Recent reviews by Lester Thornton

Puzzle game for touchscreens with achievement spam. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

You'll meet a spider sitting on a slingshot, which would like to eat some flies. This is likely Riaaf, our protagonist. You'll have to shoot him towards flies using the slingshot. On that way, the spider will stick to availible slingshots and require you to change the direction. Obstacles, time pressure, and ghosts will appear to increase the difficulty. Once our spider ate all flies, the level is completed.

It seems like the controls consist of mouse movement and the left mouse button only. There are no instructions availible and the player is required to figure this out all alone. You can guess that this game does not support controllers, because the gameplay requires you to drag and drop Riaaf, which is too hard to be done using a controller. Still not impossible, but it would loose a lot of precision.
Keyboard controls would be an option but they are missing.

Riaaf The Spider is a game designed for mobile devices with touchscreens. The menu buttons are just a few, but round and big. Animations and transitions are smooth and look familiar.
The store description includes very obvious grammar mistakes, and these even got translated into other languages...let's get back to the game. After playing just two levels, you will already have 56 unlocked achievements. Every time a level is completed, a bunch of achievements appears. Funnily the 28 achievements coming from the first level were all named as 'A', the ones from the second level are titled as 'B' and so on. After 15 levels, there are enough achievements unlocked for each letter of the alphabet, making a total of nearly 400 achievements.
In case you did not care about achievements before, you'll care now, as this heavily affects the gameplay for the next 30-60 seconds until all notifications finished showing up (there is no way to speed this up). They will be in your view, so that you cannot even see some flies before all achievements finished showing up. The images for the achievements have different colors, so you'll at least get the option to showcase them on our profile in many different colors.

For $0.99 it looks like a bargain, but you will need to consider the fact that the invested effort in this game seems to be very low. According to the credits screen, the programmer was also the designer. While the game art seems to be unique, the game was actually just thrown together by taking the game "Fergus The Fly" and replacing its name and (only) some graphics in the user interface. The original game name can still be found when browsing the game's install directory. It is also an excellent demonstration of how Steam's achievements can be used as a handicap in games.

First person shooter meets jump and run at 600 FPS. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

Lovely Planet is made with low-poly models, which enables high frame rates and fluent gameplay on older computers. The goal is to run against a pole at the other side of the level. On your way, you got to shoot red enemies which will start firing at you once they see you, avoid red balls and mind the gap when jumping onto other platforms. The difficulty with shooting is that at some point you will be challenged by falling objects, which need to be shot before reaching the ground, and by enemies standing behing every corner or between some hostages, which must not be shot, all at the same time,

W/A/S/D keys are used by default to walk, and the Space key for jumping, both at a blazingly fast speed. R is being used to restart a level. Lovely Planet does not show any crosshair, but this is totally fine as aiming is not a priority in this game. The Menu seems to be only partly in English, but once a level is loaded, you can quickly switch through the available levels using the Tab key.

By being decorated everywhere with hearts and providing music focused on improving concentration, this game appears cute and happy enough to be frustration-free.
As each level provides Highscore lists, you can compare yourself to others by the time you needed to complete the level. You'll just have to ignore the ridiculous entries by people claiming to have completed a level in 0.01 seconds or even in -9999 seconds.

Lovely planet is one of the cutest shooters in Steam and runs on every potato computer. For a fair price of $5.99. It can be played casually but definitely got the potential to make you play it for much longer than planned.
Remember:There's no such thing as a multiplayer mode.

Two-dimensional indie platformer game which is weird but fun at the same time. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

While the protagonist is asleep in the land of happy cows, a dark creature appears, thinks of an evil plan, and points its laser eyes at the cows in order to make them fly to space. Once the protagonist wakes up, all cows are gone.
He then starts his journey to free the kidnapped cows. The goal is to walk, jump around and collect a few hovering circles, in each level. Sometimes you will need to enter teleporters, which will lead you to a parallel dimension and backwards, to collect all of the availible rings.
Making a game with hectic gameplay be level-based, was a good decision, as finishing a level provides the good and regular oportunity to relax and take a break.

Both arrow keys and W/A/S/D can be utilized by default to play the game, but it also teaches that in tutorial levels with nonverbal instructions. They are changeable though, if desired. Another smart idea, since sign language makes a game playable for everyone that makes it through the main menu.

