Recent reviews by soldyne

TLDR; It just isn't fun. It is annoying and frustrating. There is no satisfaction even if you win. The entire game is meant to be nothing more than a "ball" pun, but very little thought went into the mechanics and design.

This game is ruined by RNG. Most of the "balls" you get are terrible, they do nothing and have no synergies. For those balls that you can make a "build" with, good luck finding them as there are so many possibilities drowning them out. Many of them actually try to kill you and make the game harder. There is no way to mitigate the RNG and there is no way to get a build going. Half of the achievements are RNG based. Even the small amount of meta progression (which is just unlocking 3 classes) is RNG based.

lets move beyond the RNG. The level design is terrible. the ball, most of the time, just bounces and hits nothing or nearly nothing. you get no do overs if you wiff it, you just die. some "balls" require hitting special pegs which keep shifting their position to be hidden or un-hittable which makes them useless. There are a few levels where the ball bounces around in satisfying patterns, but, not until halfway through the game. some levels have "hazards" which make the level worse and prevent the ball from bouncing entirely (webs, slime, black holes). its like playing a Sonic game but all the levels are mud, ice and water. Bosses are the worst and have special mechanics which seem to counter the "builds" that are already really hard to put together, like punishing the player for finally getting something good.

The whole thing feels like the dev hates the player and wants people to feel angry all time. According to the discussion forum, most of this was actually added to the 1.0 release without going through Early Access so it was quite a shock to everyone. If you watch old videos on YouTube, it actually seemed like a fun game once.

PROS: The game has great graphics, detailed animations, quirky humor, and thematic music. There is a decent sized tech tree to research with mostly meaningful upgrades. There is a variety of soldier types to train and deploy. The base maps are large enough to design a decent base. There is some conflict in the form of enemy spies and attack drones that harass your camp forcing you to build an efficient defense system. The main campaign is fairly open and allows multiple paths to victory with over 80 missions and "boss fight" missions to attempt.

CONS: its way too easy. you can complete the campaign in less than 10 hours. The enemy aggression is only seen in random spies and drones attacking your base, but, the enemy never retakes land that you conquer (or does so at a very slow pace). The research tree allows you to train super soldiers which cause all other soldier types to become obsolete making the research and training of them mostly pointless. Research also allows the creation of factories so you can become self-sufficient on resources which is a good thing, but, doing so trivializes the economy.

Other Notes:
There are some minor bugs but nothing game breaking or super annoying.
The mission system is similar to Evil Genius where you send your troops to the field which looks like a game board. the mission is just a timer and some random events with very little interaction on your part.

Overall - 5/10; pick it up on sale. hopefully the devs will learn from this experience and take their lessons to a sequel.

For Achievement Hunters - you can get 100% in about 15 hours.

Another great game ruined by achievements. as you can see I have over 100 hours of game time and all of it was before they released achievements. the achievements have PvP multiplayer achievements and achievements to do illegal activities which I have no desire to do. also, a lot of recent development added a bunch of stuff which just made the game worse like taxes, accounting, and money laundering. honestly, this is no longer a game about developing software, its become a HR/corporate greed simulator. I am very disappointed in the end product. I want the older versions back...

A worthy spiritual successor to the older SNES era Uncharted Waters: New Horizons game. 4 different characters with 4 different stories and a new game+ mode (5 if you include the DLC). Open world exploration with paths of piracy, trade and discovery. Over 30 unique crew members to find and recruit to your fleet. ship building, side quests, random events, guilds to found, trade empires to build, bounties to collect and hidden mysteries to solve. This game has it all. only downsides are that the art style leans toward the anime side (if you are not into that sort of thing) and if you are not Chinese there are still plenty of translation errors here and there, but, all of that is minor. NO major glithes or bugs in my last 50 hour play through. If you enjoy the Age of Exploration time period and open world RPGs then this game is certainly worth the investment of time and money.

