Recent reviews by Sire Admin Cuthbert the Great

"Asteroids on Steroids".

At this point, this is an older game, but it still checks out. If you have a music library (especially EDM), you will have hours of fun playing your songs. Beat Hazard gets a lot of things right.

Chillout vs Challenge: The game has options to tune to your mood. If you've had a rough day at work and your brain is cooked, turn down the effects, pick an easy difficulty, and zone out while wasting aircraft; the game does the thinking for you and it just feels good. Or, if you're ready for some action, pick up Shadow Mission and crank up the difficulty, it's not impossible but not forgiving, you will need to try and you will fail.

Content: There is lots to discover. Not just (your) music genres, the game has a lot of different modes and paths you can explore, different level up opportunities and generally a lot of content to explore. They stayed true to some principals (everything wraps around your music library) but really added depth where it made sense.

Graphics: You either love or hate them; this is no AAA title with 200GB of 3D maps and models, instead, it compensates by spraying particles everywhere and syncing the brightness to your music. You can turn this down if you don't like it, I find it fun and like the challenge added by needing to sort through the "chaff" to find what I am shooting at.

Gameplay: This is well covered in other reviews. The controls feel snappy, the ship does what it's supposed to, even the menus are refined and "everything is where it should be". I don't play much in the top-down-shooter category, so my review counts for little here, but from gut feeling I would say, yeah, I could pick this up easy and it felt right.

Summary: good looks, disappointing gameplay.

Starting with the good:
- The game is aesthetically pleasing
- There is a decent breadth of content
- It doesn't feel like it will become grindy/repetitive for a while

What I don't like:
- You can't curtail power plants, which is the primary mechanism with which a grid is balanced
- The physics are just stupid
- The "data views" are very basic

The main objective focuses on building generation (capacity) and lines and substations (distribution network/s) to serve consumers (load). It takes some hints from the real world, notably demand curves and infrastructure limitations, and does a good job of simulating a cascading outage, however, it does not give you the tools to combat this. On real electrical grids, operators curtail capacity to route power around the network, raising/dropping voltages to "guide" the current. In this game, you slice-and-dice your network into dozens of smaller energy "cells" because once a plant is online, it just ramps up to meet any demand it can, regardless of whether you want it running at full beans. Viewing how each "cell" is performing is not possible, the UI only presents usage/demand for the whole city, so you have to manually click through generators and guess if they're at/over capacity.
Furthering this issue, is the completely stupid way utilization is calculated. The easiest way to explain this, is with a diagram: https://i.imgur.com/4bWa8np.png
Generator B adds 100MW of capacity, with 40MW drawn by load D, and 60MW drawn from load C (with generator A supplying the remaining 20MW). This would lead to 60MW flowing over line r-t. Instead, the game will simulate flow from generator A flowing t-r, as well as flow from generator B flowing r-t, adding the two and causing line r-t to have more like 70MW utilization. This problem compounds when r-t distance shortens, in some cases overloading lines which should have no power flowing through them. This prevents you from building actual redundancy, making the game less strategic and more real time disaster management.

I don't see the niche between "easy-going time killer" and "realistic simulator". It wants too much from the player, and does not reciprocate by giving a meaningful challenge.

This game scratches a very niche itch, and does so very well. It's satisfying, challenging, and rewarding, and quite immersive.

The gameplay is straight forward. A plane comes into your airspace, you guide it to a runway. This repeats itself, literally, endlessly. There are some cool pre-defined scenarios with unique challenges, as well as procedurally generated (weather, wind, emergencies) to keep you on your toes.

What I have to point out, is how incredibly well optimized this game is for what it does. There are 3 input schemes, touch, keyboard and mouse. The interactions mirror what real ATC would command an aircraft to do (altitude, speed, heading, clearances, etc.) and the game has implemented them perfectly. You can tell someone has spent time refining this.

You get a lot more than you pay for, I love this game.

That was pretty awesome.

Cities: Skylines is a spin-off on a classic chain. When EA royally screwed the pooch with their latest edition to the SimCity brand, which they intelligently called SimCity giving the first and last games in the series the same name, Cities: Skylines jumped in to provide the game that gamers wanted.

• Looks amazing.
  
• Very large worlds, never found myself wishing for more land.
  
• Mod-friendly.
  
• DLC is "fair", it's reasonably priced and adds a lot of content.
  
• Tons of tools to help you plan and understand your city.

• AI sometimes makes really strange choices.
  
• Traffic can be an actual pain.
  
  If you like CIV, SimCity, Factorio or that kind of game, you'll love Cities: Skylines.

I bought this game knowing it was highly addictive.

It was a calculated risk, but man, am I bad at math.

Game has many explosions. The story is kinda dry, there's a lot of "blow this up" and "blow that up", but the game has many explosions. Can't really complain about the landscape, pretty much everything can be broken somehow (after all, the game does have many explosions). It's optimized fairly well, what with all the explosions the game has. The world is massive and beautiful, and full of explody things. I think the game really shines through when things start blowing up, because everything starts blowing up, if I haven't said it already the game has lots of explosions. All in all, I like Just Cause 3, and not just because of all the explosions.

But the explosions are the reason I play.

"Just Cause 2 is like Porn, nobody does it for the plot."

Also, mods and explosions.

The campaign really flies by, but this game is almost perfect.

1. Pick your own vantage points, scout the area, find that the enemies haven't spawned at this range, move 10 meters up to where the do, and rearrange the contents of some cranial cavities!
   
2. Walk over to the base to interact with the mission objectives, only to realize you stepped outside of the "spawn in zone" and now it's full of enemies again.
   
3. Close-quarters stealth kill everybody, loot the ♥♥♥♥ out of the base so you have bullets for the next mission, and feel like a total bad-ass.
   
4. On the way out, step on a land mine. Go to step 1.

• Looks beautiful
  
• Thermal Vision
  
• Open World (A bit like FarCry but with more sniping and less ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ eagles)
  
• Drone
  
• Fun
  
• Good story line
  
• Realistic Bullet Physics

• Once the story is over, there's really no motivation to play anymore (unlike FarCry or Skyrim) unless you re-do the campaign
  
• Kill-Cam looks cool, but always triggers when I have to rapid-kill a group of baddies, and always throws me off. You can turn it off, but I feel like it warranted a bit of "intelligence".

I cannot fully recommend this game until it's available on my Smart Fridge, Toaster and TV Remote.