Yet Another World launches in windowed mode, but this can be switched in the settings to fullscreen, to use the full potential of a PC screen.
It comes with slow exotic background music, which is "enhanced" by farts whenever you press the jump key...but this does surprisingly not alter the reassuring effect of the music.

If you are looking for an agility game, which does a good job as casual timekiller, Yet Another World may be the right one for you. Since the game was made by an independent developer, the unusual price of $3.99 is acceptable, as it is justified by the high quality of this title.

Remastered and enhanced version of the old and well-known shooter game Counter-Strike. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

Besides the typical game modes in shooters (like deathmatch, team deathmatch, and bomb defusal), you should give the competitive mode a try. This mode challenges you to play seriously with a team of friends and/or randomly chosen people. It can easily lead to addiction due to the ability to gain new levels and ranks plus free items.

The controls are based on the typical W/A/S/D combination for movement and the mouse to look around and shoot. Controllers are supported but need some customization in order to make it possible to play the game.

There has been a lot of work to recreate user interface and gameplay in a catchy way, and the result is definitely unique.

There are so many reasons to replay Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and given that it is one of the most played games in Steam, you should try this one, as it differs from typical shooter games and is worth the money much more than the previous versions of Counter-Strike.

A grotesque dark-themed match-three game...with jazz music. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

After selecting a level from a very unordered menu, you'll get thrown into a match-three game without any instructions. Obviously, you got to drag tiles into rows of at least three. There are no special tiles, but based on the positions of matched tiles and their number, you can eliminate one or two rows at once. Once a level is finished, a big button with laudatory words (depending on how many points you got) appears in the middle of the screen. You have to click it in order to proceed to the next level. At least that is what hopefully happens, but there is no way to verify this. The level also could just have restarted.

Nothing besides the mouse is needed, you'll use it to drag tiles from one row to another and to navigate through the menu.

Since the game image shown when downloading Inferno Puzzle has a white stripe right in the game logo, there is no exit button in fullscreen mode, some tiles lost their aspect ratio by improper scaling and the game's icon is the default unreal engine icon, it appears to be made by a single person without much effort.
Inferno Puzzle tries visually to create a very dark atmosphere, while the music tells something different.

Even though Inferno Puzzle does only cost $0.99, it is too minimalistic and unpolished in order to be worth the money.

Modern breakout game for casual joy and relaxation. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

The gameplay differs in no way from the usual breakout game, but since Breakout is a derivate of Pong, the multiplayer mode (player vs. player or player vs. [a very lethargic] AI) is literally just Pong, no bricks to smash.

The controls are very simple, you'll just need to move your mouse up and down to control the paddle. The only case where you need a keyboard is the multiplayer mode. Control keys are not changeable, which means that non-latin keyboards might need their virtual keyboard layout to be changed, in order to play with a friend.

When launching the game, you'll immediately be greeted with an epillepsy notice. At this point you'll notice that the user interface is not as well designed, as you might have expected it. Menu buttons are just a clickable piece of text, so it takes some time to figure out the difference between a button and e.g. the score display.
CRACKHEAD appears with bright graphics and "slow" electronic music. Playing this game is similar to a relaxing rave party, you don't know what you're doing and for how long you already smash bricks, but it likely won't stress you out.

CRACKHEAD is not worth the price of $3.99, but is availible in alternative shops for much less, due to being given away massively for free sometimes. At the current state, there are no features which justify buying it at this high price, but we do recommend giving it a try in case you already got this game in your library.

The game's price has decreased to $0.99 and I proudly announce that it is worth buying.

Classic strategy game with a realistic connection to historic nations and the battles they fought. A Review by The Casually Addicted Gamer

This game is completely underestimated. You may have heared of Civilization, being hyped without being very unique. In Cossacks you get to play fictional missions besides the free mode, that fact doesn't make it special yet. Though the missions give you a very unique impression of the epochal circumstances when trying to cross enemy land or to deliver a message to your king by ship when there are enemy ships waiting for you to cross their territory.
As the title already says, it only covers big european nations like Austria, Russia, Ukraine, England, etc.

Pretty basic, most actions are done by mouse anyway. Easy to map to a controller.

Excellently drawn and very detailed. When entering a new century, most images change to the matching fashion and building style.

Most game sounds are so well chosen that they never left my head even though i wasn't playing Cossacks for a decade.

Worth the money even if it's old. The sequels are nice, but this game will always stay in my heart.