Overall, I say buy the soundtrack and then go play SimAirport. The music is top notch; soothing jazz and I am glad I paid extra for it. the game on the other hand is a mess. After the game was released into its final version it need a few more passes for polish:

- The game is a performance hog and has noticeable stutters even for small airports. Large airports get unwieldy even for high end gaming rigs which is unforgivable for a 2D game in 2020's. This ultimately limits how big of an airport you can run, and its not as much as you would want.
- It also needed a lot of Quality of Life improvements. The construction mechanic is slow, tedious and annoying when you have a larger airport. The copy-paste mechanic doesn't copy zones so you have to copy-paste areas twice, once to get the shape of the room, then set the zones manually, then go back re-copy all the zone specific items. There is not enough feedback about why passengers or airlines have issue with your airport; I have a rating of 96%, but, this airline has a 0% score with me...WHY?
- There are still plenty of bugs in the game that the developer just ignored. some bugs are game breaking and can lead to a catastrophic death spiral to the airport if you don't notice it soon enough. Pathfinding is terrible; when a new international flight lands the arriving passengers can't find their way out of the airport even if the exit is directly in front of them. sometimes passengers will get stranded in places they shouldn't have been able to get into like zones marked for staff only or somehow on the roof! Trucks will just stop working sometimes and cause back ups and delays for no reason. The auto scheduler will just stop scheduling smaller flights for no reason. most of these bugs are "fixable" with a reload of an older save. The worst is when a group of agents is stuck and you don't know about it (because of poor feedback) and their path-finding continuously eats away at your CPU clock cycles until the game just crashes.

Now we talk about achievements for the hunters out there that care. There are two achievements that require grinding. not surprising, many games have grinding achievements. but, based on rigorous testing and doing some math, it will take nearly 1500 hours of continuous play in order to get the worst of these achievements. that is not an overstatement, I did the math. ~50k throughput per real world hour and you need 75 million. thats ~1500 real hours of just letting the game run in the background, assuming you have a stable airport and no bugs.

the fact that the devs released the game and then immediately decided to no longer support it and they created achievements that disrespect players time just leaves a bad taste in my mouth for this developer. As i said earlier, go buy the soundtrack and then go play SimAirport.

for 3 bucks it will give you a 5-10 hour dopamine rush, assuming you don't fall into an epileptic seizure.

A fun econ sim where you run your own arcade. There are tons of variations on arcade machines from the old retro style 80's cabinets all the way to VR head sets. There is a very tight window for getting started and you need to have a very conservative build order to get your profit going, but, once you figure it out, the game plays fairly smoothly. There are random events that keep things from getting stale like robberies, power outages, birthday celebrations, etc. just make use of the contract system to boost your income and build slowly.

As of this review, the game is still a little rough around the edges with some bugs here and there, but, the Devs are still working to polish the game and are active on the forums and looking for feedback.

for Trophy Hunters I was able to 100% in about 20 hours or so.

Come for the easy achievements; stay for the skinner box. Easily worth 3x what I paid.

Mad Games Tycoon 2 is a worthy sequel to the first. It has everything the first game did and more. As of this review, the game is still in early access, but, the developer has a full list of new features yet to come.

the game is not perfect, of course. it suffers from the same issue that many economic simulators have; the only focus of the game is to make money. regardless of the difficulty level you choose, once you make your first profitable game making money becomes trivial and the game becomes a creative toy with no real challenge.

that being said, it does scratch the itch of being a game developer for those of us who don't have the talent or will to do it ourselves. MGT2 lets you live out your fantasy of having your own version of classic game titles like Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Flight Simulator or whatever your gaming heart desires. you can also make arcade cabinets, consoles, MMO's and eventually become a world class publisher.

however, don't come in to this game expecting a lot of depth or challenge. MGT2 is more of a creative toy than a game. If that is what you are looking for, then you have come to the right place.

MGT2 is the best game development simulator on the market and the developer (Eggcode games) listens to the feedback on the forums and is genuinely interested in making the best experience possible.

Oddly satisfying open world tower defense game with deep research trees, resource management, and problem solving. Highly recommended.