Recent reviews by Trim

Realistic review: This is a $2 piece of software to test how well your free 3rd party autoclicker functions.

The entire concept of the game is to click as quickly as possible to defeat enemies, earn currencies to buy better gear, then repeat until you beat the eight short stages to finish the game. Manually clicking will result in extremely slow progress and good chances at breaking your mouse and/or developing physical injury. Resorting to an autoclicker not only demonstrates how many hundreds of thousands of clicks it will take to make progress, it proves how smart you are by saving yourself inevitable disability. Worse, it also makes the game completely trivial.

Two features have been added post-launch to give players a better experience:

Prestige -- Finish all eight stages to earn a paltry permanent stat boost. The cost of doing so is to reset the game in full, losing all your earned currency & unlocked gear and starting the game over from scratch. ...There's no increased challenge or new things to see, only the opportunity to do the exact same tasks again for more minimal stat gains.

Built-in autoclickers -- Can be unlocked by spending a nontrivial amount of currency. Overall performance is arguably better than manually clicking all day, but even the strongest item is underwhelming. And remember how performing a prestige forces all gear to be lost? Yeah, that includes the autoclicker. Be prepared to shatter your wrist again to earn enough currency and reach a middling state of competency.

In short: players are expected to destroy themselves to earn the required upgrades to beat the game, only to have them reset and destroy themselves all over again to have the exact same experience.

As someone who loves idlers & incrementals, I cannot understand the dev's intended goals of their expected player base. It's painful to play manually for more than a few minutes, it loses all potential fun when you use an autoclicker, it's pointless to prestige, and a couple of the achievements will require ridiculous amounts of dedication. Save your wrist, your mouse, your wallet, and your time.

As a fan of idle games, I like seeing new and interesting concepts evolve out of the genre. Unfortunately, for a game that's all about evolving from single cell protozoa into the most complex lifeforms in the known universe, there's very little that showcases any innovation.

Watch the trailers and there's high emphasis on seeing Unity assets on display, watching animals and humans come into being and existing in a world you create! And none of it matters. The only interaction you have in the real world areas is to spin the camera around and take pictures of stuff. Do you want or need to have a photo of a rabbit in Unity? I'll answer for you: no.

Ever played Cookie Clicker? That's what the base game's structure follows. Buy generators, buy upgrades to make the generators more powerful, buy new generators. The upgrades are all strung out on a massive web, and buying upgrades can chain into new, more powerful upgrades and generators. ...But the design of the web doesn't add anything. Play the game for two days and almost everything is unlocked aside from prestige-requiring stuff that all acts exactly the same as the rest.

But wait! There's a completely different side mechanic about evolving dinosaurs!

Ever played AdVenture Capitalist? That's how the dinosaurs work. Buy generators, click on them, wait for timers to elapse, earn currency, and pray to everything holy you find the thing you need to automate kickstarting the timers without needing to do it yourself. It's all about waiting for timers to erode and collecting currency very slowly. The most interesting aspect to this is how each "run" presents challenges for rewards -- boils down to "buy X number of dinosaur Y." Completing challenges gives the equivalent of playing cards; earn enough of each type, and you can upgrade the speed of the timers or payouts of each dinosaur. ...But it's just AdCap.

How do these two disparate mode complement one another? Completing each dinosaur run adds a small permanent boost to the main game. Dinosaur runs are slow unless you pay good money OR are deep enough that you've earned enough premium currency to improve the pace, so don't expect massive speed upgrades until weeks later. And the main game impacts dinosaurs... in no way whatsoever. The collaboration between them is essentially nothing. Perhaps more infuriating is that you must choose which side of the game you want to have focus, the main evolution portion or the dinosaurs. Whichever one you don't pick is placed into offline mode and suffers from a rather hefty speed penalty.

It's like the devs recreated a speedy Cookie Clicker, realized there wasn't nearly enough content there to satisfy players for more than a week, scrambled to recreate a tediously slow AdCap to keep players occupied, and bolted them together without any real consideration on how they should interact.

The final product isn't a horrible experience. It runs well, never crashes, the subject matter is a little different than the norm, and it gives players something to look at a couple times a day. It's just not special. I've played these games already with a different skin.

Oh, and one of the achievements takes 84 days of regular play to unlock. That's a serious "lick my taint" scenario.

A cute little idle game that's really two ideas in one. At the start, your intended purpose is to sweep leaves from the play space, following common trends & mechanics you'd expect. It's wonderfully charming. Halfway through, the previous mechanics are completely discarded and ignore the overall theme completely. The first 24 hours are engaging & highly recommended; the following 24 hours are simple to understand but a disparate mess, relying entirely upon sitting around doing nothing, waiting for resources to accumulate, and investing in a thing to have them accumulate a bit faster.

