Recent reviews by Wraith_Magus

This is an unusual city-builder in that there isn't all that much to actually manage besides the distance of the commute residents take (and there are transportation options to manage for that). The only way to "lose" is to run out of stone (which is more like ore because you refine metals from it) before you can get an asteroid teleporter. Other than that, the only challenge is to complete missions in a lower number of days than the last time you played.

As such, look at the screenshots, and you'll see that most players are playing this game just to make aesthetically interesting cityscapes. I tend to be too much of a gamer-brain to ever accept anything suboptimal, and make staggered "+" shapes pockmarked with hyper elevators to speed the commute to really make something too pretty, but it's the basic nature of the game that you should just take it easy and make a city in a cool shape rather than something "efficient." Even with the simple graphics, you have some options for things like clicking a "park" room and changing the color of the glass or cycling what kind of plants are inside, and there are buildings that "flow" into adjacent rooms (like nightclubs can stretch horizontally across the whole floor of a "world". There's even an option to follow a citizen around during their life. (They go to work during the day, then go to entertainment venues like parks, clubs, or restaurants at night.) Since citizens "age a year" every game day (which is itself a couple minutes or so), it's entirely possible to watch a whole citizen's life from beginning to end in an hour or two, which can be... relaxing? Chilling? Well, whatever you want to feel about it.

In terms of bugs or the like, I haven't really seen any, even playing the beta version of this game as a demo.

Much of your time is just spent trying to keep building housing to keep up with the birth rate, so this is the sort of game that works as both "relaxing" and a "podcast game" where you just listen to something with most of your attention, and play with the remainder of your brain.

The notion that this game is a "relaxing" strategy game is a downright lie. Essentially a tile-matching game, the nature of this game is that you have a limited number of tiles to play, yet if you can make a perfect match on every edge of a tile (which usually means on other tiles that you "complete" the edges for after playing more tiles), you get another tile. There are also "quests" to make "runs" of a certain size, but before too long, those are for things like "a river 120 tiles long" or "1,600 trees in a forest", and you get 5 tiles for completing something it takes 120 tiles to make. So basically, anything less than constant, relentless perfection is FAILURE!!

Also, the achievements that are the only progress this game has require constant perfection. As in, one of them I was given recently was "place 250 tiles in a row that are perfect placements" (another is that you aren't allowed to rotate tiles anymore), and somewhere around 230 perfect placements in a row, I apparently either placed a tile imperfectly and didn't know it because the game's interface is way too subtle about a faint red line (which can be occluded by quest markers or buildings) to actually see it every single time when playing sessions for hours.

So, again, play this game for the "relaxing" time of having felt like you were getting good at this - you're over a thousand tiles into a game, the map is huge, you have a score of nearly 100k, and 80 moves in the bank, and then you just keep getting railroad pieces you just can't match, and have to expand more out to the edges, and suddenly, without you ever making a bad move, you're at less than 10 moves left and you're left with the inescapable feeling you just ruined a run you spent the last week on in a single day and everything you did for the past week was an utter waste. Due to the sheer randomness, even tiles that should be common, like plains with two farms on opposite ends of the tile that I set up at hour 1 of my second game was a tile that didn't come until 30 hours into the game, or several thousand tiles later!! Due to the nature of how perfect tiles work, you've sunk 6 moves in the hole if you can't fill in a perfect match to a tile you've left as a hole, and you have breathing room of maybe 120 tiles, so you can afford to be waiting on as little as 20 tiles that are a "hole" when there are tens of thousands of permutations of tiles that might appear. Even more insidiously, however, is that every single piece along the edge (where you keep your odds of leaving matches open by having less confirmed edges) is essentially a frozen drain of a tile until every edge is completed, making an expanding map an increasing debt you inevitably drown within.
Every single tile you have to skip and just hope you get a matching tile for it later as you advance forward is like a bleeding wound sucking at your nerves for hours as you try to hold out until the match gets dealt to you by a merciless RNG that I swear is explicitly designed to hold out on pieces you need. You know, "relaxing", like inescapably being cornered and drowned by debt.

