Recent reviews by Cross

Helldivers II is hilarious, tense, stupid and challenging. It is truly an evolving live game and shines when chatting tactics and trash with friends in equal measure. Hearty recommendation now that the corpos have backed off.

A harmonious but simple combination of the Anno series and Dungeon Keeper. Worth playing for sure, but don't come looking for a game you can play for dozens of hours, nor a big challenge.

Played during the free weekend.
The game is expertly made, there's no doubt about it. The aesthetics, setting and feel is absolutely fantastic. The game serves up tension not found outside outright horror games, and you share in that tension.
However, the game's design is so difficult as to be unfriendly. Despite playing with three competent friends on comms, we kept losing, usually on the exfiltration run, which is a really frustrating and unsatisfying feeling.

Additionally, for all the game's immersive qualities, it has some idiosyncracies that seem to be there only to screw over players. Things like being unable to stack resources and shut security doors, as well as the twitchy movement of even hibernating sleepers screwing over your stealth attacks are glaringly unfriendly in their design.

If the hardest of the hardcore is for you and your three friends, then GTFO is too. Otherwise, this is not for you.

First and foremost is Slay the Spire's excellent and tight design. Every bit of it is meaningful and facilitates interesting choices at each moment. I am not the biggest fan of the art style, but I have yet to play a deck builder where the bits fit so neatly together. Highly recommended.

I really like Strange Horticulture. Fun puzzles only very rarely relying on moon logic, with a good story and characters sprinkled in. My only complaint is the music, I very much recommend you put on your own moody playlist so you don't go nuts from hearing one piano piece looped for four hours.

The gameplay is basic and kinda mindless, the characters are boring, while the dialogue is so brow-beating and heavy-handed it feels like it's made for a middle school classroom.

I am honestly heartbroken that I cannot recommend this game. Its commitment to immersion and grounding in history is really commendable, as is a story that managed to jerk a few tears out of me.

Unfortunately, it's all killed by a disrespect for the player's time, and a frankly awful combat system. I played with mods, including disabling the limited saves syetm, and yet still, the game's propensity for killing me swiftly and without warning to set me back an hour or more was very upsetting, and instantly killed any immersion. This is not helped by the combat system being unintuitive, lacking good feedback, and just being complicated for the sake of it.

Play it with your friends. It's a great implementation of a game of this type. Just don't ever play it with random people, as the game is infested with toxic and metagaming joykills. A beautiful game let down by its players.

Sunless Sea is first and foremost about its writing. It's what you come here for. Everything from the short snippets of the daily life aboard your Zee-steamer that show up in your logbook, to the stories you find on the Unterzee's numerous islands, is insanely well written. This a world with depth (pun intended), novelty and beautifully realised characters and locales. The gameplay itself, at least outside of combat, moves at a steady and relaxed pace, but the undercurrent of tension is always present. At any time, you have five resources to manage: Your hull (ship's health), fuel, supplies, crew and terror. Lose too many crewmen, or see everyone on your ship go mad with terror, and it's usually the end of your journey. But the game encourages you to take risk. Playing it safe staying in home waters, where the towns are sane and the worst you'll find can be taken out with three cannon shots, will soon leave you starved for the resources you need to survive at sea. No, the game demands you venture forth, into darkness and danger, into tension, risk and reward. When you inevitably die, it's not the end, though. Depending on your preparations, you're able to pass variable amounts of your skills and resources on to your successor, and then the game starts again, a new captain setting out from Fallen London, onto the deep, dark sea.
Everything about this game is thought through, and if you don't mind reading and playing a slower-paced game, you'll find a bounty of brilliant words and spine chilling tension in Sunless Sea.

After completing a few campaigns within Endless Legend, i am ready to claim that this is the best 4X game i ever played. It's better than Civilization, better than Endless Space, and better than even Galactic Civilizations. Here's why:

The game takes place on the planet of Auriga, also featured as a bit of something special in Endless Space. From the moment you start exploring the world of Auriga from your top-down perspective, the game starts subverting your expectations with a beautiful world, incredibly diverse factions (Both in visual and gameplay terms) and a couple of new twists that distinguish it strongly from its ilk that stick strongly to the Civilization formula.
The game takes some getting used to if you're 4X veteran like me, but it is sweet and absorbing as homemade jam when you get into it. The learning period is not at all helped by a fairly rudimentary tutorial that fails to explain more advanced concepts within the game, but does get you used to the interface and combat mechanics. The AI is quite adequate, but hardly a mindblowing challenge, but this is something the good folk at Amplitude are working to upgrade, so i won't give too much stick for it. The positives of this game far outweigh what few bitchslaps i can send its way.

Bottom Line
It's a wonderful game to play, look at, and listen to, and if you're at all interested in turn based grand strategy, you owe it to yourself to play this.