Recent reviews by Squiddy

This game is actually so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. Don't be fooled by the appearance; Shadow Empire is so much more than your average complicated yet boring wargame.
Obviously it's very complex. There's really no way to learn the game except to sit down with the manual and poke at the UI for a couple of hours until you've figured it out, but the complexity feels different to similar games in a way that's hard to describe. There's loads of stupid little detailed mechanics that are unintuitive and full of ideosyncracies, but the game is constructed such that it's easy to notice problems and learn how to fix them. It's clear that despite the game having an absurd level of simulationist details it is actually designed as a game first and not just for realism.
Obviously you'll get past the complexity eventually, which just leaves you with the game. The 4X-ish framework built into a wargame full of detail leaves you with so much room to approach problems and develop your empire/military uniquely to fit the circumstances of the game. Or alternatively, it starts to feel like a proper oldschool grandstrat, full of little management details and satisfying blobbing, free of the RP trappings, event trees and mana of a modern Paradox game. Even the game's stupid amateurish visuals have such a consistent charm to them that gives the game more atmosphere than it has any right to have.

Obviously the game is not for everyone, but the group of people it's for is much larger than it might appear looking at screenshots. If you're considering the game enough to read rambling reviews like this one, you should probably just give it a try.

The game is still fun.
People complaining because the videogame costs $30 with a free demo, instead of being a F2P microtransaction hell, are insane.

The game feels more DMC than anything, despite the 2D gameplay and all the Guilty Gear mechanics. It really captures the soul of playing DMC 3 for the first time like little else.
It's so refreshing to have a new game which just presents you with a combat system and leaving you to balance beating the relatively hard videogame AND make it stylish.

The Inmates Are Running The Casino

The more time passes the more I'm convinced Synthetik is an all time classic which is just too young for people to realise. Or they get hung up on "roguelike" or whatever. Buy it, play it, everything in the game is just *right*.

The first RPG that feels like a true, large scale adventure in a long time.

Balance is all over the place and the game has a decent amount of bugs that leave the game feeling messy, but its core systems are very neat. The Culture-swapping mechanic which is the game's primary selling point is honestly neither particularly interesting nor actually bad, but many others really make the game stand out.
Specifically:
- The territory/outpost/city paradigm has a lot more depth than spamming cities everywhere and results in a lot less tedium of cities you don't care about.
- Districts which are actually fleshed out and feel like a core part of the design instead of tacked on like Endless Legend or weird one time things you have to get perfect like Civ 6.
- Actually good combat and general warfare mechanics, with a grievance system that feels like it's taken from a grandstrat or something and more interesting technological progressions than Civ. Gunpowder feels like a far bigger deal in this game, as it should be.

Ultimately the game feels like it's definitely going to be foundational for the genre going forward, even if it's not completely amazing on its own.

The more time passes the more I'm convinced Strive is truly one of the best designed fighting games ever made.
Obviously it was simplified in various ways but unlike most fighting games it was simplified in ways that don't hurt what the core game is. Instead it pushes you, very deliberately and directly, into "real" game even as you learn it. And once you have, you're left with a fighting game that has a weird mix of a simple purity with a pace and complexity that's still ahead of most mainstream fighting games.

Also it's an aesthetic triumph across the board but that much is obvious.

Fun middle ground of these sorts of strategy games, feeling like some mix between Advanced Wars and Panzercorps that's given its own gameplay systems. Has a lot of restarting that isn't helped by RNG damage values, but it mostly just feels like each level is a puzzle to figure out.

It's only okay but it's the only game I can still play that lets me just jump in and shoot other people with no strings attached.