Recent reviews by Smidge204

A "Just one more thing" task grinder that has you juggling multiple mini-tasks while progressing the main story at your own pace. Just one more thing. I'll be done after this one more thing... then you notice it's been two hours.

Prepare for a grind if you're a completionist, but it doesn't take too much brain power or focus, so you'll probably get about 80 to 100 hours worth getting all the achievements depending on how efficient you are. There's lots of dialog so you can easily be in for 150+ hours if you want to see it all (which would involve romancing every character across multiple playthroughs).

I'll deduct a few points for the most common dialog being extremely repetitive and frequent. When idle, crew members will often prompt to give you a one-liner that's somewhat in context with something you've been doing recently, but it's always the same quip for a particular character.

This is probably the best option available today for city building simulators; The base game is pretty comprehensive in its content and anyone who's played city simulator games before will immediately find the concepts and tools comfortingly familiar and satisfying.

There is a mountain of DLC that expands the variety and challenge but none of it is essential to make the game feel "complete" like DLC sometimes does, so I never feet like I was being cheated or buying an incomplete game just because there's so much DLC you have to pay extra for.

Most importantly, there is a large and active community behind the game for support and discussion. Workshop content and mods mean you have near total power to tailor the game's appearance and behavior to your liking.

Super easy to learn, super easy to get into, super easy to put down. The ultimate "quick break" game! You really get a feel of speed and scale despite the primitive graphics and strange textures. I guarantee you'll be ducking your head and leaning back and forth in your chair as you weave through tight tunnels at breakneck speeds! Failure is often, and while disappointing it is never discouraging; "I can totally make it through there" will be your mantra as you try again and again... and how sweet it is when you finally do!

If you're a fan of games you can play without a huge time investment, but will never get boring, this might be the best $3 you ever spend.

A challenging rougelike twin-stick shooter packed with strong themes and hundreds of items, dozens of enemies and bosses and thirteen playable characters each with their own play styles and handicaps. From controller-snapping frustration to rewardingly overpowered, game-breaking item combinations, Binding of Isaac provides a fresh experience every time you play. This game will prove to be a bottomless pit of replayability for completionists and is an easy pick-up game with individual playthroughs typically lasting 20-30 minutes.

I'll start by saying that I'm surprised I played the game to the end.

Normally I'm not the adventure game type, and considering there isn't a huge amount of variety in the tasks required (nearly everything is a "find X of Y" hunt), the world as a whole is actually very well rounded and detailed both graphically and with optional flavor text and dialog. The characters are well personified with minimal (absolutely minimal) but well done voice acting.

It is also short, and I manged to beat it in ~3 hours. There is a choice to be made at a pivotal point in the story so I might actually go back and try to take another path. Plus there might be some things that subtly change the ending dialogs. I almost certainly missed some side quests/characterization too. For a relatively short game they managed to pack in quite a bit of content.

The story is simple but serves the purpose well, as does the crude level-up stats system. This is not an RPG to the extent that you need to consider min-maxing the few stats you have, and they seem to have minimal impact on gameplay. There are no dialog trees, but the dialog is at least partially context aware: If you encounter a character before you were meant to, often that encounter will be acknowledged during the dialog with other characters (eg: "Oh, I met (character) earlier...") which adds a nice bit of immersion.

The flower picking mechanic (flowers basically being used as a form of currency) is a bit tedious, and picking enough to get all of the extra items (keys, mostly) to unlock all of the optional doors and collect trinkets/flavor text is a daunting task. There is an achievement for picking 1000 flowers and boy howdy do I believe that could happen...

There's also an achievement for breaking 1000 pots - you basically walk into people's houses and break their pots for money Legend-of-Zelda style. That number seems to be a lie, though; The achievement counter advanced by 5 for every 2-3 pots broken, so I suspect the *real* number is 500. Still a lot though.

There is no health/death mechanic, and the consequence for failure is being teleported a small distance away.

The semi-optional mini game where you cling to the back of the "enemies" and pick flowers out of their heads is fun at first but gets annoyingly difficult. It is only required a handful of times, fortunately, and the reward for completing extras is merely extra masks that your character can wear.

The map consists of six areas - one of which is a single room you only deal with for an optional side quest - four of which are 99% of the game. These areas are fairly good sized, richly detailed, beautifully rendered but labyrinthine townscapes in which you meet the characters, collect the trinkets and find the switches which are the meat of the gameplay. The design and styling gives each area a very organic and "lived in" feel despite the cartoonish colors and proportions. It won't dazzle you with blooms and particle effects but it is very pretty. The mechanic by which you move from one "quarter" to the next is *nearly* seamless, with just a slight hiccup as you transition through an airlock-esque connecting area.

There is an abundance of invisible walls which gets a little annoying at times.

The protagonist character, which you play as, is notably not an annoying brat, moody or woefully inept. That wouldn't normally be something to mention... maybe I just have far to cynical a view of modern adventure games.

Finally, there is no foul language, sexually suggestive themes/dialog (not even a passing euphemism!) or meaningful violence - all "fighting" is the previously mentioned minigame where you sneak up on enemies and pluck flowers out of their head.

Overall a great game and I'd recommend it.

A very simple game with a clean and polished art style, soft visuals and pleasant music that still gets you leaning back and forth in your chair as you dodge obsticles. Easy to get into and easy to stop playing makes this a great game for killing some time in 10-15 minutes chunks, and new layouts every day prevents simple mastery from repetition and the boredom that comes with it.