Recent reviews by Anyplayer01

An unusual WW1 RTS that give a decent immersion that respect the history it is based on(screw you Battlefield 5 and COD Vanguard) while still reminding you that it's a videogame. I can only share my opinions in regards to the single player experience which made up of the long game campaign and the short separate episodes of historical battles. However, the RTS part of the game should be the same in the multiplayer. For this review, I will only cover the campaign.

Playing the campaign, you will pick either the Allies or Central Powers to play on a strategic map with turn-based mechanics which will decide what battles you will take. The main goal is to crush the enemy faction's national will while keeping yours high through favourable battle outcomes, mission completions and some of the random events presented to you at the start of your turn.

The battles on the strategic map can be triggered through offensive or defensive on a territory and are resolved through auto-resolve where you let the automation calculate the outcome or my personal preference, manually command the army to battle the enemy in an RTS fashion. For the battles, favourable outcomes are preferred by winning them with meaningful gains such as capturing more strategic points during an offensive, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy, keeping your casualties low and successfully defending your strategic points during a defensive.

The RTS mechanics aims to simulate the WW1 experience where line infantries operate in large individual units and would easily get mowed down when exposed to dangers such as rifles, machine guns, flame thrower, grenades, artillery, razor wires, tanks, aircraft and lethal chemicals. The trenches are the main things keeping the infantries alive when having to deal with the aforementioned dangers, however, the infantries will have to be risked out in the open if grounds are to be gained. The artillery are the other main factor keeping the infantries alive so both of these are usually the driving forces in winning the battles.

The main resource in a battle is supply which is used to requisition units and firing artillery. Whatever resources that are available in a battle are limited by whatever is available and applied on the affected territory. As an example, if you attacked with 5 corp of infantries only then all your available units are what made up the 5 corps which is further limited by the supplies that get carried into the battle.

Technological research, random events, mission completions, espionage and infrastructure development on territories are other notable factors that will affect the campaign outcome. I may have missed a few more but these are what come to mind at the moment.

Overall, the mechanics for the campaign and the RTS battle feel decently implemented and I enjoy immensely playing them. Personally, I think the traditional RTS players would be able to adapt to playing this type of game.

I have a lot more of nice things to talk about this game that made it among my favourites but I will conclude it by saying this is a good game.

Game's quality is pretty decent overall. I guess the game runs on an emulator that is pretty versatile for giving you the options to adjust the difficulty, render aesthetic, number of lives, choice between 3 different game versions which had a version I preferred to play in and etc. Worth the money, I say.

Was always fascinated by this game for its gameplay and aesthetics. It had some initial issues after its launch. They do not exactly break the game for me but it didn't give me the quality I expected from it. However, after the publisher and devs took the efforts to resolve them as quickly as possible, I'm glad this one came out on Steam to give me the opportunity to try it. I praise their efforts for this.

Most of Toaplan's games interest me and seeing how this game turned out pretty alright to me now, I look forward to any of their potential Toaplan's games re-releases in the future.

I may be living in a cave but I always consider Gradius 5 to be the last best shmup and I have not heard anything after it topping it. There are many that were close to it and Drainus happens to be one of them.

I only managed to finish Drainus default game mode on hardest difficulty and have yet to touch the extra contents I unlocked due to life commitments at the time of this writing. However, I can recommend this to any shmup fans if you want a quality game. Fun gameplay, nice aesthetics and nice soundtracks are what it has.

A turn-based strategy game with fantastic anime aesthetic, fun mechanics and knows how to tell a war story with all the ingredients it has. If there are any complaints I have with this game, that would be how the characters' lines are written for the English localisation. Descriptions for weapon data, lore in newspaper and anything not related to dialogues are alright for me where localisation is concerned.

I'll start with my main gripe which is the localised version of the characters' dialogues. Firstly, you can play it in Japanese audio(personal preference) but the subtitle is not a direct translation of the audio but lines spoken from the English audio. I may not be very well versed in the Japanese language but when you watch enough anime, you can roughly tell that the English subtitle don't match with the spoken Japanese.

Not only it had bugged me having to deal with mismatched subtitle, I also had to deal with the English lines that sometimes felt like the localisation team had taken too much liberty with for most of the characters. It's not too bad for the main story but it feels pretty crappy in the side stories. A little disclaimer, I have not listened to the English audio but when I read the English lines, I don't think highly of the localisation team's ability in keeping the original essence of the characters.

