Recent reviews by Shidarin

It's Magic, with a rewarding free-to-play structure that makes it so you'll never have to throw down cash unless you want to. The only pay-to-win mechanic is time- if you're going the competitive-but-free route, it'll take time to build up the wildcards needed to have a good deck, and as the meta rotates it can be difficult to keep up.

Frankly, the worst thing about the game is that there's no Commander (EDH) and that the game inevitably convinces you to spend actual cash on useless pieces of cardboard (real life magic cards)

Found this to be a very enjoyable, if easy puzzle game. One puzzle wasn't easy- because I'm tone deaf and have a lot of difficulty with music. One puzzle in this game is entirely audio/tone/music based. It's long, and makes you start over from the beginning each time you mess up. It was excruciating and such a disappointment to see in a game released in the last few years- if you were deaf it would be completely unsolvable.

Found the game beautiful, and the plot decent. Like some other reviewers I really disliked that the game doesn't create an autosave at the ending choice point, and it also disallows saving there. I'm not going to play the game again to see the other ending- you're just making me look it up on youtube.

There's really two main puzzles to the game:

1) Figure out how exactly they want you to solve the puzzle
2) Figure out where, _exactly_, they want you to place the pieces

But the unforgivable thing is that it requires audio to be on to receive confirmation of a correctly placed puzzle piece. There is no option to toggle any type of visual indicator. Solutions which work for a puzzle of the same type will not be valid solutions 3 puzzles later. Think you're sorting by width? NO! This time it's color.

Not Tonight makes its point but the game itself isn't a well done mechanism. I love how it slowly piles on the impossibility of the situation, how it makes you choose sides, betray and gatekeep people in the exact same situation as you.

Gameplay wise it's fine. Like some other reviewers have mentioned, you can fail missions simply because the game is throwing too many counterfeits at you- regardless of your performance in rooting out those counterfeits. Realistic? Probably. Fun? Not so much.

The main reason I'm giving a negative review is that the game slogs, and you may eventually end up in the final mission to find out that you're bugged. The game doesn't think you've completed X, Y or Z (even though you 100% have), and then decides you don't get to complete the final mission. And since the game is so, so long and repetitive (helps get the point across!) there's zero chance I'm reloading from a save and doing it again.

There's also several gameplay issues that make it harder- once you become head bouncer you get a reward from each establishment- but you don't get to pick up that reward until THE NEXT JOB- and it doesn't even automatically give it to you. Forget to pick up the reward on the last day possible? Too bad. What you do with those rewards is often cryptic and hard to figure out. Only after reading online did I figure out what to do with records- and at no point did the person I'm supposed to give the records to ask for anything. What the hell do I give to Mylanna? Still no idea.

Several in game missions are easy to think you're done, only to end up incomplete because you didn't go back to a certain establishment and do X. The first job at an establishment is unskippable, even if you're at 1 health and need to take a day off- guess you're dying.

I enjoyed what the game said, but I found the execution lacking.

The game, at the default difficulty levels, is ridiculously easy and uses excessive micromanagement to fill the player's time and create problems. If you play the Challenge mode in Jurassic Difficulty, the economic difficulty is finally tuned correctly but the micromanagement turns into a ridiculous chore.

Some examples of micromanagement include having to manually tweak occupancy and sale prices of stores constantly. You have to refill feeders manually. Tweak feeder interval times manually- the default starts at 8 minutes but is wasteful for everything but the most crowded exhibits. Even the fully upgraded accuracy of the ranger teams and ACU helicopter are ridiculously bad. In a crises situation you're forced to manually control them just so you can get a handle on the situation quickly. At the highest difficulty level, a key part of your income is actually selling minerals you get from fossil expeditions. You have to sell them manually, so every 3 minutes you're manually sending out a bunch of expeditions and then manually selecting fossils to extract and minerals to sell. There's nothing else you can do with the minerals BUT sell them- but they make you click on them. There's no way to inspect an enclosure to see how much forest/grassland/wetland is in the enclosure, so you're just guessing.

Early gameplay is great in ROI but falls off quickly with poorly (or not at all) explained mechanics and bad UX. Visual style is nice.

Simply amazing. Every good review you've read is true.

I'm done. I just can't anymore. I'm going to declare the game beaten. In my version, Mark (the main character) isn't a suicidal moron, and actually rejoins society at the numerous times he's able to. Specifically, he survives the bunker ambush, finds Walter's safe room, grabs a bunch of the gold, then calls the police to get him out of the locked office. He doesn't keep going back into collapsing tunnels because he doesn't want to call a cab, or the police, or break a window. He doesn't keep doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ puzzles where the key is hidden in a flooded sewer where the lights are out, at the bottom of the locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'

INFRA has some really cool ideas and levels. Fixing the various systems was challenging, but a blast. If the main character fixed those systems, then went back to the office to discuss further with the other team members, I probably could have kept doing the game. But rather than letting you do this, you're forced into one sewer system, tunnel or another. It ruins immersion, because no one in the universe is this stupid. No job pays so well to keep going back into a tunnel 10 minutes after the last one collapsed on top of you. Call a damn cab Mark.

Plot is more than a little convoluted but not awful. Mark could really use a lot more voice lines through the game to move the plot along and help with some of the system's tougher puzzles.

But I'm serious, some of the puzzles aren't challenging, they're just stupid.

Edit: It's now been over a year and I still think about INFRA about once a month. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Mark.

Edit 2: 2 years on now, and I'm still thinking about INFRA a lot. At this point I should PROBABLY change it to recommended but I'm still upset that Mark can, at any point, just walk away and keeps refusing to do so.

A really, really cool premise which is haunted by technology limitations. The game tells you that "The computer does better if you talk to it in full sentences." Let me set the record straight- it does not. Getting the computer to do or say what you want is an arduous task. If you ask it the wrong question (say about a plot point, another character etc) there's a high chance the computer will just spit out random help nonsense to try and get you to understand what the next objective is.

Overall the puzzles are nice and (with one glaring exception) going through the game logically isn't hard. Note that there are different endings depending on how kindly you treat the computer, but the random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it throws back at you engenders no kindness.

I've been playing Spiderweb software since the first Exile. I can't recommend Avernum 4 for 2 reasons:

* It can't run in a window
* Performance is BEYOND awful, even with the fixes for mouse lag you can find on the forums (which only partially work)

Other than that, it's more of same classic formula (although I still dislike the 3/4 view)