Recent reviews by Lessigen

Creeper World IXE is *fine* successor to Creeper World 4. I would say it actually follows more in the steps of Creeper World 2, being not top down (like CW1/CW3), or 3D (like CW4). Kind of like if Noita and Creeper World had a crossover; I guess that exists in Particle Fleet: Emergence, but I never played that one. Anyways, I cannot say with full confidence that this is a step in the right direction.

While it did have to live with the astronomical expectations coming after CW4, and I do appreciate the evolution of the gameplay in some form, having "pixels" and a limited amount of ships feels like it actually detracts from my experience. Gameplay ends up being samey and quite frankly the on-foot segments did not impress me and felt more like a gimmick. The "liquid" mechanics are novel, but also are annoying to manage in the later parts of the game. I found that I was wasting time having to micro the actions of collecting, mixing together, and collecting liquids again.

Overall, I do feel like CW IXE a good game, but not one of the quality I expect from a mainline Creeper World game (which is maybe why it's not called Creeper World 5). Unlike CW4, where with that game I continually have a strong urge to play a dozen or two community/rng missions once a year or so, I do not feel that same urge with CW IXE. That said, the price right now is good, and despite my misgivings about the game, I think that I paid a good price for what I played.

The Operator is what I would describe as a psychological spy/detective thriller where you investigate crimes. Quite honestly, what you see on the store is what you get. The atmosphere (early-mid 1990s) is fantastic and does a great job immersing you into the world. The story is very good (albeit a bit short) so I won't go into much detail about it. That said, the moment(s) of realization actually did surprise me more than I expected, especially later on in the story (I'm sure fellow players remember their experience realizing the thing about THAT camera feed).

For the game itself, I enjoyed many aspects of it but was somewhat let down by others. The core gameplay loop is quite fun, and it doesn't impede on the storytelling. The largest "disappointment" - also a common theme in fellow reviews - the game is just too darn short. I felt like I went a bit slow, and my playthrough lasted about 3.5 hours. Given the cheap price I felt like it was a good deal, but I think extending it it to maybe 6 hours would make the rising action and climax much more appreciated. The puzzles, while somewhat challenging, varied and engaging, were generally one-trick ponies that I expected to use at least one or two more times during the game.

Would I recommend this game? Yes. Despite it being shorter than I expected, I still feel like I paid a good price for a well-written thriller story that I could tell had a lot of love put into it. I'm hoping the devs make another game like this that's more meaty with the game content and length, I would definitely purchase it.

-- If you have an AMD card, it currently crashes a lot with driver timeouts. For me, lowering the graphics (or allegedly just the antialiasing only according to some others) fixes the crashing --

Helldivers 2 is what I imagined Arrowhead was intending Helldivers 1 to be from the start. The game oozes confidence in what they wanted to achieve and for the most part I believe they did. The game looks beautiful, the core gameplay is good, the progression is a slightly questionable in my experience (samples seems difficult to get in large amounts even on level 5/6 difficulty) which keeps up the track of good releases we've had this year so far (Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, P3R, etc).

I want to bring attention to the MTX. While I loathe them conceptually, I understand the need for them to support a GaaS title. To this end, I believe that Arrowhead implemented a fantastic model. No FOMO battlepasses, you can grind on your own pace, and you can get the premium battlepasses or cosmetics for free by playing. Not in the sense of playing 100+ hours for a battlepass, but more like possibly 25-35 hours. Nevermind that, the premium currency (super credits) is great value in comparison to the pricing in other games (e.g. Darktide on launch day).

Overall, I would recommend this game. It has great value for what is costs and the co-op has that kind of "chaotic accidental friendly fire" energy that brings good memories to my friends and I. $50 CAD + tax is a good price point and I don't regret paying around that amount, but I would prefer it to be a bit lower.

It's a fine successor to Paragon, but it's not for me.
However, you can't refund it... so negative review it is!

Update: After the game came out of pre-order beta into a "full release" I can no longer in good faith recommend the game. I still enjoy the game for what it is, but a fully functional cash shop with predatory practices (FOMO, can't buy in regular denominations, cost obfuscation, etc) came before other critical game features like the rest of crafting or other things like that is something that I do not support, especially after how it was handled in VT2.
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tl;dr: It's a solid 6.5/10 on my completely arbitrary number scale

There are times I wish I could give a "neutral" review on a game, and this is unfortunately one of them. I do recommend the game as the good things far outweigh the bad things, but the bad things still do leave me wanting more out of the game. I don't regret getting this game at all, but this has some very rough edges for a "beta," especially one that's due for release a week after this review.

