Recent reviews by Grumpy

The game sucked back when it came out and it still sucks today.
Humankind is not your typical 4x game, it is more akin to a racing game, you have to race to beat the other AI/players to the next era in order to pick the best faction in order to secure winning the game for the most part.
It is a system that makes sense in theory but failed in execution because some factions are just clearly superior to others and years after the games launch, that hasn't changed. Anyone familiar with amplitude's history would have seen this coming a mile away as every Endless Legend/Space game runs into the same problem as well with balance and AI that cheats being core issues for the ride. What set Humankind apart from the other titles was, absolutely nothing. It felt and played like a reskin of Endless Legend and that was about it but given it had a new, different name as well as Sega investing money into Amplitude Studios, at the very least it seemed like an earnest effort would be made on this title this time but sadly not is the reality, to the point that Sega let Amplitude studios go.

The game is not worth buying, not even on sale. The main reason for this is simple, if you enjoy 4X games, you will have played many of them and as a result you will be used to the fact that the games play best against a human with maybe a few AI thrown in the mix as well. AI in this game just pull resources out of thin air just like in Civilization games, and that also has the exact same effect, harder AI is paradoxically easier to beat and/or exploit because they have more free resources to trade/steal. This devolves into removing the AI so only humans are playing and for gaming sessions that last literal hours, sometimes day, that is a huge ask for even 3 people to do, meaning games will go unfinished between humans and AI become unbalancing paypigs if humans exploit them, which they will because the free armies they spit out are just annoying to deal with.

If you do play the game, know that district costs scale based on how many districts you have, this leads to situations where you are producing a Production district to make building things faster but every future Production district ends up costing more and it feels like your production is going down, not up. It is going up and you will be able to make things faster but just don't bother with most districts anyway and you will do a lot better because attaching territory is a -20 stability malus but can easily outdo the everything bonus of anything you could possibly build, whereas each district is a -10 stability malus and 2 of any district won't come close to 1 attached outpost. Just another example of the game balance making no meaningful sense.
This lack of meaningful scaling crescendos when you are done in the first two eras as there is nothing for you to do. Districts beget more districts so you stop building them, wonders must be claimed before being built so unlike in Civilization where you might "idle" some cities by having them produce wonders in place of you constantly issuing orders for your large empire, here you can't even do that. There are internal city districts you can build and probably should just to give the cities something to do but you will never escape the feeling of just how shallow the game actually is alongside its broken balance that you will end up actively engaging/avoiding just to remove/add something that resemblances challenge.

If, and it is an extremely small if, but on the chance that this is your first 4x game, you will enjoy it and you have a whole world of wonderful 4x games ahead of you to experience too! But for anyone who has even lightly played any other 4x game, you will know something is amiss here, you might not be able to pinpoint it, but you will know it to be true. Another corporate waste of potential and imagination.

Everything about this game is visually amazing. We have reached the apex of modern gaming in this title, destructible terrain that breaks in ways that make sense (you can even climb the ruins), superhero abilities that function just like in the show/movie/comic, Doctor Strange teleport ability which is just the chef's kiss, it is amazing.
The game has to be played to be believed, gaming has come an amazingly long way and this game is at the peak right now. So why don't I recommend it?
Visually the game is fantastic but mechanically? You have already played this game. Just like the search for the "World of Warcraft-killer" back in the day we have countless hero shooters and battle royales as well as just so many FPS games that we don't need more that do the same but look prettier or have an established IP as the skin for the same old experience, we need something new!

What is worse is that not only could this game be so much more than it currently is, it also falls into all the same traps of the games that came before it but improves on them a little. Someone leave the team during a match? Well now you will lose less points and they automatically get a short time-out. That is an improvement over its contemporaries for sure but how about this, how about we just don't lose points at all? I am not asking for a participation award here, I am saying if you have tracked that someone has ruined the experience for a group of players, you can still reward the winners without making it a zero sum game and punishing the losers who had no choice in the matter, the technology is clearly there in the game to do so.
Or how about this, getting a draw in any other game is about as fair as it gets, no one won, no one lost. However you still lose points in this game, why?! You want there to be draws, it means the matchmaking is doing a great job, but as is so often the case in these games sadly, only wins matter in the end, nothing else.