But OK, it's horribly depressing and ruins your whole day that the game you looked forwards to playing after getting home was a total disaster through the game's own fault, but you can get back on the horse after taking a bit to recover from the crushing disappointment of your second game coming to a crashing end, right? Well, haha, sucker, you still need to get nothing but perfect moves, and in the sixth tile of the game, you get handed a windmill with only farm edges and there hasn't been a single farm edge yet. RNG SAYS ♥♥♥♥ YOU, YOU LOSE! START OVER, LOSER! Oh, look, now you get an all-city tile before there's been any city edges to match it to! YOU LOSE AGAIN, LOSER! After playing my second game (for about 30 hours gametime,) it took about 15 tries to find a single game where it was even possible to get established, and it quickly fell into a death spiral of no matching tiles after only another 4 hours trying to get my hopes up. This game is just relentless kicks in the kidney by the RNG. What you can do about it doesn't matter, you just have to wait for the RNG to let any strategy you might have start to matter. Even if you have a perfect strategy based on looking up the game's probability chart to give yourself the best odds, it's still luck. You're still watching the Sword of Damocles that is the tile counter swing down with every tile you don't get what you need, and that isn't "relaxing"!!

Speaking of strategy, this game even trains you to play it wrong. Early on in the game, plains are much more common (presumably to make it "easier"), but this just puts you into a mindset that the strategy is to leave edges that are plains open because early in the game, they're easier to match (ESPECIALLY tiles which have rails, where woods-edges are nearly non-existant), only for this to very much not be the case later in the game when an invisible switch is flipped and it's time for nothing but tiles with two rail edges, two river edges, a woods edge, and a farm edge with no plains in sight. All those edges you left hours ago with plains exposed when those were common are now massive liabilities because the game taught you on one set of rules then changed the rules on you without telling! In short, the game is deliberately tricking you into failing.

Basically, there's a reason I never play games that are entirely determined by RNG. Leaving your fate up to chance is always only going to end in bitterness and depression.

Yeah, sure, this game has a "creative mode" with no move limits or score where you can "just enjoy making the scene you want", but this game's output is to art what static from a radio on the wrong frequency is to music. It's pure randomly-generated noise, best exemplified by the railroads, which tend to be a tangled knot of spaghetti that goes nowhere and has no trains on one giant track, but two trains on a single track that have to phase through each other to travel down the single linear path. It's just endless blobs of the same random stuff mashed together for no reason because this game encourages playing to the mindless procedural generation method of generating content. There is zero ability to enjoy placing random tiles down for no reason, it doesn't even qualify as a game.

Rails in particular are poison to the game, as rail tiles are vastly rarer than most other tiles. A recent event popup even has a challenge where the dev mentions that there are "no rails to ruin your maps" because in this game, rails are apparently a force of pure evil and chaos that just exist to ruin all of civilization. When I had holes in my map that I just couldn't fill, they were almost always because I had to wait for a rail of a particular shape to fit the spaghetti mess of rail tiles I'd had excreted onto me by the game.

For the TL;DR version, it's Factorio without the main character or attacking armies, but in full 3d so you can have one conveyor go over the other without the workaround of having some underground tunnels (although you do still get a pipe/mine layer underground). You can even stack buildings on top of buildings, although it looks silly.

There's some very, VERY light town management elements, but it's severely underwhelming if you're looking for a city-building sim. This is a logistics automation game, not a city-builder. You can do some decorating if you want, but I hope you're into "sprawling conveyor belt spaghetti chic". Instead, there are houses that level up if you feed them. House level raises your worker cap, so it's kind of important, but if you're playing the game by making conveyor chains for everything, less so. Experience only goes up, but there is a "happiness" meter that fills up only temporarily as you supply needs like food, water, clothing, medicine, etc., with higher-order needs unlocking as house level progresses. Sadly, happiness doesn't really do much besides being a milestone you only need to achieve for a moment and hit the button to get the reward before it drops, to get a reward of... a higher house limit. There's an issue of your reward for sending workers to do jobs that fulfill needs like food is to get more workers you can send on more jobs to feed them, but none of that actually helps you achieve the goal.

Workers can do anything in the game, even have complicated scripts of harvesting and delivering from multiple locations if you want, but because there's a worker cap in the game and workers are pretty slow, it's better to only use workers for harvesting and dropping raw materials onto a refiner or a chute that leads to a refiner. There is no day/night cycle, and workers never go home, so feel free to put all your houses on one island and then spawn workers on the far side of the moon with no path back, they'll work forever. Likewise, the game runs on that survival game physics-defying crafting logic where you can somehow mush a couple metal bars and a coconut together by hand at a "work bench" and get a working nuclear reactor. There is no power supply needed for the conveyor belts, and a sawmill built out of a few logs and some rocks can cut 2 logs per second into planks, but they have workers pulling infinite shifts to "power" it.

