Recent reviews by Mark Robbo

I’m a long-time backer with many hours in The Bazaar, and it’s painful to see how far it’s fallen short of its potential. The core gameplay loop and art are genuinely high quality - they’re the only reason I kept playing despite the growing problems.

Powerful metas stabilise quickly after changes, strong builds are trivial to force, and new releases are often overtuned compared to existing items. Balance fixes feel inconsistent, and without real communication with the community, the same issues keep resurfacing. On top of that, technical problems are still common enough to require frustrating restarts.

Any criticism - even polite and constructive - often leads to bans from developer owned communities such as Reddit, Discord, or the Steam forums. This heavy-handed moderation has created an echo chamber where discussion is impossible and player feedback goes unheard.

All of this now comes with a steep price: $45 upfront, plus $20 for each extra character. For a live service game with shaky balance, technical issues and a hostile moderation culture, it’s a risky investment - and given the studio’s track record, there’s a real possibility the game may not be here for the long-term.

This game is fun for some small handful of hours while initially playing, but overall is more frustrating than enjoyable.

Stacklands encourages "engine building" to build up production but unlike other games in the same theme, you will find yourself continuously having to pause and micromanage cards to maintain aspects of your production which you have already "solved", leading to an annoying build-up of repetitive actions as you go through the game. The developer added some tools to deal with this problem, but these have limited impact as they are annoying to produce and manage themselves.

Very amusing little VR tech demo for the Index

Don't play it, it'll pretty much ruin your life