Outside of ranked, get enough losses and you will be placed with bots, this hasn't happened to me so that is 3rd hand information, I have no opinion on it but am including it if that is something that matters to you. Outside of ranked and casual, there is nothing. Why would there be? I mean there are season passes and skins but nothing else to actually do which again, really drives home that is just yet another re-skin of a tired genre to the point I have nothing new to say outside of the technical aspects of the game which are indeed, amazing.

Another game also came out recently which is yet another hero shooter called Strinova and while it isn't amazing, it allows you to turn into a 2d image in order to avoid bullets and turn back 3d in order to shoot. Its a really simple and stupid gimmick but its a lot of fun and more importantly, its something new! I have something to talk about with that game because while it has a gimmick, that gimmick adds something to the gameplay experience that changes how you play and approach it, here in Marvel Rivals, while every hero does have unique mechanics, you are doing the same thing with them all, shooting enemies in the head.

Try the game out, you will enjoy it, but the drive to go hard and get over 100 hrs will depend entirely on if you are burned out on other hero shooters or not. For me, I really tried to enjoy this but I have already got 1000+ hrs in 'this' game, even if it isn't this one in particular, as so many of them play the same just like the MMO gold rush of the late 2000s that no matter how much I try, it just blends in. A view I am not alone in as people discussing the game just can't help but compare it to Overwatch, seemingly proving my point.
I expect this game to outlive Overwatch and to be around for a long time, my negative review is but a leaf in the wind and quite frankly you will enjoy this game despite my opinions on it but if you are an oldhead coming from Team Fortress 2 or Paladins, you won't find anything new here sadly.

Yes this is a "gacha game" however I put that in quotes because there is a real game hidden behind the veneer of a gacha game. Firstly the 'gacha game' aspect itself that serves as a smokescreen is best described as a tactics style game that ramps up in difficulty fairly quickly with a lot of grind and also is gated by stamina, so armed with this first impression it is easy to dismiss this product as just another run of the mill cash grab on Steam and it is hard to recommend the game to general audiences because 'inb4gamegetsgoodafter40hrs' and although the game isn't that egregious it does string you along into thinking there is nothing new here as you will gather typical gacha currencies or items until after about 2 hours in when you will get 'a key'.

At this point the game properly starts as the key is used to access the full game, which is what this is, by the way. Taking extremely strong ques from 'Tactics Ogre, the Knight of Lodis' for the the Nintendo Gameboy Advance this game, the real game, has a wonderfully long campaign with choices that matter. I feel dorky saying that but if you are old enough to remember when video game boxes would promise such a thing then this game is a throw back to that era. You play as John or Jane Nobody and find yourself rounded up with some locals who are caught in the midst of a coup against the empire. Wrongly imprisoned you are freed during the chaos of the coup and your adventure begins, or at least that is what you would expect but just kidding! You do escape the prison but you don't escape the rioting, looting and pillaging that has engulfed the city and you are murdered in the chaos. Since that makes for a very short video game, we are instead given a second chance to change our destiny by a mysterious cat. Despite not making much sense it does serve as a narrative point if only because it helps explain why we are able to go through the story multiple times, if you felt that needed an explanation, and that is where the real story begins.

I want to address the gacha aspect for a moment, like most gacha games you can pull on various banners to get new characters or weapons, nothing new here and they will help you do the "story mode", however this is all just a mirage, when you start the real game proper, it is mostly a self contained game. In fact the only things you can carry over to the real game, is up to 3 of your characters and that's it. This means you can ignore the gacha aspects entirely which is a mixed bag. For me I have no issues with this, however if you drop $5000 on pulling characters and equipment, you may be disappointed to learn that this game was only pretending it would matter.

As mentioned earlier, the real game takes a lot from titles like Tactics Ogre, Onimusha Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance however all those titles were two things; beloved by the people who played them, and very, very low sale numbers. Onimusha Tactics received mixed reviews back when it came out and no sequel. FF Tactics Advance 2 managed to sell just over half a million copies and... The series has been dormant ever since. Finally the team behind Tactics Ogre, a game that reviewed greatly, was bought out by Square Enix and that team would work on, FF Tactics Advance 2... Oh.