Also, you can delete most buildings and get your resources for building them back (items on conveyors you mess with teleport to your town hall). You can even delete workers(!) and re"build" a new worker elsewhere(!), meaning that if you are doing this game in phases, it's entirely possible to deconstruct nearly everything and start your whole production line over from scratch, with only house levels not coming back immediately. Especially if you're trying to skimp on workers, just plain deleting the whole production chain for one product once you have enough of that thing is mercenary but an easy way to bypass a lot of the logistical snarls you might otherwise have late-game. Ultimately, the game is a big list of "make 50 of this thing so you can unlock the next thing so you can make 50 of them to unlock the next thing so you can unlock the thing you need to win the scenario." You might think it's a great idea to cram everything in tight early on to minimize supply lines, but a key strategy is remembering to leave yourself enough room to build all the other things you're going to build later on, as you start making products that require 4-5 raw materials, which will never all be on the same side of the map, and will require around 20 building churning out all the intermediary products just for one product line. (Protip: as soon as you start a scenario, delete all the houses before they have any experience to lose, and rebuild the town with the houses in a single cluster away from any raw materials so houses don't fight for space with the factories. This also helps make sure you don't have difficulty having one school or store's access range reaches all your houses.) Inversely, many maps are designed with resources in the way of others, like trees blocking off access to a wheat field, and trying to destroy one to get to the other creates shortage problems, while trying to exploit both leads to cramped areas that require multi-level conveyor tricks to make supplies go over other buildings...

There are 8 "scenario" levels with a pop-up box tutorial on the first level to guide you step-by-step through half a level, and they you're just tossed into the deep end to figure out the rest yourself. I'm fine as someone familiar with this kind of game, but someone less used to the genre may struggle. There is a "help" menu, which is woefully misnamed, because at best, you can reverse engineer the supply chain if you stick at it. (The system desperately needs to let you click to go to what the target object's help page says, and formulas that consume the object to be listed so you can use the help menu to go UP the supply chain, not just down.) Worse, the help menu simply has nothing to say about most objects besides what a building might produce or the sale value of an item. Minecarts, for example, have no introduction or description in the game AT ALL. I had to build one, only to find it didn't work. Apparently, after busting my butt to make the stupid things, it turns out they're slower than workers, they can only carry specific raw materials only with no warning in the game they are limited and with no other mechanics acting like this, and the hurdle of programming them is greater than just using more conveyor belts like I was already doing for everything else. It turns out that they're really meant for being driven by trains to make them go fast, but the game doesn't tell you that, it doesn't tell you anything but that you unlocked minecarts and minecart tracks two whole scenarios/about 10 game hours before the steam engines that make them in any way useful.

Then again, as mentioned, there's no combat. There's no time restraint. The workers don't even care if you don't feed them too much. (If you do, it involves assigning a worker to go pick food, deliver it to their own house, and then pay you a coin for telling them to forage food themselves. They have infinite coins to give, and without a REAL trade system to export things off the map (rather than a factory), the worker houses are kind of the sink to the economy to drain all the random consumer junk you produce.) It has bright, if simple graphics, and no real story. It can be relaxing... if you're not realizing that somewhere near ground floor there's a snarl in your conveyor traffic, and now you have to delete three floors of other conveyors just to get line of sight to the problem. If it weren't for how complex the logistics of the game can get, this would be a perfectly fine game for kids. Then again, I played games as a kid based on simplified wiring robots together, so maybe a certain subset of kids will love this sort of thing?

That said, the lack of any real pressure can make replayability an issue. You just gain more stuff forever, and there's no reason to advance from the start again when much of how you're going to build is based off the map's win conditions and where the natural resources are located, so there isn't much sense that there's a reason to do anything differently.

Of course, there IS a Steam Workshop filled with level editor maps, so you can get more playtime that way.

It's fairly cheap, it goes on sale, and it's definitely a niche type of game for those who like building EFFICIENTLY whenever you have base-building in a game, so if you're that sort of person, this is just different enough from most of the other games in the genre that even if you don't stick with it long, you'll be satisfied enough you won't regret the purchase.

It's Vampire Survivor but animu waifu that mugs body transformation potions from her grandma to spice up her sex life.

I should put upfront that in spite of what the trailer implies, there is no nudity here. The only thing "censored" is the dev just trying to tease the end result of one of the tranformations. It's not exactly safe for work, but the characters all wear the same rather skimpy clothing no matter what.