The bad:
- The cash shop is predatory in nature. FOMO timers, buying the premium currency in ways that you always have more left over (sunken cost), and (in my tinfoil hat), placing the cash shop before the armoury so that you are always thinking of looking at the cash shop.
- Easily one of the worst designed UX for a game these days. None of the terminology or symbols used gets explained. What the hell does the "shredder" bar do for the weapon? They made some good strides towards amending this issue, but there are still several unexplained UI elements, namely in the Feats
- It feels like they took one-step forward, two steps backwards from the improvements made from VT1/VT2.
- Bars. This gets memed on for good reason. This is fortunately no longer true.

Meh:
- The penances, while challenging, seems very antithetical to the philosophy of "reduced toxicity/improved teamwork" - for example, the Psyker penance for blowing yourself up and killing 3 elites is challenging sure, but not what I would agree is cooperative to the overall team objectives.

The good:
- They did a fantastic job of transferring the gameplay experience from Fantasy to 40k.
- The moment-to-moment gameplay feels really damn good.
- Jesper Kyd continues to make great music. The soundtrack slaps.

I cannot in good faith recommend the game as it is right now. I was initially drawn to this game as it seems to draw from Kairosoft games (namely Game Dev Story) and add some more wacky elements to it in the form of events. This was apparent from my initial playthrough of the demo. Coming to the full game however, more cracks show in the underlying gameplay mechanics.

You and your employees have a moral mechanic called "Motivation." This ultimately breaks down to how fast you work as well as how much quality work is actually put out - I'm not sure on the latter part, because the game doesn't really intuitively tell you. This is understandable, but Motivation decreases FAR too quickly to be fun to manage, increasingly becoming more of a chore as you get more employees. I got frustrated with 3 employees (2 employees + myself). By the time I stopped playing (getting to one of the game service research branch), the workflow ended up being:
- Develop a feature, create a post-mortem (because the advice given to "read the description" means nothing beyond the first few features as it becomes very vague)
- Send your employees vacation to recover their Motivation
- Train your employees
- Send your employees on vacation AGAIN
- Redevelop your feature, hopefully with better stats since it's hard to derive information from the game
- Send your employees on vacation a THIRD TIME
- Do contract work to get more money so you can spend it on features and more V A C A T I O N
- Repeat until you get bored

The events also end up falling a bit flat in places. They are usually completely unfun and detract from the enjoyment of the game - when I see an event, it's not "ooh, I wonder what might happen," instead being like "ugh not again." To this end, there is an event chain where you get hacked by a threat group which tanks one of your features. This is mitigated (and later solved) by having a Technology stat of 7.0 on EVERY feature you have implemented. The thing with this event chain is that the attack affects MULTIPLE features every time. So you have to go through the above loop redeveloping affects features to have Technology 7.0+ spamming vacations and contract work in between so you don't go bankrupt.

I'm not sure what else to say to be honest, the game isn't fun unfortunately. I hope the devs improve the gameplay look to feel less grindy and repetitive. In the meantime, I would recommend going to look at other games that execute the software development tycoon genre better, games like Game Dev Tycoon, Mad Games Tycoon 2, Startup Company or Computer Tycoon.

I'm just happy to have more good, solid, tactical shooters.

Ready or Not fulfills the hole that both SWAT 4 and Rainbow Six left on the gaming market. Unlike a game like Takedown: Red Sabre, this elegantly pulls off a proper "successor" to both of those games along the lines of GROUND BRANCH for Ghost Recon and Delta Force.

For an early access release, I was surprised with how well-polished it was, it definitely felt like a proper game sans some placeholders and missing features (i.e. AI in Coop, map editor, some missing textures/options) etc. The gunplay feels meaty and the combat is very visceral, with engagements lasting only a moment and damage affecting your ability to continue the mission - damaged legs cause you to be unable to kick down doors, for instance. Less-lethal also feels more punishing than SWAT 4, causing various screen effects and messing up your movements. Realistic? Not sure, but it definitely makes less-lethal a very feasible alternative to lethal weaponry.