And that is it for games in the genre for the most part. Meaning that in order to even get something like Sword of Convallaria greenlit by a big studio is a huge ask. The fact the real game is also buried by a tutorial that neither describes itself as one and takes a few hours too many to get through means people who enjoy games like this will very likely be turned off by thinking this is just yet another mobile phone game, as you can see from some Steam reviews already. Those that get past that will then discover how meaningless the gacha aspect mostly is, given it seems to just be a smokescreen just to even get this game made, which in itself is not something I personally have a problem with but if you enjoyed that part of the game, it comes to a screeching halt very quickly meaning you might be surprised how "little" there is "to do" outside of the real main game.
On that note I want to warn you that the game has two banners, characters and weapons. Under no circumstances should you ever use the weapon gacha. Unlike characters, you get weapons like candy all the time and you can even farm for them as well and they cannot be used in the 'main game', unlike characters which can be used in the 'main game' but they will always be balanced to match the 'main game'. I'm not complaining as its not that dissimilar to 'new game plus' that many older games used to employ but I can't explain the weapon gacha existing as that just seems unfair to players who don't know any better.

If you read this far then you have a good idea that this game is a throwback to the 200X years of gaming and If you recognized any of the game titles I mentioned then you know exactly what to expect. If you missed out on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance era of tactical rpgs then I find this one hard to recommend as gaming has changed immensely since then and while you might get into it, the genre died out due to its lack of widespread appeal and there is no ignoring that. Every triple A studio that once developed these style of games, stopped; I enjoy this genre of games and spent many hours on the Game Boy Advance playing games like this but even during their prime, they weren't popular. Can this product be the one that finally revives the genre and ushers in a new age? No, probably not. Gacha as a genre has moved on and products like Geshin Impact vacuum up all the money for now and forever until infinity plus one, beating out the old guard of Candy Crush, Angry Birds and Clash of Clans that also were making all of the money in the known universe.

I say play it, enjoy it, try not to miss out on it, because I don't see this game surviving 3 years, 7 years or the coveted 10 years. However if it does die, there is more than enough meat on its bone that they can probably re-package it and sell it as a stand alone game. I'd buy it, but I would also be happy to be wrong as I never felt the Tactical RPG was out of juice during its prime either, it always seemed to be getting closer to "perfection" as a genre before it disappeared and if this game can give it a second chance in life, I am here to support that.

Unique, interesting game ruined by the feeling of being underwater but game controls and jankiness take a complete backseat to the terrible, awful netcode. Save yourself the download time!

Boring. Has nothing to do with Torchlight at all, they just bought the name and slapped a pretty decent ARPG onto it and thats right, I said pretty decent, mediocre. Torchlight games in general have always been boring, Torchlight 2 was the shining beacon but that was because it allowed modding and the mods really elevated that game but every other Torchlight game has been boring. Good ideas that just trip over themselves and then someone remembered they need to actually finish making the game and so it just ends abruptly, every, single, game.

This game however is so not-Torchlight that the characters have 4 fingers instead of 3 and that may sound like the most petty nitpick but I highlight it because of just how little this has in common with the other games. The character classes from those games, the Berserker, the Train Conductor? Gone. Characters or references to the older games? Yeah, not getting any, sorry. The ending from Torchlight 3? Yeah, nah, we are not expanding on that, or on any of the games for that matter. I honestly am not 100% sure if this is a Torchlight game from the Torchlight series or a different IP altogether and I am not joking, because last I looked, Torchlight the IP had been bought by Zynga in 2021, but this game is made by Xindong Network, so...? Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Torchlight the IP afterall, but then Ordrak, the final boss of Torchlight, is a boss in Torchlight Infinite, so I am just genuinely confused unless it is just a boss that just happens to share the same name, and also be a dragon, I mean that could happen I suppose.

I don't know, nor do I care because lore aside we play for gameplay and the gameplay here is okay actually. You pick a few skills and then you can add modifiers to those skills to make them stronger or do different things and while I want to sing this system praises, sadly it doesn't allow you to do anything amazingly interesting. Most of the time you end up just adding more damage and little else, you can't for example shoot a beam that ricochets when it hits other enemies that then explode on death and shoot out heat seeking missiles. If you have played any other modern ARPG its the usual boring guff, you can shoot more projectiles or change an attack to be a certain element like fire and then you just pump the damage as high as it goes. Once upon a time this was amazing but Vampire Survivor came along and showed how exciting such a system could actually be and now the genie is out of the lamp, all these older ARPG systems and combat just don't have what it takes anymore. It is like playing a modern game then playing a Playstation 1 title, it might still be fun but you can feel the limitations.

