Recent reviews by Frahg

One of the best "simulator" games out there. Not only does it simulate powerwashing well, but it also has a fun backstory and plenty of stuff to unlock to improve your experience.

A simple solution for making games that don't support borderless fullscreen, support it. It's a rare game nowadays, but when you got back 10 or so years and play some of the older titles it's an invaluable tool and just works as expected.

The best idle games are ones with lots to discover, so they don't grow stale over time. What happens when I reach this point, or when I "prestige"? How does the game change and evolve? NGU Idle has so much to offer here. The evolution remains interesting for thousands of hours. There's hidden things, obvious things, and so many paths to increasing your number, it never gets stale.

One of the ways it manages to stay engaging is by hinting at what's to come. There are locked buttons, and features named but not explained, so you want to keep playing to pursue those goals.

And then there's the humor. So many pop-culture references, and artwork that will get a chuckle out of you. Do yourself a favor, and try this game for a little bit, it's worth it.

edit 11/27/2020: still amazing, still in development. Great game.

It took me two or three tries to really start to understand the appeal of this game. At first, it felt like a very formulaic clicker. I tend to shy away from the games that blindly follow the Cookie Clicker model.

But I gave it more time, and soon I started unlocking different wizards and pets, and discovering challenges and skill points. I started to understand just how deep this game could be. It has so many things to unlock, by playing through in certain ways, that it feels a lot more like Realm Grinder.

You don't get fixed in a certain mode of play, you are playing towards objectives and that can dramatically change what you do and how you play. All in all keeping the game interesting for quite a while. I'm still early in the process of unlocking things, even with a hundred hours under my belt.

This game is amazing. It has so much character and charm. The robots have hopelessly misinterpretted what it means to have a job, and it's a riot from end to end. The only downside was that each job ended, but now with the endless mode that's not even a concern. I definitely recommend it.

I haven't played this game since May (v5ish), but even then the magic was in place. This game is made by it's asymmetric gameplay. Each person has a role on the ship and you need to work together to make your adventure successful. Even though the controls could be wonky and the outcomes felt pretty random at times, especially when chaos was high, the core system is very promising and I look forward to more content.

Since I last played there have been like six updates so the team is hard at work at making this better.

I've been trying to like this game, a lot of my friends are playing, and it continues to rise on the charts, but every time I walk away from it I hate myself for wasting my time.

It's not an enjoyable world to play in. Movement is jenky and takes a lot of getting used to. The weight of your character makes it hard to do otherwise simple things like run through a doorway or down a narrow hallway. A lot is done in the spirit of simulation that directly opposes fun. Stand next to a window, and your gun shoots at the ceiling because you can't get the gun between you and the window. Maybe that's real, but it's also annoying. You wouldn't fire a gun at the ceiling, but there's a disconnect from what your avatar does and what you think you're trying to do. It ruins the game.

And don't get me started on the general delayed (because it's server-side) opening of doors and interacting with objects...

But even if you play a lot and start to get used to these quirks, what's the game really? You drop into a big map and run around picking up stuff until you die. Most of the game is just running around not interacting with people. Not shooting, just walking and looking at the ground. If you're lucky or good, you get to shoot and kill people. If you're average, or bad, then you get killed often without even seeing who shot you. And the game doesn't show you what happened, you just die and see your body and it's like, okay, now it's time to play again.

The gameplay loop of running around for 30 minutes looking at the ground picking up stuff for a minute of firefight at the end doesn't pay off.

And then there's the circle. The circle that keeps people moving I feel is both a clever and poorly implemented feature. Half the time it's a massive penalty to you and half the time it's a non-factor. In the end the game is a weird mess of trying not to die to radiation whilst being forced into bad positions, and hoping to be the lucky last person to have to move. It's very much a lottery system and I have no respect for it.

The only plus is, I didn't spend $60 on the game. I don't recommend it.

The name of this game is no lie, it's all about logistics and efficiency. This is a great game for people who are fans of supply chains--Settlers, Anno, Factorio. All you do is assign trucks to take goods from one city where it's made to another city where it's needed. Sometimes you need to use storage locations to stage goods nearby so bigger trucks can move larger loads. Sometimes you need to build new factories so goods can be produced closer to where they're needed.

