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edit 3: Yeah, I've managed to continue to persevere, but don't let the play time fool you. Aside from the reams of P2W, the game is also off the chart PAY TO WAIT. Get to a certain point and it's 30 minutes of repair between PVP battles if you lose, or take a decent bit of damage, and it's OVER FIVE DAYS in some cases if you want to upgrade any essential components in your ship DURING WHICH TIME YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY PLAY because those essential components are completely offline. And skipping the timers isn't cheap either, even if you were some kind of masochistic millionaire. It would literally cost thousands of dollars to try to play this like a more traditionally paced game.

edit 2: THUMBS DOWN. Changing my recommendation to a thumbs down. The scent of pay to win is now completely off the charts. The vast majority of characters, items and customisation appear to be hard-locked behind the cash shop, to the point that the game and progression seems to be premised on watching an advertisement on the mobile client for three ebucks, which I understand caps at 120 ebucks a day. At 30 seconds each ad for 3 ebucks that's effectively an hour or more of ad watching per day for two days just to buy one half decent new character in the shop.

Mechanically this is a pretty typical mobile game port. Buy ship components, use materials to upgrade ship components, wait X hours for component to upgrade, repeat.

On top of this is a light RPG story line, both PvE and PvP battles (opponents are not interactive, like Gems of War you're just fighting another player's base build with some automation) and a collecting game for different and better crew. (edit: the collecting game has dissipated almost completely, other than through the cash shop.)

Pretty much every single step is an opportunity for monetisation. Use real bucks to speed up every timer, real bucks to buy gear, real bucks to buy better crew, etc. Open your account on your phone to watch ads for a tiny dribble of free ebucks.

Pretty strong pay to win elements. Pretty much the best crew you're likely to get is 3 star, pay real money to get 5 star+ crew. 5 star+ crew are a big step up in terms of quality and power. Same with gear for crew, no doubt other stuff I haven't butted my head into yet.

Early game timers are typically 2 real-world hours or less (maybe 9 actual hours played at the time of this review, including on the mobile), but there are a couple of big things that take 12 hours. I understand that the timers continue to scale up further to several days as you progress.

Notwithstanding all of the above, I think this is a pretty engaging example of the genre. The pixel graphics are bright and cheerful; you have a high level of ownership of your spaceship due to modular ship building; and you form a genuine relationship with your crew and their little animations due to odd designs (cats, robotech, general weirdos, jesus ('messiah'), etc.), animations and regular levelling up.

The big PC screen makes a huge difference to playability given the detail and complexity of what's going on. I can't imagine spending anywhere near the same time on this on a tiny screen.

Currently I'm burning out on the end game of Star Trek: Timelines (level 81) and looking for a new light casual/short attention span obsession to jump to and this game looks like fitting the bill nicely. I don't mind throwing $5 a game dev's way occasionally, but your tolerance for such things will obviously vary.

edit 1: 20 hours in and the game is really drying up of content hard. PvP battles are pretty proforma, the RPG story line is on hold, and I'm not getting the typical drip feed of collectables I'd normally expect. Sadly, there's less and less to keep me here every time I come back. Consequently, I'm wavering on changing my recommendation to a soft down thumb... we shall see how things go over the next few days.

Every iteration of Civilization further adds to the period of unavoidable stagnation that occurs after you have reached the practical limits of expansion.

The penalty for seeking any victory condition other than conquest is hour after tedious hour of clicking forward, updating build queues, and watching the world get busier and more complex for no significant gameplay benefit.

The penalty for pursuing a conquest victory is that every single tedious turn takes 10 or 15 minutes of micromanagent of dozens of units that individually do very little.

I keep buying these damn games and expansions based on some of the fondest memories I've ever had in computer gaming. Sadly, as computer technology has improved so has the game length and pointless make-work.

One day someone will invent a game that includes the Civ expansion phase only. Until that time I'm done with this franchise.

edit: as I realised commenting below, on the topic of mid to end-game stagnation (that is, everything setting itself firmly into concrete), the other objection I have for this game is that Civ does a particularly poor job of simulating a living flow of history. Once everyone's borders lock tight against each other you're really just stuck with the same Aztec and Babylonian neighbours in space as you had pushing right up against your borders in 1000BCE.

Civ challenges you to build an empire to stand the test of time. It doesn't mention that every single one of your end game neighbours will also have 'stood the test of time'. There is no split of the Holy Roman Empire, no German unification, no decolonisation of Africa, no life. The game is essentially about a bunch of fat men crammed into an elevator bouncing off each other's beer guts. There are nearly 200 countries in the world today, try telling that to Civ.

edit: massive new free update, lots more to do. I adore this game. :D

Casual game, well written with a great sense of humour.

Similar to Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator in tone and writing style. The smut is risqué, double entendre, private British school boy, slapstick.

