Recent reviews by SusanBrindle

Wow! It's like if the team that made the award-winning Battle Brothers had already made Battle Brothers and had ideas on how to innovate on that design.

hell yeah!! it's Super Smash MOBA

Man I'm going back and forth so much on this review. There are a lot of really infuriating design choices here, the biggest one of which is the decision to combine incredibly fragile situations with real-time mechanics and limited saving. It reminds me a lot of They Are Billions (derogatory.).

It's very easy to start a mission, order one guy to defend the window and one guy to unlock the door and one guy to loot, and then see that there's a maggot monster of some kind by the window, and order window guy to move back a little so he doesn't instantly die, and then get an alert that door opening guy has opened the door and died to the 3 zombies behind it.

So you reload (and once again tell your guys to eat breakfast, take the left path, loot the ambulance, and board the windows) and this time you watch the door timer with an eagle eye so that, when the maggots come, you are not watching and window guy dies instantly.

So you reload (and once again tell your guys to eat breakfast, take the left path, loot the ambulance, and board the windows) and this time remember to micromanage window guy AND door guy AND loot guy and you open all the doors and loot the stuff and then suddenly one of your guys dies. Then another. Then another. APPARENTLY there are invisible zombies sometimes.

45 minutes later you have finished the 10 minute mission.

When I first launched Deadzone Rogue, I thought "This is exactly the same game as Gunfire Reborn, but the aesthetics of Dead Space."

After 40 hours, I know understand that my first thought was largely correct, but with a "hell yeah" in front, because making a good game is hard even when the foundations have been laid, and it's different enough from those that came before that I was able to enjoy it anew.

Game is extremely cute and fun, "cozy" vibes, mechanics straightforward but not braindead, and I'm a slut for knapsack problems and light algebra, apparently.

The whole thing feels simultaneously like a labor of love and oddly heartless. There's a ploddingness to the whole game, from the wooden dialogue to the filler tasks to the kill sequences themselves.

The minigames are universally unfun and the villain not especially compelling. Sorry. :-(.

Game exists in a weird space where it's not quite bad, but it isn't quite good, and ultimately if you make a game that's almost identical but slightly worse than existing entries in the genre, I gotta downvote even if, in a vacuum, the game is respectable. Just play Hades or Gunfire Reborn or Deadzone Rogue. The only really interesting and new idea in this game is the way that upgrades get tied to your weapon (So you commit to having a Fire Grenade and then every Fire upgrade is applied to your grenade) but I don't actually think that idea works well in practice.

Very cute! Fast paced and fun card combos; each King feels pretty different. Reminds me of Ratropolis but a little less stressful.

Already well worth my nine dollars!

EDIT: It's gotten even better!

EDIT EDIT: I have now gotten every achivement and beaten every level. Took 120 hours. Pretty good value even for the twenty bucks they're charging now!!

It's modestly better than FTL. FTL was pretty good.

Starcom isn't great, but it also isn't bad, and there aren't so many good games in this genre that I'm just gonna skip a relatively cheap one that's still pretty good. It's like how hotdogs aren't as good as bratwurst. I'm hungry and it's here. Star Control 2 and Starsector are both probably better but I've got like a thousand hours in them so I need new game, and this is new game. Yay.