Recent reviews by Finite Monkey

RUN! Get out now! It's an auto-battler, it's easy to get started and deceptively deep in it's complexity! SAVE YOURSELF FROM THIS ADDICTION!... *opens it up for JUST ONE MORE RUN*

It's a solid city builder and the water physics are beautiful.

it is still early days of its dev, so the drive to achieve things is still quite self-directed, if you will.

Looking forward to seeing more as they build it.

I already knew the story (all of it) before playing the game, but that didn't detract from how great it is as a game experience. The artifice of the game's design is really well thought out and put together and there's a lot to appreciate in how the game's journey is crafted, especially in how well the visuals and music are integrated.

It's not super long to do one full pass of it, so even if you know what's going to happen, it's worth experiencing at least once to appreciate the work that went in and how well it was carried off.

It's pretty much what it says on the box and some YouTubers have published solid gameplay videos, if you're curious. I've been having a lot of fun with it, although that's not to say that I don't have my minor design gripes.

It's clearly designed with iOS in mind, but was easier to roll out to Steam first, so it feels very much like a slightly less polished Mini Metro/Motorways kind of deal.

Been having a lot of fun with it. Similar to the Armageddon games (so, Panzer Corps), but with a little variety with the base building and stories for the factions. Looking forward to grabbing the rest of the DLC at some point and unleashing some 'nids on Gladius.

I recommend playing this if you like X-Com, just not yet. It's a good take on the formula, the breach mechanics are a nice add in, but this feels like a beta with some outstanding QA testing to be done, not a finished product. Once it's completed, this game will be a nice new entry into the franchise, but for now...

Bugs:
* The 'Name New Save' dialog box's UI doesn't scale correctly.
* Breach items will have 'Not for this breach position' displayed incorrectly at times, but will still be selectable.
* Target icons disappear from the UI sometimes and abilities need to be cycled through to force a refresh.
* Unequipping an Epic Weapon from Blueblood keeps spawning 'Error! ReloadUpgrade_Gunslinger has no FriendlyName!' objects into upgrade slots, which then stay in my supply once removed.
* When epic weapons are assigned to agents and the game reloaded from saves, including auto-saves after a program crash (of which there have been a few), the base weapon of that type completely disappeared from my supply, leaving Shotgun and SMG wielders with only the weapon they had, as they can't be unassigned without a replacement and the weapons can't be hotswapped between agents.

So, yeah, once those issues are ironed out, and there's possibly more I've forgotten as I've been turning a blind eye to them up until now, it'll be quite good.

Hopefully I can finish this campaign run before all my agent's weapons disappear...

I really like this game, I do. I love the aesthetic, I love the mechanics, I love the vibe of it.

But it's incredibly unstable. Every 10 or so minutes it crashes and I have to force quit and reboot the program. Thanks to the auto-saves, at worst I have to redo one building placement, but it's still a massive disruption to the experience.

I recommend the game, absolutely, but less so the meta-experience of playing it.

After the success for the first remake, I was curious where they were going to go with this one. My first playthrough was certainly fun and satisfying, but in the end, I wasn't compelled to revisit it after I was done.

But now that the DLC are here, particularly 'War of the Chosen', there's so much more nuance to the overall mechanics that it's worth revisiting periodically... which I clearly do... Although, I'm not sure I totally recommend playing the DLCs on your first time through as they do complicate the initial learning curve, but I'm not able to play it for the first time again, so I can't rightly say.

It's still not the same as the originals, but the remakes stand very well on their own as their own experiences and they shouldn't be directly compared beyond deciding if you must have the levels of complexity present in the 90s games or are happy with a game that is engaging, challenging, satisfying and scratches your itch for tactical complexity with ease.

I definitely recommend this one and, if you've not played it since the vanilla release, I would definitely recommend coming back with the DLCs and giving it another spin.

I backed this game at the outset partly because I'd backed and enjoyed HBS's Shadowrun games already, partly because I was keen to experience a game designed by the original creator of Battletech, and no small amount because I'm just a sucker for the franchise and I will play (or watch) anything with the name on it.

And I was not disappointed in the slightest. This game is exactly what they promised, exactly what I was hoping for, and exactly what fits the feel of the pitch.

There have been a couple of bugs here and there, which are frustrating, and some niggling design choices I don't agree with around the store and MechBay interfaces, but the core experience of the game - hitting the ground running with a Lance of 'mechs and shooting, punching, and otherwise jumping your way to victory - is absolutely perfect.

R.I.P. Dekker

I really wanted my fun with this to last, as I tried to get my head around the driving mechanics. But, as I kept going, other issues popped up that killed it for me.

Controller glitch made it impossible to use my wired XB360 Controller past a certain point and the AI devolved into cars sacrificing their own lead to drive me off the table... not really a great way to code a racing game.