Recent reviews by Sorting Algorithms

I want a refund.

I can see how the original release would have made for a tight and tense experience but with the Sunken Sins DLC that comes built in to the game the game is broken in a fundamental way.

The original premise of the game was that you had a village full of cultists tasked with purging the community of its sinners before their dark god returns in three years, each season you would have to sacrifice a villager and if the one you picked was guilty of a mortal sin then the backlash was minimal while if you picked someone guilty of lesser offenses the townsfolk would be outraged. If you played your cards right you had just enough guilty villagers to sacrifice one every round of the game, and picking the right people to minimize backlash against executions was a hard balancing act but also a concrete goal to aim for.

The Sunken Sins add on extends the length of the countdown from three years to five, but keeps the same number of sinners. If you play correctly then a little over halfway through the game you'll run out of people you're "supposed" to execute so you have to to start killing off those who are only guilty of lesser offenses, making the entire back half of the game a tedious exercise in keeping your various factions from rebelling due to you killing the "wrong" people.

The concept and presentation are great but the frustrating mechanics and and constant repetition maybe do a bit too good of a job of putting you in the mindset of a self-flagellating cultist desperately hoping for the arrival of their god to release them from their torment.

There's a lot to criticise this game for: the completely desolate open world, the characters that are never really funny or interesting despite the huge amounts of dialgoue and animated cutscenes dedicated to them, how buggy and unstable the game is, the fact that the majority of levels are identical-looking subterranean bases randomly generated from the same handful of rooms and corridors populated the same few enemies...but at its core the biggest sin is that it's just not very fun to play. Your movement and attacks have no real weight and despite the conspicuous focus on giving each agent unique weapons and powers actual combat is just chipping away at enemy health bars while keeping your own health bars filled. A great encapsulation of this is that the game has 16 difficulty settings but each one is just a small incremental increase in the enemy stats and the amount of money and experience you get; playing the game on the easiest difficulty and hardest difficulty is exactly the same only all the different bars empty and fill at different rates.

If money isn't an issue you might be able to get a few hours of entertainment out of it before the malaise sets in but I guarantee you that you have other, better shooters you haven't played that are a better use of your time.

Cool idea for a game but I'd say wait for a sale.

A most generic and no-effort dungeon crawler.

Switching from the overhead view to a sideways perspective makes this installment play out differently than all the others, but it's still the same core gameplay. The last third of the campaign has a few too many 'gotcha' moments on each map, especially when it introduces overpowered drone enemies that can destroy your ship in moments, but so long as you practice good save game hygeine you can power through most of them once you get wise to their tricks.

Abandoned by creator, not a game.

Not even a game.

The game that started it all! Much more simple than the sequels, but that relative simplicity is as much an asset as anything else; the game is thankfully free of the annoying timed puzzle levels that bottleneck the later games and with only a few types of units you can focus on slowly taking over the map. The only things I really miss from the future installments is the ability to actually detroy creeper spawners and a more robust upgrade system to make turtling even more rewarding and powerful.

Apparently this was an Early Access title that unceremoniously dropped by its creators after being superficially updated to v1.0 and it shows, there's some basic core city building and resource gathering but it's all very thin and flimsy. It's a shame because you can see how they might have been able to build it to a decent game if they had kept on developing it.