Recent reviews by hermanJnr.

Ideology is a strange expansion because it sounds incredibly exciting on paper but the actual result (in its current iteration at least) is just adding tedium and busywork to the game.

The most annoying feature is that pretty much everyone you want to recruit to your colony will have a completely different ideology to all the other characters you have and it causes constant chaos and mood swings.

The game already VERY slowly dripfeeds you recruits or injured enemies, many of whom have bad stats already, so adding this extra layer that every single recruit you get must also have their worldview completely converted just so your characters can get along is really frustrating.

For example - I got a recruit that was a cannibal. The rest of my people hate cannibalism. Therefore to stop him from constantly throwing a fit, I need to let him butcher human corpses, which massively upsets my whole society. The only way around this is to throw him in prison for about 2 months and SLOOOOWLY change his way of life. Which is just...not fun. It's just annoying.

My alternative is to not have him as a colonist which...cripples my whole colony.

Why is there not more flexibility? Why can he not eat human meat, but no one else cares as long as they're not being forced to do the same? It's in his culture after all, why do they care? But there is no such flexibility built in.

Also most of the cultural ways of playing don't add much but instead just artificially restrict you. For example, if you have a tribe that venerates close combat weapons but hates ranged weapons, what do you do if your characters all just have terrible close combat stats? The answer is that you have to give them knives anyway, or take a massive mood hit.

Surely if a culture venerates close combat, they should get a big skill bonus to close combat? As they would train their whole lives in this? But no. Instead it's just an artificial rule that forces you to use melee even if it totally doesn't fit your colonists' skills.

Or maybe you're playing as a Body Purist faction. So you end up with a society of people who would rather have no limbs and be constantly in pain rather than use high tech body implants that are better in every way. How does this make sense? More importantly, how is it fun?

Baking ideologies into the game for novelty is a great idea, but I really think converting ideologies needs to be made a lot faster and a lot of the stupid massive debuffs for simple conflicts of interest need to be tweaked to be more reasonable.

City of Gangsters is a game I *WANT* to love, even a game I would play a bit more of in the future. But for every good idea the game has, it makes itself so incredibly frustrating with anti-fun, deliberate limitations and really poor design decisions.

I can't recommend it because it feels incredibly unbalanced and designed as if it's trying to waste your time deliberately. I'll explain further in my full analysis of the game.

A sort of modern follow-up to the classic Gangsters: Organized Crime, CoG is about running a Prohibition-era crime outfit. The first thing I like is that the game simulates cities as diverse populations and your crime gang has a base ethnicity that dictates your first relationships and your abilities to produce certain goods to a high standard.

For example, starting as an English gangster allows you to make cider especially well. However, beyond this gimmick the game doesn't actually explore this interesting idea further outside of a couple of "missions" that are unique to your background.

The next feature I like (at least for the first 3 hours) is the social connection system. It's a cool exploration of business networking; to sell your illegal booze or bribe a cop, you'll need to know someone who knows someone. This is fun when your empire is tiny, but soon becomes annoying when you have to pull in favours from 300 different people just to sell a couple of crates of booze in a new part of the city.

Gameplay is very much about logistics, shipping booze to customers or your speakeasies to be sold, extorting businesses and keeping out rival gangs encroaching on your territory. Unfortunately, EVERY aspect of this core gameplay loop is incredibly flawed and requires absurd levels of micromanagement.

First, the UI is ridiculously clunky and there are some choices that make no sense at all. There is a Resource UI that shows you specific resources you can buy and sell in businesses - however, this must be toggled on and off every single time you interact with a property on the map.

This means you'll be driving round with your crates of booze, constantly having to check the Resource Overlay every single time you want to sell a crate somewhere yourself or buy a resource you need. Every time you sell some booze, the UI disappears and you must get it up again. Absurd.

Why the developers couldn't just have an icon on the property showing that you can sell what you're carrying there, I have no idea. The map gives you tons of info that is useless and none you need unless you toggle on and off 20 different overlays. Awful design.

Next we have the most fundamental problem in the game; your gangsters are not gangsters, they are FedEx truck drivers. And you never have enough of them, because the game has stupid artificial limits on how many Crew Members you can have. If history worked like City of Gangsters, Al Capone's gang would have consisted entirely of 6 people who spent all their time slowly driving apples around in trucks.

