Recent reviews by The Purple Menace

This game is kind of a relic of it's time, it's basically a simple kind of city management game but it plays like an old graphic adventure game. I say that to imply that it's about as cryptic and mean as those games can be, but it's somehow meaner than them because it also has a fair amount of luck involved in the process. This is the kind of game where you will lose entire runs to one bad dice roll, and if you can't stand that then this game isn't for you.

However, if you can accept some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ here and there this game actually is a very interesting glimpse into a somewhat sidelined fantasy world, that being Greg Stafford's Glorantha. Glorantha is mostly unique today as Stafford did what Tolkien did, he based his work off of his own studies of history and anthropology, while most fantasy writers today and even back then just riffed off Tolkien's work. For a quick introduction, Glorantha is a bronze age world with a complex mythology that is influenced by the universalism of Joseph Campbell. It is a world of high magic where sufficiently powerful heroes can become gods.

You don't need to know anything about Glorantha to play this game though, as it teaches you what you need to know as you play. The emergent storytelling of the game is pretty good, if somewhat limited by modern standards owing to the game's age.

What else is there to say? APE OUT is a game where you APE OUT to get the APE OUT of it's confinement. This game is very simple, you can smash things or grab then throw things. You smash the people that are trying to stop the ape from getting out, you can also grab them to use their guns against other humans or to throw them into obstacles or other enemies.

This game is really elevated by it's distinct, Jazz album art style and it's procedural soundtrack that is entirely made up of percussion instruments. You hear a satisfying cymbal clash whenever you smash and enemy and the drums escalate to a fever pitch in moments of intense action.

Outside of that there isn't much more to say, it's a sleek action game with a unique premise and an amazing soundtrack. Also, what other games let you play as a rampaging gorilla escaping from a lab?

Saurian is a very interesting game. You can probably tell from my avatar that I have a bit of a bias for this game, but I'll try to be as fair as I can be. Firstly Saurian is far from finished, it's still in Alpha and that means the game is not quite optimized and weird bugs crop up at times. Despite the lack of optimization the game is visually stunning, each animal and plant is rendered in loving detail with regards to scientific accuracy, aesthetics, and readability in game play. Cretaceous Montana has never before been depicted in such a true to life manner, the only other form of dinosaur media that matches Saurian is Prehistoric Planet. It's refreshing to see dinosaurs depicted as animals rather than monsters.

The game play is relatively simple, you are a dinosaur. As such the objectives of the game are based on simple animal drives; finding food, staying hydrated, avoiding predators, and ultimately finding a mate to pass on your genes. There is no grander narrative or objective to the game. This simplicity combined with the games beautiful visuals lend a zen-like quality to the game and I think this game is best enjoyed in a manner similar to games like Abzu or Journey. This isn't to say that the game isn't violent or terrifying, but those things emerge naturally from the interactions within the ecosystem rather than out of crafted setpieces.

If you're looking to play an episode of Prehistoric Planet then I can't recommend this game enough, but if you're looking for something more like Skull Island then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

Essentially Hand of Fate's darker and meaner cousin, Inscryption combines a surprisingly robust and fun card game with an excellent atmosphere and story. This is a game best played completely blind, so I will not discuss the story in this review. This game is clearly a labor of love as the game is filled with references to real world card games, specifically Yugioh and Magic, and much of the games' terminology is consistent with card game terminology. The game essentially is an extended draft with the framework of a rogue-like, deck building is strategic but kept interesting through the inherent randomness of earning new cards. There is also a robust macro game that allows for new progression outside of any given run, although since this is so tied into the story I won't be talking about it much. Finally I will reiterate that this game is best played completely blind, if it looks interesting to you just take the plunge and give it a try.

Y'know that feeling when you've owned a game for years and yet you haven't played more than 100 hours of it? yeah, that's this game. I don't really know what to say other than it's a game that's somehow nothing but waiting while holding down the S key and occasional micromanagement of Dwarfs. There's little to no reason to play outside of earning a high score, which I personally don't find very compelling. The arcade mode is the same experience every single time and the other game modes don't really help. Every time I've played this game I've listened to an audiobook or a podcast and I've realized after about 10 or 20 minutes of "gameplay" that I'd rather do something else. This is a great game to play if you have work to do because the act of playing this game is so flat that even tedium or frustration is better than it.

