Recent reviews by Kitschy

hella

For completely full disclosure, I don't enjoy this kind of game very much. I'm not personally very fond of games without much direction and that are as esoteric as this one. This game isn't an exception; that's why my playtime is so low.

But that being said, you might wonder why I'm still recommending it. It's because after I determined I didn't want to play the game I immediately went off to look at videos and dive through the wiki. It's beautifully written, pretty diegetic in terms of mechanics and story, and it's got a strange and very fitting artstyle for the themes.

A lot of horror I feel relies a lot on jumpscares and can be kind of mean-spirited in a lot of ways. But this is a game full of humour, empathy, warmth and hope along with its unsettling characters and themes of eldritch dread and body horror. So even if it isn't a game for me, I see a lot to love in it and felt compelled to give my feelings on it.

game nice

Troubleshooter was a really pleasant surprise for me. I didn't have high expectations for the game going in, but I was kinda blown away by just how much fun I've ended up having with it, and how much of a labour of love it clearly is. It has something of a slow start, unfortunately, with characters unlocking a bit too slow, but once it grips you it really grips you with plenty of systems, such as heavy customisation, robot building, pet taming and more.

The game is very clearly heavily inspired by the newer XCOM games, which shows both in the UI, the visuals and the gameplay, but it adds a layer of RPG elements on top of it that adds more of a sense of consistent progression for better or worse. The focus on distinct characters with personality and unique classes and playstyles instead of disposable grunts is a choice I personally really enjoy, and the lack of harsh consequences for failure is really good for me.

The RPG system has quite a bit of customisation; you can equip gear, you have a main class and two advanced subclasses for each character that unlock new abilities and further customisation options, and masteries. They're essentially how you build a character: they're skills, generally either passive or conditional, that you assign to a character to change both their stats and how their abilities interact with themselves, allies and enemies. It's a super cool system, but...

The downside of all this is that it is kinda grindy. If you want to craft gear, you need to either get a lot of money or do a lot of hunting of monsters and other resources. Masteries are gotten either as drops from enemies, or from unlocking them through levelling up player classes and subclasses. Many are tied just to enemies, and many more-or-less essential masteries for making a build capable of dealing with the strong enemies are locked behind those self-same enemies, which feels a bit awkward.

Still, the base gameplay very much scratches the XCOM itch for me, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. The story, told through a sort of VN approach, was surprisingly enjoyable too, and the characters often very endearing. Particularly Ray and HERO IRENE have been enjoyable for me, and Bianca and Alisa's relationship is an absolute delight.

It's a game that's overflowing with fun stuff, with some smaller annoyances that, to me, weren't enough to overshadow the enjoyment I had of it. I definitely recommend it if you enjoy the newer XCOM games, and you can stomach some grinding.

Edit: There's been several patches since this review, so while some things are still relevant, others aren't. I'll update it as I get the feel for the new stuff when I get around to playing it more.

Total Warhammer 3 is the third installment in the Total Warhammer franchise, and it is a good game. It is, unfortunately, also plagued with a ton of design issues and oversights and bugs that makes it hard to recommend as it currently stands. The short and sweet of it is that if you absolutely can't wait for more Total Warhammer, this is a nice enough tideover until there's more DLC and the new combined campaign map comes out in a few months. But if you're not in a rush, or still haven't experienced everything TW2 has to offer, definitely stick with that one for a while yet and wait with picking up Total Warhammer 3 until at the very least the game has had a handful of patches to fix some of the glaring issues with the campaign and some factions - or modding support has been added so you can mod those issues away.

The singleplayer campaign map in the game right now has some agonising mechanics, which are a combination of (mostly) incredibly unrewarding "dungeons" that penalise you for doing them but are mandatory, take 5-7 turns and are only doable with your faction leader's army, a race against a handful of other AI factions with an almost immediate loss condition if you don't participate, and rifts that pop up across every territory across the gameworld that heavily penalise the area they're in.

The dungeons, the Realms of Chaos, are generally fairly uninteresting slogs, with the exception of Slaanesh' realm. It is the only one that has a potential reward, as you can get some huge bonuses or great gear, if you decide to *lose* that realm. It's very thematic and cool, and gives an extra bit of strategy. The others are pure penalties and Tzeentch' in particular is an RNG-fest, which the AI of course doesn't have to deal with - they're hard scripted to arrive at the end of the realm after 5 turns. You can get around it with a cheat sheet, and you might need to - if you get behind the AI, you lost the realm. There's nothing to do unless you happen to catch them to kill them so they get thrown out. All of the Realms end with a survival battle, a long, long battle in which you need to survive waves of daemons, while getting reinforcement points to summon reinforcements, build defensive towers and barricades to help you survive, etc. The idea is nice, and it's fun the first few times, but since each of them is so long, they get tedious fairly quickly. Fortunately all but the final one can be auto-resolved with a strong enough army.