What makes that 2nd half so jarring is how the 1st half is so pleasant to play. If all the game turned out to be was the sit-around-to-collect-and-invest type, it'd still work and I'd still grind my way through it. It's not BAD bad. The reason it stands out is because the change in mechanics is so drastic and disconnected that it ends up disappointing as much as it does.

The positives outweigh the negatives, and it's an easy full clear for achievements. I like it quite a bit, but if you play you should prepare yourself mid-game for a short but hard stop idle investment that serves only to eat up time.

Determining whether this game deserves recognition is tough. The basic design is solid and I know I'll be playing it long enough to nab all the achievements. However, what brings it down is that it's a super grind that eventually relies completely on regular player input and RNG to make progress.

Simple idea -- mine resources, then sell them for cash to get more miners or buy blueprint schematics to improve a drill that allows you go deeper and find more valuable stuff. Resources have a dual purpose as they are required to build the drill parts, too. So grind for minerals, sell them, buy upgrade plans, grind for more mats. It works.

Where this game fails is when that core loop no longer applies. Get deep enough and eventually the vendors no longer have new blueprints for sale. All upgrades for the game must then be acquired by collecting treasure chests that are found randomly by your miners. These chests despawn after a set period, so they cannot accumulate over time. If your materials inventory becomes full, miners stop working and therefore they stop looking for chests. Further, chests cannot be stored or collected with any form of in-game or external automation; a player must check in on their game every few minutes to scroll through their massive mine and manually click a chest to open it. In short -- if a player stops interacting with the game regularly, progress slows to a halt. And that's assuming that the randomized chest contents provide something useful to progress... the high majority of the time, the rewards equate to minimal amounts of extra cash. Gotta get lucky to find something truly valuable.

The problems grow the deeper you go. Eventually, a battle mechanic opens up where you fight monsters. The opportunity for battles is random just like treasure chests (though they do appear more frequently) and must be initiated manually. The fight mechanic is to watch a progress bar grow to full upon which you click a button to attack and then watch the bar fill up again. This is another process that cannot be automated in any form, so if you want to fight you must be playing. You can earn more weapons to watch and click multiple progress bars over time, but these too are earned randomly through chests and fights, requiring luck & 100% player intervention to find them. Weapons can be upgraded to charge up faster and perform greater damage, but the requirements quickly become so steep that you must grind out absurd amounts of money to do so and then wait anywhere between hours or even multiple days before they're ready for use.

I think this game is confused on what it wants to be overall. Granted, it's originally from 2012 and genre staples were not norm at that time. But I can't give it a pass in this age. Too many of the designed mid-late game systems require immense amounts of player interaction, while simultaneously there are some roadblocks where there's practically nothing that players can do to earn the resources except sit around and wait for days on end. It's exciting to open a chest and find a meaningful item that can speed up progression, but the amount of time and input demanded of players between those moments is agonizingly slow. All absence of built in automation only exasperates the issues.

In these early days after their remastered release, the devs have been active and responsive to the players. There's new content and objectives, and they have plans to do more over time. I do not know if their goals will impact any of the flaws I see in their product. At this point, my review is that it sucks to have an idle game running and to feel forced to interact with it every couple minutes hoping to find a needle in a haystack. If forms of automation for chest collection & battles are included in the future (or new vendors are added to simplify the acquisition of blueprints & weapons), my tune might change considerably.

Until then... scroll scroll, clicky clicky, grind grind, hope hope, groan groan.

Let's get the two most glaring faults outta the way first:

It's an idle game involving zero player input beyond purchasing tech or leveling up weapons. That itself isn't an issue -- the problem is how the interface requires two forms of player input. The main play screen utilizes the mouse; all menus are navigated using the keyboard. Frankly, it's a horrible control scheme and makes zero sense.

Further, the game does a very poor job of giving specific details about weapons and upgrades. Item descriptions and mouse-over tooltips tell you what a thing is and sometimes their intrinsic effects, but no numbers are provided to show their direct impact. This upgrade clearly boosts your XP, though how much you receive per upgrade you'll never know. Getting another level in a weapon will increase your damage, but there's no indication how much damage that weapon does. There's a total damage per second stat, but individual weapon stats are omitted. It's poor design, plain and simple.

One thing this game has over other idlers, though, is a story. ...But that's not what I like about it, either. Just because it has something different to it doesn't automatically score points with me. In fact, it gets in the way of progress more than I like since story beats act as roadblocks for upgrades, and every loop through the game forces players to endure the same unchanging story each time which is only an annoyance.

What makes this game good is its simplicity. The combination of its short length and lack of complexity is a breath of fresh air for idlers, most of which take weeks or months of investing time to reach an end state. There's no planning or calculation for how to proceed: it's tiny steps of picking the next thing you want to upgrade on your own terms and eventually you'll beat the game. Not knowing how much damage your weapons do doesn't matter... they'll get you to where you're going regardless.

