a game to fill short gaps in their day.

For a game still in early access, this is a game in fantastic shape. Playing it feels like recapturing the days of early Minecraft. To me, it feels like a bit of mix between Minecraft, Skyrim, and Zelda BotW. I highly recommend trying it, and I'm excited to watch it grow and develop from here.

Based on current version (0.153.2), and on not having progressed past boss 2 but having been in most of the biomes, here are my pros and cons:

PROS
- Combat feels great and is satisfying
- Skill leveling system works well
- Graphics look really great given their limitations, makes for a really nice atmosphere and style
- Finding abandoned structures in the game is really fun
- Fast travel is unlocked quite early on and feels fair / good
- I personally like making your own map and map markers
- Small size requirements and system requirements

CONS
- Inventory system doesn't feel quite right yet
- No way to destroy items you don't need or want
- Manual fishing is super buggy
- Not quite enough variety in enemies or in biomes
- Not quite enough reason to explore
- Dungeons are a bit samey and could use a way to help you map them inside
- Absolutely hate the music

What I hope to see in the future:
- More enemy types and variants
- More things to forage or ways to farm foraged items
- More things to do with tamed animals
- More things to do with treasures
- More possibilities with building and crafting
- Ways to share the map and map markers in-game
- Ways to reveal sections of map in-game, for example, interacting with weird statues could reveal the map for a biome?
- Ways to visually customise armor, gear, furniture etc
- More structures to find / things to explore
- Optional quests or NPCs?

In short

Pros:

• Funny tank puns

Cons:

• Terrible UI
  
• Complete lack of character writing
  
• No depth of gameplay
  
• No replay value

In detail

Panzermadels is a 'game' in the style of a dating sim, where you seduce a friendly WW2 tank. Think Hatoful Boyfriend, but with tanks. Though, as I'll explain, the comparison to Hatoful Boyfriend is completely unearned.

The game has some very good tank puns and some good humour. I really enjoyed the first play through I did for that reason. Things really don't hold up for a second play through, and here's why…

1. The scene-skipping mechanic is awful. In most VNs or dating sims you'll have some equivalent play/pause button in the screen borders. In this game you just have a menu button. If you want to start scene skipping, you have to go in through the menu both to activate and to deactivate skipping. However, this is very unresponsive, if you spot a scene you haven't already seen you generally can't slow the dialogue back down in time to read it.
   
2. For a large number of scenes, the tank girls are completely interchangeable. In total, there are maybe only three places where you'll get a choice of scene, plus an extra place if you make some of the right dialogue options. It's disappointing. Certain tank girls also have much better and funnier unique scenes than others. Combined with the poor UI for scene skipping I find this frustrating.
   
3. Most half decent dating sims / VNs will generally have hidden stats or consequences for certain options. I'm at my third play through, I've not noticed that any of the choices I've made differently have affected my ability to choose particular tanks at the end. So long as you interact with someone enough that makes them an option.
   
4. There are also plenty of 'choices' that do precisely nothing to the outcome. There are also places that jarred for me with the storytelling - one tank girl had complete amnesia about a conversation we'd had only days ago.
   
5. Because of the above combined, there's really not any replay value. Unless you're stubborn, like I am. I'm now mostly playing it on skip in the background while I do other things so that I can collect the endings. A play through in skip mode probably takes 20 minutes, a full play through is probably 40 minutes.

Would I recommend this game? Not really.
If you want cute schoolgirls combined exquisitely with tank jokes and other tank stuff, I heartily recommend you go and watch Girls Und Panzer. It's an amazing show.
If you want a funny or surreal VN/dating sim, I heartily recommend you give Hatoful Boyfriend a try. It's got a good range of characters, choices that matter, and an interesting story line that takes place over a full year (rather than the best part of a week).
If you're after smut, well… there are probably better things, to be honest.

SteamWorld Dig is an interesting game, but with a number of missed opportunities.

The look and feel of the game is really great, especially the artwork. Gameplay consists of (1) digging (2) acquiring ore (3) selling ore (4) beating set levels. The main maps are randomly generated, but the set levels are fixed. I really enjoyed the set levels, and appreciated the care put into the puzzles. Though not particularly difficult, they were interesting. The randomly generated maps are frustrating after a time. The biggest missed opportunity in this game is to do more with the very brief set levels. The other missed opportunity is that it doesn't make much difference which ores you are digging, the only distinguishing feature is how high a price they fetch from the vendor. When you're mining, there's no obvious way of telling which ore you're digging up, which does matter for bagspace, especially if you find a valuable gem. It also feels like there might have been more benefit from being able to craft some items from certain ores.

The end of the game was surprisingly frustrating, and I felt a bit annoyed at being forced to backtrack through the levels.

In all, it was fun, and worth it for the sale price. I hope that there will be a sequel with some added improvements.