Recent reviews by Squeewockle

Great to play board games with your online friends, without the extra hassle of setting up.

Score

✰82%✰

Pros

Thousands of Board Games
Massive replay value

Cons

Controls are fiddly
Not all mods get updated

Gameplay:


Tabletop simulator is a dream come true for anyone who has ever loved engaging in board games, and just can't find the company to play them with. The core aspect relies on mod-based contributions, like Garry's Mod – except for tabletop games. There are thousands to choose from, ranging from things like RISK, Monopoly, Cards Against Humanity – to Chess and countless other party style board games.


Some mods are intricately rendered with original skins for playing pieces, others are cleverly designed and planned out. There are original games, and a good chance to find any of the board games you've loved back at home or for those times where you're forced to put up with extra relatives.


The initial premise, of course, is that you're presented with a table, faced against a randomly generated background (which incidently is also moddable.) Depending on if you choose a private or open game will decide if you play with your friends or with strangers. I would probably recommend playing with friends, as there is a high tendancy for random players to “flip” the table, which consequently ruins the progress of whatever is there.


The controls of Tabletop can take a little getting used to, since sometimes a wrong movement can accidentally sabotage things that you don't want sabotaged, or reveal your card hand. (Which then makes you flip the table because it was a really good hand.) This is probably my only real gripe – the chance of a game being killed before it hits the real action, and the fiddly controls. Also, perhaps, people who have excellant mods but don't update them, or don't include rules with their games. :(


The gameplay offered is whatever mods you choose to download and whenever you find people who will want to sit around and play all those classic party games. I played Pictogram! Cards Against Humanity, Uno, Threeway Chess and WoW Guess Who! In one session with a few other friends.


It's brilliant to be able to pick through the list and agree on games together without doing the packing and unpacking that goes beforehand with physical board games. Obviously there's something special about doing that as well, but when your friends live across the map, this is the perfect opportunity to get them together and tackle that desire to find people willing to sit around long enough for board game sessions.

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Score

✰85%✰

Party based game where you lie and trick your way to victory, or convince everyone else you're telling the truth. What is there not to like about this? Addictive and fun.

Pros

Gameplay interactions with other players
Tricking and decieving people
Every game and outcome is different
Scroll/odds rebalancing can stifle chances of certain roles

Cons

Highly dependant on other players not ruining the experience
Annoying pop up adds whether you paid for it on steam or play it for free


This originally started off as a browser game, which proved to be such a hit with the people who played it, that they wanted to help support the creators to get onto Steam and Mobile - so it could become more well known. With a successful kickstarter and greenlight, the goal was finally achieved! Perhaps in the future it will make it to other platforms, too.

Don't let my time here fool you. I have just a little over a thousand matches played at this point in time from the browser version. So, where to begin?


Well, first off, this is a party game based on the likes of Mafia. It's played with up to fifteen people, though you wouldn't want to have any less in order to have the best kind of game. The current updated version of this game starts you with the ability to choose your name – which can result in some hilarious trolling, depending on your mood. You know something's happening when half of the players decide to call themselves after Game of Thrones characters, or someone has a name that automatically makes others hate them.


After that, you have the role-wheel, which will select you your role for the game. This can be skewed in favour of those who have brought scrolls from the in-game shop to try and increase their chances of landing the role they want. For example, every role can have a 7% chance of being selected for you. If you use a scroll, it can increase the odds of the role you want to say, 20%, whilst decreasing the odds for everyone else – so they would drop from 7% to 4%. This can be annoying if you prefer to not obtain scrolls – but honestly, there is so many roles to choose from, it shouldn't matter too much. At some point, you will have roles you don't want, and roles you love. That's part of the fun of a randomised selection. The shame about this is that you will get pop up adds to entice you into the shop to buy things.


After finding out which of the 33 roles you are, you then act as according to it for the game. Each game can be anything between ten to thirty minutes long. The main game is split into several phases. You start off with:


Day One: discussion. Then night one. Then day two: Deaths. Then discussion. Then voting. Then discussion – this cycle repeats right up until the ultimate winner(s) are declared. Depending on your role, will depend on when you can preform your actions – if you have actions to achieve. With the voting phrase, if someone is voted up, they have to defend themselves, and the other players will vote guilty or innocent. Guilty votes will kill the defendant, and innocent ones will spare them.


You have three “sides” to speak of. Side one is town, or the “good” side. Town's main job is to oust the bad side before the bad side kills them. The catch is, Town has no clue who is Town and who isn't. So through discussion and usage of roles, they have to work out who is telling the truth and who is lying. You can get Support roles, Protective roles, and killing roles.