I found the game pretty easy, and I'm OK, but not great at shmups. I lost about 4 times and then had to just deliberately die 6 more times to get the final "lose 10 times" cheevo just to get 100%. A single run takes about 30 minutes tops on nightmare mode, and that's with me deliberately avoiding objectives to farm more power, and lower difficulties are as short as 10 minutes per run. I mostly played nightmare mode, which led to longer runs, and I tend to spend longer on games than most people and I still 100%ed the game in 12 hours... but it's also $5 at full price, so I don't feel cheated, and I honestly could stand to play the game some more just because it's still fun.

It can be played purely as a dodging game, but there's also a setting that largely turns the game into a twin-stick shooter, letting you use the mouse or right stick if using a controller to aim the basic attack or projectile-type attacks.

The game is based around those transformation potions. You gain one from a choice of three at the end of a stage, with each of the six transformation types being a branch of specialization, with six active powers, one passive power, and a "mastery" passive power. These also have a visual effect on the character, like beast potions giving a tail for the first stage, ears for a second stage, and in the third stage, you get the full transformation with a new pose and "ending" (which is just a score screen and credits with a different background art that looks fit for a dakimakura). You can only have six active powers at a time, so choose carefully. You only gain the "mastery" passive powers if you max out a transformation type, like full muscle transformation changing the sprite (but not the 3d model in the stages) to a tanned bodybuilder that gives extreme bonuses to the other powers in the tree, like +50% damage, +20% rate of fire, and one extra projectile per shot. Just having a single transformation potion from a branch unlocks at least one attack and the passive.

For reference,
Big breasts = explosive spells (think unaimed classic D&D stuff like Fireballs and Lightning Bolts), with AoE radius increase passive
Small breasts = projectile spells (aimed spreads of bullets), rate of fire increase passive
Wide hips = Area spells (AoE damage-over-time spells), with effect duration increase passive
Muscle = Melee spells (shorter-range with either high RoF or knockback), with critical rate passive
Succubus = Curse spells (more Halloween-themed versions of other spells), with an increased number of projectiles per shot passive
Catgirl = Familiar spells (get animal friends like Sonic that do some damage), with a move speed bonus passive.

The abilities are NOT created equal. A large part of why I failed my first couple runs on normal, then stomped nightmare repeatedly was just learning to recognize the trap options. (Well, that and realizing some monsters are spawning bullets when they die that I need to avoid rather than just trying to kill them faster.) The cat familiar, for example, is SHOCKINGLY useless, as are most of the familiars that aren't crows. (Because the game mechanics encourage you to constantly move, many familiars are stuck just chasing you instead of actually attacking, which is extremely counter-productive.) Meanwhile, fireballs or black holes can solo the game. As a set, projectiles have the best comprehensive list, but there are some I'd rather skip to take black hole even in that set. When I did an all-melee run, 80% of my damage was just the buzzsaw.

The game has procedural content open fields with some occasional tree obstacles. The hit box on the witch and where you can't walk because of obstacles is extremely vague. The field extends indefinitely, allowing you to just move right for 20 minutes on a stage if you want, and pumpkin "boxes" have power-ups that even collect all items on the map, which can take a while if you've gone half a mile off-course, so that space is apparently being recorded in memory. The game overall has a very "Halloween-ey" vibe, with a witch floating through a haunted forest filled with Jack-o-Lanterns fighting "demons" that look like "creepy-cute" stuffed toys that kind of look like Kingdom Hearts heartless.

There's a flower in every stage, but finding one object in a limitless plane is impossible without the owl adding the marker for where it is, and when that happens is apparently totally random. These work as additional skills, with some having absurd bonuses like adding bombs to the basic attack or negating 25% of hits, stackable twice, but whether you get them depends on not finishing stages long enough to get them.

There are four types of stages, in order from worst to best: "time attack" (survival), exterminate (completed when you kill a number of demons), boss (completed by killing the boss), and a weird one with a walking container that seems to be completed on staying near the container that follows you. Running from it constantly delays the level, while a boss just warps close to you. Delaying progress to try to find the flower and kill more demons for xp for more skills all translates into better survival odds, so the non-delayable time attack is to be avoided at all costs.

Also, the game's a made by a very small team of Asian developers that didn't get the best translation job, so some of the grammar is off and terminology is confusing. For example, a power-up that gives more projectiles per attack refers to this as "hits +1", and how long spells endure is referred to as "lifespan +5%". The story is too short for it to matter much there, but it can confuse people whether some attacks benefit from a given passive or not.

