Recent reviews by GeorgeRRMartinLutherBurgerKingJr

A fantastic rollercoaster taking you through whimsical highs and heartbreaking dips. The core game mechanics themselves are a real treat and interesting evolution of match 3 gameplay. The story frame and world are wonderful. Spoiling the rest of my review because it's kind of hard to evaluate and discuss this game without spoiling one aspect, vibe, mechanic, etc. I'm decompressing after finishing the game as much as I am reviewing it.

This game is great medicine to all the roguelite/deckbuilder/run-based games I've played that have their core game mechanic and a minimal framework to facilitate you repeating the same mechanics, but with more stuff unlocked, or difficulty incrementally piled on. There's nothing wrong with doing that, it's an economical and effective template for a developer with a novel game mechanic twist, but it also doesn't usually feel to me like a complete package, there's no ending, there's not much of a narrative, most characters and elements exist only for an immediate role or decoration for mechanics along the way. Those games don't really end so muc has you eventually stop playing it. Titanium Court is an interesting question and answer to that design consideration.

Having gotten all the achievements, I also enjoyed the conversation/dynamic it had with completionism. I personally am weird about ending games, there are many games I loved but never finished, never will finish. On some level never ending them means never having to say goodbye truly, there's always this potential theoretical energy left that I could one day go back and finish, something to look forward to or just passively know there is something good I could get to. Titanium Court has it's own context for this and it was bitter and cathartic both when I found myself guiltily choosing to continue removing curses, filling out my to-do list, and exhausting dialogue with every NPC. I was a monster, I was Strife, I punished myself and reached an arbitrary point of completion, and I felt something besides whatever little bump of dopamine that might be what I got from 100% in other games.

The characters of the court were delightful, I loved so many conversations, gags, and moments with them. I felt horrible when just natural; thoughts in the situation wound up draining the magic and power through all-consuming rationality. I can't remember last time I felt so bad even stressing out any of these faeries. I've played games that so desperately wanted to have an evil route that made you feel bad and feel like what it must be to be bad, but this made me feel worse than any of those ever could've. I was just enjoying a game, I was just being selfish, I was just trying to believe they weren't real, but I can't help but identify and feel when you stick a face on something.

In the end, I did "everything" but also missed just enough tiny things to have left myself a tiny sliver of potential energy. A personal cheat code. I destroyed the court and locked myself out of the world. I have the ability to make another save file and start anew. I never finished reading the Clockwork Monastery and I never won a round with one of the jobs. Potentially I could play again, see familiar faces, and try to wash away my old guilt and find a happier end and experience the last drops of unknown. Or not, knowing where I went last time I had the opportunity and what it means for me to be there.

I feel some type of ways and I'm glad to have felt these things even the sad ones.

My personal favourite little moment in this game: Saying yes for the first time to a musical performance and ended up thinking about my life in the context of fish who go to ♥♥♥♥ and die.

Good art, A+.

One of the coolest looking games I've played. Love everything about this art style and presentation. The little animation loops are perfect. Music, atmosphere, and sound design is great too.

Gameplay is an interesting balance of playing the odds and to your outs. You choose which row to move to, but not which spot, so you need to identify which lanes are safest and which have rewards worth a higher risk of damage or death. You'll also need to plan ahead on some boards with enemies that change form or over time, plus you have a special power for each character that offers another move or option for a turn.

You get some influence over your character as you progress, periodically choosing to upgrade your strength or magic, as well as picking out teeth to further change the odds. For example you can try a high strength build with teeth that make them more likely to land on strength monsters and less on magic. Each build has its own risk/reward to it. A balanced build can handle weakish enemies of both types but any strong ones around could still be hitting for 2 or 3. A build specializing more can avoid big damage of one type but need to take extra steps to avoid the other. Using powers, items, the extra esoteric elements you unlock is important for shoring up the risks of your build.

During runs you acquire gold in various ways. You can use them during the run, or on certain floors you get the option to send it back up. It's another risk/reward, spending the gold in the run could legitimately help you beat boards you might just die on without using those items. Sending the gold back up could unlock something to help the rest of your next runs. What I end up doing is always sending gold back up whenever I get the chance, often avoiding spending at the shop besides the "nose" discount, and just accepting my runs might end early because I was being too greedy to buy a bomb or whatever. Then I'll periodically do a "real" run where I just spend all of my gold as I get it.

The boss designs are fantastic and their fights have unique mechanics that mix up how you've been handling that area's enemies up until then. The first boss is still my favourite, you can just tell he's a rad dude who loves to menace in style, but also be chill and freaky about it.

Instant cRPG classic. Nails so much about what I want from a computer RPG by echoing some of the experiences I love from tabletop, then dives into a character a way a tabletop DM can't with you and that normal cRPGs often fail or choose not to do. Very often I was offered a choice of action I would think to ask my real life DM and how he would respond in letting us, even when it's obviously a bad idea. Reactive without just punishing you, indulging you to have fun the way you've apparently chosen to seek it.

The structure of this RPG is fantastic, taking the right lessons from it's inspirations to weave this homebrew DnD module that evokes the anxieties of our time through fantasy history and factions not too far from the origins and history of our own analogues. You do not play yourself or make your own character, but you explore the character, discover things about them, and influence and try to define them with the actions you have him take.

