Recent reviews by Shanti

Marvel Snap lets you build totally broken combos to get 100x the power you should, but keeps it balanced with good counterplay, and because the most broken combos are unreliable. This game is a paradise for dreamers.

This game has way more depth than I expected. It's also brutally difficult. There is a lot of heavily thematic story. It is kinda a multitasking challenge to keep up with matching color with the enemies while dodging their attacks. Especially once enemies start changing colors, too.
You have a "veil" you can throw up for a second to delete all bullets (right click). You can shift your hue with space/alt or the mouse wheel. You attack with left click and aim with the mouse. You move with WASD. I haven't tried the controller support, but that sounds way better!
Everything has like cooldowns, ranges, reload timers, speeds, and there's upgrades for all of that and the main upgrade system is color coded. So I can make my reload fastest when I'm magenta, then when I run out of ammo I want to shift magenta so I can reload faster. But maybe I want to be yellow, since that's where I put my armor upgrades?

Major negatives are that it seems like it could use some revisions and the text is almost painful to read. I'm hoping it gets some updates.

I tried to take a screenshot of the codes repository and my computer crashed.
I lost work.
It punished me.
Scariest game ever.

I hate this game. It takes a mechanic (incremental upgrading) core to a hundred games I love and hold dear, and reduces it to a naked skeleton, laying bare the stupidity of the reward functions in my brain. I played this once, for 4 hours, staying up 3.5 hours later than I should have and ruining my next day. I'm sure I'll play it again, hoping to raise my score from my poultry 23 billion into the glorious ranks of scientific notation I see on the leader board (I think the high score is something E34 currently). It's an utterly scathing critique, it's skillfully made, a meaningful piece of art.

This game is my soul. It's a rougue-lite asteriods-style shmup.

The upgrade tree is so interesting, following these incremental steps you end up with builds that feel entirely different.

The controls are tight and there is a wonderful variety of enemies. Can't wait for the boss fights to get more flushed out: the few there are really shine.

Terrific!
Portal is one of the greatest games ever made. Portal 2 is longer and more polished and adds some cool fluid mechanics. It also adds a wonderful 2 player cooperative campaign that is wonderful for your LDR.

There are a lot of cool things in Verdant Skies, but I just want to talk about the gene splicing system.

You plant seeds, water them, eventually you can harvest the plants and extract their seeds. A seed yields like 4-10 crops and each crop yields 1-3 seeds, but extracting the seeds destroys a crop so you can't sell or eat it. The seeds you extract are clones of the seeds you planted, so if you want more genetic diversity you have to find new seeds in the wild. Strains of seeds can have different traits, like higher quality fruits that sell for more, or more yield each harvest. Some genes are hinderances, like requiring frequent watering to grow.

So you bring your seeds to the gene splicer, and suddenly you see each seed has 32 gene pairs that can each be either red or blue, and each trait is tied to 1-6 gene pairs. You can together the genes of two seeds, but not anyway you want: you choose a two seeds to take the left and right genomes from, and then choose where in the genome to cut. But you can only make one cut per splice, and splicing consumes both input seeds and gives you only one result seed.

Making your dream crop will lead you down a delightful path of gathering geneticly diverse seeds, splicing some together, then realizing you need more spliced seeds, so you have to grow some to maturity and harvest many seeds from the finished crop. Then you'll discover that two desireable traits together also matches the sequence for some terrible gene, and you'll have to go back to the drawingboard.

I'm off to hunt for a seed with a blue-5 gene, so I can perfect my Pulsar Potato crop.

Absolutely amazing. No other game has made me feel as skillful as this did. The controls just melt away and you can preform an absolutely amazing ballet of precise air-dodging, bullet-reflecting, and shooting. I don't know how the game can throw that many projectiles at me that fast and expect me to dodge, but does, and I do.

At one point in the game there was a boss who would teleport around the screen, and somehow I started being able to predict where it would appear, but I have no idea how I knew it. Bleed 2 is full of this kind of experience.

Boss fights are dense in this game. I found that most bosses took me a few tries, and left me with almost no life left (so I would definitely die on the next boss). I got C's and D's on most levels. I made it through the game like this on hard mode in 91 minutes, which feels a little short. But I pretty much never beat two bosses in a row, and playing this game is really more about mastery than about narritive. So I'm eager to play through again, trying to die less, get better grades, and better understand each boss's patterns.

Plus there's a harder difficulty and different weapon sets to try. Can't wait to see what it's like with just a sword and no gun.

Competitive tower defense is one of those holy grail genre crosses. Fire With Fire makes you wonder why it every seemed like a difficult design problem. Players simultaneously build their defenses, and can launch attacks on a cooldown.

ATTACKING:
Attacking is very simple: you choose which enemies attack in what order, for example two groups of armored units then a group of fast ones. Ranking up one type of enemy to level 3 unlocks another, and flying units have to be unlocked so players can tell if you're working towards them and prepare.

The attacking units gain levels each time they're sent to attack, so players are encouraged to attack as often as possible. There is a clear timer until you can be attacked again, so there are short windows when it's safe to sell and reconfigure your maze. This all combines to just work on the attacking end, without taking too much of your attention off of your defenses.

DEFENDING:
On the defense side, players get to decide how to arrange their maze. Enemies spawn from two points, so usually you'll want to merge the incoming streams. Clear dotted lines show the paths of enemies from spawns to your tree, and as you are placing towers you can see how each one will change the paths before you build. You are not allowed to place towers that would completely block a path.

When you start a game, you can choose three schools of towers. Each tower has a base tower and a tech tree with two paths of two more unlockable towers (5 towers per school total). Building the base towers give you tech points in that school which can be used to unlock more advanced towers or to level up individual towers, so one way you gather resources is to build low-level towers.

A major choice in each game ends up being whether to build a quick, mediocre defense which might get out classed if the game lasts to long, or to architect a complex combo of towers (like stun and splash) that can handle anything but might get you killed before it is completed.

OVERALL:
Fire with Fire is a great structure for a style of game I have been looking for for a long time. It already blows away most of the similar Starcraft mods I have tried.

There are some interface issues - things like upgrading a tower or building two different types of towers often just take more clicks then feels neccesary, which can be irritating. Sometimes it takes too long to find an opponent.

The game still needs more content. (duh, it's early access.) There are only a few different options for which towers and enemies to take into each game, but it does still feel like there are a wide variety of options and tactical choices during each game. There are still towers I haven't seen.

All and all this is a great game, and I'm excited to see how it develops!

[early access] Awesome game! Unique enemy design, characters all have a lot of personality. Very exciting to see how the end of development will go!