Recent reviews by Mike

Orcs Must Die was one of my favourite games, so I was looking forward to an actiony tower defence. Unfortunately, X-Morph Defense falls well short of that mark.

The Tower part is pretty minimal, with only a few different types of towers with really basic archetypes: the basic one, the short-range one, the long-range one and the anti-air. The fence system to shape the enemy path is pretty cool. Towers don't level up or get upgraded at all other than to switch types while playing a mission.

The Action part is a top-down shooter with a handful of different weapon systems you can use. You shoot the enemies and dodge the bullets. There's no drops or upgrades or anything at all to shake things up within the mission.

The major problem is the interaction of the two halves: there really isn't any. Your towers don't influence your ship in any way and your ship can't do anything to change the behaviour of the land enemies. The closest you get is by trying to pull enemy fliers toward towers that don't have something better to do.

For the game outside of the missions, there's a sort of tech tree, but it's so sparse that they may as well not have bothered. There's a story, but since tower defense enemies tend to be pretty dumb, it doesn't really work. It's not really a genre that should take itself too seriously.

Lastly, the game feels like a mess, visually. It's like watching a Transformers movie. There are machines and explosions and all sorts of exciting, colourful bits, but it all just sort of blends into a blob of nonsense. Everything is nicely detailed, but nothing is worth looking at.

All in all, it feels like there's the skeleton of a really fun game here, but it just isn't fleshed out. With a bit more work, there could be a really fun sequel.

Sang-Froid is one the of most disappointing games that I've played. I went into it thinking that it would be like Orcs Must Die but with werewolves, which sounded like a pretty awesome premise; instead, it turned out to be a clunky, dull action game with strategy and RPG overtones.

The worst part of the game for me is the interface. The font used was definitely picked for style rather than legibility, making it tricky to get a quick read on your ammo count. The health bar is a strange, bifurcated heart which again is not helpful for at-a-glance info. You wield two weapons, but instead of using a toggle, weapon selection is modal. You have to hold down a key to keep the rifle out. Reloading the rifle is boosted by button mashing which is an egregiously stupid mechanic. The whole town's worth of shops could have been condensed into a single screen. The fear factor UI is painfully unintuitive but works decently once explained. I think even the developers realised how bad the UI is because the tutorial is filled with videos describing in elaborate detail how everything works. When you've gotten to that step, you need to seriously rethink your design decisions.

The gameplay is where things really fell apart. It seems like most traps are one-use-only which kills the tower defence feeling for me. Because you can't rely on traps, you need to dispatch a good chunk of the enemies yourself. Unfortunately the lumberjack runs quite slowly, hits weakly and reloads his rifle in a period-correct fashion. Combat is a slow and tedious affair with the player's weakness being balanced out by the enemy's reluctance to attack. To top it off, the animations are surprisingly unsatisfying.

Calling the game an epic folktale is a bit disengenuous. The writing is 90s after-school cartoon caliber and the voice acting is pretty wooden. The animations are disappointingly stilted and exacerbate the problem; using static portraits would have been a major improvement. Worst of all, it takes itself way too seriously.

It's possible that the game gets significantly better after spending enough time on it. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other games that are better right off the bat.