Recent reviews by [kabrňačka] Woodbinka

I have been waiting to write this review for a while, really hoping that things would change and I wouldn't have to give a negative review. But sadly, the things stay the same. Honestly this game had great potential. There is a lot of content, items, different mechanisms. It would be a great roguelike spin on minesweeper, and the game has really a lot of offer, but sadly, it has one fatal design flaw that invalidates everything. Unless you are playing on casual difficulty the boards are not always solvable without guessing. This by implication means that no matter how well you know minesweeper patterns and how you well you can quess probabilities, no matter how good items and equipment you get through the playthrough, you cannot win this game by skill. It is not a puzzle solvable by your brain, it's a game of luck. I had multiple playthroughs where my story progress was stopped just because I HAD TO guess and I wasn't lucky enough to win the level. This effectively locks the rest of the game after casual difficulty for you, unless you are lucky enough to get there. With this flaw, everything else doesn't matter. Hundreds of different items don't matter, because with boards unsolvable without guessing not much can help you, items become clutter. The game simply becomes a lottery. You either have to stay on casual forever so you don't feel like you are mocked by the game, or just keep your futile trying in battling the luck in the game. As I said before, it really pains me to give this a negative review, but I cannot otherwise. The players asked about this luck-based element and the developers have defended it, keeping solvable boards only in the casual difficulty, and by implication keeping the rest of the game not locked by skill, but by luck. So apparently there's not much chance it will change in the future, thought I'd love to be proven wrong. And if that ever happens, if they fix this design flaw, then I can recommend the game. But not until then.

Probably the best idle game I've seen. There's tons of content and it just keeps unlocking more and more just as you are starting to get bored. Well designed and with tons of humour and memes. Definitely a great timesink.

A great, simple picross game with a lot to do and some variants of picross.

I seriously don't know how to start this review. There's so much to say about this game. I think I should start by shouting huge cheerish THANK YOU! To Jake Huhman, the game's sole developer and publisher. Not only because he made an amazing game, but because he's a great friendly guy, really caring about his game and it's players. The amount of work he put into his game is astounding, fixing bugs, releasing frequent updates and inserting loads of references and little details and jokes anywhere where's some text. Look at Floor names. He hangs out around the forums a lot, and likes to chat about ideas. So once again, kudos to you!

Now finally to the game. Let's put a quick TL:DR intro here: At the first look the game looks like a simple tile matcher puzzle game, and it truly is one, but I guarantee it's the best one ever made. It builds upon the simple concept and expands it to a strategy genre. For matching tiles, you get resources. For resources, you recruit units or build floors. To build floors, you have to make room in your Hoard, the stockpile where Loot falls from dead enemy Heroes, defeated by your minions, and after building a floor. Loot which you match to get MOAR RESOURCES. All this in quick cartoonish package filled to the brim with humour.

Don't get deceived by it's cartoonish pixelart look, though the game graphics are very creative, detail and expertly crafted to finest pixelart, all staying in the cartoonish theme of the game. Nice element is you can customize colors of resources.

In the core, this game has a very complex systems built in which offer tens of hours of just explorating what Units can you build, going through Phropecies to "building" your own game style, possibly retaining it through multiple playthroughs using the Legacy system. This system allows you to keep hero minions, items, floors and resource capacity in exchange for completing time limited quests, which range a lot in variety and difficulty. You progress through the game not only on the level of a single "run", but also on scope of multiple ones, as you unlock new Floors through Phropecies, which for example require you to build several floors (sometimes ones which block each other), and recruit some amount of units. Each floor you unlock falls under a specific Tier, which form trees of possible combinations of units you can use to defend your dungeon. And as they are trees, to climb some branches you have to give up some units, because some floors block each other, as I mentioned before. Some floors work as traps, other allow you to recruit Mounts, which can your Biped minions use to roam the dungeon, offering considerable advantage.

Expecting your question "and what are they for?" I will explain. Your minions are defending you, because you are an extremely evil person and all righteous persons want to hang your head above their fireplaces. And they group at the dungeons ground floor, waiting for it to open, forming waves of trouble waiting at you periodically. All units travel around the vertical dungeon using elevators, and as heroes descend by one floor at a time, your minions can travel freely, patroling the dungeon in meantime.

Granted is, Heroes will sooner or later be caught by your minions, and when this happens, the combat happens. It is turn based and works on cycling heroes in party, each taking one attack and defense at a time. Both minions and heroes have great variance of attacks, abilities and perks, some working as buffers or poisoning enemies. Those perks don't serve only for combat. If you have a general "theme" in your floors and units, specific heroes come to defeat you, for example necromantinc dungeon resulting in holy heroes.

Expanding the system even more, sometimes you can find items in your hoard which upon collecting serve either as passive effects to the game, active items affecting Hoard with for example spreading a specific resource or shuffling the hoard, or even serve as Potions on a specific floor, taking some time to recharge after each use. Another hoard element is that you can build specific tetromino-and larger- shapes to raise capacity of a specific resource stockpile. And if you need some more to fiddle with the game. there's possibility to move floors, even with enemy heroes in them, for a little price. Needing specific resource and your hoard is almost empty? You can refill it for a price of a little chunk of each of your resources. Want another? You can unlock Banners, which give you specific bonuses to your game, for example granting more mouse slides per move. And if you still arent satisfied, don't worry, Jake improves the game at a regular pace.

