Recent reviews by bhaktivedanta

Surprisingly fun abstract idle rpg - mechanics and interface are a bit obscure at start, but one gets the gist rather quickly by looking at possible actions and exploring the menus. If you are into text-based adventures and looking for a game combining the spirit of late 70s genre pioneers with modern idle mechanics, you should give this a shot.

A nice space-themed idler, where one has to tune the load-out of one's ship for each prestige-reset.
Does not feel too grindy, basically adjusting a few settings in work breaks.

The Penguin IQ Test is not actually an IQ test, but a challenging puzzle game, where the player has to guide a penguin character through a vast magnitude of two-dimensional maps to freedom.
The task is always, to move the penguin from a starting point to a certain end point. Movement is directed with several kinds of arrows: permanent, temporary, rotating and direction-inverting.
The player has to place the arrows on the map and then let the penguin run the parcours, watching events unfold like a rube-goldberg machine. This is similar to a programming game, but without actually having to write code: The sequence of the penguin's moves is encoded by the arrows on the map instead.
Often, there are objects to interact with: Blocks to fill water or lava pits and to activate pressure plates, buttons and pressure plates to open doors, machinery to push blocks and even NPCs that will also follow arrows and remove trees or rocks blocking the path. In some levels, the player will have to place teleporters or walls on the map or even interact with cloning machines in order to succeed.
The Penguin IQ Test comes with a large amount of levels and the option to download more via the workshop or create own maps for other players. The levels offer a lot of variety and never felt repetitive, making The Penguin IQ Test stand out among the puzzle games on Steam.
The game features retro style graphics and music that fit well to the overall theme of logics and abstraction.
Considering the amount of content and how well thought-out the often very challenging levels are, the game's price is a steal and The Penguin IQ Test is a must have for every puzzle lover!

If you only want some dull arts questions without anything around, well here you go...
I played 5mins and had already questions repeating... not sure what that says about the available volume.
You get the 5k Achievements all at once when starting the game, they all have the same name and icon, which reads... wait for it... "boxing trivia"!!! That should tell you all you need to know about how much love and effort went into this game.
Bought this at a 90% discount and still felt that I overpaid...

Gwent is a dack-builder card game. Players build decks for up to 6 different factions adn then battle other players in a best of three rounds match. The art of the game is to pick the right card combinations and to know which rounds to fight for victory and when to pass after - hopefully - having depleted the opponents hand and thus being able to win the next round.
At least that is how it is supposed to work, BUT...
The meta is very narrow: Only very few builds are viable to an extent, that they have fair chances against most other builds. Those few "universally viable" builds require some specific "legendary" cards, which are - who would have thought - a pita to obtain via grinding / without paying.
If you are willing to pay for the heavily overpriced card packs - more than 4 EUR for a mere chance to draw sth. good - you may be alright with that, but the game's lousy overall balance and the unpredictable nature of future balance changes do not exactly invite to invest in this game imho.
Until you finally get the cards required to build a deck on par with the current meta, you will pretty much have to play rock-scissors-paper on a deck vs. deck level, meaning you either get matched vs. an opponent with a deck that your specific sub-meta deck may win against or vs. one that you have no chance to beat even with the most favourable hands your own deck has to offer. Is it fun when a match is basically decided before even the first cards have been played? I think not.
My advice: Try it for free, you may still like it, but do not pay for this, this is pretty much a ripoff.

Nice graphical style and a lot of flair, look and feel of one of those table-top addons that could be combined with those classical p&p rpgs in order to visualise dungeons, etc. - in fact it reminds me of my pen & paper days in a good, refreshing way.
Don't expect booker-prize worthy storytelling here (... which game has?...), it's mostly classical tropes with a nice style.

I do not own this (yet) at review time but have played it with a friend via the remote play feature. Worked like a charm and adds a lot to the experience.

TL;DR: Not for competitive PC players that prefer mouse and keyboard over controller.

Splitgate is a fast-paced egoshooter with the special feature that players can place portals on certain parts of the maps. These portals can either be passed by the player or shot through and allow for quick flanking.
There are zillions of different game modes from deathmatch (team / free for all / ...) over various domination modes to round based modes where the opponent team has to be killed in several rounds. The selection of guns is pretty much a Quake / Unreal / Doom arsenal, but the variety is certainly greater, with some roles (shotgun / sniper) covered by several guns with subtle differences.
The game also features jetpacks with limited (but recharging) capacity in order to enable more movement options.
One big plus is that the game does run on Linux and performs well.

I would say Splitgate is a fun game overall, but a fair competition is tainted by the aim assist and bullet magnetism console/controller players enjoy. They will have an inbuilt aid that will slow their crosshair when it is over an opponent and thus create an aim-lock effect similar to some PC cheats. Also, their shots will register as hits, even if the crosshair is off by some angle, just as if the bullets were magically attracted to the target.
This assistance appears to be pretty strong compared to other shooters with similar mechanics and levels subtle skill differences between average talented players like a bulldozer. Reportedly, there are also first cheats out that capitalize on this inbuilt mechanics.

