Recent reviews by Audio_Raven

Absolutely fantastic, if you love management games. The game starts off relatively simple, just point and click to send your units to the same coloured icons, occasionally giving advice during 911 calls, but it picks up rapidly. Soon you'll find yourself dealing with multi-party accidents or such a wide variety of them that you have to try to plan things optimally. Should I send a general-purpose fire truck to the collapsed building, or a specialized technical truck? What if the technical truck is on the other side of the city? Can you get it there in time? Would the speed up from its special tools even matter at that point?

Slowly you start having to make harder and harder decisions, but it never feels overwhelming until one day... a disaster hits and you're assaulted by seemingly endless stream of emergencies, that you have nowhere near enough manpower for. Your success in those missions depend on how effectively you can manage chaos and scramble your limited units around. These times are where the game is at its best. When you're working at 300% brainpower, just trying to hold everything together, and you just barely manage to scrape through with a win, the game feels fantastic.

Highly recommend, if you like this style of game. Doubly so if you can get it on sale (especially with the DLCs, which add a lot of nice little features to the game).

Its free and the humour is on point. Give it a shot!

Modeus is a treasure.

The cars feel like they're full of helium, but the rest of the physics are wonderful. Definitely takes a while to 'git gud' at, but once you do, its super satisfying. The game is great fun.

THE FACTORY MUST GROW.

It's very buggy~

Citizens are being attacked by GIANT INSECTS! Attack the GIANT INSECTS and save the citizens!

Very fun game that does an excellent job of portraying the slippery slope when dealing with the question of rights vs security.

*** Spoilers ***
You start off with basic tasks like hunting down murderers or catching terrorists, but then a hurricane hits...

... And you're not permitted to go snooping through people's offline data, but you break the law anyway because if you can track them down, you can send FEMA their location and save some lives! So it's fine, right? Sure, some people lose a bit of privacy, but you're rescuing them from the hurricane!

And then as you rise through the ranks you get a bit more power and you start dealing with tracking down serial killers or stopping an active shooter... But then a senator doesn't like the fact that your department is ignoring people's rights to privacy and wants to shut you down...

... So you blackmail her by digging through her data and finding embarassing information to damage her career. Can't have her foolish ideals stand in the way, obstructing your quest to save lives, right?

And then a bunch of corporations give you access to their data, making your job to track down terrorists even easier, and helping you along the way in your original mission to find a man who caused a few nuclear reactors to overload in a massive terrorist attack, but they want a couple favours...

... So you start doing a bit of corporate espionage on the side, but it's fine, I'm sure, because the backroom deals are how you make progress, and no one *really* needs to keep their shopping history private, do they?

But then some of this stuff gets leaked and more politicians start rallying against it. Fools. They don't know how hard you're working to keep this country safe! They don't know how necessary it is to use this data...

... So you launch a disinformation campaign to silence them and ruin their credibility. It was their fault anyways. They threatened the department, and you needed to protect it! You're the only one standing in the way of the terrorists attacking america, so getting your hands dirty sometimes is fine if it's to protect the greater good, right?

So throughout the game you're doing these underhanded deals, blackmail and character assassinations, but it's fine because you're catching terrorists, saving lives, and generally making sure the citizens can go on with their happy little lives. Soon it pays off! You catch a terrorist who leads you to a terrorist who leads you to a whole network of them! ... but they're scattered across the globe, and many of the countries aren't too keen on sending them to the states for judgement...

... Well they stand in your way! They're harbouring enemies of the state, that's basically an act of war, right? You need to show these governments the errors of their ways... Or maybe you can't. Maybe you should arm some of the militant groups in the countries who are more friendly towards US interests... So you start distributing arms to them and help them seize power, but it's fine, right? You toppled a government and installed a few dictatorships, but you've got to help your country! They were basically asking for it anyways by hiding your enemies, right? So what if a few thousand people on the otherside of the world got killed, you're supposed to protect Americans and that's what you're going to do!

But now your powers are growing and word of your department's actions are reaching the journalists, who are writing scathing criticisms of you and turning the people against you... Well you can't have that happen, so you need to silence them, either by getting them fired or threatening them to keep quiet! Freedom of speech is just getting in the way here, this sacrifice is for the good of the nation, right? Right?!

Despite your best efforts public opinion is still slowly turning against you, and the politicians are noticing... well there's an election coming up, so you've got to make sure a politician friendly to your department gets in. Can't have the president disband the department of liberty, there's still so much work left to do!