My apologies for how long this review became. I kinda got carried away, as this game revived my belief in the inovation in genre of quick puzzle games, granting me tens of hours of intelligent, though-out and great fun, which I believe won't certainly end soon. To end the review, let's look at overal Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Simple concept, deeply and well-thoughtly expanded, with ongoing development.
  
• Very nice and detail pixelart graphics
  
• Offers a lot to explore and needs a lot of time to explore everything. And it's worth it.
  
• Nice music
  
• Deep strategy system allowing for your own game style, with large variety of units and items to use as ingredients
  
• The game feels very alive, with units battling at multiple floors and roaming the dungeon. Seeing heroes run into sawblade traps is very satisfying.
  
• Puns everywhere
  
• Found out Fungus traps are OP (already balanced out), built enough floors to have over two dozens of Fungus traps, heroes died even without being touched by minions. Played the run for three hours. Got a 1st place global highscore and had it for a few days. 11/10 would try to gain highscore again.

Cons:

• Terrible, addictive timesinker
  
• Sometimes, the mouse control feels a little bit...ambivalent, but after adding the possibility to cancel your move on hoard with right click, these issues are not as anoying as before
  
• Seriously, I don't know, this game is great and getting better with each update.

Thank you for reading, I hope I helped you deciding whether buy this game, treating yourself with an amazing logic game, and rewarding Jake for his work, as he truly deserves it.

Have you ever played Portal? Did you like it? And have you ever wondered how would it look in 2D, with pixelarty cartoony graphics and with other portals like resizing ones? Wonder no more and try this logical platformer game. The puzzles aren't totally easy and will make you scratch your head from time to time. The rooms are vast and there's a lot to discover. I really like this game's take on Portal ideas and mechanics and I recommend it.

If you like Lego and Garry's Mod, this game's for you. It's not only simple building with lego-like bricks. It has an extensive modding support, an event system allowing you to easily script almost anything right in the game and flawlessly working multiplayer. Loads of mods available, hundreds of bricks for downloads, thousands creations you can build (and blow up with rocket launcher afterwards).

You are a stickman and you fight loads of stickmen using only mouse buttons. Sounds dull, simple and easy? It only sounds. The game is fun, challenging and has a great feeling, parodies kung-fu movies (seriously, the dubbing and accent of dubbers is hillarious) and with it's easy-to-learn-hard-to-master provides fun when you've got a few minutes to spare.

After playing vanilla, Gods and Kings and finally spending 50 hours on Brave New World, I can finally review this. I was VERY sceptical about CivV. After CivIV, I thought it couldn't be better, and when I first saw CivV, I decided to stick to IV. The vanilla game is....unfinished. There are features missing you'd find in other civ games in the base game, like religion. With Gods and Kings, the game finally becomes playable and is somewhat good. But after buying Brave New World, I can finally say this game is worth it.

With all the features it gives you, CivV is a great 4x strategy game offering countless hours of fun. Damn, with all the DLCs and expansions, i can't even say which is better, IV or V. Compared to previous civilization games, I have to mention the new features like Social Policies and Ideologies and caravans, which are great and work really well. Civ V is also much easier to get into for new players than previous Civ games.

City states are a new feature as well. Being friends with them brings you various benefits, but you can play the bad guy as well and annex the hell out of them.

Religion is very well made. You practically make your own - select symbol, name it and select perks which give you various bonuses. You can also reform it later and add more perks.

Despite my initial doubts, the change from squares to hexes helped the game to feel more vivid. Changes to war unit system (no more multiple military units on one field) make the war more strategical and you can actually change the balance of power in the late game (unlike in CivIV where war in late game meant stalemate no matter how much units you pumped in) . I love how the culture is remade. It not only expands your cities but you also buy social policies with it. And what's more, with BNW you also generate tourism which can culturally influence other civilizations and take them over.

In short: if you like 4X strategies, get the complete edition of CivV. It's totally worth it.

Pros:
Looks good
With BNW, it's a true successor of Civ series
City states, social policies and all other new features are very well made and fit together very well
It's so good it's a timesinker.

Cons:
AI turns take long to compute
Could be better optimized (but no stuttering or lags, rather textures unloading and reloading etc.)
Mods not working in multiplayer (although they should according to their description)
It's so good it's a timesinker.

Let me ask you a question. Do you have neighbours? And do you have a particular type of a neighbour, that annoying and upleasant type, who rants because your parking is too noisy and your TV is too loud, but he hosts parties and kicks you in the face when you tell him to tone the music down? And have you ever dreamed about revenge? Ever thought about breaking into his house and making his life as miserable as possible? Well now you can, at least in this classic title(s) by JoWood. Take the role of Woody, a young happy guy, who enlisted for a reality show about taking revenge on his annoying neighbour. Many people are confused about the genre of the game, I'd describe it as a stealth puzzle adventure. Check situation, do pranks, don't let him catch you. Sounds simple, but some levels are really challenging, and getting 100% score on each level is much harder than the casual and childlike look of the game would suggest. Both titles (NfH1 and NfH2) are tons of fun, challenging and enjoyable, and I recommend them to anybody who likes adventure/stealth games or just enjoys taking revenge on annoying neighbours.

Not worth it. Time slider je sice velice cool nápad, ale kolizní modely jsou zabugovaný, pohyb je strašně pomalej, blbnou rozlišení...a dá se říct že ta hra je až tak casual že to jádru toho nápadu škodí.