For the most part there's not much to see that you wouldn't happily show your grandmother other than cartoonish splash pictures at infrequent milestones (eg recruiting new characters, levelling up relationships).

There is also a free uncensor DLC in the store that removes the black bars over body parts, making the character creation screen very... pink, which may be relevant to who you have watching over your shoulder at the start when designing your main character.

The women give as good lip as the men and are fully empowered in all the interactions that I have observed. Everyone of all genders is romanceable and the main character can be any combination of physical attributes and clothing styles from any gender.

A lot of effort has been made to make the romance options as appealing with the men as they are with the women, and there is an equal number of male and female characters to interact with. Although never explicitly so, the tone and style of your interactions with the men tends more towards gay male, however, so if you're a straight woman your mileage may vary depending on your attitude to such things.

At no point did I ever see anything even close to needing a trigger warning. In fact, everything was just sweet, funny, inclusive and empowering.

You as the main character are played entirely for laughs, leaving the power dynamic firmly on the side of all the other characters that you engage with. Even your 'rival' is pretty nice.

There really isn't any significant strategy to speak of. The business side of things is structured as a battle game - train your managers up, battle rival 'companies' and take them over. It could have been a zombie game for all the relevance the mechanics have, but it works.

I found myself up at 3am still playing on my first day, which I haven't done with another game for quite some time.

Whether you think the price is appropriate for a really chilled, funny, well made, addictive casual game is up to you, but I personally got more than my money's worth. The world needs more games like this.

Well worth a couple of hours of your time for the bargain basement price of free... well, it's a demo precursor to a full release next year some time, but still, how often do we see those nowadays.

Similar gameplay cycle to Deep Sky Derelicts and Darkest Dungeon without the punishing difficulty of the latter.

I think this is a genre that we need more of and this is looking like a pretty positive contribution. I felt inspired to post this review to encourage people to wishlist.

No idea of the dev's roadmap, but I'd like to see the management side of things stepped up a fair bit, possibly a campaign mode, and runs longer than 52 weeks (each week is a turn although a lot of turns are things like training and buying things from merchants rather than battling).

The dev seems like a wonderful guy, but sadly I'm not feeling it.

To be frank, I swear I programmed this exact game in BASIC on the Commodore 64 35 years ago.

The entire 'simulation' seems trivially simplistic and most of the discrete parts of the game are to all practical consequences disconnected from the other parts.

In my first full game on normal I solved a bunch of trivial 'dilemmas' in the throne room for no significant reward, listened to a bunch of minstrels blip and bing tediously for +1 Minstrels Guild rep a time but for no other clear benefit, bought a bunch of soldiers and then set about invading everyone, buying more soldiers, invading everyone, upgrading a barracks or two, invading everyone, then taking over the world, all in text.

There are a number of sub-systems that seem potentially interesting, like exploration, specialist buildings, and gladiator-like battling, but ultimately none seemed particularly necessary and I ended up ignoring the lot in favor of just buying troops and invading people.

Invading isn't even that interesting. Invading a territory simply increments your territory counter by +1 while subtracting your soldier count by some random multiple of one hundred. There are no specific resources to be fought over, no flavour text (such as winning a 'mountain range' or 'forest'), and there's certainly no cute ASCII map.

Of course, #playyourway and all that, however the game largely forces the invading by having other countries invading you regularly, which while beatable, drains your manpower, which costs you gold to replace, which means you never get time to upgrade anything unless you gear up to entirely take out the source of the irritation.

I don't begrudge the dev his passion project, but frankly, I consider it a little bit cheeky that he considers it worth charging us for his hobby. Dwarf Fortress this ain't.

I've been playing obsessively for a while, despite an earlier critical review, and I've finally realised why. Dota Underlords is a slot machine.

I mean, it's not just heavy on the RNG, it's an actual one armed bandit. Seriously, I'm terrified to think about what monetisation model Valve might be setting up around this one.

Basic gameplay cycle is to buy a couple of heroes, then keep hitting the next turn or cycle button in the hope that the new heroes you're offered duplicate the ones you already have. Every three times you match a hero you get a level up, free up a slot, and get an endorphin rush.

Tacked onto the basic slot machine is a set-collecting card game to give you a feeling of control. Each hero has a couple of tags (such as "tank", "troll", "mage") and you'll typically be forced to collect tags you pick up in the first two rounds for the rest of the game. Players get bonuses for collecting multiple tags from a single set, and if you've been particularly successful with RNG you can get some overlaps and a nice synergy going between two or three tags.

In between slot machine button presses there’s a non-interactive video mode where your collection bashes some other random collection for a bit, with the most lucky button presser getting another endorphin rush in the form of a ‘win’ to reward them for their exemplary success in button pressing.

Dota Underlords is so trivially simple, yet so addictive, that it's scary.