Does it match the hardcore-ness of SWAT 4? Almost, but the deficiencies in it are both more forgiving and make the missions more fun to play in my opinion. A dead civilian does not instantly fail the mission score-wise, but your score will take a massive penalty regardless - this can cause you to fail a mission that you would otherwise pass. RoE is somewhat loose, but I'm sure with time it'll be smoothed out.

That said, the AI is definitely the worse part of the game at the moment. Civilian AI has a tendency of running around aimlessly, ignoring your commands, or occasionally running into active gunfire. Criminal AI suffers from more traditional AI problems of "seeing" you through walls and wallbanging you with great accuracy. I have not played solo with team AI, so I cannot comment on that. Once the AI improves, it should make the experience that much better.

Should you get this game? For 40 USD/45.99 CAD as of this time, absolutely. This game puts many other "tactical shooters" (R6 Siege) to shame and gives actual tactical shooters like GROUND BRANCH and Zero Hour a run for their money. Supporter Edition is just to support development, with a few cosmetic bonuses and access to the first expansion pack. I'm sure the expansion pack + base game will be cheaper than the base game + Supporter Edition, so do not feel like you're obligated to get the Supporter Edition to get the expansion pack. It's more geared for you to support the 100% independent development of the game.

TL;DR: Exceptional tactical shooter that slots in perfectly with the SWAT 4/Rainbow Six void. If you have the money, I would certainly recommend it.

In Honey, I Joined a Cult, you play a Prison Architect-esque management-tycoon game where you're in charge of running a cult, managing its gradual expansion while trying to keep under the radar of both the general public and law enforcement. It largely plays the same as Prison Architect, but focuses more mood management; in that sense it plays more akin to Rimworld.

I do not want to dissuade people or the devs too much as I enjoyed the game for what it is, but as it stands at the moment, there is a solid base for gameplay however there are some glaring concerns that affect my otherwise glowing review of the game.

The first is that it seems a bit too sandboxy, in the sense that after you play for a bit, it ends up feeling samey. It's open-endedness with being able to "create your own cult" does not lend to its uniqueness from playthrough to playthrough. Perhaps having a campaign of some sort with unique scenarios will help in improving this aspect, as playing the standard sandbox mode ends up feeling repetitive with, to be fair, some changes depending on which "path" you take for divine inspirations (which could be thought of as overarching themes for your cult). Additionally, having more events or more dynamic pawns akin to Rimworld would make it more unique per playthrough, but perhaps that may be asking too much at the moment given the current state. Hopefully this will be improved in the future.

The second is that the AI seems... absentminded? For example, the AI will wander around while working doing nothing as there is work to be done, then decide "Oh, this needs to be fixed" then walk over to it, and repeat. It was beginning to get annoying to see two of my maintenance Watchers idle around while there were 6-8 broken items that needed to be fixed, sometimes requiring manual intervention on my end to get them to fix something. I hope that this will be improved in future patches.

My final complaint is how hygiene works. My understanding is that washing a pawn's hands after using the toilet only grants a chance at cleaning the pawn. Which severely increases the likelihood of a Watcher getting injured from poor hygiene, especially in early game. It's really frustrating to see injuries created from eating without washing hands, akin to Rimworld's "ate without table" debuff. This should certainly be switched to a bar like Mood or Health, with the differing tiers of sinks offering faster filling of the hygiene, a higher maximum of the hygiene bar, or something similar. At least in this way, it puts some control back into the player's hands about how they should handle hygiene, rather than making it pure RNG about whether or not someone will get an illness from poor hygiene.

Now, the final verdict. Is it worth ~20 USD/23 CAD off-sale? At this point, I would say yes. There's enough content to last a dedicated player about 12-15 hours per playthrough. Despite my grievances about the game, I did enjoy it for what it was and I am excited to see what they'll be able to do in the future, with my main hope being the implementation of a campaign mode. Unfortunately, I have not played Rimworld Ideology yet so I do not have a frame of reference to compare the two.

This game is really wonderful. It's like a D&D campaign video game adaptation, with several custom campaigns with a central villain and story. As your characters progress through the world and campaign, they develop as characters, both emotionally/socially and physically. Relationships form - for better or for worse, characters get involved in schemes, or their personal backgrounds, stuff you wouldn't think affects the story ends up coming up later on, giving you that "wow the game kept track of that?"