Side two is Mafia, the “bad” side. Mafia's main job is to kill every town member and persuade them all the while that they're Town. Mafia's average number is three. Their advantage over Town is that the Mafia know who each other is, and can communicate with each other at night. You can get Deception roles, Support, and Killing.


Side three is Neutrals, who all have individual goals that can either tie hand in hand with Town or Mafia, or just benefit themselves. You can get Benign neutrals, Killing neutrals, or just plain Evil ones.


Because there are so many roles, I will just mention around two from each “side” as a small example of the kinds you can get.


One role Town can get is an Investigator. During night-time, they can choose to look at another player to determine what role they have. A successful invest will reveal up to three roles the person can be. For example, someone could show up as Vigilante (Town Killing), a Veteran (Town Killing) or a Mafioso (Mafia Killing.) Through guesswork and questions, you can figure out if the person is good or not. Another town role is the Jailer. At daytime, they can choose to jail whoever they think is suspicious, or someone random. At night, they can then question the person in their jail to try and figure their role out. If the Jailer suspects their captive of lying, then they can choose to execute them.


For the Mafia, they can have a Godfather, who is the leader. He can kill someone at night, or make a Mafioso do it for them. Their advantage is that they can't be killed at night, so if someone shot them, they would be immune. The Disguiser for Mafia is someone who can take on the name, position, and face of someone who died. So if a confirmed Town player is chosen to be killed, the Disguiser can choose to “become” that Town, and people would believe they were still the same player.


For Neutrals, you can get an Jester, whose goal is to be hung by everyone else. They can do this by being annoying or throwing false information. If they are hung, they can choose to kill a guilty voter at night, from the graveyard. You can also get a Serial Killer, whose goal is to kill everyone – Town and Mafia. Serial Killers are also immune at night.


So, yes. There's a lot of roles. But really, the main selling point of this game is not the graphics, the music, or the diversity of the roles. It's the interaction with other players. Every single game is different because it depends on each player's ability to successfully do their role, and convince others of the truth, or their lies. It's a game about deception, and the feeling you can get when you pull off a tricky deception is just amazing. Imagine the Town's surprise when you convince them you're just a poor doctor who wants to heal people – and actually turn out to be the Serial Killer. Poor things. Maybe there's not a lot of good to be said about a game that teaches you how to lie convincingly, but trust me. This is fun!


A very important things players need to do is write their findings or information down in their last wills. That way, if they die, the information can be read by everyone else, and hopefully benefit whoever needs the information the most. (For example, an investigator may have found the Godfather, but isn't sure, so they write it down. And when they die, people can see they suspected someone of being a Godfather.)


You'll get people who leave if things don't go their way, or people who game throw, so quite a few times, a game will depend on the personalities of those you interact with. I've had some frustrating games where people ruin it for others, and awesome games where everyone is doing what they should be doing – and injecting a little fun into it, too.


I honestly think everyone should try this game at some point. It's free as well since it's still browser based. I chose to buy the game here because I loved it, and wanted to support BlankMediaGames. You have absolutely nothing to lose from trying this game out. And if you play with friends, you may end up damaging friendships, but that's okay. They'll forgive you … in time.


Go play!


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Neat for anyone who likes a simplified RISK to play with friends online, and doesn't want to wait an hour for decisions to be made.

Pros

Graphics
Simple

Cons

Drag and Click doesn't always select properly
RNG seems stupid at times


I've been meaning to learn RISK for a while. It was always one of those games that I saw and heard a lot about, but never quite got around to the stage of persuading people to sit around a table and play it. With RISK: Factions on steam, this problem is eliminated. If you have no clue whatsoever on how to play the game, this will give you a nice crash course, though the rules it offers with the Factions element are a lot more simplified than the normal rules. They also make the gameplay a lot faster.


It can be fiddly working with the faster drag and release methods to speed up troop fights. You can either watch fights happen, including each painstaking dice roll, or just speed through them. Sometimes it doesn't always work when selecting and choosing – and with smaller territories they can be hard to highlight. I've had quite a few incidents where I wanted to invade a specific territory, and it took me 20 or so tries before the area finally got highlighted.