I'm not even kidding, that's the sad part! The game gives you 1 new crew member per business you buy, plus one every now and then for controlling large amounts of territory (your protection racket). This is nowhere near enough. You're supposed to have Managers in your illegal businesses to make them more efficient, but this uses up one of your crew members who is needed to make deliveries to keep the business running.

Gangsters: Organized Crime, which came out about 20 years ago, understood this better than City of Gangsters. In that game, employing a criminal to run a business meant they disappeared from your limited number of guys and a slot in your gang was freed up for a new hire. Somehow CoG doesn't understand this two decades later.

This becomes hilarious when you start promoting your best gangsters to Capos and they are STILL stuck driving a truck around like an idiot. Why on Earth can't I just hire a few dozen cheap nobodies to drive some trucks about?

This brings us onto the next absurd artificial limits - territory expansion and property buying.

To expand territory you open a Front, which then extorts local businesses for you and collects the cash. You then have to have one of your gangsters drive there to pick up the money (because of course you do...) However, the game artificially forces you to only have up to two Fronts expanding at a time. This is for no reason than to constrain your ability to expand and lengthen the game arbitrarily.

Additionally, the fee for expanding your protection racket gets greater and greater...again for no reason except to destroy any fun you might be getting from building an empire.

This same nonsense is repeated EVEN WORSE with buying property. First time you buy a building to set up a business it will cost you $4k. Next it'll be $5k. Suddenly, when you want to open your sixth or so business, you start having to pay $15-25k for some tiny mouldy little garage.

For some reason, you also have zero control over the business you can buy. If you make lots of cider, it makes sense you want to buy businesses that produce apples for you. NOPE. You're stuck with whatever random businesses the game gives you. Again, why?

This is totally ridiculous and makes it feel like you're constantly broke and can never expand as you want to. Why is the game PUNISHING me for being successful? The end result of this rubbish only serves to force you to have a total of 5 losers driving around in trucks all the time even though you own half the city and have killed all the other gangs. You spend almost all your time waiting for the money to tick up so that you can buy the next even more expensive property and wait even longer for the money to tick up.

The social system, as mentioned before, is cool at first but soon becomes a huge drag. You must exchange "favours" for even the simplest things. Want to hire a new gang member who isn't dumb as a rock to run your new business? Have fun driving around the entire city asking every single person you know for a favour to hire someone! Why is there not a simple menu to hire goons at my safehouse? Why can I not just pick from a big list? WHY?

Finally we have combat and gang diplomacy - or rather, in reality we have neither. Initially it seems interesting - you have bats to beat people, guns to do more damage. Sadly, you soon realise there is no point to any kind of violence except shooting people dead with guns. This is the same mistake Gangsters: OC made 20 years ago, and CoG somehow falls over it's own feet and makes it again.

In this game if you beat up the local hoodlum who is harassing you, instead of becoming scared of your power he will become enraged and continue attacking you for literal months. If you kill a member of a rival mafia group, they will be hostile to you FOREVER.

There are no deals with other big outfits, you basically just kill each other as soon as possible and that's it.

The worst part of combat is that once you have 3 guys with pistols, you can take over the entire city and become practically invincible. The AI is stupid and keeps it's guys standing around on their own, so you just drive three guys up and shoot them dead. Repeat this over and over again, and three guys can quickly take over the entire city. Again, why is this so easy, but running your businesses is so stupidly restricted?

There are a few other things I *do* actually like - keeping corner hooligans alive can be good because you can do business deals with them. Ironically this is better interaction than with the other main gangs that are supposed to be the big players. The general low poly graphics of the game are quite cute even if the soundtrack is extremely repetitive.

Overall, a game with so much potential that it ultimately squanders. I think it'd be a much better game if it actually allowed players to build a gang and have fun expanding, rather than deliberately trying to restrict you at every turn for no sensible reason.

This game should be called Raidbro Simulator because that's basically what it is, sadly.

It's got lots of interesting features like building, vehicles, flying vehicles, PvP, hunting, crafting. Unfortunately 90% of these features don't matter. Basically every game comes down to the biggest zerg of edgelords on the server no-lifing resources and then raiding everyone else off the server.

My favourite thing to do was run a shop. That's genuinely fun, because you have a building that supplies something useful to people, you can get quite wealthy trading items people really want and you also get a bit of action defending yourself from people trying to rob you.

