Recent reviews by Raptor

You might be playing Death Roads: Tournament wrong. At least, I was when I first started playing. It didn't become obvious to me that you need to find a balance between playing weapon cards and ramming vehicles in order to achieve victory. I was very focused on weapon cards and this just got my hiney handed to me a lot. This became very obvious to me when playing the monster truck and I soon started copying that strategy to other vehicles with good succes.

And yes, sometimes the RNG just isn't in your favor but that's just the way the cookie crumbles in card-based games.

DR:T has plenty to offer for quite a few hours of fun: the AI is pretty clever, there are quite a few cards to unlock and the vehicles and drivers play differently so it's a question of creating a strategy that suits you, the car and the driver.

The game also has a few downsides; enemy variety is not that great and the forced boss end-fight is dragged out way too long with cheaty mechanics and enemies have so few cards in their deck that it feels like they -always- draw the right cards.

I wonder why it even features platforming, it seems almost childish in its simplicity to me. The monster-catching is okay and works. Maybe it just tries to be a side-scroller variant of Pokemon a little too hard.

I don't find Dusk all that enticing: the graphics are subpar, the enemies are somewhat uninspired, the map design is horrible and it feels a bit like a Quake knock-off (which I guess, is a compliment). I think a futuristic, industrial theme would (e.g. Quake) fit this art direction much, much better. Everything just looks silly now, there's no grandeur to it. If I'd have to describe this game in one line I'd say it is the mangled love child of Redneck Rampage and Quake.

I might play it a bit more but I keep getting the feeling I'd rather just replay Quake 1 or give Quake 2 a shot every time I think about doing so.

So ... I have to grind over and over to defeat a boss but I don't know how so my save-game is perpetually stuck fighting a boss I can not defeat. The upgrade system needs reworking, there are far too many consumables and too few upgrades.

Premise is okay but the game is very barebones, you'll have seen all there is to it when you reach the first boss.

Jump, jump, jump, fire, hit wrong button, lose some health, jump jump, jump, forget you got grenades equipped, lose some health. Start over from checkpoint.

Got past all that? Here's a boss fight where you're caged in with him. Lose the fight? Start all the way over again. And again. All those fancy weapons you can pick up during combat? Might not be there during the boss fight, use your gimpy starting pistol instead.

Not my idea of fun.

An auto-battler where you pick equipment, move from room to room in order to fight the end-boss and eventually 'other' players. I say 'other' because there's no way to verify that these players actually built said armies but we'll just assume the developers aren't trying to pull one over on us.

There are several game modes, some do not have this PVP element and some get you there quicker.

Unfortunately, even though there is some method to the madness, it all feels a bit pointless as it is incredibly difficult or even impossible to estimate the effectiveness of something you've just done. And that 'other' player that just crushed you? Hopefully you were able to tell what the most effective unit was on his team because most of the time it's just a wall of humans facing another wall of humans. There's no way to rewind (Why not?) and trying to click on a unit to see some stats is often not possible with everything that's going on.

There's no real point in not completely filling up your part of the playing field with humans unless you're playing with the food mechanic on (which I suggest you disable unless you enjoy having even less control over decision making) and even then, you'll probably want to keep them all on for the PVP.

The statistics at the end don't mean much to me and I constantly have the feeling that although I enjoy auto-battlers, I don't particularly enjoy the poorly written and uninformative tool-tips (Try figuring out what magic damage is, for instance) and I constantly have the idea I should do something more productive, something that actually allows me to use my intelligence to crunch some numbers rather than just constantly guess.

I'm sure there's whole websites dedicated to telling you exactly what the most effective build is and hopefully the RNG will get you there but I prefer figuring things out on my own and DG doesn't allow me to do that in a fun and time-efficient manner. Not recommend.

A walking simulator with silly conversations that you won't really care about with an layer of pixel hunting and choose-your-own-ending mixed in between. I didn't care much for it, maybe you will?

Although quite solid, it also seems to be rather repetitive. In the first few hours or so you'll have seen all there is to it. But I suppose that the 99 cents I paid, was more than reasonable.

A slot machine that pretends you are in control of your own faith. Do you enjoy making decisions based on a lack of information and with random, punishing outcomes? Yes, Your Grace is for you.

The idea is that you 'just make it till the end of the week' so you will have to balance helping and managing resources. Unfortunately, because there is no way to gauge risk-reward, you just end up randomly doing things most of the time. Although you'll probably end up on your feet most of the time, the game has a habit of making you lose because of silly things.

Spent too much gold on the weekly summary? Haha, you snooze, you lose! No warning that you can't actually 'borrow' gold or anything, just game over. Luckily, you can then resume your save game and not make the choices you made that ended up bringing about your bankruptcy. Of course, unless you are forced to because you simply don't have enough gold or food.

There's a ton of got-cha's in this game ... Like, did you know you can pick up items from your castle and use them? No one bothered explaining that one to me and I only just discovered that in time in order to not fail one of the bigger events in the game (which, even thoug you succeed, you still fail because ... Well, they might advertise it as such but your choices are rather meaningless and the developers just love their deus ex machina).

Not recommended unless you enjoy gambling.

Although Shipbreaker seems well made they overshot the line between reality and fiction a bit too much for my liking: this reminds me exactly of -work-. I have the same "why am I doing this? I should be doing something interesting with my life!" going through my head when I play this game as I do with work. Even the atmosphere is very corporate cringe which, once again, reminds me of my work. The propaganda, the endless information that no one bothers reading any way, the way choices are presented to you like they somehow they're choices in -your- life that -really- matter and not just line the pockets of some manager way, way higher than you.

I think Shipbreaker is what happens when a HR department tries game design.

That aside, the gameplay itself is somewhat mundane: arguably I don't take ships apart in real life but I am fairly sure that if I did, it would be more exciting than Shipbreaker which is basically just sorting very neatly cut parts and throwing them in the right direction while your colleagues nag you with things that aren't relevant and you just want to get through the day so you can go home and do things you feel bring you a glimmer of happiness while you navigate to the mine-field of backstabbers and work-a-holics and try very hard not to become one of the working dead.

Unless you really enjoy taking things apart in videogames, I can't really recommend this. It just doesn't offer a lot of gameplay and it really is more like a job.