Recent reviews by Colonel Martyr

I cautiously recommend this DLC/Expansion. I recommend it highly on the caveat of buying it on Sale because, in my eyes, 30 dollars is way too high a price point for an expansion in an RTS.With that said, I do think that Royal Court adds some fun flair to the game with the court intrigue, animations in court and the artifact system and it definitely helps fill the gap between wars or succession issues. The only real downside of the DLC is I feel like Court Events are limited and you usually end up running into the same 4 or 5 events since they're the same cards just shuffled in a small deck. RC adds a lot of things and I think for a price point of around 15 or 20 dollars, this is about the level of quality you might hope and or expect from an expansion that definitely does make your court feel more alive beyond portraits of concurrent rulers you pilot, but 30 dollars is too high a price point even though I do deeply enjoy CK3. Overall, I'd probably give this DLC a 3.5 out of 5. It has a lot of flavor but the biggest dings sort of tie together in that A. The price point is silly and B. The pool of content it offers is fun but a bit light and I question how much that truly justifies half the price of a full game.

I can't say I enjoyed trying to play this game, honestly. A lot of paths to success are seemingly gamey and random. You can still try to do things peacefully or lawfully and yet the game still punishes you based on arbitrary things. One might make the case that it's an issue of reality ensuing, but it just translates into poor mechanics. Armies seem to be pointless while insurgents are just always coming out stronger. I'm mostly disappointed because I expected a game more able to use diplomatic processes than just a war fighting whack-a-mole simulator.

If you want a loosely political game but focused strictly on war fighting, then I guess this is for you. But I didn't enjoy it.

I've only played an hour of Wanted Raccoon, but I feel that's enough to warrant a 'feel' for the game's vibe so I'll give my first impressions so far:

Wanted Raccoon is an interesting game that graphically and control scheme wise hearkens back to the period of the 2010s when indie games with a niche audience were all the rage. The graphics are simple, the animations of cars and humans are stiff and the controls are wonky. However, these oddly add to the charm and, for some, nostalgia for this niche genre of simulation games.

The biggest problem I've had with this game is when 'cutscene' moments happen, the game has a tendency to lag sometimes, or if you're going too fast like, say, when you're using the fire extinguisher on your Skateboard.

As this game is still in EA phase, I think it's fair to allow the developer leniency because the game is functional, charming and its story amusing. The problems in the design are exactly what EA is for and I hope the dev(s) designing the game use this time wisely.

This game isn't for everyone for reasons I've state before. This game appeals to a very specific sub-sect of players and I think from what I've seen so far, the game appeals well. I hope MAD Sprouts continues to build upon and improve the gameplay, lag and all that because for what this game is as of 11/22/21, it's a fun and straightforward timewaster and I love that.

For now, I cannot recommend this game. It has a lot of good potential, for example the design overhauls from the first game are cool and you can see there's a lot of love poured into the game. But for me the biggest turn off for me is the fact that the faction system is very disconnected. Every faction generally starts out neutral with you, so you work with them, no big deal. But if you run into any of their patrols? You can't just simply say 'Hey, what's up' and part ways. Your only option is to either fight them, hope you can flee, otherwise they'll fight you. It really makes no sense and I've had to reload way too many times over this incredibly rigid and inflexible system and it really ruins a lot of the fun of the game for me. So for the time being, I cannot recommend this game until further patching addresses this issue.

As of writing this, I have 7 hours into the game, so I still have much to learn. But one of my biggest gripes is the learning curve is a bit thrown at you and left for you to figure out. I also do not care for how even of the lowest catastrophe difficulty, I still suffer catastrophes and it easily desolates my village because the game's resource consumption is almost as high as you can bring in.

All that being said, I still enjoy the game, I'd just like the game to be more fair and balanced to the player on easy/medium difficulties, or maybe this is my inexperience as a newbie. For an Early Access title, this is a very good game and I cant wait to see where these guys go with it.

The most flexible world design in Fallout to date. While the story is not the most deep or complex, it's a beautiful experience, especially for anyone who's making this their first entry into the Fallout series.

So what's to say about Shelter? At first, based on screenshots and graphics, I expected it to be, at best, low effort bunker building simulator to appeal to the niche base of post-apocalypse fans. In a nutshell, it is. However, it's not JUST a bunker building game, it's got a surprising layer of complexity to how you can build your shelter up, not a lot of complexity, but it's much more than one may expect based on initial appearances. The game can get fairly redundant in the cycle of 'Build > Low on resources > Expedition > Return > Repeat' however, this is made up for by the relaxing OST and amusing things such as traps for hunting and the later game jukebox. This game is by no means perfect, however, considering how low my expectations for the quality of this game were, I'd rate it about a 7.5 or an 8.0 out of 10.0. 1 being horrible, 5 being average and 10 being perfection. So my rating for this game is 'very good'.

Pros:

Well designed crafting system
Varied ways to layout your shelter to your tastes
Lovely backdrops in the exploration menu
Relatively decent depth of day to day management of your bunker

Cons:

Expeditions can feel very repetetive at times (or quickly, based on how patient you are).
Shooting is bizarelly inaccurate even when you do meet the strength requirements.
Bears are a damn nuisance to fight or flee.
Sometimes it feels like it's just a clickfest with minor interaction.

So far I've found Fallout Shelter enjoyable. The Free to Play aspect can make certain things like characters and weapons inconvenient or a little difficult, but given the state of the low price indie game market on Steam or the rubbish coming out of Greenlight in the past few months, I'd say you get your money's worth out of 'buying' this. In that I mean it's entirely based on whether you enjoy resource management and casual building games. If you don't, you're going to not enjoy this game. Honestly, it's not so bad beyond the knee jerk reaction over a Free to Play game with microtransactions. I can't say you can call this pay to win because I've spent no money on this game, nor can I afford to, but I've gotten some pretty nice stuff from the scavenging and Wasteland exploration. To be honest, this game is entirely what you make of it to be. But it's a casual time-waster kind of game, so you shouldn't expect it to be a free game with AAA storytelling or something, it's a settlement management mini-game, basically.

Playing around with CK2 with this update and it's alright. The Content pack is largely unneccessary since Africans are generally out of the way, but I do admit I like the new councillor models and portraits for Africans instead of them all being the same black guy like there's a secret cloning lab somewhere in the Sahara letting loose clones. This is a pretty nice content pack. Entirely optional, but it's nice if you play in Africa or like to merge physical genetics traits, so I recommend it if you want more flavour.

CK2 is a fantastic game with a learning curve, but once you get over it the game is a ball. You can refine your dynasty through genetic selection, conquer much of the world or just live out the game as an unambitious duke if you're so inclined. The great thing about CK2 is that it follows very little stories beyond characters like Charlemagne and the history of other famous bookmarked characters and yet so many stories can unfold for you. Mongols conquer Byzantium. Scotland conquering England and countless other ahistorical potential stories.

The downside though is an expensive DLC list. For the uninitiatied, the general rule of thumb with Paradox games is 'Wait for the sale' because you'll get so much content for so much less and at a fairer price. Definitely one of the best games I have ever played and if grand strategy is your genre, I thoroughly recommend CK2 to you.