Recent reviews by Vermind

AoW4 is a solid successor to Age of Wonders 3. A very good game in its current state, with the possibility to play good, evil, or neutral regardless of your magic choices. Unlike AoW3, you are not locked into your choice of magic at the beginning of the game, but can pick and choose from magical tomes to develop towards any form of magic during the game.

Unlike AoW3, you do not have to stall unit production to make builders, settlers, etc non-combat units. These functions (road building, outposts, cities) are handled by regular units and heroes. You also produce city improvements in a separate queue, allowing for simultaneous unit production and city improvements. This makes the game more fast-paced, but on the other hand, you cannot simply capture cities in one turn; you need to start a siege process with a hero present near the city for a few turns in order to be able to attack a city. This means that even though the game is faster paced, the defender receives fair warning and can gather their people to try and defend the city while it is besieged.

Species are fully customizable, you can make forest dwarves, cave elves, super strong frogs, or swamp cats if you like. The species is also independent of magic choice or even leader type; your leader can be a dragon while your species is cats, for example.

I have only a single negative thing to say about the game -- default scenario timer of 150 turns is too low to achieve conquest victory, or pretty much any victory other than score in most scenarios when playing on hard. It would be more fun if all of the default worlds had a timer of 200 or 300 turns, without having to go and customize it. Special score scenarios are fine though, where the idea is to reach score fast before the turn limit hits, but that is not my idea of the core AoW experience.

In the versions before the Golem patch, the AI took very long to do their turns, but in the current version I am very happy with the AI performance and the game.

There have also been some visual glitches for effects introduced with new items, but these seem to be quickly fixed by the developers. I have had next to no crashes running this on Proton on Ubuntu.

unique survival / crafting game with pve/coop focus. Content is added regularly.

Battle royale with ships + pirate era weapons.
Collect loot, fight others, and have king of the hill type matches in a sea map.
Game mechanics are fine, there seem to be no crashes at least for me, textures are very good looking (but very heavy on the hardware, turn them down), but there's not many players (yet). Bots are challenging enough though. There's a discord channel to coordinate when players are on and to find your ship crew.
Get it if on discount, support the small dev team, and have some fun.

Works 100% on Linux with Proton (I use Proton 5.21-GE)

TL;DR: If you love dinosaurs and don't mind some inconvenient bugs, get it. Otherwise don't get it.

Can you ride dinosaurs? Check.
Can wild dinosaurs kill you? Check.
Can everyone else and their dinosaurs kill you? Check.
You also lose all your stuff when you die, except the stuff you kept at home in boxes.
You can raise dinosaurs, having them lay eggs and obtain creatures better than their parents in every way (eventually).
Almost all settings of the game are configurable via ini files, so you spend minutes instead of days raising creatures for example.

On a friendly server in PvE and in single player, it's a great survival + dinosaur riding FPS.
On official / PvP servers, it can be a colossal time sink and then the best guys on the server just wipe you out.
YMMV.
it still has a few things that are broken, and I don't believe they will ever be fixed. Once you get to mid/endgame, some parts may feel unfinished.
DO NOT BUY IF THIS BOTHERS YOU:
- You cannot save in some boss caves even in single player. When you load you just die.
- Some quest items (artifacts) just won't spawn in single player, forcing you to cheat to get them.. This was fixed recently (May 2021).
- There are missing textures (checkerboard) in places on both old (Island, for example snow cave pit near artifact) and newly released maps (Crystal Isles) on Linux native client. However the game works great on Proton without this issue.
- You may lose your carefully tamed / raised creatures to bad pathing and creatures jumping into lava, if you are not careful or have high speed settings.

2021-12-19: Some more positive points since the original review:
- The game can be played well on Linux with latest Proton, with even better results on Proton GE custom version. Even BattlEye is now supported
- Since the last paid-for update of Genesis 2, the dev team seems to have focused on improving the quality of life in the base game, fixing many long-standing bugs. For example, fixing weapon reload while riding a weapons-allowing dino, cryopod UI improvements, and tek suit helmet activation buttons.

Deeper than Witcher 2 in choices, More open and larger than Witcher 1. Best of the series yet.

A simplified Dungeon Keeper game but with an extra Overworld to deal with.

Play if you want to learn to think like a snake.

I have been playing Wesnoth for countless hours before it appeared on Steam. I recommend it for all turn-based strategy and tactical simulation fans.
Wesnoth is a unique turn-based strategy game where you control a leader who is able to recruit units from a castle. You pay for units using gold, which you get by holding village tiles across the map. So territory control as well as which units you buy and how well you keep them alive are important factors.

Units have experience levels, and heal up on level up. You gain experience by fighting or destroying other units, with higher gains against higher level units. The game has a random hit and miss chance dependent on terrain, weapon types, etc. so timing level ups, choosing the terrain and weapons you fight with, and having the right units against your opponent are key choices.

If I have to compare wesnoth with other turn-based games that I know, it is a much deeper tactical simulation that in the Civilization games, and at about the same level of complexity as the battle sequence of the Age of Wonders games (without the magic aspect).

I have been playing Zero-K on and off for a couple of years now (before it hit Steam). The game focuses on territorial control to gain the main resource ( Metal ). You use metal in factories, assist by using builder units to build faster, and build units and engage other players. All units play differently and have their natural strengths and weaknesses. There can be hundreds of units on the battlefield at a time, and you can zoom in and out as you wish.

You may thing it's like supreme commander, or planetary annihilation, or some other game inspired by Total Annihilation, there are many. However, unlike others, Zero-K has a flat technology tree, so you can, in theory, build any unit at the very start of the game. You are also not limited to your starting factory; there are no factions, but everyone has access to all factories.

Zero-K units also use real physics for movement and projectiles, so you can dodge rockets and artillery shells with fast-moving units, and jump away to avoid a bomber about to hit you. You can move units to a formation by simply dragging the formation with the mouse. You can make units join a group when they are created, so that you can easily add reinforcements to your main force as they are produced without having to go and manually select them. These features set a high bar for other RTS games, and I have not gone back to those since discovering Zero-K.

In addition, the Zero-K AI does not cheat. All of the above features make Zero-K a fun and diverse game to play. Oh, and it's free and open-source.

I played Awesomenauts before the Starstorm expansion and before the free to play announcement. At that time, the game had few characters and felt cheaper than for example League of Legends, which was free. This prevented lots of people from playing Awesomenauts. Now that the game is free to play, and all characters are unlockable without paying money, I think the game is much more accessible for new players. Skins, characters etc can be tried in a sandbox before buying them, which is great for getting what you want.

The game itself is a fast-paced 2D MOBA similar to League of Legends in principle, where you destroy turrets and the enemy base and kill enemy players for cash and experience, making your team go up in level.