Recent reviews by SquirrelsOfWar

A truly great achievement in the RPG genre. Plenty of room for repeatability, that is if you even make it through the spider-like bethemotic of a campaign. A fantastic translation of 5th edition D&D (maybe onboarding could be better for people who don't know the system) that features a host of roleplay potential. Exploring is up to you, be thrown to impossible ledges, float to survive colossal falls - roaming around the environments is an adventure in itself, not a simple A to B autopilot. Writing and conversations keep the game fresh, with millions of outcomes of quest paths (most less obvious than you would think). You'll be finding new solutions for adventures well into the year 2055!

With the latest patch, this is the smoothest and most realised version of Icewind Dale. One of an era of classic RPGs, it comes rejuvinated for a new era. That being said, it is quite technical as it comes from an older version of Dungeons and Dragons, so can be a bit intimidating for those not used to that system.
The story and dungeon crawling is high quality, and there's plenty of hours to be delved into with a solid level of difficulty.
I'd highly recommend this to those who've either played the original release or those looking to get a good window into an older era of D&D.

Total War : Warhammer 2 seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. With a mountain of content (lots admittedly as DLC, but all well worth the price of admission), it not only expands from the previous Total War formula with a wide array of factions, playstyles and a diverse landscape but also from the previous Warhammer entry by polishing pretty much all aspects of the game.
The turn-based overworld is second to none, although admittedly Creative Assembly have done better since on their real-time battles (especially the AI, where in TWW2 the combat AI is functional at best) it can't beat the sheer joy of realising a battle with these monsterous fantasy units.

While I know the sheer amount of content for this game may be intimidating for a new purchaser and I know the tutorials probably don't help the onboarding process, once you've started taking turns and ploughing through the fantastical world you'll be hooked.

With the popularity of Dark Souls at the moment, difficulty seems to be the buzzword of the industry. This can be a great boon and imbues games with a sense of accomplishment and worth when done correctly. Blackguards seems difficult for all the wrong reasons, from an obtuse user interface to mindbogglingly poorly designed stats pages.
While I appreciate that any game coming from an existing Pen and Paper world will always have a higher step up for the user than most, Shadowrun earlier last year seemed to create a system both faithful and functional while Blackguards seemed bogged down in it's own mechanics.
The story is about par for course and the voice acting is quite refreshing, but it just seems like the clunky mechanics just get in the way of that experience and the difficulty wildly differs so much you bound between feeling elated and cheated every few minutes.
While people howl off the rooftops at the percieved "dumbing down" of videogames, sometimes it has a point. Parts of the design feel snobbish, as if it wants to pat it's faithful on the back and tell them how smart and clever they are while with the other hand swatting away the "casual, filthy masses". Blackguards needs to get down of it's high horse and reduce the barriers to entry that stop it from being the good game I know underneath is has the potential to be.

Banished has some great features to it, it's simple to learn and yeilds that "just a bit more..." addiction that is the hallmark of a well designed stratagy game. The tutorial is almost unneccessary as the game is so easy to pick up, the only thing I ended up actually learning was a few UI options that were buried in unintuitive places, something a tiny bit more testing might have routed out. Nowhere near close enough to be a dealbreaker, or detach from the fun of creating a thriving city.
Difficulty is the name of the game and this game sure does have it by the bucketloads. A refreshing pace from the far too forgiving modern stratagy scene it offers a good balence of enjoyment and discovery but can somehow go into that Dark Souls-esque realm of "why is this game doing this to me!".
While it can get frustrating, it does force you to pick up and start again, keeping it fresh as I'm sure after a certain point the choices would stagnate the game slightly once all used up.
While I got a ton of hours out of it, it's difficult to recommend. The quality is getting there, sure, but the price is a bit steep (£15 at time of review) for something that still has it's first-itteration quandries to sort out, and with the infequency of patches, I'm not really sure these tiny patches will ever come around.

Defence Grid 2 builds upon the surprise hit of the original with a miriad of new and welcome features. The original revived the Tower Defence genre and also allowed it to take the leap from free flash game over to a full retail release. That was not unwarrented, it oozed charm in it's voice acting and visual simplicity. Thankfully the voice acting is back and indeed expanded with a cast including that Bioware favourite Jennifer Hale and Firefly alum Alan Tudyk, both of which are exactly as excellent as you would expect!

In the natural expansion that comes with being a sequel there appears to have been a good deal of confusion. Menus are mindbogglingly unintuitive to cycle though, it brings back awful memory of the dashboard that shipped with the Xbox 360 on launch (trust me, it doesn't hold up). There's plenty of game modes that seem well designed and add lots of life to the intrepid builder, but they are quite hard to track in the interface. I think my biggest complaint is that somehow it has done the impossible and has had a visual downgrade between itterations.

After a few rounds you get used to the clunkier visuals and settle into the varied and polished gameplay. There's some great length to the campain, expanded by the dozens of variations and challenges per mission, it really does give you some wondeful value if you want to even complete 1/5 of the modes available.

In summary, while on the surface making something as simple as tower defence work on a larger scale may seem easy, DG2 finds a few of the faults that have defeated some of it's competition but it still exhudes the charm and polished gameplay that made DG1 such a runaway hit. If you want more Defence Grid, here it is!

Tropico has a history of producing very average filler DLC, while most of them are usually decent bits of fun "Mad World" offers nothing for the user except frustration and torment. It is a grind and is buggy beyond all belief. Parts of the game are uncompletable, not just through technical bugs but also by some mind-blowingly terrible design choices, things that even one playthrough in the office would have raised so many red flags everyone would have gone colourblind.
I struggle to comprehend how a product this flawed can even be released and it is a shame that is has muddied my experience with such a good and interesting franchise.

A really excellent and deep strategy game that offers absurd hours, even before you use mods to completely change and twist the campaign. With breath-taking historical accuracy it creates a world ripe for you to wage war or swift diplomacy with.
For old Total War fans this is the difinitive version of the franchise, with the only critique I can level at the game is that there are plenty of features hidden away or harder to use. While the game can sometimes struggle under the weight of it's immense systems, it is impressive that such a sheer amount of features exist in the first place!
Overall a triumph for RTS genre and a gift that keeps on giving!