While probably not a good example, the time the game won me over with the legacy mechanic was when my friend and I lost a character in combat. We were bummed out as most people would, but we shrugged and carried forth with playing. A chapter or so later (about 15-25 years later in game), we stumbled upon the son of that character who inherited many of the same traits and feature as their father, and ended up playing a big part in our story going forth. Characters that die or ones that survive a campaign may live as legacy characters, and you might even find them in future campaigns, complete with most of their stats and their gear!

The combat mechanics are also similarly not a gimmick, and they provide solid stat buffs depending on one's relationship with another person, which makes it really great. It makes you think more about the positioning of your party as to grant the maximum amount of buffs to as many people as possible.

Similar to FTL (and other roguelikes + roguelites), there is both a benefit and consequence for messing around in the story. Sure, you could clear out every tile and reinforce them to get more experience for your party or resources for crafting, but you run the risk of maiming or even permanently losing your party members (you get only one "redo" of death/0 hp PER CHARACTER, they will die forever if they go to 0 hp again) and your enemies will also get stronger. In some campaigns, this may even have worse repercussions for lack of spoilers. So, it may be in your best interest to leave some stones unturned so to speak.

Writing is done through the use of comic-book like panels, which provide a nice change of pace from the typical walls of text and cutscenes, and presumably helps cut down on character animations and other things like that. This format also helps visualize the actions you can make and the consequences of choosing one action. It also helps me develop an attachment to a character, which makes me think about certain actions especially in combat, as it's not just a "stat card" you're losing, but someone who might drastically affect someone else in the world, not just in your party.

Multiplayer is a mostly-functioning experience, which is impressive give the size of the dev team and it's recent implementation. It works well, every now and then a desync that might require the host to force an event, or to rehost. In the latter case, I didn't even have to leave the lobby, just reloading the save fixed it. Some windows aren't synced, which may be intentional, so if you use Discord or something similar, screen sharing might be a good option to see the windows aren't showing up, or if the text adventure windows don't appear properly. Achievements currently don't seem to work for non-hosts (only the host gets them), but that will likely be fixed in the future.

I would recommend this game even at it's full price. More so if you have someone else to play it with. It's one of those games that I'm sure will come back in conversation as it has for my friend and I, like "hey, do you remember Linius, the guy who absolutely destroyed that boss over one turn?"

Note: In multiplayer, I would recommend a maximum of 5 people for maximum fun; you can have way more than that but 5 characters can only be brought into combat at a time. You typically start out with 3, but you can recruit several more during the course of your story. There are also mods that will increase the starting count of heroes.

I would first like to congratulate Leafy Games on fulfilling their feature-complete 1.0 vision. One of the few Steam Greenlight games I can say actually pulled it off beautifully. Been following you guys since I saw the Beta trailer years ago back in 2015. Really proud of you George and Preston. :)

Admittedly, I haven't played in a while since around Beta 29.7 so some of things I discuss may be different (the Lost Colony didn't exist at the point I played if I'm not mistaken).

If I could describe this game, it would be "a coop Star Trek roguelike," or perhaps a less horrifying space-Barotrauma with no PvP. You are tasked with finding the Lost Colony, though that serves as more of a story hook, as you don't necessarily have to do it to enjoy the game for what it is. You venture the universe with a crew of up to 5 people total, each in unique roles - though you can do functions of other roles, you are severely limited in the benefits you bring to that function. I should mention that every role except for Captain can be filled with AI, so don't be hesitant if your group has less than 5 people.

You can take on various quests which can take form both in space and on planets (in Star Trek-style "away team" missions) of removing threats (bandits, the local wildlife or depending on your disposition, other hostile factions), gathering scientific data or do missions planet-side. Doing these quests will grant you cash and more importantly, XP which will help you develop your character into its specific role. As an example, the engineer can specialize into skills that benefit the ship's reactor, which will help in pushing it farther than before in extreme scenarios like a uneven fight.

Of course, over time, the universe starts changing. A faction may start expanding and taking over other places, or you might change your disposition with another faction due to the actions undertaken during a quest. While this is all going on, the "chaos level" increases, which will scale the difficulty of your opponents as you improve your ship with various equipment and upgrades you find, buy, or salvage from across the galaxy.

I've owned this game for several years now and I can confidently say that if you are interested in a Star Trek-like game you can play with your friends, this is definitely the one you should get.