Overall, it's short but fun, and frankly, you can probably tell if you like the theming on your own. Just don't expect more from it than it has - there's only a dozen or so images with some Ugoira motion effects, and a 2-minute story. I came here to kill demons and get a cat-eared waifu that fills the screen with such constant explosions I can't see where I'm going, and I'm... well, I got both.

I have some mixed feelings on this one, but it's so far left me mostly positive. I personally prefer Pathfinder, and love Wrath of the Righteous, but if you're set on 5e, this is at least a supplement to Baldur's Gate 3.

To lead with the good, this is an almost total recreation of the 5e D&D ruleset, minus the subclass options (a but one for each class of which aren't in the SRD, so WotC would sue), which are custom to this setting. (Plus, your money doesn't go to WotC/Hasbro if you buy this, if that matters to you.) What's more, this game is multiplayer-capable and you can make your own 3-dimensional dungeons which you can then invite your friends to play a game through, while using turn-based combat without significant compromises for real-time the way that Neverwinter did. This is a HUGE selling point if you're a fan and want to spend your free time making new dungeons because your latest game got canceled. The system is also very moddable, including a Unity Mod Manager fan content system several custom campaigns use to add in some of the missing features in the base game, such as allowing multiclassing, or subclasses.

I have to give a special shout-out to the 3d in particular. Even in Pathfinder, there is no use for athletics because there are no jumps. Solasta has jumps. Solasta's dungeons are an absolute jungle gym. There's cliffs you can shove people off, pushable blocks, chest-high walls for cover, and generally terrain actually matters. In 5e, even! I cannot stress enough how much other games in the genre miss this part, and how much making terrain matter helps keep combat interesting. The one big downside to this, however, is that the camera doesn't have a "rotate up/down" feature (probably to prevent you from seeing there are no ceilings), which is an issue when you need to aim at stalagmites to shoot them down, which others have criticized in their reviews.

The main villains of the game are a race of crocodile-people called soraks that have more monstrous sub-breeds (they seem like a trademark-avoiding version of yuan-ti) that have an innate Spider Climb ability, so in their fights (usually around cliffs) they start scuttling along the walls like xenomorphs. They really make the most of terrain and how its meaning shifts when someone with a climb speed shows up.

On a neutral note, they're perhaps too faithful to the 5e rules considering the medium. The Owlcat Pathfinder games cut the xp down by about 1/20th because they absolutely pack the dungeons with encounters for more, quicker encounters. This game is paced like the tabletop, with 2-3 setpiece encounters per dungeon. Then you get 4 random encounters on the way home, and gain more XP from those.

Next the negatives:

First, you're going to need to buy the DLC if you want the full system. Core classes like bard and druid, and races/ancestries like half-orc and gnome are locked behind the DLC. Many player-made Steam workshop campaigns also require the DLC. I'd recommend playing a little of the base game to try it out, then bite the bullet and get the bundle while it's all on sale if you like it.

Second, they fully voiced the campaign. This might seem like a positive to some, but this is not a game with a huge budget (see the graphics). Voice acting is expensive, so they limit your character voice options to 3 per gender. (And one of the female voices is very masculine.) Note there are options to play 6-character campaigns, and that the way this game works highly pushes for replayability, and you'll start to see the problem - it's going to be a lot of the same voices. In fact, you have to have a gender-balanced party to avoid having the same voice in the same party! It's also just a waste to make a major selling point the ability to build your own content and then dump a huge portion of the budget on something content creators really can't use without making things really awkward like when modders try to resuse Elder Scrolls voice acting outside their original context. This is the sort of thing you really need to get a Vocaloid-type system to make work the way they wanted... And it's not like the voice acting is good, especially for side-characters. Even the editing is problematic, as there are many lines that have awkward pauses or characters start responding before the other finished a question.

And that brings me to the next problem, which is that, while the rules are laudably tabletop-authentic, it'll never be as authentic a role-play experience as actually role-playing with friends when playing a single-player campaign, so they decided to use a "personality system" where you give your characters personality tags like "altruism" or "greed" or "cynical", along with a "formal" or "slang" tone, and whenever there's a conversation, the character will say things based on their manner of speech and personality. This is an interesting idea on paper, but even theoretically, it has some knock-on effects. You're given a section to write down your own backstory for your character if you want, but it's completely pointless. Even if you want two characters to be siblings, the game says they meet for the first time at a tavern. They will never acknowledge anything you want to create for a backstory, so don't even bother.

