Recent reviews by Staticwombat

I've played enough of this to pass a judgement now. At its core, Sulfur has some nice gunplay and interesting mechanics, but becomes tedious and frustrating as time goes on. The most fun I had was in the demo (the first level), with each level become progressively less fun and more irritating.

One of my pet irritances have been:
- Recipes are for you to discover. Good luck figuring out how to make grenades without metagaming! It'll be plenty of trial and error, assuming you have the right parts.
- Some recipes are straight up downgrades on what goes into them. This is likely intentional, but is annoying when you're just throwing stuff together to discover what works.
- Most gun modifications feel like downgrades, especially because the more modifications you add, the more durability gets used up.
- If the katana's "block" ability works, I didn't manage it, and died because of it.
- There's no two ways about it: Dying at the end of a run is just annoying, not fun.
- Generally, inventory management is frustrating, and you will spend a lot of time debating whether you should keep that Steel Helmet versus 2 kidney stones and a raclette, instead of playing the game.
- I'd argue loot is actually TOO common, which doesn't help with the above.
- Provided you come to a level with a decent loadout, fights are fairly boring. If they're slow, you just backpedal and shoot until they're dead. If they're fast, you either hope to blast them before they close the gap, or run away, shoot, and repeat.
- Some levels are just annoying. The hedgemaze is a great example. The forest isn't much better.
- Apparently, some bosses can just one hit you (Terrorbaum). This was the nail in the coffin to me that this might be more frustrating than fun.

Can be completed in under an hour, nice quick little experience.

You can get this effectively for free when buying in the bundle with Sulfur.

Great game. Completed the storyline on hard and that was plenty enough. It's a good little city-builder, and there is distinctly a point where you "win" (regardless of the story) because the challenges it throws are something you can easily survive. All in all, great for a dozen or so hours.

Best game ever made. You don't need to know anything about it other than this is the perfect game for you if you like adventure and discovery.

My all time favourite game.

Actually a pretty fun game, when on a steep discount. That said, online is COMPLETELY dead and the singleplayer isn't particularly fun, you're playing this for the chaos of playing with others.

I got this for £3.35, I'd probably have paid £6 or £8 reasonably for this. £16.75 is an extortionate price. The devs shot themselves in the foot by releasing it at such a high price, massively overvalued their game. Which, again, is a shame, because it's pretty fun.

Quite a shallow game at this point in time. It feels like Theme Hospital or such, just every now and then you get strafed by enemy planes.

There's very little focus on the fact you're running an airbase, it's mostly just a standard colony survival game (and a very, VERY easy and basic one at that).

Every now and then you have to send a selection of planes off to do missions, for which you should be maintaining a variety of planes. In theory, the challenge here would be making sure your pilots are well trained, in a good state, and ready to go, but... When you get a new plane, it comes with a full crew, and there are no clear "skills" in the game (or if there are, I couldn't find them). So you don't really have to develop your people or worry about them at all. And that's pretty much it for the "airbase" side of things (apart from, again, being strafed, for which you have some defence options but it's mostly just a matter of sitting back and letting it play out when it happens).

Building is very slow and frustrating, especially if you make a mistake in your orders and have to cancel. Floors, walls, and roofs are all built individually, but if you plan out a whole building and then realise you need to change the floor or roof, you basically have to cancel the entire construction and start again. Also, if something is damaged in an air raid, there's no feature to auto rebuild...

As a final point, resources are... Bizarre. The game makes a big show and dance at the start about "Resources are limited, so you have to use what's around you where you can!". Whilst there's plenty of collecting resources on the map (eg, cutting down trees, gathering water from pools), I never feel pressed for resources. Getting wood and planks from trees makes sense, but I was shocked to learn that I can not only produce my own metal on my base, but doing so COSTS NOTHING!?? You literally just tell your people to magic up metal from thin air, which makes metal a sustainable resource, unlike wood.

Further, there are only a few structures in the game your people can't directly build, that you have to order from off map. Seemingly everything else (fuel, ammo, electronics. literal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bombs) can be made on base, very easily. So, I guess resources aren't really very sparse afterall.

Long story short, very disappointed in this game. Definitely not worth it right now. Maybe it'll be better in a year or two.

Regret buying this outside Steam, think I'd rather refund it. This isn't a game about making trains and routing them, it's a game about building towns and then some trains between them. It's basically Anno, but with trains, it plays very similarly.

If I wanted to build towns, I'd have bought "Sweet Towns", not "Sweet Transit".

Oh, and while we're at it, all the reviews are right. The UI is absolutely awful, finding key buildings is unnecessarily difficult. Everytime I want to build a storage, I have to search for it since I can't find it under any tab.

EDIT: Having played more, I still can't recommend this. It's a real shame since the train implementation is really nice. However, here's a few key gripes:

- I am building industries, so I can build more industries. Again, if I wanted to do this, I would play Anno. Why aren't the industries and settlements just provided on the map and I shuttle between them?
- Why do I have to micromanage how towns distribute wares? The absolute mess of having markets feeding off storages, production buildings, making sure I somehow siphon off the right resources to the warehouse vs to the market... It's unnecessarily complicated.
- On that point, why can I only feed markets and such from ONE location? Why can't they have two or more inputs? I appreciate couriers are meant to solve this, but they move such a small volume of goods to be unnecessary.
- Why isn't it clear what buildings do or don't impact desirability? This would not be hard to implement. It's equally not clear that trees completely block negative desirability.
- There are nowhere near enough ways to control attractiveness.
- The balance of costs seems to be very out of whack. If you get into a debt spiral, it's pretty much impossible to break out of.

Again, a real shame, the trains implementation is great fun but it's unnecessarily frustrating to play.

Cute little game that you can complete in a full evening. Simple mechanics, a refreshing little 2D puzzle platformer. 4-5 hours gameplay, unless you're going for completionist, then you can expect to add 1-2 hours on that. I enjoyed it a lot.

The only minor gripe I have is the number of webs I had to use to do some of the tasks. The video is pretty generous when it shows using only 3 webs to get the leg on the mecha-ant, I used a LOT more than that. Moving some of the objects is a bit tedious, but overall worth it. The movement and exploration are the best parts.

Given Sseth just reviewed this, and in lieu of ever having bothered to write a full review, I can confirm this is absolutely fantastic. It's worth it at full price and it's absolutely worth it on this one-off sale.

EDIT: And I might as well update this to highlight this game again so Stem gives me a nomination award.

EDIT2: Updating it again. Another year, another nomination award.

Flash and its associated game design died but this one missed the memo