It's not a hard game, though at times you will have to focus all your resources on accomplishing a goal. For the most part what you need to do is obvious and how you will do it is very straight-forward. It can be relaxing just going from city to city, assigning trucks to deliver goods, getting pop-ups that things are being completed. You will grow and accomplish goals, and it's a feedback loop that will satisfy constantly.

The downsides of this game are really in implementation. It's very playable, but there is a lot of wonkiness in clicking on things, and it's really easy to make frustrating mistakes. Few mistakes penalize you but you will always feel like you are fighting the interface. Elements disappear when the map is dragged, the zoom level and focus of the camera bounces all around making have to constantly reorient yourself, and I guarantee you will be annoyed trying to click on a truck or a city hundreds of thousands of times. Additionally, a lot of the game's rules are obscure and rely on trial and error to understand.

All in all, it does what it sets out to do and despite the technical issues it's a fun logistics game. Don't buy any DLC until you finish the main game. It will take you a hundred hours to complete what comes in the base package.

Some people bemoan the changes that this Anno brings, but for my money it is different from it's predecessors in some very positive ways. I am not a fan of competitive RTS games, so I have always treated this game as a realtime economic simulator. My favorite Anno mode is continuous mode, and I have only play the series multiplayer a handful of times. With that in mind, here are some changes that I liked in this iteration of the franchise.

In the past the game was needlessly complicated by a lack of communication of the rules. A big part of the game is creating production chains (e.g. 2 of one resource, makes 4 of another resource, which is used to make 1 of a third resource). In all previous iterations, quantities were hidden and had to be either referenced by an outside source such as a wiki, or meticulously observed and recorded in your brain. Now the values are visible from the UI and the game can be learned and mastered without an outside aide. This is a huge improvement, and cannot be understated. The reason for not making the production chains visible was baffling to me as they were obviously hard-coded and learnable--they just served to obfiscate the game and make it harder for new players to enjoy.

The main change in this iteration though, is the definite shift from economic RTS to city-builder campaign game. No longer do you compete with AI (or players) over territory, and build up your base until you "win" the map. Now, there is a single, over-arching campaign which drives your entire time with the game. Instead of starting over from scratch with each new session you instead move to different maps and start a new colony there expanding your current company's foothold and resources. There is no longer an AI presence on the map to compete with for resources. Now, there are invaders and catastrophies, but generally speaking the only limit on your expansion is your own efficiency.

Most of the mechanics of Anno remain in the campaign but are refined and expanded to great success. There are quirks of each map that affect your production, goods that have to be transferred between civilization types, and there are one-off missions which provide an alternate method of obtaining resources and making progress. This is the first game where I felt like missions were woven into the fabric of the game well. In previous iterations, I often just ignored the missions that were given, and even if I tried to do them I often found them to be obtuse. Now I feel the missions are both important and engaging and I do them all the time.

I also feel like the season pass really adds a lot of intrigue to the game. Between the stock market, space colonies and the new sectors, the game has hundreds of hours of gameplay. Unlike most games where DLC doesn't interest me, I'm glad to have purchased this season pass.

I have loved every version of Anno since the first one I played, 1701. Each time they improve the mechanics and the presentation, and this version is no different.

It's what you think it is. You pick up body parts and throw them in a fire, then you mop up the blood from the area, then you go rinse out your mop because now it's all bloody. Over and over, this is what you do.

It's not a good game, but it's not bad either. The core mechanics aren't hard--you pick up body parts, and clean up blood. Sometimes you dispose of weapons or broken furniture.

But there's a challenge to doing things optimally. Do you bring a bucket to a spill or just clean up the spill and then come back to your bucket? You can drop body parts or walk through pools of blood creating more mess that you're just going to have to clean up. So it pays to be vigilant.

There's some humor, especially in the areas that you're set to clean. It's a lot about exploration (finding corpses in weird places under floorboards, on tops of bookshelves, with knives through their chest and pinned to a wall). The areas would be less fun to clean a second time, but then there's achievements such as collecting all the money in a level or leaving it spotless (a hard task to accomplish).

At the end of the day you'll really just doing something mindless and repetitious, and if it were hard it wouldn't be fun at all. But the absurdity of the task, and the ease of it and the sense that you're getting something done keeps you going.