Is it an exceptional game for the genre? Not at all. But I like it nonetheless.

A direct port from Kongregate with little to nothing changed in the crossover to mobile & Steam, this is not a spectacular game. The pinball table itself has very few features with only a single means to earn points. Few portions of the board can be improved, though upgrades can be earned after resetting / prestiging including unlocks that automate select functions. While each reset does earn some form of new unlock making subsequent resets faster and easier, oftentimes performing the next tier of reset strips away upgrades earned earlier and thus hinders progress, forcing players to redo many of the steps already completed. While this mechanic is not unheard of, the value of what is earned per reset is far less than what's lost in the process, and all you're left with is repeating the same simple tasks on an uninteresting pinball table for countless hours.

Important to note, this is an incremental game (as the title implies) and not an idler. You make far better progress when manually involved (usually purchasing upgrades or performing resets, not actually playing a pinball game), and letting it run overnight is mostly pointless since something needs investment or resetting almost all the time. There's little reason to let the game run on its own. What makes this particular entry weird is that the ultimate end-game goal is to earn, reset, and invest enough so that the game BECOMES an idler... but at that point, there's no reason left to play.

The game's not outright bad... but there's nothing interesting left to see or do after the first hour. The physics are a tad weird, the table is featureless, and the grind toward full automation is filled with a constant stripping of other automation, forcing manual intervention at all times. The silver lining? It's not a derivative of Cookie Clicker and is somewhat original. ...If one doesn't count the other two games just like it by this dev on Kong that feature a slot machine or lottery scratch off as its surface game but use the exact same upgrade / automation systems this does.

I've played worse. But I also can't recommend it.

A funky indie title. It's so many different things all at once. Simplistic menu-driven RPG combat, timed reactions like Paper Mario, mixed in with a word-based puzzle game and a Pokémon collect-a-thon, all wrapped up in an anime-style visual novel set in feudal Japan. An odd combination, but... it kinda works.

It's not a spectacular representation of any of those things, and considering its age you'd think the devs would have ironed out all the bugs and crashes by now (I've experienced three CTD's in the few hours played; thankfully, autosaves have softened those blows considerably).

But you know what? It's a unique combination of systems, it's not trying to be bigger than what it is, it does its job decently well, and despite a certain amount of repetition I'm not bored of what it has to offer. I approve of this little relatively unknown gem.

If I were making a list of my personal top 10 games of the decade, Mad Max would be near the top. And yes, I've said stranger things in my lifetime.

The overall game design isn't special. It's essentially an amalgamation of other successful games, its only unique flourish being a rad car. Take a version of Fallout's landscape, Arkham's combat, and any Ubisoft open world game's radio towers & endless collect-a-thons. Blend them together into a gruesome paste, sprinkle liberally into a [literal] sandbox, add a touch of horrendous voice acting, and voila... a masterpiece?

Okay, maybe not. But there's something about the mixture that keeps me coming back for more. I did a 100% completion play through immediately after picking it up. About two months later, I re-installed it and played through it again. It's been over four years since it was released, and I still can't get this game out of my system. It keeps calling me back over and over again, and every time I'm always happy to start a new file and do it all over.

There's a couple weird bugs. There were one or two bad decisions made regarding hand-to-hand fighting, something that you do a LOT. Depending on your progress or focus, the car combat is either atrociously bad or pitifully easy. For a dying, empty world, there's a heck of a lot of map locations that -- strange for video games, I know -- always seem to have something beneficial lying around for you to pick up. I reckon at least 2/3rds of the world and available activities are kinda pointless; you can complete this game by doing surprisingly little. And if story is your jam, Mad Max won't give you much. It basically boils down to a revenge story, except it's not about finding peace of mind for dead loved ones... it's all about avenging your car.

That's kind of the thing about this game, though. Max is hardly a character. Brain half fried, chasing a pipe dream, he's essentially reacting to the world around him and becoming the catalyst to move events forward. As silly as it is, one of the best characters in this game is his vehicle. Its mobility allows you to traverse your sandy wasteland and infiltrate your foes' strongholds, but it also proves invaluable for protection against raiders and even nature itself. Nearly everything you do is in service of improving your car. Entering an enemy camp, getting surrounded by a dozen rabid fighters, and pulling off a perfect series of attacks and parries can make you feel like a bad dude... but sometimes the game shines its best when you're just cruising nameless dusty roads, watching the sun rise, taking in the desolate yet beautiful landscape.

Frankly, I don't know how to sell this game properly. Apparently, the devs didn't either. The game was kinda panned by critics after release, and the dev team jumped over to Just Cause and abandoned Mad Max at their earliest opportunity. It wasn't helped by the fact that it uses a little imagery from the beloved Mad Max: Fury Road film but doesn't tie into its story whatsoever, so the fans felt a little burnt by how detached it was. And not everybody who plays it falls in love. I understand if you get bored after driving to your umpteenth makeshift camp, punching half a dozen dudes, the whole purpose being to pick up two nodes of currency valued at 0.1% of your next car upgrade.