Completing quests does more than offer material and experience rewards, you reflect on completed major quests and choose a potential feat befitting a certain perspective or element of how you view yourself. There is no consulting the dnd texts to minmax myself a multiclass monster, I become that through insistence and action.

Combat encounters flow with the rest of the game, no separate action-strategy system that turns your character and actions into abstract math with a sprinkling of flavour depending on how good your DM or computer game is. Instead each encounter is specific to the situation and each treated like the deadly encounters they should be. No grinding or fighting trivial filler, you are a mortal and some jackass kid with a knife or a rock can kill you, let alone the monsters to be found in a dangerous dungeon. There weren't many combat encounters, but all of them felt exciting and risky and were relevant to the story or what I was doing. Felt like real people dealing with scary ♥♥♥♥ in their city, not just some Fantasy Archetype Guy Killing Monsters Doing Adventures. The stuff here was grounded and mattered.

Tons of great character all around, Snell will go down for me as one of the all-time RPG partners. Tolstad is my favourite kind of fantasy melting pot city. I loved this setting, the history, and the story. Fantastic game, probably Game of the Year for me unless something really unexpected comes out. You can tell quickly if this game will click with you and if it does, it will do so throughout in a very good way. I think I was sold on this game just reading the stats descriptions when first starting the demo.

My only gameplay regret is I left a whole day on the table and failed to find my final friendly inventory rat. A few other minor things I must've missed or chose not to do for ethical/political reasons will be on my completionist list if I ever replay. And I'd eat more apples. Overall though, I made the choices that mattered and made sense or felt right to me at each moment and am very satisfied with the paths I took.

The game's art and music is also wonderful. Long review and I'm running out of synonyms for good. This is the kind of game I'll never forget and part of me will wish there were a way I could go through it all for the first time again.

Wonderful game with some surprising extra elements to discover right under your nose the whole time.

Fun tower defense game that doesn't neglect the fun of mazing. Every turn can have different spawn points for mobs, which can require you to rework your maze at times to take advantage of the terrain and new mob routes. Many standalone TDs don't have a mazing aspect at all, or when they do you basically want to plot out your maze on the first round and start building it as much as you can each round. In Gnomes, the map expands and new spawn points are added in random spots, so you can't just rely on the same maze every turn. You have to balance what units and items you use and buy and where they are placed depending on how mobile they are between rounds.

There's also an aspect of economy, needing to generate gold with crops to buy new "towers" or new unlocks & relics in the shop. Some crops can even be vital to your maze or unit composition strategy, able to deal damage themselves being trampled, or offering adjacency bonuses to gnomes.

There are a variety of terrain types with different combinations of hazards and terrain blockers. Plenty of starting faction options made out of 4 of the game's items or towers in thematic combos.

The worst thing about the game is you have to kill all these poor goblins instead of these nasty gnomses. Otherwise a fantastic TD with an emphasis on dynamic mazing strategy. If you like Gem TD or Spectrum TD on WC3, you should love this as well.

It's only Act 1 for now but it's another great Supra- series entry so far. Runs well on default settings with a 3080/5600X and looks really nice. If you liked the other Supraland games then you'll also enjoy this one. Very excited to see the future areas you get peeks of in the Act 1 areas.

Beautiful gameboy visuals and excellent tunes. Demo indicates this should be a fun game at launch.

Great evolution of the Civ formula that solves the mid and late game problems of Civ 6 by refreshing gameplay and adding new objectives to pursue. The commander system makes for some fun positioning management in war, to better hoover XP and support your attacking units. It's also just a blast to roll up with a full Commander and drop out a spray of units to mass attack and then pack it up and be on to the next battle next turn.

The different era gameplay goes a long way in keeping a game interesting past the first 100 turns, and the crisis at the end of each era apply some much needed pressure to make you use your resources and not always cruise effortlessly to victory.

Mixing and matching your leader with different over time is really cool and I can't wait to try out more combos. The diplomacy currency is a really great addition, getting you to make real choices with your currency as you cannot do everything you might wanna do, you have to prioritize. There's a risk/reward to trade deals that can be interesting gambles, and you can benefit from deals you don't want, or to spite a leader you don't want to help.

Overall a great new civ game. I miss the cartoonier look for the civ leaders but the new map looks great and I dig the elevation and river changes to terrain gameplay.

An absolute joy recapturing the feeling of openeing a huge tub of mysterious old games from a garage sale for an old console, or your first time discovering emulators and ROMs back in the 90s having access to hundreds of games you never knew existed.

There are 50 games here that are all fantastic in their own ways, many taking familiar gameplay forms either retro and modern and adding a unique mechanical twist while streamlining the controls to work with only two buttons and directional input. The sense of cohesion by these fictional developers is absolutely top notch, a fictional history woven in hidden story and through game design and art visually. Just an incredible experience I cannot recommend enough.

Fantastic art and music, loveable characters you sometimes swear have been gaming icons for your whole life and somehow forgot. Mini & Max was my personal favourite of the batch, but any time I open the game I'm confronted with a screen of total bangers and can really never go wrong selecting any of them.

Also you can win cute stuff your pet pig and their cool house.

Fun blend of word games, riddles, and other word puzzles with a traditional RPG form. Combat is a really fun puzzle in and of itself, figuring out good combos, remembering the words, typing them in sequence under pressure. Good sense of humor throughout the game. Definitely recomend if you ever enjoyed Wordle or word games in general.