Kinda-sorta like Divinity: Original Sin, you also don't play as one character, but all of them, however, you don't pick dialogue options for one character, each character always comes up with their own response, and you just pick which character gets to speak. (For everything - the paladin in my party is always the one that tells the merchant they want to shop, and the rogue tells them we're leaving now.) This flexibility on who says what also leads to a lot of obvious logic failures the devs didn't account for. For example, my rogue has the spy background, so there's an option to have them use a code phrase to talk to someone who might be from the same network. The rogue then says they need to talk to them "alone", by which they mean "the party steps back 5 feet and acts like they can't hear." They then get info on what happened with a shapeshifter attack, while the rogue vouches for the other spy. Then, the party gets together and decides what to do, and one of the options is to accuse the spy because they're "hiding something" (being a spy)... and it's the rogue who vouched for the spy who makes this accusation, because they're the "cynical" party member! Later, I talk to the same spy, and the rogue is like "I'm angry, you know what you did!" "Let's come to an agreement." "I'm so glad we get along!" (No agreement was made, BTW, I have no idea what these characters are talking about.) This on top of the "you didn't bring proof - no we don't count any proof besides specifically doing our fetch quest" nature of quest design that has people pulling out their hair about this dialogue system. All-around, a decent idea with poor implementation.

Then there's the character aesthetics. I don't mind a lower-budget production having less fidelity, but I really, really wish there were more character sliders. Color sliders instead of presets cost you NOTHING, game developers, and some of the presets here are HORRIBLE. The "Asian" skintones look less like a normal human than the olive-colored orc skins! You already let us have purple-skinned humans, so just let us have color sliders. Beyond that, the modeling is pretty wonky and involve parts like arms clipping through torso armor. This isn't a huge deal during dungeons when zoomed out, but cutscenes zoom in and have everyone take a pledge raising their right hand... and then nobody does, but someone shoves an arm through their chest.

With all that criticism out of the way, though, I'm still giving it a thumbs up because it turns out it's still D&D, and it's still fun. When I'm done with the single-player campaign, I especially look forwards to making a game for my friends.

Like its predecessor, Underland: The Climb is 30 single-screen levels. It took me a little over 3 hours to play through in its entirity. If you measure games by playtime, then, well, at least it was at a price where three hours of playtime is reasonable.

It's a 2d physics/"fizzics" puzzle game, where you select your character or various machines with the mouse, then control them with WASD and space. Unfortunately, there are no means of rebinding keys, which really annoys me because W to jump just doesn't work for me, especially when I'm using space (for an interact key, like what E is normally used for), and space should be jump. At least 15 minutes of that playtime was redoing levels after walking into acid because I pressed space to jump. Also, this game interprets having a controller installed as "always walk right", even after I disabled controllers and tried making right on the stick do something else, making me have to unplug my controller.

Beyond that, the game is more of a puzzle game this time than just a platformer where you have to time your jumps. A half-hour of that playtime was me actually getting stuck on the last few levels for a few attempts. Unlike the first game, this game has a pickaxe which is just a free click dirt removal tool. This is both much easier to use and somewhat more demanding, as any jitter in your lines can have weird effects on your attempts to roll balls down slopes to fly over gaps and hit targets. The extremely slippery TNT trollies are much less prominent, meanwhile, which is a plus. The most fiddly thing this time is the acid, and you have a lot of levels where you have to wait for acid to feel like flowing to another platform from a flat surface. The main character is fortunately immune to single drops of acid, but it hilariously (or frustratingly) pops aliens by the dozen.

Speaking of which, the monstrous aliens use the same logic as Lemmings or Goombas, and will happily walk straight into laser beams. Most levels require "herding" them into locations to stand on pressure plates to let you escape. It makes you wonder how the rest of humanity was dumb enough to be killed by a horde of "walk left until you hit a wall, then walk right" morons when there's apparently floating platforms and lasers with infinite-use power supplies just lying around abandoned. In fact, there's at least one level where they start you off next to human-eating aliens, but you're safe because since the last game, the aliens forgot how to jump over a knee-high obstacle. Hey, humanity, all you had to do to stop the alien invasion was flip a table into the way!

All told, this is a game that costs less than a coffee, and lasts slightly longer, so if you want your puzzle games not to overstay their welcome, this is certainly that.