Thankfully, the overall quality of the grand story don't feel too affected by the localisation quality since I enjoyed it. You can find light-hearted moments in the story but you will always be reminded that this is a war story with its horrors and glories. Pretty tame if compared to Saving Private Ryan but it's an enjoyable war story nevertheless. Don't expect anything groundbreaking here but you can enjoy how well everything are put together.

Mechanics are fun and almost no different from the first game. Progression is RPG-like where you train the soldiers' based on their classes equally and gain new equipment either through upgrades, rewards or loots. The aiming will feel weird to FPS players but it makes sense for this game. For controls, I can't say anything for controllers but game handles well for mouse and keyboard with custom inputs available.

Level designs feel fair although I'm speaking from the perspective of someone having played a lot of strategy games set at highest difficulty. For reference, think Into The Breech at highest difficulty with 0 casualties on my side and civilian. Only times I felt challenged in the game is when it throws weird surprises at you and when it offers difficult side challenges. Still, I enjoyed the playground offered especially when I get to play with cool toys and test them in it. The well made combination of the mechanics and level designs help ensured that the game is fun.

No issue with optimisation for me. I'll share with you one amusing story here. This game starts up faster than Risk of Rain 2 for me. I think this game is just technically well made and I highly appreciate that in the landscape where so many so-called AAA games always screw that up.

How about the audio? Very yes. Sound effects work well for their intended effects, and musics fit the atmosphere and pleasant to listen to. The guns and explosions generally sound loud and punchy but there are a few weak sounding ones but insignificant in hurting the overall experience.

In summary, it's a turn-based strategy game with a war setting made well with all the components it has and I would have given it a perfect score if it wasn't for some of the poorly written English dialogues of the localised version. Thankfully, the flaw is not crippling. Definitely a game worth playing.

An early access game that feels mostly stable to play in and has enough survival, adventure and relaxing content to get you hooked on for some time. More content likely to come.

One main thing you want to be wary about this game is its automated world save system is a bit whacked where it may rollback your hours, days or weeks worth of your construction efforts. Had this issue happened to me regardless of whatever Steam cloud setting I set for it, so I'm still holding the devs accountable for this. I suspect the issue may also happen if you play the game in a device with multiple accounts.

Once you figure out how to manually backup the saves, you can go ahead and freely enjoy the viking fun without worrying about the aforementioned issue.

On a closing note, regardless of the reason causing the save issue, I wish the users didn't need to go through the technical hoop just to safeguard their save file in this game because there's no manual saving function in the game. For now, those who are vulnerable to the issue can feel that they are thrown under the bus.

Principally, I find it hard to recommend this game just because how the simple issue can totally ruin the fun experience you can get from the game. If you know the simple technical hoop to manually saving your world, then I can recommend this to you.

A very well made factory-themed time sinker both in gameplay and technical design. First timers who have interest in designing any algorithm of sort will easily find themselves lost in trying to optimise their ever growing factory.

Also a great game to play with friends to at least fill in the loneliness of being stranded on a hostile planet. However, don't expect the game to be action heavy as the game is mainly about making your factory build for you.

Easily the best strategy game of the year for me. One of the most well made Total War game for its fun & excellent gameplay, and almost bugless first release & throughout its lifespan.

All you need is kill.

Unless you are a tourist.

A slash 'em up game that have enough challenges to make a casual play session enjoyable. This game is definitely a lot more fun when you got a partner to play with.
2018 and it still is a good co-op casual fun.

Terrible ground forces game design: Mostly poor maps, poor matchmaking, poor reward system(aircraft get better rewards), exploitable graphics(removeable walls & trees exploit) and probably a few more I haven't listed out. All these combined to make the ground forces mode a frustrating experience that is not worth spending your large amount of your time on. Better off use those times on playing RPG games that gives you better satisfaction.

I can't say anything about how the air sim is but I originally picked up this game for the ground forces, so this is generally my personal experience on the Ground Forces mode only. To be easily picked out by aircraft even when your team was initially doing well combined with other frustrations, I will just say that War Thunder Ground Forces shouldn't have existed.