The traditional mouse+keyboard setup will most likely still be the better option for the most gifted talents on an elite e-sports level, should this title ever reach e-sports maturity.
For the average player, however, the use of controller provides a very significant advantage, allowing for a run-and-gun playstyle that would require a lot of practise using mouse and keyboard.

Thus, for mouse and keyboard players, Splitgate certainly makes for a good casual time-waster but, sadly, not more. Missed chance!

Battletech is one of a long series of games reaching back to the 1980, which is centered around giand two-legged fighting robots, called "Mechs". This one is a turn-based tactical game where the player controlls squads of four "Mechs" and fights small scale skirmishes vs. other Mechs and sometimes vehicles. The action is seen from a bird's eye 3rd person view as usual for the tactical genre.
The dystopian background story is centered around a mercenary company taking contracts and participating in the various conflicts of a future galaxy settled by various human factions fighting each other. The player has their mercenary troop travel from solar system to solar system, fight in small scale regional encounters, hire and train Mech pilots in various skills salvage Mech parts from the battlefield and upgrade their own Mechs.
The design of the combat mechanics is solid but not groundbraking. The main tactical aspects are cover, evasion by moving and attack from behind capitalising on a Mech's lower back armour. One also has to manage heat generateds by firing weapons and using jumpjets. All-in-all the fighting feels a lot like X-Com: Enemy Unknown but with a less challenging AI.
Mech customisation is also reasonable, one can chose from 3 main weapon categories (guns, lasers, missiles) and has several options in each of these including rare advanced versions. There are also auxilliary upgrades such as range finders. Detailed editing of the armour profile is possible, providing some tactical subtleties such as mechs being heavily armoured on one side only but requiring cover from a teammate on the other side. The limiting factors for all mech configurations are the tonnage allowed for each chassis and the available weapon mount points. There is a wide range of base chassis (Mech models) to chose from, most of which one has to buy after tedious grinding for funds as the mercenary outfit one has to manage is completely broke at the beginning of the campaign.
Mentioning the campaign, we come to the bad parts of the game: Multiplayer is virtually non-existent, I have been told there is a discord group and a forum on the paradox page for the few players who still fight each other online. On a friday evening I found a single open lobby which was set to private. - There is a reason less than 0.1% of players have the multiplayer-related achievements on steam.
So we are left with said singleplayer campaign: The story evolves around the player character being drawn into a succession conflict, helping a lady enforce her claim to the throne and avenge their old mentor who has been killed by the ursurper.
Rather cheesy cartoonish sequences, run-of-the-mill storyboard and dialogues that have three answer-options that all lead to the same outcome could all be forgiven for a tactical game. What can not is the repetitiveness of the missions. Grinding for funds, one will have to play the same mission on the same maps versus slightly different opponents over and over. The AI is really stupid and sometimes even fails at pathfinding. Repetitive boredom all over it is.
So maybe one could at least sit back, relax and enjoy the artworks...? Nope, sadly not! The design of the space ships is actually rather good, reminding a bit of the Perry Rhodan illustrations. But starships are only shown in cutscenes while travelling between different solar systems. These actually become an annoyance after a while, as they can not be skipped (at least not on Linux where, by the way, the game runs very well thanks to Unity).
The different Mechs often look so very similar that one has to click them and chack the info-box in order to determine what model they are. The variety of biomes is even smaller than the size of the map pool - everything looks very much like old earth. For a game set in an era of interstellar travel this is really underwhelming. Even the odd sets from George Lucas' Star Wars look more credibly alien than what Battletech offers. As a consequence of loveless design, or rather the total lack thereof, the visual appeal of the skirmish-battles is on-par with the genericity of an asset-flip.
All that comes at a steep price tag, charging extra for dlc with content so very limited even pay-for-every-button Paradox should be ashamed.

Bottomline: The main problem with Battletech is that it does break every promise made during the first two missions by sheer repetitiveness and boring look-and-feel. Don't buy, even at a bargain, unless you are being paid for the time spent playing.

Word of Tanks Blitz ("WoTB") is a tank battle game where two teams of 7 tanks battle on various maps. The main challenge is positioning your tank right to block incoming shots with your armour and to hit the enemy in vulnerable spots. There is a vast selection of tanks available: historical, prototype and fantasy models.
Blitz is the mobile-available version of the "big brother" World of Tanks. The main differences are smaller maps and teams and a faster paced gameplay with battles lasting 7 minuts at most.
As in the original many tanks require either real money to purchase or a tedious grind to unlock for free. If you want to have nice tanks quickly, the game can be rather expensive. There are also some minor pay to win aspects such as premium ammo in the game, but overall premium vs non-premium feels fair and balanced.