However, even if you just sell small items, eventually some people who just play Rust 24/7 will C4 your store for 50 scrap and it just feels like you're wasting your time.

I've actually been on servers of 100 players where 50 or so were just in one clan raiding everyone else constantly. Such groups get gear so much better than the smaller groups/solos it just gets really boring. "Oh wow, I get to fight the five guys with AKs and full metal armour with my bow again for the 50th time, so fun."

On top of that, the game really encourages this mentality of addiction. In order to be "competitive" you have to play it a stupid amount. I've known people in their 30s and 40s who were playing for 18 hours a day, every single day, with no job or real life outside the game. It's quite sad, really.

All in all, not a bad game in theory. However the community is extremely toxic and the entire game is basically just dudebros in enormous squads blowing your base up over and over so they can steal your pickaxe that they don't even need. Gets tedious.

This game is honestly fantastic. I see many comparisons to The Forest here, but I actually preferred this over that game by quite a margin.

If you can get it on sale and you like survival games, I 100% think you should go for it.

First of all, the survival gameplay is really fun. You can build framework modular buildings almost anywhere you want, and set up large sprawling jungle bases or small camps depending on your preference and needs. In Story Mode can spend 60 hours sitting around in the jungle hunting, fishing, setting traps, building huge structures...or you can simply rush through the main objectives. It's up to you.

Hunting is smooth and enjoyable, infection and injury provide compelling obstacles (especially early game) and the "body inspection" mechanic is pretty cool. Predators are scary and force you to look for specific audio and visual cues.

Once you know what you're doing, you'll find that you feel like "king of the jungle". Suddenly you're the apex predator and you seldom struggle to have a hot meal and somewhere nice to rest by the end of the night. The hellish jungle suddenly becomes full of resources and plants that provide a bounty to you. It's a cool feeling.

On top of that, I found Story Mode surprisingly enjoyable. I wasn't expecting a great story at all, but Green Hell really does a good job of telling a sad and at times horrifying story. It's definitely one of the more memorable stories I've seen in games recently, and touches on themes of modern greed versus the perhaps more innocent tribal way of living. It's not afraid of drawing a pretty harrowing depiction of sickness and death, either. It feels especially poignant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I won't say any more here.

It also has two endings depending on your actions.

Finally the graphics - as a 3D modeller in my spare time, I really appreciated the detail and care put into the game environment. The devs didn't cut corners here, and there are a lot of nice graphical assets in the game. Bravo to the artists.

At the time of writing, I've played this game for 5 hours.

A bug meant that all my progress was lost and apparently the game can't even save correctly.

I'm happy I got this on a huge sale, or I would be pretty furious at this. The full price of £15 is completely outrageous if the game won't even save your progress correctly - it makes it unplayable.

The concept is very interesting but the execution seems buggy and amateur so far. There are many strange occurrences. For example - arrest 4/5 members of a terrorist cell, designate 4/5 of them correctly, prevent them performing an attack and the game still says you did a "very poor" job almost every time.

Unless a dev can actually explain or correc the saving problem, I'm going to have to recommend you don't buy this even on sale.

Jagged Alliance? More like Janky Combat.

Honestly, I don't know why this game gets so much praise from people. I think 90% of players must look back on it with rose tinted glasses or something. Everyone says it's "realistic", "tactical"...err, no, it really isn't. It's laughably unrealistic.

The first enemies you fight are just "administrative soldiers", the game tells you. They're mostly armed with trash pistols.

By contrast I brought the best men I could hire, including Leech, a man who has "98/100" Marksmanship and a bolt action rifle. A crack shot sniper according to his description.

Well, the first real battle of the game and I had to capture a small airport. I had Leech set up lying down waiting for the enemy with his rifle. Meanwhile the enemies ran around like headless chickens out in the open with their pistols.

I watch my sniper miss 4 shots, reload, and miss again. Meanwhile I'm firing an MP5 with another character over and over and hitting nothing.

Enemies with pistols then proceed to instantly kill my medic by firing their pistols right across the map, then wound my sniper with their pistols, then down my third guy with pistols...all from about 200 metres away. WTF?

I savescummed this battle and it went the same BS way every time. Your soldiers will often miss a single enemy upwards of 20 times even at close range. Meanwhile enemies seem to just auto-headshot you from outside the range of their pistols, even ignoring cover.