The main campaign mode is designed basically to give you the rules on this version of the game, and introduce you to five “leaders” who each have their quirks. You also get the option to have the classic RISK map without the added faction goodies, a classic RISK map with them thrown in, and a faster win method, or utilising maps that showed throughout the campaign, with their specific objectives. You can control one of five leaders: McGutterpants, Generalissmo Meow, His Excellency, Gary, Commandant SixFour, or Colonal Stiffenberg, You can either take objectives on the map for extra bonuses within game, such as an enemy city or capital, or achieve something such as taking over 5 territories in one turn -- to gain advantages over the rest. I can guarantee RNG will annoy you a lot. It can be depressing to see your 10 troops fail to take over an country with only 2 troops defending. Such is the way of the RNG Gods.


The graphics are cartoonish and comical in nature. The faction leaders are funny, with their own animations and expressions for when they attack, lose land, and gain land. The maps themselves are easy to follow, and quite bright.


The music is alright, there's nothing I would find outstanding about it – same with the voice acting tailored to the faction leaders.


There's nothing particularly special about this game, but if you want to play RISK, learn the rules, and be able to play with friends online, then this is definitely worth some of your hours.


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Awesome story and tactical game with pretty anime style graphics. A must buy for anyone who has even the slighest interest in RPGS and action games.

Pros

Storyline
Innovative battle system with perma death elements
Music
Characters
Cel shaded goodness

Cons

Battle system targeting mechanics
Perma death :(


When I first saw Valkyria Chronicles on the Ps3, I remember thinking how lovely the artwork was. I remember passing this many times when I went into the shop, telling myself one day I would buy this game, often picking it up and just re examining the cover and blurb at the back, as I did with all games I considered bringing into my collection at some point.

A fun combo of the Sakura Wars series, Fire Emblem mercilessness, Skies of Arcadia and third person element gameplay – Valkyria Chronicles delivers to its audience a refreshing experience and take on RPG action – and even spawned an Anime based on the game.

For lovers of emotional, involving story games, Valkyria Chronicles will not disappoint. With many allusions to the second world war, your main character and his forces start off in a tiny nation known as Gallia. As much as this nation would like to remain neutral in the erupting war between two superpowers around them – because Gallia is rich in the precious mineral that sparked the war in the first place – it gets invaded by the main antagonist nation: the East European Imperial Alliance.

Through the exploits of Squad 7, you will follow an well constructed emotional story that hints to darker elements of history.

Spoiler text
Without spoiling too much, (but just in case so blank blank blankity blank) you have the Darscens, hated and reviled by everyone around them. You have the mysterious legend of the Valkyries, who have not been seen for decades, who wielded incredibly advanced tools, thousands of years ahead of the nations around them. So you have the small nation resisting a superpower through the incredible luck, skill and tight knit troops of Squad 7, and you follow their story into mortal peril. I will say that this game made me cry. There are small side stories too where you can learn more about the supporting characters. Combined with the game-play, it will take you a good length of time to complete the main story.

The Gameplay is a nice spin on normal tactical elements. The system used is referred to as BLiTZ, or Battle of Live Tactical Zones. Once you've gotten past the cut scenes you control a set amount of troops on the field, each with different abilities. You get to select your own troops in the recruiting menu. Each individual troop has strengths and weaknesses which add a nice personal element to the game, as you will actually end up being attached to some of your troops, despite their minor impact on the main story. In your Action Phase, where you can control the troops on the field, they have a movement phase and targeting phase. Your movement is determined by your AP (Action Point) Gauge. Once it runs out, the unit will no longer be able to move. So you will spend your precious AP trying to position your units in the best way possible, and take out the most targets. Positioning is absolutely vital because after you've finished moving all your troops, the enemy gets to do the same in return. So an out of position troop could get out maneuvered and targeted by several enemy units, and die because it was too far isolated, or unable to receive supporting fire from your nearby troops due to a bad location. Surveying the terrain and deciding which unit is best placed where will work to your advantage. You have: Scouts who are able to move very far, but are weak and lacking fire power. Shocktroopers who have less movement but more damage. Lancers who are slow, but can take hits and deal chunks of damage to tanks. Snipers who are also limited in movement, but have long range and can nitpick targets from towers. You also have tanks which are devastating to infantry and can knock down walls, but can't roll over certain terrain and have restricted controls. Engineers who can repair damage, barricades, disarm traps and replenish ammunition. These are just a few of the units mentioned.

Although the system is turn based, it does require a lot of forethought in what you do with your turn. The bad thing about the third person camera viewpoint is that even what should be dead accurate shots can miss, due to the awkward angles it can sometimes present the character in. I personally really like the tactical elements behind this – especially as wrong mistakes will punish you in permanent unit death, like Fire Emblem.

