Recent reviews by Mr.Simplex

Legitimately one of the games I've had the most fun with in recent times. It's fresh, while feeling familiar, has really cool mechanics and pretty rewarding meta-progression and most importantly - gnomes and lots of them!

10/10 highly recommend if you want some casual and engaging gnome-centric tower defence fun.

A pretty great game about a chicken and a shotgun and a pleasantly hard difficulty curve.

Icarus is a really solid mission-based extraction-y survival game. The grind can be a bit hard in the beginning, but the missions have been greatly improved in recent updates with a lot of the excess running taken out.

Hard mode is there for us veterans who played the betas and want to relish that absolute terror we felt back then, and overall the game has plenty of content to explore between missions and static worlds and the varied maps (hopefully the alien one turns out good).

Only thing of note that pulls the game down for me was the transition from the localhost-y type multiplayer that was originally in the game to the more dedicated server approach. It was pretty annoying for an OG beta player to take a couple months break and then come back and find that ALL of their progress had been wiped and that I had to start from scratch. In addition, it is a bit sad that people can't continue a mission unless the original host hosts it again (even if the UI leads you to believe otherwise) as you used to be able to.

However, these are mostly minor gripes levelled against a game that's pretty solidly fun. I can even play it on my GTX 960 which is impressive considering how high the minimum specs are.

All in all, check it out and bring along a few friends. Friends multiply the fun of Icarus by tenfold.

The Enemy's Weapons Are Better. What an experience!
This is another situation where I would love it if Steam had a neutral review option.

Positives:
- The core gameplay loop is entirely explained by the name. You have no weapons, so instead you have to avoid the enemies' shots, weapons, etc and make them hurt their owner. It's a simple premise, but quite enjoyable.
- The story itself is somewhat generic, but due to its massively abstract nature, I actually found it somewhat compelling, and I think that it could, with a little bit of work, actually be quite intriguing.
- The music perfectly mirrors the story with weird and indescribable melodies which add to the very strange nature of the game's premise. The only problem with the music is that after a while it does feel like you've heard it all before, and the largely dissonant melodies can begin to seriously grate.
- I'm not sure whether it's intentional, but I do kind of like how after you die you keep your greenstone and kills which means that you continue to grow in power each time you start the campaign again.
However...

Here are a few negatives:
- Default movement speed is waaaay to slow, which causes all boss fights to drag on for way longer than they have any right to. This can be countered by moving diagonally at all times - which gives you fast movement speed but is obviously an unintentional bug.
- You can upgrade your movement speed, but the amount of greenstone required to do so means that for the most part you only ever end up with a full speed build just so that you can progress at a vaguely adequate rate.
- Escape key does not pause the game or open the settings menu. The settings menu that you can access in game only lets you quit, you can't change anything else (a problem with music that is so repetitive and loud). However, you can change more settings on the main menu's settings screen. But this menu only allows you to turn music on and off or switch language. It would be great if you could modify screen settings, etc, actually control the volume of music and sounds and rebind keys.
- In game, it can get annoying when respawning as often times you spawn on top of enemies and their weapons which causes you to take massive damage before even starting the fight. What also exacerbates this is that enemy dialogue damages you too.
- Dying 5 times FULLY resets your progress, meaning you have to tackle all the bosses and also go through all the cutscenes again - all of which are not skippable, and this is worsened by many boss fights going way too long and feeling like they are using cheese rather than skill to kill you at times.
- And worst of all, my save file randomly stopped working one time and I had to restart the game from the beginning

In summation,
the game is heading in an interesting direction, and I could see it being pretty good in future, but currently it's not there.
Hopefully the dev continues working on this title though as it's obvious this is one of their first projects, and I'm curious to see how they improve and grow.

After playing a couple of hours, I once again wish that Steam had a 'neutral' review option.

I love supporting Indie devs, and it seems a lot of soul has gone into the production of the game, but for me, it's too bare bones to be sold for the price they are asking. The game revolves around the idea of having your characters sitting around the table, with each one performing a different attack to attempt to knock out all other player's characters first. It's simple and fun for probably the first hour, but then it starts to lack.

Although the game is marketed as "pvp" there is no pvp except with those on your Steam friends list, and even then, the number of different cards/characters you have to bring to a game means that most matches feel identical.

I think the game could work, but it needs more time in the oven. I personally would love to see a lot more cards be introduced (perhaps some that don't require a physical character) and some kind of deck system alongside proper randomised matchmaking.

If you find the game on sale, I would say go for it, you'll at least get more fun out of it than those $5 Unity asset flips. But if you're coming for a new spin on the online PvP card game genre, then this is not it - maybe after a few updates, but not yet.

So, I've decided to now update my review after a collective 200+ hours over both the main and experimental branch. Osiris is a really nice game. It's changed a LOT over the past few years as the devs continue to improve it, and it's overall moving in a good direction. I have personally talked with Brian the lead dev and creative behind the game, and his constant determination to finish this project that has given me so much faith in it.

If you are looking for a complex "The Martian"-style survival game with evil alien bug things always trying to kill you, then this is the right game for you. It is not in a finished state at present, and there are a number of bugs. However, each bug is methodically worked on and ironed out by the team and it is obvious that they will not conclude development until Brian's vision is fully realised.

Top highlights:
- The new bug AI can be scary! (plus all the old creatures will be readded soon)
- An honestly really sweet building system that lets you create a very cool sci-fi base.
- Build a space station and ship and venture to multiple planets!
- There is now an actual story that is both engaging and well constructed
- Never had any performance issues (while still running my old GTX 960)
- The game is regularly updated with features and bugfixes
- The mines are terrifying
- The oxygen system has been reworked to be understandable and impactful
- There is a skill tree which you can use to get different abilities/buff your character

Not so good:
- The game's still in Early Access, there are a few bugs which can be a bit irksome
- The default keybinds are still weird (using F1 for inventory)
- Losing oxygen isn't punished harsh enough
- Because of the current Ai rework there are only a few types of creature
- The 'Build Goal' system is still a bit broken

Overall I'd bump the game up to an 8/10. If you're not keen on the Early Access model and potential for odd bugs now and then, then do not purchase and wait for version 1.0 (which should be pretty close now!). If you don't mind Early Access, then go right ahead, it's a great game!

Another classic Civilizations, I would highly reccomend it.

Arctico is a beautiful little game. It is a soothing exploration game with lite survival and building aspects. The base building parts of it are fun and the survival barely intrudes on the overall experience.

Of course, this game is in early access and there are bugs and parts that feel unfinished, but otherwise it is a really great game that I would recommend.

Was once my favourite game, it was exciting with a nice cartoony element. Sadly, the game is completely dead with practically zero players nowadays.

Pretty nice casual game, I recommend it!