Recent reviews by Red Bat

A game so obscure it doesn't even have a TV tropes page.

It runs poorly on modern hardware and requires a fix that you'll have to find in the forums. Otherwise it'll lag so much as to be unplayable. You need to know this before you consider buying it.

That said, if you can get this thing to run properly, it's kind of a hidden gem. It's an RTS game that focuses on squad based combat in order to cut down on micromanagement. The economy is also fairly simple. In addition to gold, you have a number of resources that represent different types of unit upkeep. If you go negative in those resources, then it cuts into your gold income, which can sometimes be worth the price. Overall very simple compared to a lot of other RTS games.

It's hard to explain what this game does do right because much of the game is simplified compared to other RTS games. There's heroes, various special units you can add to your squads, unlockable technology you can find in ruins, several marching stances that have different speeds and varying degrees of being ready for combat. Overall the game is very simple but it comes together pretty nicely.

The story is nothing to write home about. There's a lot of characters, but to be honest I can only remember a few. The campaign itself is fine, with notable fights. Overall it's a fine game for only 10 dollars.

One problem I have with it is 3 of the 4 factions are functionally almost identical, only differing in slight ways. The other faction is the Ceyah, who are the bad guys and thus have zombies and skeletons. Ahriman's Gift fixes this slightly, but it's still kind of a problem. There's also only one campaign, while Ahriman's gift has 3.

For 25 dollars... I can't recommend this. The Gravship feature gets old after like 2 playthroughs with it. It's neat, but kind of a mess. The rest of the game isn't built around gravships, so you can land and then immediately trigger a raid based on the wealth of your gravship and before you had time to setup defenses. Obviously you can deal with this by putting turrets or something on your gravship, but it still feels a little like you've just added a very detailed mod to the game rather than a DLC the game was built around handling.

The other additions are neat, but not worth the price. Odyssey adds more animals and unique animal abilities alongside the sentience catalyst which boosts them and reduces their wildnesss. This is sorely needed to make the animals skill not feel useless, but it's also a minor addition.

The new unique weapon system is... a feature I guess. Sometimes you'll get a very interesting weapon that you'll actually use. Other times you might just get a modified revolver that you'll sell. Going to be honest I rarely encounter these weapons and rarely make them a big part of my strategy when I do.

The new biomes are amazing, alongside the new landmark system which adds interesting variations on biomes. Probably the best part of the DLC. I particularly like the glowforest where it's always dark. The lava fields are also interesting as lava flow can sometimes cause chaos if you don't build barricades to stop the lava flow.

Anyway, the problem is a lot of what this DLC adds is very ignorable. If you don't build a gravship, then it feels like very little was actually added other than the biomes. For 25 dollars, it's very little. I'd grab one of the other DLCs like Biotech or Royalty first.

Wow... OK this game is up there with Ratopia as being one of those games that seemed like a joke and ended up being a surprisingly engaging time sink.

The gameplay loop is actually pretty similar to games like Cult Of The Lamb and Moonlighter in that you have a simulation aspect which directly feeds into a more combat focused aspect of the game. In this case you play as a crazy cat lady and the simulation is basically breeding cats, spreading mutations among generations. You can send unwanted cats to other people as for some reason cats are basically a second type of currency in this game which can be used to unlock metagame rewards such as expanding your house.

However the real meat of the game is when you take your bred cats, assign them fantasy classes, and send them on turn based tactical adventures. This part of the game plays a little like Slay The Spire. As you get further along you randomly unlock abilities, passives, and items. You can even split off into a harder path if you want to take risks to get better rewards. It's hard to explain why this works. But you can discover weird synergies between the different classes and items which allow for some strong tactical combat. For example I was able to beat a boss that dodges direct damage attacks, by trapping him between 2 cats that each knockbacked an enemy on contact, making it so he bounced back and forth between each cat taking 1 damage at a time until he died. Another game I had a Necromancer get the passive that spawns a leech every time he heals, and another passive that gives him better leeches, since leeches heal the Necromancer each time he is attacked, this led to a hilarious spam of weak summons.

One gripe I have about the game is it's a bit brutally hard and it takes a very long time to play. For example there's quests where you have to take an item to the end of a run, but if you lose the cat with the item, you have to do it all again. Almost all the quests are like that, except often with other qualifiers on top of it such as preventing a cat from leveling up or forcing every battle to be a hard mode battle. As of now I've got 28 hours in the game and I'm still finishing up stuff in Act 1 of 3. This is not a game you are going to beat quickly.

