Recent reviews by AngoraFish

Fantastic game.

Typically I'm one for long and detailed reviews but what you see is exactly what you get here.

I bounced off Planet Coaster pretty quickly, but Parkitect seems to be retaining my interest. The economic simulation seems better than PC, or at least, there's more meat in the management side of the game.

I like the aspect of designing your park to properly separate the service functions (eg stocking shops) from the customer side of the business (where the patrons walk around).

Super-dedicated devs.

Highly recommended.

Today only (just like every other day) because you are such a loyal player (just like every other player) you have been selected (because you logged into the game today) to get a 25% discount (from our normal ludicrously excessive prices) to pay us to give you one trivial drop (although you'll still need to buy another four of these to make it half decent) plus enough materials to partially level it (commons only, sorry, nothing useful).

Simple card collecting game with almost no skill or strategy, a true skinner box with lots of micro levelling and similar ding! moments where you receive a mini endorphin rush for clicking on something trivial more times than is healthy.

This is a classic mobile game, where every single click is an opportunity for monetisation, where in order to get anywhere you will need to log into the game at least every three hours (break up your sleep if you have to), and where the only skill required is how much money and/or time you have available to throw away. Absolutely don't even think about playing without at least buying the monthly card for $4.

Yeah, I went into the game with my eyes wide open. I don't even like Star Trek. I was simply looking for a casual distraction to break up my sad, short attention span existence. I like mini-endorphin rushes, and I am lucky enough to have the flexibility to pause my life intermittently for constant distractions.

Would I wish this sad, meaningless existence on any of my friends? Absolutely not. I therefore cannot recommend this game to anybody at all.

edit: 1,800 hours in and my thoughts haven't changed.

Doki Doki Literature Club is this month's new hotness, supposedly with crossover appeal for people who are not normally fans of virtual novels. If there is crossover appeal, however, I'm not seeing it.

Most specifically, the first two and a half hours are largely pretty bog-standard VN click and read, with a trivial amount of interactivity, and that's just far too much in my view for the eventual payoff. (You could get the two and a half hours down a bit if you skip enough text, and context, but then what's the point?)

After two and a half hours, the game does abruptly get kind of interesting, "disturbing themes" are introduced (no spoilers, the warning appears several times on launch), and some fourth wall breaking occurs, but none of that is interesting enough imho to justify the proceeding two and a half hours.

Possibly my opinion would be different had the game taken half an hour to get to this point, and the game is interesting enough when you finally get there, but even at that point I felt as if the game required quite a bit more emotional investment and suspension of disbelief than I proved to be capable of.

Overall, I expect that Doki Doki Literature Club is going to be well worth the effort for those who are already a fan of visual novels. For everyone else, you may find that your time is better spent elsewhere.

edit: since this review is attracting a lot of attention I've reworked the text a little for clarity and readability, although the general tone and content hasn't changed.

There really is no point buying chests in Crusaders. In packs like this what you're looking at instead is the Golden Epics (GE). GEs can’t be found anywhere else whereas jewelled chests drop regularly for free. Neither of these two GEs are worth throwing money at.

Hermit is a good early game main dps crusader but he requires some awkward positioning, making him difficult to use effectively. He will also be replaced very quickly with better options. Sasha is an early game buffer, and much easier to use, but will also end up being replaced fairly quickly.

If you do have a lazy $20 to spend on Crusaders this pack would be a very long way down on your list of value for money options. For example, every event and every weekend there will be a special Golden Epic offered with a 3-pack of chests for $5. Buying four 3-packs over a month for $20 will give you four GEs and 12 chests, as opposed to 2 GEs here and 10 chests.

Alternatively, another way of throwing $20 at the devs would be to buy the Song of Thrones Starter Pack (available in game). Although this pack also offers two GEs and 10 chests it also comes with two event crusaders you may not otherwise get for a while, both of which fit well in a lot of formations and indeed Brogan remains viable even for end game formations. Both crusaders will also sit really well in any royal formation, which is an excellent staple formation for the Crusaders mid-game.