I actually like the concept of this game and wanted to give a good review, however I cannot. The reason I decided to thumbs-down is not at all the monetary aspect but rather two very major flaws in "competitive" play:

I am a person who enjoys games that are easy to understand but hard to master and require effort to build up one's skill. World of Tanks Blitz sure checks that box.
However a team game should allow for full premade teams (platoons) to join a battle and compete vs. other teams. Without that feature, there will never be serious strategies/tactics on any map.
WoTB only allows platoons in casual gameplay and thus there is no competitive gameplay worth mentioning. In fact the pinnacle of team tactics is often "all go this same direction".

Another big minus is the rating system. Mathematically sound rating systems should give lower rated players, who outperform their expected results, larger rating gains than higher ranked teammates, who had a bad game. WoTB however appears to ignore its own impact metrics (damage, kills, spotting, ...) and attributes successes mostly to the higher ranked players while losses are counted towards the lower ranks.
As this system is implemented, the changes in rating after a game give the individual players very little feedback about their actual performance and what should be improved. Often those rating changes even appear to contradict the various other impact stats, that are shown next to them.

As a consequence of those two points - no team-queuing and a mathematically flawed ranking system - the matchmaking experience is pretty random and chaotic and makes it very difficult to learn from the matches one has played.

All in all WoTB as a game falls way short of the many possibilties offered by its concept and is little more than a rather expensive waste of time.

Zero-K ("ZK") is an open-source real time strategy game based on the Spring engine.
That engine has been around for over 15 years and it shows: While the graphics may not be state of the art any more, the other technical aspects of the game are very mature.
Spring based games tend(ed) to be oriented at the 1990s classic "Total Annihilation" ("TA") but ZK has come a long way: The devs have streamlined the mod so that every unit and building has its own role and mechanics: There are units that cloak, stun, disarm, jump, incinerate, push or pull, climb walls... and lots more.
Units are organised into different factories, each of which represents a certain theme or gameplay focus:
Rovers are quick in flat terrain but fragile, tanks are the robust but more expensive option for the plains, there are aircraft to bomb high value targets and shield the team from air attacks and there is a gunship factory for providing close air support to ground units. There are bots with cloaked snipers and stealthy melee assassins, heavier shield bots, amphibious bots, jumping bots for taking strategic hills and closing in quickly to the enemy and there are spiders for mountain warfare. Also hovercraft and ships have their own factory.
Sounds a lot? Yet, the game is relatively easy to learn (but hard to master) as every factory has only the units required for the classic roles on the battlefield (raider, skirmisher, riots, artillery, assault) and a few specialists for the factory-specific gameplay. Most factories can do most things in principle but every on is best suited for a specific purpose.
As in original TA there are the two resources metal and energy where metal is extracted from spots on the map that thus mark strategic important positions and energy is created by specific buildings. Unlike original TA there are no buildings to generate metal from energy but instead excess energy is used to "overdrive" metal extractors with decreasing returns. Thus one cannot simply sit back in one's own base and build defense. A good economy requires to conquer the metal spots on the map!
Every player starts with a single (unique) commander as the first construction unit and can instantly build a free factory of her choice. There are no technology levels as in original TA or other games. Instead "higher tier" units and buildings simply cost more. This design choice makes the game very fast and dynamic to play and allows for a vast magnitude of strategies as players can cooperate to rush more expensive units and (hopefully) gain a surprise advantage by those unit's special capabilities.
In addition to the standard factories there is also a strider-hub for very expensive super units and there are game-ending super-weapons to break ties.
The game features ranked competitive matchmaking in 1v1 or small teams (but currently only 1v1 has a decent player base). There are also casual games, typically played in larger teams up to 16v16, FFA games, coop games vs AI or special aliens ("chickens"). The AI can be surprisingly strong and give this game a viable singleplayer option.
A specialty are widgets written in LUA which can automate a lot of the tedious click-work found in other rts games. Many widgets come with the base game and others can be downloaded for free. For example there are skirmish AIs which let artillery retreat from raiders and push when they are free to advance. Writing ones own widgets is not considered cheating and there is a variety of community-made "helper scripts" available. (Note that it is usually expected to publish the self-written widgets for everyone.)
With the default skirmish AIs and other widgets, players can focus on strategic thinking and tactical nuances and need not indulge in rapid clicking only to manage default tasks as is often the case in other RTS games such as Starcraft.
I have been playing Spring based games since 2006 and ZK since 2011 (with a long pause), before it came to Steam. A decade of continuous development has resulted in a very polished game which is surprisingly well-balanced given its complexity and unique innovative features. Certainly a must-try for RTS-lovers.