Recent reviews by factoryofsadness

Balatro is amazing, but it's hard to describe it in a way to do it justice.

Do you ever play solitaire? Solitaire can be quite chill and relaxing.

Balatro is a solitaire card game, but it adds elements of poker and roguelikes, and that makes it feel more high stakes. There's more going on under the hood than a regular game of solitaire, so decision-making and strategizing are more involved, and this makes Balatro feel more thrilling (and frustrating at times) than solitaire.

That's all that I can really say. It's a fun and unique experience that you have to play to understand. When you see Balatro win some GOTY awards for 2024, you'll hopefully be inspired to give it a try.

I know that the developers are encouraging people to nominate this for the "Better With Friends" award, and it would certainly deserve it.

But in addition to that, you should nominate it for the Outstanding Visual Style Award. It would be a glorious bit of meme-ing if everyone could do that.

A fun singleplayer game that's a cross between STALKER and Escape From Tarkov. Don't be fooled by the graphics--the visuals might be 2D, but the gameplay is not. Engaging any enemy, whether human or otherwise, will always be a gamble. And on top of that, you have hunger, thirst, and tiredness needs to balance, as well as things to craft. So, you'll be in for an interesting challenge while you explore the game's post-apocalyptic world.

However, this is Early Access, so buying the game now is something of an investment for the future. But $20 American is not a bad price to pay for what's already there.

This is the best Madden alternative I've played. Don't be fooled by the pixel graphics, this isn't just a frivolous, arcadey game made for a quick buck. There's a serious football game in here, with players who get "gassed" after a long run, and actual football plays that you'd expect to run in a Madden game.

There are two main issues to this game. One is that the passing and kicking controls take a lot of getting used to (especially the kicking). The other is that there isn't a full franchise mode, you can only play one season and you can't trade players or anything like that.

Still, this is a good game, and I could imagine the Legend Bowl franchise becoming to football games what Super Mega Baseball is to baseball games (i.e. a great alternative for people who aren't too concerned about having real-life players in their games... however, there already is a well-done NFL mod for anyone who wants to play with IRL teams/players).

A very unique sci-fi take on the simulator genre. Just like a lot of "simulator" games, Hardspace: Shipbreaker can be quite relaxing to play, but all that relaxation goes out the window if you make one wrong move, possibly causing a huge explosion.

I highly recommend this game simply for the unique premise and the interesting physics involved with demolition and explosions in outer space.

This is one of the most unique games released this year. I like to describe it as "a psychedelic action RPG about death and reincarnation". I don't completely disagree with the other users who say that the combat is somewhat repetitive, but it wasn't so repetitive that it discouraged me from continuing with the story, which is the main draw of the game. The story will blow your mind...

As other reviewers have noted, this is possibly the closest thing that we have right now to the OASIS from the novel, Ready Player One. I don't have VR, so I can't tell you how that experience is, but I can tell you that it's still worth trying out if you don't have VR gear. While your ability to manipulate objects and the environment are more limited, you can still have an interesting time meeting people, doing karaoke, and other fun things that the game engine allows for. I don't know if you'll want to be in VRChat all the time, but it's something amazing to try at least once and marvel at how quickly the future has snuck up on us.

There's a big reason why I like this game, and I'm afraid that people might misunderstand it. Let me try to explain...

Descenders is basically a modern 3D remake of Skifree.

"What?! That doesn't make sense! How can you compare a modern bicycling game to an ancient skiing game?"

Well, they're not that different from each other. They share a lot of game mechanics, but have different skins.

In both games, you go down a hill at high speeds while trying to avoid random obstacles, and you increase your score by doing stunts. Because of that, playing Descenders felt quite familiar.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Descenders is a carbon copy of Skifree. It adds some nice modern features, like character customization (seeing your character wearing a jersey with your Steam username on the back is so cool!) and the FTL-like campaign map. However, it fills the same niche that Skifree did, as a high-speed downhill stunt game that you can casually pick up and put down whenever you have a spare moment. The gameplay itself is not casual, though, and it will take skill and patience to be able to pull off tricks consistently.

So, in sum, this is a great high-speed, high-skill game that you can conveniently pick up and put down in a short amount of time. I see this filling the same niche that Skifree did in the '90s (but with some deeper features), and I recommend Descenders to anyone who likes games like SSX or Tony Hawk in which you do "extreme" stunts.

Do you remember the NES version of this game, which was titled Rescue: The Embassy Mission.

Well, this version of the game doesn't have D*ck, Jumbo, or Kemco in it. Instead, all the characters are boringly named after letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet.

0/10

I still recommend this as the best Civilization game ever made. Even though the series is two iterations out, the Civilization series made a terrible misstep that it has yet to rectify: 1 Unit Per Tile (or 1UPT for short)

Civilization takes place on a large strategic map, representing the entire world, that's divided into tiles that each have their own features and terrain. War is waged by moving military units across these tiles.

The problem with 1UPT is a matter of perspective, and the matter of strategic vs. tactical combat. "Strategy" refers to the grand overall execution of a war by a nation's military, while "tactics" refers to the actions that a military unit takes in a single battle. A game series that's well-known for featuring both the strategic and tactical view of armies is Total War, and it shifts between the perspectives very well.

The problem is that Civilization does not shift between these perspectives (not that I really want it to, as I think that goes against the spirit of the game), so Civilization V and Civilization VI have tactical combat taking place on a map meant for strategic combat. In Civilization IV and all prior Civ games, you move your military units and when they meet an opposing force, RNG simulates what happens on a tactical level. It makes sense and it fits the strategic perspective of the playing field.

Civ5 and Civ6 use the same perspective, but the 1UPT restriction makes it so that on 1 tile, which represents a few hundred square miles, you have only one military unit. That doesn't make sense!

And I understand why there's a number of people who prefer it. They hate so-called "Stacks of Doom". In every Civ game through Civ4, you can have a theoretically infinite number of military units on one tile. These can quickly decimate a defending city's military if the stack of attacking units is large enough.

But that's the point!

If the enemy is able to defeat you with a stack of doom, then it's on you for not making your own stack to defend. Civilization isn't just about combat. It's also what happens between combat. It can also be about avoiding combat, if that's what you're going for. You need to build up the production of your cities, and then you need to produce wisely. Civilization is about more than managing a military, it's about managing your economy and infrastructure.

Forcing tactical combat on Civ puts too much weight on the military aspect of the game, since you have the headache of figuring out which military unit goes on which tile. And because Civ has ways to win the game peacefully, it goes against the spirit of the game to put that much weight on management of the military.

So, until Civilization reverses the horribly-flawed design choice of 1UPT, Civilization IV is still the prototypical Civilization game. It is the pinnacle of everything that Civilization is meant to be, and I hope that in time, Firaxis will understand the error of their ways and leave the 1UPT nonsense to games that are actually meant to be tactical combat games.

(Low playtime is due to all my playtime being credited to the "Beyond the Sword" expansion, plus most of my playtime was from when I had a physical copy of this game.)