But seriously, there is no point at all in buying anything for this game unless you have the spare cash to make a donation to the devs. Don't feel pressured by the free to play popups and guff to think that you actually need to spend a cent. You don't. But in any case, you certainly don’t need this particular pack.

This game is exactly what it says on the packet. A largely relaxing experience gliding around giant coloured monoliths. It's an unapologetically casual game for when you are looking for a bit of quick escapism without much thought required in a break between sessions of Path of Exile or just before bed.

Scoring is based on how close you can fly to the monoliths and for how long you can maintain that without crashing. Extra points are awarded for proximity to monoliths on more than one side. For example, flying through a tight valley might give you 2x points while flying through a small tunnel might give you 4x points for proximity on 4 sides. (These multipliers are arbitrary, I have no idea of the actual math here.)

You’re not forced to fly close to anything either. If you’ve just been though an intense tunnel experience you can simply glide outside the range of anything risky for a bit until you compose yourself again for your next daredevil stunt. Or you can glide from one map to the next and enjoy the view if that’s your thing.

Still, the scoring mechanism adds some interest and I suspect that for most players the game would get old pretty quickly without it. Scoring also gives you some incentive to return to revisit your previous best and to push your luck enough that you’re probably going to die sooner rather than later, and that’s a good thing.

Is it a well done game? Yes. Is it worth $3? It's pretty disposable really, and no doubt will appear in a great many bundles in a year or two, but it's an indulgent purchase for less than the cost of a cup of coffee; you could do a lot worse.

Desdaemona is not an exclusive troop (I currently have 15 copies), is not even in the rarest two classes of troop, and I don't recall ever seeing Desdaemona in a competitive team. The other stuff in this pack will drop within half an hour of joining a top-200 guild (check the forums).

More or less any player would be better off making in-game purchases instead for the ongoing daily rewards, forever, that the associated VIP points give you.

Gem keys have extremely low drop rates for higher rarity cards. The odds of anything good (legendary of better) are around 1%, and the odds don't change simply because the keys were purchased through this pack.

All up, this pack could be the worst value purchase in the game. It isn't worth $1, let alone $10.

edit: After two more years of power creep the value of this pack has declined even further, stay away.

I more or less automatically downvote any review that dismisses casual games with the throwaway insult of "mobile game". And while Tiles & Tales is a mobile game I don't hold this against it as such. What I do hold against it is that it's a BAD mobile game in the style of the piles of forgettable three star dross clogging up the various app stores.

Tiles & Tales offers a variation on fairly straight forward casual tile matching. Unlike much better games in the style such as You Must Build A Boat and Gems of War, however, I'm struggling to find much skill here. Matching consists of dragging every tile on the board simultaneously in one of four directions (left, right, up and down). All tiles therefore end up bunching up on the side you have dragged them to with matches merging together to create larger stacks. Larger and larger stacks are required to progress.

Because you only have four options each turn (left, right, up or down), strategy is minimal and inevitably you find the board clogging up with tiles that, counterintuitively for a game of this style, become harder and harder to match until the game grinds to a gridlock and you die. Often you find that well before the end of a round you're just pushing the same tiles back and forward to run down the timer because there's literally nothing else you are able to do.

Every time you "die" due to lost health from creating too small stacks in the correct suite you get a cheery popup asking you to use "gems" to reset your health and continue.

More or less that's it. Other than a very, very light RPG skin (basically, just a generic animated fighter character who whacks something every few turns) there are no "Tales" here at all.

Graphically the game sits in a standard mobile-sized vertical frame in the centre of the screen, with the edge bars filled with a static, generic screen filler image. Overall, things look attractive enough for what they are.