...But this game is fantastic. The majority of the 27,000 Steam reviews back me up. This is one of those times when the critics got it wrong. If you think you might enjoy exploring a dying world, can still dig basic Arkham fights, and allow the possibility that exploding cars can be pretty cool... you gotta give this game a try. I never would have believed that driving a jalopy through empty deserts would lead to some of my favorite gaming moments of the 2010's... but I've also never expected to shart myself, either, and in both cases I walked away with some interesting stories to tell.

Meltdown: a cheap-ish twin stick shooter that, if you know the genre, will surely contain some things you like. ...And some things you wont.

Good stuff includes decent controls, earning XP for improved character stats, new weapons & gear to purchase and upgrade, surprisingly easy ammo and health management, random stages and enemy layouts upon redoing missions, and an acceptable EDM / dubstep soundtrack if you're into that kind of thing.

But there's some weird / bad stuff that offsets almost every good element.

In an isometric game, you'd think that moving you diagonally would mean you moved a perfect 45-degrees in the stage -- but you'd be wrong. Check the screenshots to see how tile-based the floors are, so it's super obvious when you don't move along tile seams the way you'd expect. It doesn't break movement, it's just odd when controls in a game like this don't synch up to logic.

Upon leveling up, the camera pans around you dramatically in slo-mo and takes away all control. While you're defenseless, the enemies are still capable of moving closer and firing projectiles. It's unlikely you'll die, but it certainly adds unnecessary tension and stress since the game gets to do its thing while you stand helpless.

Lots of stuff to upgrade, but the rate of earning currency is relatively low and you could never work on all of them simultaneously (all my money's gone into two of the ten-ish guns, completely ignoring melee and all four bonus armor slots).

There's incentive to perform melee kills as often as possible as it gives you an XP bonus, though for some reason the devs decided it was a great idea to have a female voice over announce you've done so every time you do it. It's like being nagged for doing exactly what the game wants you to do.

Reloading weapons in this game is bizarre. Firing weapons both depletes ammo and increases a gun's heat capacity, kinda like they stole the worst mechanic from original Mass Effect's weapon system. Max out your heat, your gun goes into standby until it cools down. Okay, that's fine. The weird thing is that your gun doesn't have ammo capacity, so you can fire as often as you like so long as you have some ammo and your heat isn't maxed. Literally the only thing that reloading does is reset your heat levels.

And it's a good thing that levels get randomized every time, because that's about the only change you'll experience from level to level. The tile sets never change, and the limited enemy types devolve into either "I can melee this one safely" or "I should sit back and shoot this." It should be mentioned that this game really wants you to utilize a chest-high wall cover system, so much so that it clutters areas with countless blockades. Traversing areas results in slowly walking around junk or even more slowly vaulting over... too bad that the cover system can be pretty much ignored at all times, so in effect the stages are filled with needless, repetitive garbage.

The devs also decided that enemies can't exist in this world as though they were corporeal objects and allow you to walk up on them from off screen to allow you to plan your method of assault. Instead, every enemy materializes out of thin air in unknowable locations, sometimes directly on top of you and with the ability to instantly attack. It's rarely enough to overpower, but it's often enough to piss you off, especially since this is one of those games that rewards end-of-stage currency & XP depending on an arbitrary star-based performance rating.

That's a lot of nitpicks. And frankly speaking, the gameplay itself isn't exactly compelling since it's rather repetitive and you see almost everything the game has to offer after half an hour. But strangely, I like this game more than I think I should. There's nothing particularly special about it, yet it also doesn't do enough wrong for me to shut it down out of frustration. By no means does it deserve a glowing recommendation... but if you like twin sticks and can pick it up for a couple bucks during a sale, I know of plenty other worse ways to burn your money.

Wurroom is an experience, not a game.
The experience is abstract, surreal, and incomprehensible (for me, anyway).
It can be kinda pretty every so often, and a couple of the music tracks are neat if not remarkable.
Difficulty is nonexistent. Achievements are tied to progression over the course of ten minutes. And it's free.

But in the larger scope: It's simply claymation set to click triggers. No story, no challenge, nothing to make you stop and think. It's weird for the sake of being weird. Some people might find that fascinating, but I find myself uninspired. Free, easy cheevos, and short duration are nice positives, but I simply cannot recommend what's basically a short-form art school project.

Oh, and I ran into a bug that soft-locked the game halfway through, requiring a reset. Looks like it's rather common according to the Steam discussions. If the devs can't get basic order of operations click "puzzles" to function correctly in a ten minute game, the take away is that this is only about the presentation of art. Pass.