Long story short? This game really feels stupid. I couldn't even tolerate the combat long enough to get better gear - maybe the game improves, but what's the point when you have to put up with that nonsense?

Flawed but good indie survival horror game.

Things I love -
- The opening atmosphere/story. It's basically System Shock on Mars, complete with finding diary entries of people and stuff like that. The cinematic that starts everything off is surprisingly good for a budget title.

- The base management. You have to maintain and upgrade equipment in order to craft gear and keep the facility running. I liked this feeling of being a scientist/engineer in addition to being a horror protagonist.

- The combat. It's generally decent and the weapons feel meaty.

- The graphics. Not bad for an indie title.

Things I don't like -

- The item durability system. Just like System Shock 2, for some reason in this future world weapons visibly degrade with every damn shot. This wouldn't be so terrible if it weren't for two things: at the start you can only repair things to 50% durability (WHY?!) and as the game progresses you get utterly flooded with enemies.

It can get to the point where your shotgun breaks every 2 floors of a 5 floor apartment building and you have to keep taking a lengthy trip to repair it. This is anti-fun, to put it lightly.

- The crappy stuff you start with. The gear you begin with is utterly inadequate for anything, and it takes hours to replace it with moderately better equipment.

The way crafting is, you need a large bulk of junk to recycle to make gear. Yet you can only carry 20 kg at the start, which is a completely piddly amount of room when you also factor in the weight your oxygen tanks and so on will take up too.

I know it's a survival title but the amount of stuff you get at the start is so lame it makes the first few levels of the game a chore.

- The "dark" levels. Most facilities, even when powered up, are completely dark until you find circuit breaker type things on each floor to turn the lights on.

I know this is supposed to generate tension but it feels cheap. Enemies hitting you infects you, which slowly kills you and is hard + expensive to cure. Combine that with pitch black rooms and an absolutely pathetic starting flashlight and you can barely see enemies until they are already biting your face.

I think the game would actually be a lot better if dark levels were much more rare.

----

Overall: A good and underrated game that still has some significant frustrations. 7/10, since I still got good entertainment from it.

The Castle Doctrine takes place in some indeterminate part of "the 90's." You, as a homeowner, must protect both your house's vault and your family from other players, who come in as home invaders and burglars.

You can turn your house into an elaborate maze ranging from a fairly harmless but secure labyrinth designed to simply deter people to an extremely complicated deathtrap designed to slaughter any fool who dares enter with malicious intent.

There's a twist though. There are only two ways to make money to upgrade your house; robbing houses, and killing would-be burglars with your traps. This means most players also resort to robbing other homeowners. Oh, and the nastiest bit of the experience? The game is a rogue-like.

If you die, game over. If someone murders your family (which it's entirely possible for them to do if they get past your traps and have weapons), the game does not end but they are gone forever.

First of all, I like the themes and aesthetic of the game. It feels crushingly dystopian - it's not just the 90's, it's like a weird alternative nightmare 90's where everyone is trying to kill each other and the only counter to this is insane paranoia and violence. It almost feels a bit like Deus Ex 1, in that society seems to be collapsing even though it hasn't totally gone over the edge yet. The visuals are bleak and the soundtrack is dour and oppressive.

Somehow the game is made creepier by the fact that we don't see anything of this society outside of home reinforcement and burglary. Every player is given a triple-barrelled name (e.g. John Kenneth Williams) that is distinctly and unnervingly reminiscent of how notorious criminals are named in the media.

Who are these mysterious people breaking into your house? Are they your neighbours? Your "friends"? Total strangers? Off duty cops? How much has society degenerated?

None of these questions are ever explained and it somehow makes the game feel more disturbing.

Over time, the gameplay cycle also begins to morph into a subtle social commentary on the madness of both violent burglars and crazy survivalists who spend years itching to kill someone for entering their property. Both are trapped in a futile cycle of loss and fear.

The more burglars you kill, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more burglars will target you. The more burglars target you, the more you must reinforce your security, and the more danger your family is therefore in. It's a vicious cycle.

The first time someone kills your wife you will probably feel crushed. But, while it's a cruel thing to do, there is at least a pragmatic *reason* for someone to kill her, since she carries half of your cash and can be armed.

