Recent reviews by Wiz

45 hours played, so, I tried. Of course, FM hours are often spent with the game running on a second monitor to the side while you're doing something else, but still, I played the thing.

But the terrible UI, the many bugs and glitches, missing features etc. are too much.
Even the match engine looks nice but then you realize it's just the old engine with all its weird behaviors and known issues ported to Unity instead of something really new.

Even without the bugs it wouldn't be worth it.
Sucks because they finally put women's football in and I was excited to try that out, but nothing is worth dealing with the many flaws of this game.

Misses half of the functionality of earlier editors.

Half of the things you can still do crash the game.

The writing is so bad I’m a little insulted that somebody thought the target audience of this game would like it. It’s a lot of incessant pandering to Jagged Alliance nostalgia and general nerd culture mixed with attempts at humor that are as cringeworthy as they are incessant. Spoilers ahead:
You can’t play for 10 minutes without a reference to the old games. There’s a drug called Metaviron, of course (it apparently gives you blue eyes because nerd culture). Elliot, the idiotic advisor from JA2, fled to Grand Chien, of course. One of the barkeepers from Arulco is also there, obviously. And so on. This is interspersed with nerdy references Big Bang Theory writers would have been ashamed of. Someone directly quoting Bilbo Baggins when asked to hand over a diamond. There’s a bat signal in the jungle. Ancient African relics and voodoo cults of...Cthulhu? Sure, yes, it’s a nerd thing, gotta have Cthulhu.
The pandering never stops or slows down. And of course there are some shots taken at easy targets...that still mostly miss. There’s an animal rights activist called Petta (GET IT?) because making fun of vegans is surely still the zeitgeist. There’s a Karen. Her name is Karen. She would like to speak to the manager of a refugee camp because being there is worse than when she wanted to vacation in Acapulco and ended up in Arulco. This is extra funny because, you see, there was a tourist couple in JA2 that wanted to go to Aruba and ended up in Arulco and you had to escort them. You recognize these things and we’re pointing at them, won’t you please laugh?
If you like your media to yell “DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR CHILDHOOD!?” at you and want nothing more than being spoonfed regurgitated entertainment, you might like this if you turn your brain off, but it’s awful.
The worst thing, however, is that the mercs you hire have less depth than they did in JA2 while having more lines. Ice, whose character was completely butchered, is almost entirely a gangsta parody and will talk about thug life and badass ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ without end. Mouse’s personality is that she’s a lesbian and mouse-like. Steroid will not shut up about the gym and his biceps. This wears very thin after maybe 5 hours, or roughly 10% of the game.

In terms of gameplay, it takes as much from XCOM as it does from Jagged Alliance 2, and comes with a fun strategic layer and a lot of balancing problems that will hopefully get addressed. There are some weird things about it, like the fact that the game is about a conflict over diamond mines but to force the player’s hand the mines run dry eventually, so, really, at some point everyone could just go home. The endgame is a chore and I didn’t finish the game. All weapon types can be useful in the late game (unlike in JA2, honestly) but crit-fishing from stealth with sniper rifles and/or, if you have the ammo, overwatch creeping are the best and unfortunately also most boring options. But still, the gameplay loop is engaging, it’s mostly that, without the Jagged Alliance name and a decent marketing budget, this game would not really stand out too much. That’s not to say that the gameplay is why I’m leaving a negative review. It’s just not good enough to make up for the horrendous writing.

A good FFT-like game with well thought out, smooth mechanics and nice enemy variety. And a million ways to customize the difficulty, which is great.
The writing isn't stellar but the story keeps moving at a good pace.
Definitely recommended but moreso to people looking for good gameplay, less to people that want a gripping story.

Terrible match engine.
The management part is good but the actual football is infuriatingly bad, even after the first big patch.

About 15 hours in, some of which were idling. Only had winning runs with two out of 3 characters. I still haven't even unlocked everything.
And yet the game has already gotten stale for me due to always fighting the same enemies - outside of the 1-3 bosses you face, there is very little variation between runs. It also takes a while for whatever deck you're building to really develop an identity because you only get to add or remove a card - generally one at a time - every so often. Which means the first "act" (out of three) of each new run is usually almost exactly like the one of the run before in terms of actual playing experience, at least up to the act boss.

Heavy RNG influence adds to this. You only get a few cards to pick from when you do get to add one or buy from a merchant and that means you will often pick up generic good stuff early and completely pass on adding a card later because the game only gave you stuff that you don't need. Whether to skip a card or not can be an interesting decision to make as a player, of course, but as you only get so many opportunities to add cards in a run it adds to the deckbuilding in this game being unsatisfying. Whether or not you find relics (= passive abilities) that synergize with your deck is also down to RNG of course. All in all, I often felt like my role in building a deck was mostly passive, coming down to picking cards that worked with the theme the good early picks the game had offered me supported instead of actively designing a deck.

Combine the repetitive battles and the unsatisfying deckbuilding and you end up with a game that is hard to ever really get excited about.

It's good and still getting better due to ongoing balancing efforts and free DLC.
The setting and - mostly - the characters are fun. Combat is decent and varied but has some issues with balance and becoming too easy later on. The main story is badly written and communicated but luckily only takes up about 10% of the game while the side quests range from decent to very good.

Recommended because when a game lets you play a ghost monster that can possess boulders to crush Indiana Jones knock-offs I'm willing to cut it some slack. It's not without problems, though.

As you may notice, I have played this game for 3 hours. I also got the 100% completion cheevo. So for an asking price of 5 bucks, you don't get a whole lot of game here.
What you get are 59 short, single-screen levels, which ideally would be enough to keep you busy for a much longer time were it not for three things.
First, a lot of the levels are there to introduce or familiarize the player with mechanics. These hands-on tutorials are great, but in The Dweller there are just too many of them relative to those levels where the game goes all out.
Second, relatedly, there's not much of a difficulty curve, and there aren't that many challenging levels.
Third, without saying too much the last couple of levels change the gameplay completely, and for the worse/easier.

The game's good levels are a lot of fun, though, and figuring out the right moves to crush one archaeologist in front of a second one who then gets scared enough to run off the nearest cliff in a panic is just extremely gratifying.
The graphics and sound, while not exactly AAA level, add to that darkly humorous atmosphere, as do some journal notes you unlock along the way.



In short, given the short playing time I'd wait for a sale, but I can still recommend this to anyone looking for an atmospheric, not too difficult puzzle game.

Repetitive and grindy. Glad I got it as part of a bundle.

The gameplay is great. The concept is simple and the game is easy to get into, but everything feels fresh. Your goal is to bump monsters into the water, and to that end you use a handful of abilities and the terrain itself, occasionally also turning the monster AI on itself. All while ideally avoiding to be eaten.
This comes together really well, because the abilities, tiles and monsters are all designed with simplicity in mind but taken together present you with interesting problems to solve.

The animations are also very nice.

The port could be a lot better, though. I haven't played the mobile version, but there are just a lot of things that could have been better. For example, when you want to see information about a specific tile or monster, you first have to click on the magnifier button you'll see in the upper left when you look at the screenshots. Then you click on the tile. This has no place in a PC game, in this case this whole process could be avoided by just using a left-click for info/right-click to move or bump scheme.
There are also no zoom or scrolling functions as far as I can tell, which can be annoying, especially when you walk straight into a pack of monsters you couldn't see and really don't want to deal with right now.

Overall I like this game a lot for its unique, challenging and addictive gameplay, but I hope some work is done on the PC version because the UI is a little clunky when it really doesn't need to be.