Be aware of what you're paying for. There are 30 one-screen-large maps to complete, and it took me less than 2 hours to finish the whole game. It's cheap as chips, but you don't get much. I guess if you want a high-variety diet of games...

You use mouse to select astronauts or... controllable objects(?), and then use WASD to move and right-click to do whatever thing the object can do (like explode for the trolly full of TNT). Also note that there are no ways to rebind the keys or other affordances for other control schemes, so if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard, you're pretty screwed.

I found the puzzle aspects of the game fairly easy - I only had one puzzle I couldn't immediately see what I needed to do, and even that only took a minute of fiddling to figure it out. By the last couple levels, the developer seems to have given up on puzzles and just outright relied on having to get past timed flamethrowers.

Instead, the primary difficulty is just how difficult the fizziks tends to be. Like many deformable terrain games, this one suffers from jittery vehicles that won't stay still, and if you try to select something else, they start rolling away even when on flat surfaces. The biggest challenge in the whole game was just getting the stupid pipe vehicle to stay on the stupid moving platform. Adding to this, clicking between different vehicles is unreliable, especially if more than one is near one another - the game can choose at random from which vehicle is near the cursor at times or just ignore the click altogether. I also had issues with astronauts getting stuck mid-air because even though all the visible dirt is gone, there's some invisible barrier to movement.

I don't really have strong (or, well, much of any) opinions on this game ultimately, I'm mostly just fine with it because it was somewhat different and if there's one thing you can say about it, it's that it didn't overstay its welcome.

In spite of the name, this game is really a roguelike dungeon crawler (with a party formation system like Darkest Dungeon) at its heart. The only "management" is just sending the monster girls to "work at jobs" like the gym (which for some reason pays them to work out - I need to renegotiate my gym membership) to gain bonuses to build stats. You don't gain levels in dungeons, you gain stats and levels through doing jobs, but need to go into dungeons for the money and game progression.

The concept of "class" is essentially replaced by how the abilities a monster girl has depends on a combination of race, personality archetype, and position in the order of battle. Each race has a passive ability and two actions for each position, and each personality archetype has two actions for each position. For example, a vampire has a passive ability of recovering health and energy whenever they attack bleeding opponents, and in the back row has the ability to summon a swarm of bats to attack the enemy and inflict blind. If a dorodere, they can throw caltrops from the back row, as well, which inflicts bleed and enables triggering that passive ability of healing from attacking bleeding enemies on the next attack. Looking for synergies between racial and personality abilities is key for party formation. (Unlocking the second half of the abilities relies on raising "trust" from giving gifts purchased at the store, with personality determining which gifts they like.)

Beyond that, the game is... deliberately unbalanced? You enter a dungeon looking for artifacts that you're forced to sell when you leave, so you always start with no artifacts. (Although each character can wear one piece of equipment purchased outside the dungeon. This apparently doesn't count as an artifact, since they don't appear as random treasure, but they have artifact-like powers...) These artifacts are wildly disruptive of combat. For example, they can do things like create orbs every round or double the number of orbs created. Orbs are a sort of "ambient magic" needed for some abilities, and if over five fill the track, an "orb overflow" inflicts a major effect based on the sixth orb's color, like a blue orb overflow making a massive wave hit the enemy party and inflicting slow status effects, gray orb overflows adding armor to the whole party, or black orb overflow inflicting blindness on your whole party if the enemy triggers it. There is no limit to the number of artifacts you can hold besides the number of events you can trigger on a map before hitting the boss and having to leave every 10 floors, and the compounding effects of artifacts mean that if you're lucky in your artifact acquisition, you can have near-constant orb overflows drowning the enemies in floods every round.

Beyond that, status effects are a massive swinger of battles, and also have no apparent cap. (I've had over 500 armor on a character, where armor deducts from incoming damage. The character had about 150 HP, so +500 effective HP, and going up +200 per round when enemies hit for 30 damage is crazy.) Whether you hit with status effects or dodge them is based upon the same "accuracy" and "dodge" stats as normal attacks, but enemies can do things like give themselves focus. Wolves, for example, can howl for +6 focus stacks to all wolves on the map, wolves can howl in any position (in the rear position, it's the only action they apparently CAN take), and each stack of focus inflicts -3% hit chance against them with no cap on the number of stacks (although you have a minimum hit rate of 10%). On its own, focus goes down a mere -1 stack per round, so wolves can easily make themselves nearly impossible to hit. Meanwhile, a bakadere character in the back row, for example, has an ability to nullify all focus, and status-negating abilities like these that seem weak become almost mandatory against things like packs of wolves.