I decided to completely rewrite my review of the game post-bolivar because it actually addressed many of my concerns with the game directly (too few strategic resources, AI playing fast and loose with the turn order, and builders and scientists being overpowered).

This game looks like a Civilization clone and to be perfectly honest it is, but it does enough different that I think it stands out. The three biggest differences are that the map is subdivided into distinct territories, there is a distinct battle map, and changing cultures as the game progresses. I'm covering these because these are the differences that, at least in my opinion, are why I prefer this game to Civilization.

I've really come to like the territories system because it's actually more granular than civilization's system because of the way city settlement works. Any player can claim a territory by constructing an outpost, which is a basic administrative center that cannot build anything but prevents other people from building outposts in the territory. Outposts can be evolved into cities, the amount of which is limited by a soft-cap that can be increased as the game progresses. Because skirmishes between armies are allowed in neutral zones, this makes forward settling difficult to do and is often a very direct prelude to war, which I greatly prefer to the more binary systems used by Civilization.

The battle map sections off a part of the world map in which armies of units fight one another. These battles take place over three rounds over a couple turns, the amount of turns lengthening with the scale of the armies and the amount of turns passed. This means that battles happen on a faster scale than the rest of the game, which means that the tactical elements of warfare are made more important, tactics like defeat in detail and false retreats are doable and quite effective, like they were in history.

Finally, changing cultures as you progress through the game is one of the most elegant ways I've seen a game represent cultural change over time. By using real-world cultures as touchstones it really allows you to shape something pretty unique as you progress through the game. All that being said there are some progression paths that are pretty cut and dry mechanically, but this usually is only between two eras rather than through the whole game. This also allows you to pivot your strategy fairly effectively, although the different win conditions of Humankind make this a little less important than in Civilization. To use Civilization terms, the only victory condition is a score victory, which is a loss for game variety. The victory conditions are at least highly adjustable buts since all players are pursuing fundamentally the same goal it can get a little repetitive at times.

This game does have exclusive content for having an Amplitude games account but it's not time locked, if you make an Amplitude account and connect it to your copy of Steam you can receive this additional content at any time. It takes a lot of guts for a studio to not rely on FOMO when it comes to these things, so I'm always happy when developers take the high road like this.

Now that that's said, I want to close by saying that I am beyond pleased that Amplitude pretty directly addressed my primary issues with the game, although I honestly doubt that my review had much to do with that. As I said in my original review I really do like this game, and now that it's eminently more playable it's far easier to enjoy it's strengths and its weaknesses are not quite as harsh as they used to be. That being said I do still have problems, I still really dislike the badge system, I don't like that complete embargo is the default for trade, and there are still a fair amount of text and UI glitches, but overall the Bolivar update has massively improved this game.

Now that 3.0 has come out alongside the newest expansion, Nemesis. I feel it is time to once again rewrite this review. As a foreword to the whole review, the changes to how population works means that as a whole, the game runs far better than before and weaker machines should have a much easier time running the game. I still get slowdown because my machine has a relatively weak processor, but the game is no longer reduced to a glacial crawl by the late-mid game.

Despite what the advertisements say Stellaris is a 4X game with some economic simulator elements, not a grand strategy game. The game attempts to simulate a galactic market and it does an alright job of doing this for the most part, increasing supply decreases demand and all that. The issue with this system is that it isn't diverse enough to create anything terribly complex because there aren't enough different kinds of resources. I do still broadly enjoy the economic management part of the game because a lot of different strategies are equally viable; extreme planetary specialization, self-sufficient planets, space resource economies, it's all there. If you want to have an empire of slave worlds that produce basic resources which are shipped off to a city planet where the ruling elite reside? You can do that. Some players have joking referred to this game as Victoria III, and while I want to see a real Victoria III in the future I wouldn't object to Stellaris heading in that direction as well.

Warfare in Stellaris is entirely strategic, the player's role in war is building the infrastructure needed to support a large navy, designing the ship classes used by the navy, and the overall composition of each fleet within the navy. The Ship designer is very flexible and allows the player a large degree of freedom to experiment with different patterns and personalize their navy. The lack of any tactical element to the warfare is perhaps disappointing but expected for the game's genre, and the fleet battles are at least visually impressive. If you want to watch space ships shoot each other with gauss cannons and pulse lasers, you're good, but if you want an in-depth space warfare simulator you should look elsewhere.