The reason I don't recommend the game is because as it is, it is just boring. No multiplayer has been added and while the developers promise it is coming, we live in a world where devs can promise the earth while delivering nothing and hide behind the "early access" moniker until they announce EoS as fanboys will defend anything. Its not even an issue exclusive to this game either, the ARPG genre is suffering an identity crisis because everyone is copying each others homework instead of realizing we want to become a black hole of death and destruction and that getting loot should always feel exciting. There is no easy fix either, usually this is where a reviewer gives their opinion on how to fix the problem but not here, it is very difficult to make players god-like while still having challenging gameplay and likewise if all loot is 'exciting' then eventually none of it is. I hope someone comes up with a good solution but I acknowledge this is a complex problem to solve and so far Torchlight Infinite doesn't solve it either.

This is a very difficult game to recommend because it is very unfair and I do not mean the difficulty itself. What do you need to be able to play any game? A controller, and what do you do when the controller doesn't work? That's right, you are boned! The controls in this game are an abomination because your character attacks automatically which is fine, but you can rapid fire if you hold left click on an enemy so you want to do that, but that causes the problem that often you want to be attacking and left click also moves you.
This means you miss-click into running into a group of enemies instead. Okay just hold shift to attack in place right? Okay that is fine but you need to click on enemies that have a shield icon to remove their immortality so now you are hovering over shift and click everywhere on the screen and oops, did you fat finger hitting tab when trying to use your skill 1? now you have brought up the steam overlay and are probably dead in the game. Alright, okay, lets use controller instead! But both keyboard and controller have their own problems especially because you want to fight very few enemies at a time, pulling a whole room onto yourself is a good way to die, which goes out the window because you also need to click on many things on the screen, such as interrupting enemy spells or removing those shields I mentioned earlier while also staying as far away from enemies as possible and avoiding things falling on your head and it all just cumulates in the fact that being trapped on linear rails rather than having an open space to move around in makes the game hard!
Not the fun kind of hard but the kind where you will die often due to things going very wrong very quickly because of the controls and this seems intended as you will discover when you get to the final region with the screen filled with things demanding your attention while trying to not die and then because your card load out is randomized maybe you still have a bad hand so that doesn't help either since there is no option to obtain new cards or cards you might want, if the card you want or need doesn't drop, tough. If that ends your run? That is tough too.

There are a lot of game systems working against you which ruins the game experience as a whole and if we ignore those the very core of the game is only mediocre at its heart which is also problematic because you can feel like the game will pick up if you just dig deeper, but it doesn't. The core of the game is just a linear click-a-thon with you having very little control over what things you get to use to help you out making defeats feel pre-meditated rather than due to a lack of skill.

BEST GAME 2021
BEST NEW GENRE 2022
It is not hyperbolic for me to say Vampire Survivor is the game that made me find joy in gaming again. An extremely simply premise inspired by an even simpler game if you can believe it, that will drain away hours of your life in that "one more turn" phenomena once worn as the crown of the Sid Meier's Civilization series.

You are a 'survivor' and castlevania inspired enemies slowly walk towards you while your character automatically attacks them which actually sounds really boring but that is the beauty of it all in that your expectations are set low, really low. Nothing here is going to blow your mind at least not initially anyway but like the best kind of horror movies the tension slowly ramps up until the fog is so thick you can barely see through it, your mind wandering how you even failed to notice the thickening encroaching fog that you are now unable to see outside off.

That is my whole review because as with any good horror story, it is much better experienced than hearing second hand from someone else who will inevitably botch the delivery. I will say this however, if you don't "get" the game within the first hour, get a refund and give up on it. I don't say that out of callousness either, what I mean is the initial experience is a slow burn and I would never use the argument "it gets better 50 hours in!" as we used to do for games of the past that were often crap until you got deep into it. Nowadays if you are reading this you probably are well aware of how many other games are out there vying for your attention at any given time so why make yourself suffer? Without spoiling too much about the game the first few playthroughs will feel unfair, as if you were designed to lose and die due to no fault of your own but rest assured that if you manage to unlock stage 2, the Library, then the gameplay experience improves immensely and if you weren't already, then you will seriously start to have fun.
It is a shame that stage one is quite the sucker punch given how excellent later stages are but maybe it is intentional?