One thing that's a problem is that monsters don't increase in power as you go down floors. A lot of games that have a system of roguelike dungeons where you keep the same character that gets reset at the start of a dungeon have the monsters increase in power every single floor, but this game basically only gives harder monsters depending on which dungeon section you entered, and you keep fighting the same monsters until you hit the boss. Because artifacts are such massive powerups, the hardest floor is always the first one, and as you gain artifacts, you inevitably steamroll the enemies if you can survive to the fourth floor, and bosses are the easiest fights in the run.

All told, I can see why some people would balk at the anime trope-y nature of the game, and the reputation monster girl games have, but this really is just a dungeon-crawler that has a VERY light character-raising element to it.

Another game I'd prefer a "meh" rating for. I'll ultimately give this a thumbs up with a ton of caveats because I did enjoy myself with it.

First, this game is definitely not for everyone. You have to be basically a little kid who thinks big stompy robots are the coolest things ever at heart and let the coolness factor carry the game for you.

Second, this is absolutely a "podcast game". I think the timed missions are a mistake, this is a game to be played at your own pace as a zero-stress thing to fiddle with while listening to a podcast that takes up 80% of your brain. It's a bunch of repetitive tasks leading to a payoff that isn't engaging enough on its own not to be boring if you aren't already paying attention to something else.

The game is basically a string of minigames involving clicking on a part to remove it, clicking on bolts to unscrew them, click-draging the part to pull it away, going over to a repair station, doing a minigame about tagging the damaged parts so lasers fix it, going back to the limb, and doing the same order of operations to reattach them. Often, you need to get to some wires or hydraulics that are buried beneath another part, which requires removing a different part, and then 10 minutes later you've disassembled the entire leg down to the metal "bones" from top to bottom just to uncover a single shock absorber in the ankle because you had to disassemble the entire hydraulics system in the thigh, first. If you feel under pressure to do it fast (like the timed missions), this is EXTREMELY frustrating because you often have no idea how much work it will be, but you get the same time limit as you'd get to replace a single exterior armor panel. Hence, again, the key to enjoying it is to not care about speed.

I also have to just say the design quality isn't that great. In this game's favor, all the content seems like original assets. However, everything seems to have the same texture, and looks like the same kind of dingy metal. Collision detection is really wonky, which is particularly bad with the decorrosion minigame. Some of the parts are missing their back half of polygon faces when you do the repair minigames, being a void. There are also no ways to rebind any of the controls, which is a glaring flaw, here.

Also, the missions the people who didn't stick around to play through when reviewing down are a lie. The missions are really just renting out mechs you own to other people as a late-game passive income thing, you just pick missions, and they take 25 minutes to complete. The parts where you pilot the mech are three VERY basic "calibration" minigames which are "my first programming project" level basic content with extremely low production values. (Mining involves click-holding at a crystal until it disappears and a "ka-ting" sound file plays.) The Sakura calibration is very basic first-person platforming, which just feels awful.

Hence, I'm giving it a thumbs up, but I can totally understand the negative reviews, as well. I strongly recommend the demo and playing past the first couple missions with the music android voice off and just listening to a podcast.

Like with a lot of these Choice of Games games, whether you should go for it depends more on if the premise is based on something in which you already have an interest, rather than relying upon the writing to carry a subject you're not into, alone, as you need to be invested to get imagining your character. For what it's worth, though, the narrative style is capable of making a gripping narrative, if I'd perhaps prefer more descriptive text to flesh out the worldbuilding rather than leaning so much on imagination.

When it comes to the "gameplay", my one complaint is that I feel like you're put into "choose which of these two hostages you make hate you or die" situations too often, and in situations where my RP leanings would make me take one choice that is "sub-optimal" for how I want to manage who hates me how much. (If the gray-style alien says eating vegan meat substitute is unethical because it still resembles food and the warrior race guy says no animal suffered so how could it be 'unethical', why would I side with the gray except to just suck up to him when their argument is so clearly nonsensical? This is like a strawman parody of a vegan that hates even other vegans for not veganing hard enough.)

The references to previous games are just Easter Eggs (the VR game the kids play is set in the same land the author's previous works were set in). I didn't feel like I was missing anything not having played those games, the way a couple other reviews said.