When some other player deliberately murders your harmless children as they try to flee, however, the game exposes you to a level of player-on-player callous disregard few other games do. You can even track down the house of the murderer and brutally repay this bloodshed in kind, or die trying. But your dead family will always be there to starkly remind you of your failure.

The gameplay itself is really quite interesting. Robbing a house is turn-based, with each move of your character triggering traps, opening doors or revealing more of the "fog of war" of the house.

Meanwhile building is real-time, and can be as simple as throwing up walls or as a complicated as making remotely-activated electronic deathtraps with clever proximity switches or twists.

So far I would recommend the game - the only issue is the small player base, but with the developer recently announcing the game will be having sales, this should hopefully rectify itself. Definitely get it if it's on sale, it's good fun :)

I'm recommending this game, but only on three conditions:

1. You have a lot of patience and time to play.
2. You listen to a lot of podcasts or whatever and you need a "chill" game for when you're doing this.
3. You ONLY buy this on a sale. It's not worth £20+.

Otherwise, I don't recommend it.

Wurm is a game that requires a massive investment of time to get enjoyment out of it. Say you want to build a house, this is what the process will be like for your first 10 hours with the game:

1. Find out where the hell you are.
2. Make a mallet. (Cut down a tree --> Shave wood into Shafts --> Make mallet head --> Combine shaft with mallet head).
3. Plan your house (requires Carpentry skill, which requires grinding more wood objects).
4. Obtain around 80 planks for your house = cut down and SLOWLY haul around 15 trees, then saw them into planks over 20 minutes.
5. You need nails to nail the planks to your house. This means you need to mine iron...
6. Dig a mine for 2 real time hours. Find iron (if you're lucky/sensible).
7. Dig iron for 10 minutes.
8. Haul iron to your house. Smelt iron in a campfire, because a forge needs MORE resources.
9. Smelt nails. You can now finish your house, so people won't steal all your stuff!
10. Make a small cart, so you can actually haul stuff at a reasonable pace...this requires cart wheels, which require shafts and shafts require logs so...get out there and cut some trees...

As you can tell, the above is pretty involved. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a game you can just jump into.

Perhaps my biggest annoyance with the game is the bad UI, which feels like it was designed in 1982 and hasn't been modernised since. If you want to dig a wall for example, you will need to click the wall after double clicking your pickaxe, and then hit "3" over and over again.

You can queue up 3 actions but it can take 50+ hits to break a wall, so you're going to just have to keep hitting "3" for the next ten minutes.

Worse than that, crafting is incredibly clunky. You can't just select a tool and create X number of something. Instead for many tasks (such as Improving items, an important thing to do), you need to keep putting things in your inventory, right-clicking them and navigating to the Improve task. There's no way of doing this faster.

It feels really irritating when this is a game where you have to do the same task so many times. Why do I have to keep navigating this clumsy menu?

Also, this game is far more fun with friends. Get some mates on and you'll have some laughs (such as when my friend randomly dug through an entire mountain for 8 hours when I was asleep...I still can't believe that).

NOT RECOMMENDED: NORMAL PRICE
RECOMMENDED: ON SALE

The main issue with this DLC is that Baranor is simply too weak. Having one life would be fine if he was tough and could take a few hits, but he is extremely fragile and the gear "augments" that make him tougher are not easy or reliable to get.

Also, healing yourself requires you to quickly open a menu and press "Heal", but annoyingly you simply die if you get one-shot, even if you have 3 full health potions left. It would have been far more balanced if Baranor could at least heal himself in his "injured" state rather than die if he has spare medkits.

This complete fragility also means you cannot engage captains in close combat pretty much ever (I am playing on Gravewalker and getting near even a bad captain is basically instant game over). Most battles involve you sending your crappy (and extremely expensive) mercenaries in and spamming long range weapons over and over again.

I mean, come on. I know he's a human and he's not got a Ring of Power, but even so, with full upgrades he's still pretty terrible. Ranged uruks (including even ranged grunts) are so extremely dangerous it's ridiculous - one arrow or bolt from off the screen can totally end your game.

Imagine if every time Talion got one-shot by a random Archer or Thrower Uruk the game just restarted. It's silly.

Aside from balance issues, the DLC is quite fun and I'd recommend it on sale, but the poor balancing really does suck fun from it.