... So you blackmail politicians, leak incriminating documents, and funnel support towards your prefered candidate, ensuring she wins the election. You've subverted democracy but it's fine, right? You need to protect the department because it protects the nation! You're the hero of this story after all! You can't let people who don't understand get in the way, right guys? Right?! Sacrifices must be made! It's for the good of the nation! The good of us all! There's no way I could be the villain, right?! I am the hero here!!!!

But of course, it doesn't stop there. You need more power. Even when you're launching military assaults on embassies in foreign nations, even when you drone-strike your own citizens, even when you assassinate the leaders of other countries who once tried to help you but now stand in your way...

And then you see it. You get betrayed. People want the power your department has, and your boss and other corporations are vying for the systems that now control the world. What was a perfect, all-seeing system is being used as a pawn by people for petty power plays and revenge... to further their own ideals at the expense of everyone else. You know that you need to end this. You need to stop it. The people at the top need to be brought down. A system this powerful can't remain in the hands of those who would abuse it. A system this perfect either needs to be destroyed or to remain under the control of someone who would use it for good... someone like you... And after all, you're the hero, so why not take it? It's for the good of the nation after all...

*** End Spoilers ***

Unfortunately there's still a few problems with the game. The interface is not nearly as responsive as it should be for as simple a game as this is. Additionally when you get assignments cross-referencing between multiple suspects,... ugh... the limitations of the UI really make themselves known, and despite there being hundreds of HCI papers out there for how to build proper interfaces when comparing data, this game chooses to use none of them. As someone who worked in an Info-vis lab for a while, I can safely say that the method they chose to link data between two different suspects is one of the most annoying and tedious ways they could have possibly done it. You will audiably groan when you see the mission rules "Link evidence when two suspects travel to the same city at the same time.". It is that bad. Fortunately these missions are few and far between, so you don't have to deal with it too often.

I also didn't like that your actions basically had no lasting effects. Any big choice either ends the game or lets you continue playing. I was really hoping that...

*** Spoilers ***
When you get betrayed, you would have a chance to work with the Snow Owl black-ops division instead of with Tripwire to work your way back up to the top. Maybe based on which faction you had a higher reputation with. They're black-ops anyways, with everything they do being classified and deniable, so helping you wouldn't be completely out of the question.
*** End Spoilers ***

That aside, the game was very fun and very satisfying to play. It played around with a lot of neat ideas, and again, I really liked the story. I also liked how it showed your progression from living in a trashy apartment and working in basically a basement closet to living in a super upscale neighbourhood and leading your own division as you progress through the ranks. I highly recommend it.

8/10

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!!

It's more Valkyria Chronicles. If you liked VC1, you'll love this. It adds a bunch of rebalances, quality of life improvements, and more content, but still feels very familiar. Some of the problems from the first are still there (scout rushing is still viable, though other classes have been buffed greatly, and the AI is still dumb), but for the most part, it works well. If you didn't like VC1, this game won't change your mind.

As for me, VC1 was one of my favourite games of all time, and I think this is a very worthy sequel. It keeps what made the first game fun, and expanded upon it to make it even better. For the most part, they did a fantastic job and highly recommend it.

Ugh, this game is hard to recommend. I have experienced more crashes in the 25 hours (at time of review) I've put into this, than any other game I've played combined. Selecting missions is more based around avoiding the Devs inability to properly code events, than personal preference or faction standing. There are some severe balance issues, with certain missions being far too easy for their rating, while others are far, far too hard (I would actually say unfair for some of them, particularly defence missions).

... Yet despite all these flaws, the game is legitimately fun (when it works), and has kept me coming back again and again. I love the presentation, I think the animations are sufficienrly clunky and really suit the fact that you're driving 50+ tonn mechs. The core gameplay is fun. Some people say it's too slow paced, but I thought that fit the theme of piloting a giant robot the size of a small building. The customization of the mechs is excellent, and the soundtrack is good too. Really, if they fixed their missions (spawning reinforcement waves at the start of the mission so you're fighting 10v4, defence buildings being made of paper, escourt missions being... escourt missions, etc.) and fixed their crashes, the game would easily be my favourite game of this year.

I still recommend the game, because maybe it won't crash for you and maybe the missions will get fixed soon, but seriously devs. Fix yo damn game.