Recent reviews by coriolinus

The immediate reaction on hearing about this game was "Cool, a new iteration of Jagged Alliance 3!" And it sounds very similar, on paper: run a mercenary company in Africa, with a game loop alternating between strategic decision-making on the overworld and tactical grid-based combat where a small OP squad overwhelms superior numbers.

In practice it is in fact very like JA3, with quite a lot of modern XCOM mixed in. The problem is that it mimics its influences very strongly, but somehow manages to be worse than either of them in every respect. Soldier customization is limited; you make a decision about once every 2nd level. They each have a voice and a few lines, but most of those lines are annoying. The marketing suggested that each would have unique personal skills, but in face only a few of them seem to.

The maps are very pretty, I have to admit.

Overall if you're considering this, I'd strongly recommend just getting Jagged Alliance 3 or XCOM (2012) instead. You'll have more fun.

It's a Bethesda game: part power fantasy, part story and exploration, part weird jank. I'm having fun with it.

Brilliant writing. The game part is barely a game, more a pair of minigames glued together with some choose-your-own-dialogue trees and the occasional QTE. Even so, this is an early highlight of 2026 for me. It doesn't matter that it's 60% passive cartoon-watching by duration; those are some really good cartoons. Eagerly awaiting season 2.

The game is hard enough to make you feel clever, and easy enough that feeling clever comes reliably. It's an addictive light mech-battler where you have an asymmetric advantage over the computer: you can foresee what will happen in each five-second round, and it cannot.

It's not a perfect game, but it more than justifies its purchase price.

I don't really follow the MCU; the big Marvel in the header is more or less irrelevant to me. This game is good independent of the branding.

Mapping a superhero fight onto a card game, making this game a deckbuilder, is one of those innovations which is very hard to predict ahead of time, but which makes complete sense after the fact. If it followed the Firaxis-era XCOM formula too closely, this couldn't have been as good. Instead, it's a new take on a mature genre, and it's quite fun.

You just get into a groove: wake up, break ships. Poignant messages from your teammates, break ships. Filch spare parts for your own project car, break ships. Chip away at the insurmountable debt, break ships. Learn better methods, break ships. Upgrade your gear, break ships.

The thing that makes this all work at all is that breaking ships is quite fun. They make sense, and they generally break down nicely. There are moments where things can get away from you, but they almost never seem unfair or unavoidable. It's a matter of developing your technique. Learning is at the heart of good gameplay.

This is a lovely little game easily worth its price. You might get as many as a dozen hours of entertainment out of it, but those will be good hours.

It's a fun game, up to a point. The first several missions are all a joyful, light, arcadey thing where you don't have to think too hard.

Then, at some point, you fail to keep up with the difficulty curve. For me, this happened when due to chance, one of my main landing gear failed to deploy on landing. Aircraft was a total loss, one crewmember died. My replacement plane was crap compared to the previous one, and it didn't have several essential systems that I depended on.

The missions don't get easier. Down one crewmember, with a plane missing key upgrades, I embarked on the subsequent mission. It was a disaster: my engineer bled out because there was no attempt to replicate the loadout of the previous plane, so instead of 4 medkits on board, I had 0. This caused me to run out of fuel over London. At that point, the pilot decided that instead of attempting to glide into a gentle landing, he'd just nosedive into the Thames. Plane was a total loss. Half the crew were killed. New plane was 100% unupgraded. Level 0 replacement crew were useless.

This is a game to play if you enjoy doing precise things very fast while making no errors, cognizant of the fact that in war, even a perfect play can get you killed. At that point, you just have to grind your way back up. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, then go for it. Personally, I dislike the requirement for both perfection and luck.

CP'77 is a deeply flawed game in many ways, but it's also an expansive and beautiful one. It thoroughly captures the zeitgeist of the 80s, and projects it into a dystopia which is both familiar in theme and distinct in details. The voice acting, motion capture, and character design are all wonderful.

It's buggy as hell. Alternately (minor spoiler): the player character has brain damage and is an unreliable narrator. The bugs, in my experience, are all cosmetic things not affecting the flow of gameplay. The gameplay itself makes for a pretty decent stealther. I haven't yet seriously attempted any other playstyles. That said, as a stealth and hacking game, it's better than Watchdogs 2. It's slightly worse than Deus Ex, but it's also dramatically more expansive.

Maybe wait until it's on sale; discounts always improve perceived value. I'm not sad to have bought it at launch.

You know the mud I'm talking about. It clumps on your boots, 5 kg each, sticky and heavy and miserable to move through. In a forest fire, it produces perfectly natural clay. This mud is the kind of mud which inspires engineers to drain swamps and invent ever-larger bulldozers.

Spintires is a game about this mud, about taking light trucks and progressively heavier trucks through the terrain in an attempt to outwit the mud. There is no economy in this, not when the end-of-mission screen notes you've burned 3000 liters of diesel fuel to move 8 tons of logs from one side of the map to the other. Real people would simply write off this terrain and give it up as useless, at least in its current state, and its resources unclaimable.

Can you drive? Can you drive with precision, flair, style, speed? Then get out. You need none of that here. What this game wants is the person who can drive with a winch, coordinating their engine pulses with pulls, steering at one limit or the other, to escape the everpresent mud.

Bring a friend. Play alone. If you think you might like churning along in first gear, fording rivers with a load of logs on a trailer behind you, this game won't judge. It's right there with you. But no matter what: you will get muddy.