Recent reviews by ivi

A cute little game, arguably more polished and fancy than its parent Stacklands, albeit with somewhat less depth. Can be cleared comfortably in a few days. The theme and setting are enjoyable and the graphics quite satisfying.

Friends of XCOM and JRPGs will find a nice fusion in this game. Troubleshooter is essentially just a clone of Firaxis' XCOM games, however it piles on a lot of character progression and theorycrafting that XCOM (intentionally) simplified away. Where XCOM has very few short 'n' sweet ways to customize and specialize characters, Troubleshooter goes ham with very detailed systems like skill crafting, skill set bonuses, gear customization, gear crafting, gear drops, skill drops from specific enemies, etc etc. adding a lot of depth.

I would not consider the added depth to be an *improvement* over XCOM. Rather, it is a sidegrade. It offers something else for people who enjoy it. Others may consider it just added tedium.

Troubleshooter is, however, designed for more "bulk" of play, by being extensively customizable for animations etc. to happen *very quickly*, leading to you being able to play more missions with more things happening in them. XCOM is more of a slow, more cinematic experience, where each action takes a decent amount of time.

The biggest win for Troubleshooter is in the art and aesthetic. Troubleshooter's character designs are great, if simple, and the art style is very appealing for fans of an anime / manhwa style. Not enough praise can be poured on the CGs representing the characters, or the sheer amount of them.

The biggest loss, however, may be in the writing and the localization. This my one biggest pet peeve I would like to see improved. The story of the game, unfortunately, does not draw me in AT ALL, with very uninspired, bland dialogue and a plot around a "Spoonist" cult which appears rather silly just by its name. It is hard to take any of this seriously.

However I feel that the biggest loss of impact in the story may come from the poor localization. I do not speak Korean, so I cannot compare the original vision of the plot and characters to what we receive in the English version. The English is ripe with stilted, awkward dialogue, very boring, matter-of-factly descriptions of events, and a complete lack of characterization or uniqueness between any of the characters due to the fact that they all speak in essentially the same way. I am forced to enjoy the characters only by the compelling art of their designs, as the writing and dialogue behind them is very uninspired, and I find myself uninterested in their personalities, since they do not seem to have much of one.

This is not even mentioning the various plain *mistakes* in the localization, coming from a lack of cohesive plan behind it, leading to various game mechanics being described in either awkward, or different terms from sentence to sentence. It is clear that, at some points, the localisers did not really know what context they were translating their lines in.

I implore the team behind TROUBLESHOOTER to research ways to provide a better localization of the English text, perhaps with the help of an external company. Focus on bringing across the characters and story in a more lively and interesting way. And make sure that the localization team understands the gameplay and mechanics in order to be able to helpfully translate ability, skill and gear descriptions.

I will recommend the game for XCOM and anime fans, however TROUBLESHOOTER could be *much* better if not for the missed potential due to the above issues.

EDIT: According to GitHub, the software is now completely abandoned. See comments.
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The software was fine until the creator released a version 9.5.5 on GitHub, which is beyond the version 9.5.4 available here on Steam. Now I get an update prompt every day upon starting my PC which won't go away until I go through the trouble of uninstalling Borderless Gaming on Steam and installing it via GitHub instead, which makes me wonder why I bought it here in the first place.

NecroDancer is an instant classic, and one of few games where Early Access is ABSOLUTELY worth it. The game is addicting and pretty much complete, and the updates keep coming hard and fast, bringing more and more variety and fun to the table.

The gameplay feels complete, looks, sounds and feels great and is immediately addicting. Replayability is available aplenty via custom music, roguelike-characteristic difficulty, replays, leaderboards (for gold score and speedrun time, respectively), unlockables and a hardcore mode with optional seeds input.

The only missing feature is a zone; there's 3 zones à 3 levels right now, which are plenty to bite your nails out already. Other than that, all that's left to be added are simply optional bonuses; more variety and options, of which there already exist a lot.

This is legitimately the only Early Access game I can recommend and say "get this right now". The amazing music won't let you go for a while, you'll find yourself doing other stuff to the NecroDancer beat... that's how addictive it is.