This one is a tough one to recommend, so I'm leaning on not recommending it. I know, on paper it adds more than the other DLCs, but it also costs more and the content it adds is mostly stuff I rarely do much with until pretty late in a playthrough.

The big thing it adds is the southern desert area with southern city states that have a lot of unique stuff. This can be pretty neat if you decide to hang around the south a lot. They tend to have worse armor and shields, but good weapons including some exotic ones like guns. They sell other unique stuff and have arenas you can participate in. Very neat, but due to the way map's tend to generate it's rarely worth it to head south. It only spawns 3 settlements for the southern factions and they tend to be very spread out and aren't even guaranteed to have a harbor. Until fairly later on when you have a lot of money it also tends to not be worth heading down there, unless you luck out and one of the city states spawns a short distance from one of the kingdom's settlements. They do have different trade goods so you can make some side money buying and selling on your ways to and from the south. Just for me I find it very much depends on map generation whether I go south, and even in ideal circumstances very little of my gameplay is spent in the desert.

Also the music for the fights vs southern enemies is pretty good. Nearly as good as the music for when you fight barbarians. Unforunately southern enemies tend to be more threatening and less rewarding in most cases than northern ones, but at least you won't typically see anything like Unholds in the south and some of the other beasts only appeal in the south in arena fights. The nomads also have a unique ability to throw sand in your brother's eyes, which is neat but it also tends to make them average at being a bit harder to fight than northern bandits.

The new Retinue system might be worth picking up the DLC for even if you don't plan on heading to the south much. However the Retinue system is a bit of a money sink and it'll be a while before you get far enough in the game for them to make a major gameplay impact. Still it gives you another goal to shoot for to improve your company later on.

This is also the only DLC to add another late game crisis to the game. The southern city states and the northern kingdoms will go to war, giving you an opportunity to earn some money fighting against either side. Much like the nobles at war crisis, it's also kind of a "safe" crisis in that cities won't be destroyed and you'll be able to recover relations once it ends.

Overall though it's 15 bucks. Yeah it's a lot of content, but it's content I personally don't interact with much compared to the other DLCs. I'm not recommending it, but keep in mind I'm pretty much at the threshold of whether or not to recommend it.

This is the DLC at adds a bunch of origins, which are basically sets of advantages, disadvantages and occasionally other mechanics to play with. It also adds Barbarian opponents, who are tough, usually carry worse gear than other enemies, break formation a lot, have captured unholds later on, and often have the Adrenaline skill. They also have probably the best music tracks for their fights.

I personally like the Northern Raider's origin as it starts me with bad relations with 2 kingdoms, leading to an early game of mostly raiding caravans. They also have a chance of getting extra loot that would have otherwise been lost.

The champions are also interesting. They drop unique gear.

This IS a recommend, but it's a soft recommend. It's only 10 dollars but there really isn't much I can say about it's content. Most of it's value is in the alternative origins.

Probably the funniest of the downloadable heroes. Like all the downloadable heroes the Doomweaver has a lot of build flexibility, however he's mostly themed around purposefully suffering Tzeentch's Curse's in order to stun everyone around him. This can be useful and unreliable, but is funny as hell. The strategy to do this is usually to just repeatedly cast the otherwise not particularly useful Warp Accretion spell over and over until the curse strikes.

He's otherwise kind of a weird unit. He can wear heavy armor despite being a spellcaster, meaning Skaven can have an armor tank hero that mostly ignores his spellcasting. He can place down some idols giving some weird conditional buffs and debuffs. He can also be a damage focused spellcaster, but he'll be super unreliable as one.

He fits in a weird way for each faction that can hire him. For Skaven he's got some interesting buffs and usually more useful damage spells than Skaven's own Warp Lightning, in addition to being the only hero they have access to that can wear heavy armor. For Cult of the Possessed he's the only caster they can get other than their leader unit, giving him a neat niche even if his buffs are probably worse than Weapons of Destruction. The Undead already have a good buffing and damage dealing spellcaster, but he can still run around and get Tzeentch to basically nuke him near enemies.

Not to say the game itself is bad, but the soundtrack is arguably better than the game itself. For a game with a weirdly simplistic art style, it does absolutely nail the audio aspect of overall presentation. Particularly the tracks associated with the barbarians and southern city states are arguably much more badass than the actual fights vs those groups.

I've played a few other games where I turned the music off and just had this soundtrack playing in the background. I'd certainly recommend forking over a few more bucks to add a solid soundtrack to your steam library.