But seriously, this is a poor game that largely seems to exist to be simple enough to pass a couple of hours in before you notice, and annoying enough to provide a little bit of incentive to cough up a couple spare bucks to push through the tedium in the hope that something interesting eventually opens up. Sadly, I can't see any evidence that handing over money is going to result in anything other than more of the same.

So this game has been on my wishlist for a while, but I've put off installing it because of the flood of negative reviews suggesting that progression is impossible without paying.

Seriously, I have no idea what these people have been smoking. I've been binge playing this game for nine hours over two days and have never hit a wall; nor have I ever been tempted to pay money.

The game looks gorgeous, there are constant drops and unlocks and great progression to keep one motivated (every two or three games is another unlock), there are lots of layouts and the game plays smooth and crisp with absolutely no bugs.

Every now and then I run out of time and simply log back in a couple of hours later with my time bar completely refreshed. Well, it's a casual game and I'm happy to have an excuse to take a break. (In any case, your action bar is refilled every time you level up and extra time potions drop fairly frequently.)

Teasing out the negative reviews, I would guess that over half of these players wouldn't even have looked at the game (or reviewed it) in the first place if it wasn't free to play. Many have played for less than an hour. And for those players down voting the game with 40+ hours, I reckon they've had their money's worth. lol.

Most of the negative reviews can broadly be described as either 1) people who think Mahjong solitaire is too hard, 2) people who think that casual games (that is, "facebook" or "mobile" games) don't belong on Steam, and/or 3) people who don't like free to play models based around limited timers.

For #1 and #2, I don't even... Seriously, don't look at Mahjong solitaire games if you don't like or have no interest in learning how to play Mahjong solitaire games.

For #3, I can't imagine that these players have done much more than have a toddler tantrum the first time they ran down the timer and had to find something else to do for a bit. I guess, if you're the kind of person who wants to spend a whole day playing nothing but Mahjong solitaire without a break then sure, this isn't your game. There are several other perfectly fine options you might want to look at instead if you have the cash.

For everyone else you really can't go wrong here. This is one of the best Mahjong solitaire games out there. As a bonus, it's free!

Less content than most mods, the Firaxis' equivalent of horse armor.

6 extra names added to the city state random name generator list, three additional natural wonder tiles to possibly discover (but generally not), and a scenario that virtually nobody has any interest in playing.

No new civilizations, no new wonders to build, no new units to research, no significant additions to the base game at all... just, no.

TLDR; Not worth $10 because this pack is worse than standard packs (1 Golden Epic & 5 Jewelled chests @$10 < 2x event packs for 2 GEs & 6 JCs @$10 ($5ea.)).

The longer version - With Crusader's free to play model you are encouraged to buy Golden Epic cards with a few random chests thrown in with them to make you feel like you are getting more than you are.

Golden Epics are 50% better than the best gear that you can otherwise get in the game. (Note that this doesn't translate into a 50% DPS boost, in practice it's potentially much less because of the way the game multiplies boosts across crusaders in your formation.)

The chance of one piece of epic gear dropping from a jewelled chest is approximately 1/5 chests. This means that in this pack you are paying $10 for one golden epic, one other random item of epic gear (on average) and a few other random boost cards that are effectively worthless (the extra rares are very easy to come by as they drop from standard chests that drop every few areas).

Most other weekends, as well as during regular events, there will be a different, unique golden epic bundle offered with three jewelled chests for $5. In practice, if you do want to spend money on this game (and there is really no need to) you are better off saving your money and buying two event packs and getting two GEs and 6 chests, rather than one GE and 5 chests as in this pack.

In fact, event gear is more valuable than gear for Jim because the only effective way to get gear for the event crusaders is during an event, while basic crusaders like Jim will continue to have a ton of gear drop for them throughout the year.

While Jim can be a pretty good starter if you only have the basic crusaders (more are offered a couple of times a month during events), later on he will almost certainly be displaced in your formation and therefore you should consider Jim's GE a short term investment only.