Recent reviews by Nicholas

This is quite a nice little game. The main selling point is the unusual time manipulation mechanic. It turns the game into something of an ever-evolving puzzle, every move requiring awareness of your surroundings and the potential actions of enemies (which can shift as your own moves shift).

It does wear a bit thin late in the game, where one-hit kills abound and ranged attacks come from various directions. However, while failure can come frequently, it's refreshing that it can be reversed with a mere flick of the mouse wheel rather than having to load a save.

Beyond the core mechanic, presentation is solid - visuals and voice acting are okay, and the music is distinctive and enjoyable.

All up, a solid experience.

Remarkable job from a solo developer. Voice acting is great, the choices are genuinely impactful and it made me laugh plenty of times. Plus it's nice to see so many Australian references!

This is a game with a solid gimmick (shifting between versions of a world is hardly new, but it is unusual for an RPG), but it is wasted with the otherwise mediocre to poor elements of the game.

Primarily, I just found it dull. The combat is sluggish; in the absence of any ability to dodge, battles against anything with half-decent health revolved around kiting. There is plenty of tedious backtracking, and since enemies don't respawn there is often nothing to do than trudge along. I wound up upgrading character speed not for tangible benefits in gameplay, but just to get around the world a little faster! Puzzles are frequent, and usually painful. The story...well, I can't even comment on it because I was so bored I began skipping it after a couple of hours.

The achievement stats speak volumes - 81% of players reach level 2, but only 29% leave the first area, which takes a couple of hours. I pushed a fair bit beyond that to see if things improved; sadly, they did not.

Solasta is a solid mid-budget TBT/RPG which is somewhat more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to many mid-budget tabletop adaptations, its strength is in its user experience. I'm not overly familiar with the SRD 5.1 ruleset, but the game explained things well throughout. There are an abundance of granular ways to customise difficulty, including in the course of a campaign. Quick travel within maps is a great feature, saving plenty of time, and the game log features handy links to transcript of dialogue and loads of recent saves. Perhaps my favourite was the scavenger system, which kept me from spending too much time juggling inventory - I could leave it behind, and either collect it through the scavengers some time later, or get some money for it. Resurrections are readily available, avoiding the need to restart fights just because one party member goes down.

That user experience helps to compensate for otherwise mediocre core campaign. The story is largely generic with few choices, the writing is forgettable and the voice acting often poor.

Combat is a mixed bag; while there are an array of feats and spells, it can be a bit on the shallow and slow side. While there were some tense fights as I balanced dwindling HP and spells, too many were a slog as we just chipped away at health. I wound up turning down the HP of enemies, not because combat was overly hard, but just to push through it faster.

The custom campaigns may offer a better experience, though be aware that some the basic races and classes are locked behind DLC.

It's not going to blow away the biggest and best CRPGs, but you could certainly do worse. Indeed, I've been quite critical of the likes of Pillars of Eternity, Age of Decadence and Gamedec, but happily recommend this as a solid indie CPRG.

It's a shame that SI has moved away from FM Touch on PC (yes, I know there's the Xbox and iOS version, but the former is not on Steam, and the latter is locked behind a subscription).

This really is FM in its pure form, without the bloat introduced to the main game in an effort to justify yearly releases. Churning through seasons in a few hours to build a dynasty is so much more interesting to me than the endless and mostly irrelevant minutiae which plague the main game.

Having said that, this is a somewhat sloppy game, with glaring bugs such as the interface breaking when you combine club & international management, and weird graphical glitches such as players on the same team having different outfits - or, better yet, no bodies at all.

I'll still take a buggy, slimmed down FM over getting hit with another twenty useless emails between each game!

I played the original Satellite many years ago. I remember enjoying it, but can't speak for how faithful a spiritual sequel this is. Assessing on its own merits...it's pretty bad. I didn't think a game about a team of supersoldiers in a cyberpunk world could be dull, yet it is.

The tutorial is wonky - randomly popping up to explain things I'd been doing for an hour, then completely restarting when I loaded a save forcing me to quit and relaunch the game. Even with the tutorial, some concepts made no sense at all to me.

Gameplay amounts to a lot of tedious micromanagement, slowly waiting for AI characters to meander along unpredictable paths (especially as pathing for the player characters is terrible; they quickly wind up strolling into trouble if given any latitude) with seeming equally inconsistent mechanisms for whether or not you are spotted. I didn't particularly like Desperados III but it did this sort of gameplay so much better.

The common criticisms of this game tend to be the overly difficult combat and the inflexible and esoteric character builds which the game is built around.

The former does not bother me so much; between the prominent warnings about its difficulty and my usual preference for limiting combat in RPGs, I skipped combat altogether.

The latter is a bigger problem. A game with different pathways for different character builds can be great. I replayed Fallout 1 & 2 many times with a variety of character builds to try different ways of resolving issues. The problem here is that it felt less like different pathways, and more like a set of dead ends. There were too many times, especially for such a short game, that I just had to shrug and turn away from a situation rather than being able to approach it in a different way. Between the narrow character builds and the relatively unremarkable story, I wasn't compelled to try again with a new character.

I also found the environments frustrating. They are too big for their content, leading to a lot of aimless wandering and pixel hunting for the very few things that you can interact with. Small-scale environments can be done well in an RPG - see the Shadowrun games, for instance - but here it just feels empty. They also seemed plagued by lightning storms; apparently there's a rather irritating graphical glitch which remains unpatched.

I really liked the sound of this - small-scale RPGs where choices matter are very much my thing - but it just doesn't feel well executed.

It took a little while for me to get into this one. Early on, it felt quite shallow and frustrating. Once I began to unlock more cards and characters, however, the experience was significantly enhanced. New synergies opened up, and the strategies for tacking the toughest enemies became apparent.

It takes a bit of persistence, but stick with it and you'll find a solid deckbuilder/roguelike.

I can normally put dozens of hours into even a mediocre builder/management game, but this falls short of that standard.

The user experience is just horrible. The visuals are cluttered and uninformative, while a handful of grating sounds repeat ad nauseam. Important information is not available. Worst of all, it's glaringly buggy - most strikingly, crew members just become stuck for no apparent reason until they starve to death.

There are a few nice ideas, but nothing which seems remotely worth battling through those issues.

A perfectly solid light survival game. It's never overly difficult, and does become a grind in the late stages (more electronics sources, please!), but it has a solid gameplay loop and enough depth for time to pleasantly fly by as I played it.