That's right. Start resetting those levels every time you lose someone you like. (Unless you play with a heart of iron and accept each unit death that occurs.) I don't have a heart of iron. So resets did indeed occur. :(

Graphics wise, I love the animations. Cel shaded games can be a bit hit and miss in my opinion, but this one has beautiful artwork, smooth and polished graphics with watercolour style backgrounds, with enough detail to keep you moving along. Although they're not stunning, they're well presented.

I find the music of the game great. There are sad melodic piano tracks, uplifting battle themes and tense tunes in moments of great strife. I loved sitting around and listening to certain tracks loop, because they were so well crafted. The voice acting isn't particularly memorable in my opinion, but bearable and good enough for what we're presented with. You have the option (At least on my U.K version) to have it both with the English voice actors or the Japanese voice actors. I actually did it with the Japanese voice actors.

Honestly, I loved this game. I would happily recommend it to anyone that I could, especially as it combines the best of both worlds – a strong story, characters you become attached to, and an innovative battle system that will have you planning out your moves as best as you can, sometimes with the odds horrifically stacked against you.

Definitely get. Like, seriously. What are you waiting for?

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So I may have gotten this game and blasted on it a bit. I have a favourite strategy and a favourite gun that my friend thinks I'm weird for liking.

But it's my gun.

It's a really simple game in that you have to survive wave after wave of brain munching aliens with a selection of weapons each with their strengths and weaknesses, making sure you never get trapped or stay too long in any one place, and figure out how to use the environments best to your advantage.

Also, the enemies are fabulously pink.

FABULOUS. :D

Title: Age of Empires II HD
Genre: Strategy
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment, Ensemble Studios
Publisher:Microsoft Studios
Release Date10 Apr, 2013


Now this is a game I played back in school, because our history teachers believed it was an educational game. Yup. How to learn about William Wallace? Look, here's something! Well, they're not entirely wrong. It does tell you about civilisations and some of the heroes associated with those cultures, and the single player campaigns somewhat emulate historical events in the game setting.

Really though, you end up learning that Britons happen to have insane range so you can derpaherp build loads of archers, or the mayans have funny monks wearing skirts and feather caps that can convert an entire army, and that easiest and standard ai is easy, but moderate is actually pretty hard. And if you hate building houses, then why not be the huns? Also build lots of castles. You can never go wrong with castles.

Honestly, this game can provide so much entertainment. As a strategy, you start with a town centre, and your aim is to advance as fast as possible. You collect four different resources in order to do so: Food, Wood, Gold, Stone. You can choose different paths in order to win, and each game can be around two hours or less. Longer if you're going for a passive victory or want to build an absolutely huge army, or have a big world map.

You can win by killing everyone around you in the end game with your amazing killing machines and units, killing them early game before they are able to advance far enough, collecting all the relics scattered around the world map and putting them into your monestary, or being the first civilisation to build a wonder, which costs a lot of resources. You also have other conditions for victory, such as regicide. Better protect your king!

Sometimes the logic in the game can be a bit off, such as the fact you use houses to increase your population limit, but you can't actually put people in houses to hide. Other than that it's an addictive game. There's something very satisfying building up your nation, successfully defending against others and reaching the end game where all the action really starts to happen. I know I've spent hours trying out all the different nations when I was younger, and playing with or against friends.
A few issues I have with the game is that you can't select all your units if you have a very big army. Say you have fifty archers, you'll have to select three groups to move rather than the whole lot. Mix this with other types of units, and you find it's quite hard to direct everything when it comes to an attack. So lots will just be chilling out instead of doing anything.

Looking for Idle villegers can be annoying, though you do have an idle button which will let you scroll through any of those slackers.

And the amount of times I lost my scout because I couldn't spot them on the map after I directed them somewhere. So sad.

I wouldn't mind an auto explore feature with the scouts, since there is sometimes so much to focus on, that you're probably going to end up with him chilling in some forgotten forest somewhere.

Pros

Addictive

Does kind of give you a brief insight into history

Archers are funny

So are monks (Wololo)

Oldie but goldie

Sheep and turkeys are the backbone of any nation

Cons

Keep losing that stupid scout

Hard to control lots of units at once

Visually hard to track things on the map, since you have to either scroll or click on a specific place, no zoom/overview feature. At least one that I'm aware of

Ai difficulty jump from standard to moderate seems a bit steep

TL;DR


Definitely recommend. I'm probably biased because I played this in my childhood. It's my precious. But anyone with a preference for fast paced strategy games, should give this one a look. It's a classic! (Do I even need to mention that?)

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