While this game is very buggy and in many ways feels less polished than some EA titles, it's still one of the better open world survival craft games out there. In fact while I consider the sequel a slightly better game, I still feel like this one did a few things better than the sequel.

In one of the more realistic depictions of a survival crafting game, you actually play as a survivalist. Most of the building and crafting at least attempts some degree of realism. If you want to build a wall, you need to get a separate log for every single log seen in the structure's blueprint. Most crafting recipes also consist of ingredients you'd logically think could actually be used to craft the object in question. Compared to the sequel, the building is a little bit worse but the crafting is a bit better. There's plenty of stuff you can craft out of stuff you find in the forest, including various pouches and containers made of animal skins. Not to say realism is necessarily better, but I appreciate it compared to a bunch of other games with crafting mechanics that oftentimes go well into sci-fi or fantasy.

Enemies are also somewhat smart in this game. They might not necessarily always attack you if they see you. They can run away, lead you into ambushes or even become enraged if you kill their buddies. The mutants are also some of the creepiest enemies I've seen in a video game. Even when you can get the hang of fighting them and take them on with little trouble, they still manage to inspire some degree of dread in facing them. They are creepy, strong, and horrifying. Doesn't help that a lot of the cave environments in this game are also outright terrifying to explore. Even the surface can be horrifying as you'll wander around and stumble upon dead bodies or corpse effigy's, and the surface gets more dangerous as the game goes on.

All that being said. I don't like the story, or rather the almost complete lack of it. You occasionally find objects of supposed story significance but for the most part you don't actually get any real answers. You'll just pick up something, look at it, and you know it's supposed to be a significant story item, but at best it'll be something you have to draw your own conclusions about. If you can get to the endgame you do get some actual answers on some stuff, but it's very unsatisfying. This is a game where you have to enjoy exploring for the sake of exploring, because actually finding things tends to be unsatisfying. I also don't like just how much of the game takes place within the caves. I don't hate the caves, but there's some point where you've spent so much time in them that you kind of would prefer it if the game didn't constantly want you exploring caves to progress. What happens on the surface doesn't really matter. The entire progression through the game is done in caves. At least the sequel mixed things up a little bit by having you switch between exploring caves and exploring bunkers.

Anyway I think this game deserves to be considered among other games in the genre such as Subnautica and Grounded. It's rougher around the edges than those games, but it's otherwise a pretty good entry into the bloated open world survival crafting genre.

The closest thing to Megaman Battle Network out there. Mixed with, whatever subgenre of roguelite people want to argue Slay The Spire is.

The mix of genres actually works pretty well. You build a deck of spellcards over time as you fight battles, visit the shopkeeper literally named Shopkeeper, and fight the other playable characters as bosses. Ideally by the end of the game you should have a fairly optimized deck of cards, otherwise your run is likely going to end in failure. There's almost no story whatsoever, it's just raw gameplay. Same general grid based gameplay as Megaman Battle Network, but your deck is fed to you randomly only to reshuffle once you play every card. Each playable character also has their own unique basic attack and mechanics. My favorite being Terra, who is themed around breaking squares on the opposing side.

There's some interesting stuff going on with the deck building aspect. You can delete useless cards, upgrade cards, try to build around some synergy between cards, etc. For example Hazel tends to function well by placing turrets and other objects down and potentially moving them around with cards themed around displacing things.

The game is pretty hard. It requires good reflexes and being able dodge while simultaneously trying to setup attacks. The deck building requires planning otherwise you'll have to go through a bunch of bad cards before you can get to the ones your strategy is based around.

Good game all around if you want to scratch the itch left by Megaman Battle Network. Although it now has to compete with Megaman Battle Network literally being on Steam which wasn't the case when this game first launched. Still recommend it as it's gameplay isn't a 1 to 1 recreation of Battle Network, but its a harder recommendation given nostalgia fueled gamers can now just buy a collection of the games that probably led them to looking into this.

This game is so bad it made me hate the series until I went back and replayed the first game, which also hasn't aged well.

Almost every aspect of this game is bad. I have no idea why it was praised so much even all the way back when it was first released. The story is terrible. The dialog is terrible. The morality system is a joke where your choices are to act like a normal person or a complete and utter psychopath, with little incentive to pick the bad choices other than just being evil for the sake of being evil. For example you can blow up a town... For no real gain. The combat isn't terrible... But it isn't great either. Everything this game has that isn't bad isn't great either.

If you want a better open world RPG experience, stick to Skyrim or one of the dozens of other games that do it better than this.