Recent reviews by Lujo

It is amazing! Looking at if from the store page, you might be fooled into thinking that it's a generic shovelware grinder. And you'd only be right in that it is a striped-down combat-only roguelite, except it's one of rather high quality when it comes to mechanics. Great little gem of a game, you can't put it down. Three thumbs up!

For a straight-up puzzle game, it's got a faily amazing and engrossing story. Recommended, as long as you don't dislike puzzle games.

It's a really cool take on the mega-old classic - LEMINGS! But with Zombies! XD

Felt fairly challenging, too, not really a casual experience. Rewarding, though.

It's a fairly simple, but very charming post-Slay-the-Spire roguelite. I had fun with it, even though it feels like at one point it was meant to be very difficult, but then most of the difficulty got patched out of it.

Not much more to say about it, really. It's one of those that are really simple, but not pretentious and very charming, so it doesn't feel like a letdown.

I rarelly review a game before I'm done with all the achievements, but I'm making an exception in this case.

My experience with the first game was not so much "mixed", as "conflicting". In terms of audiovisual design & direction it had been a glorious masterwork. In terms of game design it was painfully shallow, inept and felt like a mobile-only showelware cashgrab.

This one... isn't.

Much to my pleasant surprise, and against my expectations, this one actually delivers a lot of what the first one promised and then spectacularly failed at in practice. I was not even going to buy DDII after slogging throgh DDI. The Stagecoach travel concept felt like a painfuly contrived excuse to follow roguelite trends where "everything has to be FTL / Slay the Spire now", and looked like a pivot away from the original game, rather than a way to improve it's many flaws. So I wasn't even going to buy it.

But, having played several relatively recent roguelites all following the same Slay the Spire -esque model, I got to buying DDII from that direction. After having some fun with a few of those that really offered style with the barest semblance of passable substance, I figured that "I kinda want to see one of these, but with the nice ambiance and style of DD". And, sure enough, it felt contrived and a bit silly for the first few runs, but then I realized...

...that this one actually works way better than DDI ever did. DDI was an extremely bare-bones game. The decorum made it look like a tense, scary, difficult game, but it wasn't one. It was flat-out unplayable unless you used the cheeze strats, and held no challenge whatsoever if you did.

DDII isn't remotely like that. All the cheeze strats are gone. It's like DDI, if it had a week of competent playtesting. You actually have to work for your wins, and all manner of tools that are available to you are actually useable and do work, but none of them are so effective as to solve the game for you.

Also, the traveling model just works, as contrived as it might be. Every run is a new adventure, hell, every stage of the journey is a mini-adventure, and every checkpoint you reach leaves you feeling glad you managed to pull it off, while accomplishing at least some of your goals.

And just when you think you've got the hang of things, you try a different hero composition and get horribly, hideously wiped. But you can't immediately tell what it was that carried the previous team composition, let alone how to make the other one work. It's wonderful, and while the first one may have been a bit of a trainwreck, this one might actually be the best thing in it's genre.

There *is* a CAVEAT to it, though. The audiovisuals simply don't hit nearly as hard this time around. And it's not because things aren't scary now that they're familiar, or because the story is a bit less nihilistic. It feels like the guys at the wheel really threw their concentrated best onto the table when they made the first game. It had glorious visual clarity and the different monsters and areas looked and felt tangibly disctinct, while channeling visceral takes on horror classics, both universal and cult-adored. It was so good that it carried a laughably bad game to epic success all on its own.

But when they made this one, in order not to repeat themselves, they ended up going with what feels like a "b-list" of bad guys. Some of the visual impact is gone due to several reasons I could not fail to notice. A lot of enemy "tribes" all draw from the same vein of body horror. The "melted fleshy mutants" in the city, the "toothy flesheaps" in the country and the omnipresent "lovecraftian octopus people" that you run into anywhere are rather too close to each other visually. And they're all sort of too close to the (returning) Swine, while the fish-mutants area now also shares too much of the color pallete with the rest.

The only distinct enemies are the bony zombies in the woods... and they feel way more out of place in that environment that what was going on in the woods the last time around, and don't hold a candle to how well "skeleton soldiers" worked in their DDI setting.

So there's that. It's not a dealbreaker, the game is worth gushing about on it's merits as a game. But it's a real shame that the glorious ambiance masterpiece was wasted on the first game, while this one sort of gets stuck with leftovers in that department.

Anyhow, much better game than DDI, I do recommend.

Not really a thumbs up, moreso a "I wish there was a neutral button rather than just yes and no". I'm not sure who exactly I'd recommend it to, is the thing. It's got a rather nice visual style, as well as a rather fine run-down-contemporary setting. Seems to be inspired by Canada, feels more European than you usually get to see in games, giving off a bit of a Disco Elysium vibe that way.

Otherwise it's not bad, and I've certainly played worse modern point-and-clickers. It doesn't have an insufferable protagonist, which is a welcome exception. But it's just not quite charming enough, deep enough or memorable ebough, and might be a bit on the frustrating side when it comes to some of the puzzles.

I guess that it's a step above most of the genre output from the last decade or so, but it doesn't reach "yes, do absolutely play it" level of some of the classics of the genre.

For all it's flaws, it's a rather incredible RPG. I wouldn't say that the writing is necessarily the best - there's hits and misses when it comes to execution - the plot, ideas and psychological exploration are worth endless praise. It's not really a game you can appreciate on a single playthrough, though.

Unfortunately, one playthrough can give an impression that you've seen all there is to see, discuraging the player from trying again and finding out just how much content there actually is. If you do buy it, get ready to give it several runs, with different perspectives and goals in mind, and you will be very glad you did.

I had my doubts, but it was really great. In fact, it was the best RPG I've played in a while and I wish there was more stuff like this. Very much a recommend.

Yep, it's great. I put off playing it for ages because I suspected that it's great - spawning a wave of imitation card battlers everywhere was a hint, for one thing - and it was.

Much recommended to fans of degenerate Magic: The Gathering decks. What you guys are looking for in MtG actually works here, because it's a single player game, and it's not a game with small numbers. So you can go nuts and not ruin the experience for others.

Also for fans of roguelites and card battlers and whatnot, obviously.

A very good remaster. It's fun and a nice grind for nostalgia if you've played it as a kid. The original C&C campaign is a bit unbalanced and the difficulty varies wildly, but the Red Alert one is fair enough. On top of this, there's quite a lot of bonus content.