Minimal UI, great music, solid gameplay loop, addictive.
Feels really good to have a decent game again after such a long drought.

Right away I will point out the game is "dead", there is no support for the game. I do not see that as a bad thing because the game is very old and frankly leaving the server running for those that want to play it is a nice thing to do and I apprechiate it, had this been a Square Enix game the server would have been closed down a loooong time ago!

With that out of the way, if you find any bugs, exploits or crashes don't expect them to be fixed.
I had fun with the game, over 200hrs infact so why don't I recommend it? Well, heh heh, about that...
This is a gacha game with all the fixtures and trappings that gatcha games have but being EOS it is inevitable that you will obtain everything still remaining in the game and upon doing so you will realize that the things you could (and still can) spend money on are actually not worth it.
The game is balanced, extremely well balanced infact as every character has a specific gimmick as opposed to straight up powercreep so you should swap your team as needs demand.

This creates a situation where obtaining new characters doesn't feel exciting, it feels mandatory and likewise the real money characters don't outweigh the f2p characters. How do I know this? Oh I spent money right? Well, urm, no, actually. Remember what I said about bugs won't be fixed? Yeah, I'm sure you will figure a few kinks out on your own very quickly. Not that the game is buggy or anything, its actually pretty polished in most regards but I didn't actually play for 200+ hrs as leaving the game running allows you to obtain quite a generous amount of loot despite not actually being an idle game.

And I think that's it, I have played my hand, given the game away as it were. I aquired most everything within the game by not actually playing the game and the results were better than had I actually played the game and so upon discovering this my enjoyment of the game went up immensely because until you figure this out the game plays like any existing gatcha game complete with a, say it with me, stamina system so even if you are enjoying the game there are times where you either pay to play more or you are "done" for the day.

So here is the trick, you can throw banquets and they give you a random assortment of prizes, some of which are tickets to attempt to draw for other characters but you can only throw banquets one every x hours. If only there was a way to speed time up in games...If only...Anyway once you figure that out its cruise control to unlocking every character since now all you need to do is leave your setup running overnight and by morning you are swimming in resources. Weapon unlocks is complete RNG so I can't help you with that but having the full roster is mandatory for harder game content.

Yeah, its cheating but without it your stamina runs out very quickly and your rate of progression (without spending money) dries up to a stop! Even with this exploit you need duplicates of characters to fully unlock them, its relentless! Some equipment pieces are also mandatory so the grind never ends! So if you were playing honestly then I have no idea how much money you would have to spend but it would be pretty high and on that note, the characters you can buy with money are no better than the ones you get for free so don't fall into that trap either.

You've seen games like this before, you've played games like this before and having one that is EOS is interesting because with no new things to look forward to, you can see just how silly it is having a stamina system in a game, yet developers persist in keeping them.

You will make noises whether you want to or not.

A fun little game with a nice story and that's all there is to it.
I don't mean that in a bad way though, it is afterall an idle game and by definition most idle games are about pushing yourself to the limit in infinite dungeon crawling/numbers rising, infact I may as well start by getting the only "negative" out of the way which is to use third-party software to speed the game up because the in-game option to speed up battles costs so much you will literally beat the story mode before you can ever afford it so save yourself the bother. That is the only negative thing I have to say about the game.

As for positives a lot of those come down to what you want from an idle game. The genre is ripe and while Soda Dungeon 2 is more of the same that was Soda Dungeon 1, you already know if you are the kind of person that likes idle games and if you are then you will be right at home. On that note you don't need to have played the first game to follow the events of this game as they are mostly self contained stories.

As someone who enjoyed the first game I was right at home with this one and it did not disappoint but having played other, better idle games I can honestly be objective and say this one is middle of the road lacking the depth of its peers and the elements that make other idle games more compelling but with all that said I enjoyed this one exactly because it wasn't bogged down in all those bloated systems and was just a good game on its own merits.

You can fit this one in your busy life, get a few hours of fun out of it and then move on like candy or soda but I don't see anything wrong with that. Recommended.