Edit: This review applies to the single player experience only. Your mileage may vary if you actually have friends (hot seat or direct connect only).

Imagine a novel. Each chapter takes around 30 minutes to read, is told from the same perspective, involves the same group of six friends, and starts and finishes at the same point in time, each time. The story is told entirely through a series of mostly identical set-piece interactions. Each interaction has illustrations.

Every new chapter includes a few small things that are different. Maybe the main character is interacting a bit more with one friend and a bit less with another friend, but either way much of the dialogue doesn't change regardless. There is no discernible character development.

Now, imagine that after reading a couple of chapters you're starting to get a better idea of who everyone is and their interests. You, the reader, have occasional opportunities to pick one out of two dialogue options and you now have a fair idea of which of the two is the correct choice.

Say a character likes chickens and you have the opportunity to chose an option that gives them a chicken for their birthday. Turns out that the chicken you picked for them is actually a shape shifting changeling that goes on to eat half the guests at the birthday party, putting something of a downer on everyone's evening. (-1 smarts / -2 fun)

How many chapters do you think you would get through before tossing the whole book in and starting something more interesting?

Multiply 30 minutes by the number of chapters you're likely to read before getting bored. This is the amount of game play you can expect to get out of this game.

I made it through three.

Siege of Centauri is a perfectly competent tower defense game that does absolutely nothing new for the genre, which is just fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The game looks attractive enough, and I've enjoyed the time I've spent with it so far.

The only part of the game I've found with an early access feel is some missing voice overs, but otherwise it plays like a complete and well realised game with plenty enough meat on its bones.

There's only six missions currently, with a plan to release a new one every week or so from now on until the campaign is complete. Given Stardock's legendary post-launch support I fully expect to see these and more over time. Either way, I'm not too far off seeing my money's worth already.

Buy direct from the devs's website rather than Steam to ensure that more of your cash goes into making a better game, instead of into Gaben's pocket.

There's a very appealing flow to Slay the Spire with lots of meaningful decisions and no downtime.

Play card, do damage, expand your deck as you go and see satisfying combos play out exactly as you imagine.

Although there is a bit of strategy (you often get to select one of several cards to add to your deck as a reward) the main body of the game is tactical - what cards have you got in your hand, is anything good left in your deck, how best to play these to win each battle.

It's also a card collecting game for those who don't like building a deck. Collecting happens from very discrete choices, primarily as rewards from combat and adding them to your current deck.

Slay the Spire is very tactile with a super-satisfying feel of weight associated with playing a card, not especially taxing (unless you like to over think things) so works well as a casual game while evolving enough to keep things interesting.

There's enough procedural generation to ensure that evey run feels a bit different.

The main claim of the game, however, is how nearly all information is completely displayed to the player with very little rng. This may sound like a chore, in the way that chess can be a chore, but it isn't as the decisions are largely all discrete and easily intelligible.

Slay the Spire is a classic in every imaginable way.

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Refunded.

Game is a novelty which gets tiring very quickly. As a single table this would need a bit more than novelty to justify the price. Sadly, I can easily see it appearing in $5 bundles in a year or two.

Despite the multiple playfields there are very few opportunities for aimed shots, or combos, or jackpots and although these exist it's almost impossible to see the opportunities behind all the noise. The entire game is therefore primarily about keeping the ball in play. This is just as well as the flippers are very small and therefore timing shots for precision isn't easy, and certainly there is no practical way I can see to manipulate the ball around the playfield.

I can see this style working as a shmup where the playfield scrolls forward as you play, but in this case we have an essentially static playfield without any sense of evolution or progress.

And on the topic of shmups, if it is one it's not actually very evocative of the genre. There are no unlocks or power ups I could see, and although there are swirling alien-like lights they hover over the playfield and don't shoot at you and it's almost completely random whether you hit one or a lot, a problem exacerbated by the fact that flipping the ball through the middle of a circling formation of blobs inevitably also happens to send the ball on its way to another level of the playfield entirely, and dropping anything left of the formation off the screen.

Not sure where some of the reports about real ball physics have come from, since the ball feels very much like it's made of rubber with virtually no weight.

Graphically, the playfield is washed out, tiny, and has very little definition and virtually no three dimensionality making everything blurry and indistinct. This is particularly the case when animated, although the screenshots above do illustrate this problem quite well.

The game is an exercise in watching your tiny ball interact with various sparkles and pops that appear to have little relationship to anything at all - something that I'll admit gives a pleasant adrenalin rush in the same sense as a fast paced paddle or marble popper game or a match-3 cascade.

In terms of performance, my PC is getting pretty old now but it does play Pinball FX3 just fine. This game however, stutters constantly on very low settings, most noticeably as the ball gets anywhere near a flipper.

On balance, however, my main objection is simply that after 20 minutes play I'm bored of it already.

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