The strongest aspect of Stellaris is how much freedom it gives to the player to customize the game. The game does come with a variety of pre-set empires, but it also allows the player to make their own and the tools for doing so are incredibly robust. Sure you can make a classical militaristic empire that wants to conquer the galaxy but you can do much more than that too. Want to make eco-socialists that live in orbital habitats? Sure you can! An democratic state ruled by an elected chief scientific officer? Perfectly viable. A race of peaceful space-buddhists that just want to be friends with everyone? You can have that too!

Finally, as with all Paradox games, the DLC buying guide. Federations, Nemesis and Utopia are the only ones that I would say are a must have. The only one that I would say isn't worth it is Synthetic Dawn, as gestalt consciousness game play is simply put, incredibly boring.

Really good music, if a little uninspired occasionally. It does a good job at setting the mood for the game in general.

Favorite song: Duty and Honor

It has been years since my initial review, I have played this game on and off since then and I can say that my opinions on this game have changed. I actually really like this game, and I now know that I simply didn't understand it.

To restate the things that I was positive about in my original review; Banished has a very pleasing, if uniform, visual style that resembles a diorama. Some people say that this is a medieval game, but it always seemed more like colonial america to me. Regardless, this game has simple visuals that convey needed information effectively while also looking quite good. Banished does not need to contrive difficulty through outside forces unlike many other city-builders currently on the market, there are no inexplicable zombies nor barbarians sacking your city like clockwork. All difficulty in the game comes from managing your economy and enduring the environment. The only issue with this is that there's a lot of important information that the game simply doesn't tell you, like how long it takes for certain crops to grow or their frost resistance. This information is easily accessed in steam guides but the fact that the game doesn't even make an attempt to inform the player is somewhat disappointing.

As for refuting my original negative claims, the villager A.I. is actually incredibly strong, the failing comes in when they have to move long distances to reach a job site, as they can get cold or hungry before they can actually get there. This isn't an issue per-se, but it can make some starts very weak, particularly if you're boxed in by mountains. I also overestimated the efficacy of farming, mining and quarrying. These jobs only become profitable once you've reached very high population counts and have a lot of people to throw at them. Gathering, fishing, and collecting above ground deposits of stone and iron are far more efficient in the early game, with the only downside being travel time.

My difficulty with construction was caused by, once again, poor information on the game's behalf. Laborers are not unemployed people, they collect resources and bring it to construction sites and storage facilities, you need a lot of them for a village to be functional. In addition, population growth is mostly player determined, a population without available housing simply won't grow.

This game is definitely worth it's asking price, despite my original statements. This is a city builder that is pure economic management, and I think there is a niche for this kind of game.

Now I didn't exactly know what I was getting into when I bought this game. I'm no total War Veteran, I started on Shogun 2 (Which I cannot recommend more). Being a fan of the classical era in general, I was quite excited for this game, but wasn't quite sure on whether to get the first Total War: Rome before this one. I ultimately decided to just wait.

Of course the experience wasn't the same as all those Rome: Total War LP's and gameplay videos I watched (Of course not having played it I'm not really one to judge). Yes this game is somewhat unpolished and several of the Update/DLC factions have units rosters that are utter train wrecks (I'm looking at you Odrysian Kingdom).

Other than the less than stellar release (This is why I always wait several weeks before buying any game). This game is actually very good, it had big shoes to fill when compared to the first Rome, but I think it meets and in some cases exceeds the standard set by the first game and by Shogun 2, The atmosphere set by every single battle is simply stellar, it's really easy to get wrapped up in the game your first time around. In my opinion, this game has better replay value because of the radically different factions and the different political houses for Rome and Carthage.

Additionally, the game runs like a dream, gone is the constant slight slowdown from Shogun 2. Another Preformance improvement over Shogun 2 is that the load times have been easily more than halved.

I do however have my problems with the game, some of the factions have utterly awful unit rosters that make them almost unplayable (Everything in the Pirates and Raiders DLC for example). The unit banter is incredibly repetitive and occasionally nonsensical, on the other hand though; the voice acting is generally excellent, meaning it isn't too painful to listen too.

If you like Total War, I cannot recommend this game more, just don't expect it to live up exactly to it's predecessors, but underneath all the bizarre design choices, there is a good Total War game.