As for the rifts, you can interact directly with them to close them, but it requires either fighting them or having several heroes run around in your territory to close them using money. They do have some utility as they allow your faction leader's army to jump between them (and only your faction leader for some reason), but it's not quite enough to offset the massive penalty they give the area they're in, nor the fact they'll spawn hostile heroes and daemon armies wherever the rifts are too. The later in the game it gets, the harsher those penalties are and stronger the armies are too. All this heavily disincentivises aggressive, expansionist playstyles, as the more territory you have, the more rifts there'll be in it, and the more heroes or armies you'll have to have patrolling your territory.

The prologue campaign however is amazing. It serves as a narrative introduction to the plot of the main campaign, and a tutorial for new players. There's not much new for veterans in this campaign in terms of gameplay, but its story is the best there's ever been in a Total Warhammer game.

Moving away from the campaign, there was a siege rework that uses many of the same mechanics of the survival battles. All minor settlement battles now take place on specific (beautiful) city maps, with several lanes of approach, capture points and the possibility of making towers and barricades if you are the defender. While they're fun to defend, they're not nearly as fun on the attack. Depending on your faction, and the map, it can be really frustrating to fight them, and especially on higher difficulties you will need to as the auto-resolve heavily disfavors the player at those difficulties. The towers will continually respawn, and they can be very devastating. On the flipside, it means that, if you are the defender, you can defend against armies you might not otherwise have been able to, as the balance of power is so heavily skewed in your favor. The AI is not smart enough to really abuse it the way a player can, nor counter that abuse - thankfully. I do wish there were less of them, though. The AI rarely attacks my settlements in my experience, so I'm usually left on the much less fun attacking side.

Walled sieges have had a similar overhaul, with their walls now facing in multiple directions, and with sprawling lanes, defensible chokepoints and of course the same tower and barricade mechanics and capture points. I am in the minority who never minded the old style of sieges, but there's no denying the new maps are very pretty and that they offer more tactical options than they did before.

The new factions all have some fascinating new campaign mechanics, and I think it's fair to say this is the most complex and interesting a launch roster has been, not even taking into account the sheer quantity. Each race has a very distinct playstyle and identity on the campaign map and to a lesser extent also the battle map, which means that the replayability between races is pretty high. Unfortunately, some of them, while certainly interesting, have a lot of design or implementation issues that means the enjoyment is somewhat diminished as the cracks begin to show. The Daemon Prince, for example, while based on the super interesting idea of customisation of both himself and his faction, falls short by being a very weak legendary lord by himself, and running out of things to get fairly early on compared to, for instance, the tech trees of other races which usually last considerably longer.

Diplomacy had a very cool overhaul, where you now get to see just how interested in a deal another faction is, what factors are impacting it, what you can do to change it and so on. It also allows you to trade settlements, and create outposts in your allies' territory to get access to their units, which is an absolutely amazing new feature. It lets you supplement your army with up to 4 allied units per army, allowing you to shore up weaknesses, or just have fun adding some more monsters from other factions. Some old issues still exist, but overall a great overhaul.

And of course, as with many new Total War releases, there's a slew of variously severe bugs that will absolutely affect the enjoyment of your game.

As it is now, it's very hard for me to recommend picking up the game if you have only a passing interest in the franchise or are new to it, and I would strongly suggest anyone interested in the game to wait a bit unless you're absolutely sure you'll be able to overlook the early issues the game has. I feel absolutely confident that it'll be a great long-term purchase like Total Warhammer 1 and 2 were, but it just doesn't feel completely finished yet, so if you aren't absolutely in love with the franchise, stay away for at least a few months or until modding tools are out.

Cute and fun little puzzle game.

It's pretty goooooood.

This is the best roguelike I've played, and I love it to bits. It's very fair, it's got a lot of customization in most ways and it's got a good sense of humour.

If you liked Spyro the Dragon on the old consoles and you wanna experience it again, this is the same game remade almost completely 1:1, frustrating bits included.

It's a super simple platformer series, with a lot of minigames in the second and third game that are of varying quality - just like in the old times.

This is probably one of my favourites, if not the favourite game I've ever played. It combines a strategic empire management part with tactical real-time battles (with pause and slow-down for more control) and the Warhammer universe in a great big combination that was a dream come true that I never really knew I had.

The empire management aspect of the game is a bit simplified compared to the older games, but it's for the better to me. Where things like population isn't here anymore, each faction has their own campaign mechanics to take care of instead of such things and to differentiate them from all the other factions. In addition to that, each faction has their own *combat* mechanics too as well as units, such as Vampire Counts being completely incapable of ranged attacks, relying instead on monsters, cavalry and magic, where the Empire is a generalist faction with a bit of everything and Dwarfs have heavy artillery, good infantry and lack cavalry of any kind.

It strikes a good balance between complex and simple for me, just in the sweet spot where I like it.