Recent reviews by AJAvalanche

Very nice roguelite combining elements of arkanoid and top down shooters. Super fun and easy to get hooked. The menus could be a tad bit more readable (the 1-bit palette doesn't help to read what's highlighted etc.), but nothing game breaking.

The theme and the overall look got me curious, been watching this one for a while. I must admit I got sucked in, it's even better than I expected.

The core gameplay is about harvesting resources and delivering them to the right place for processing. And it works great, the game is very relaxing, but somehow also challenging at the same time. While building new facilities is never an issue, because you never run out of resources, placing every building so that the base runs efficiently can be a bit of a puzzle and it takes some time and thinking to set everything up.

I also love how combat is a nice, clean cut, almost "board game" challenge, that is sufficiently combat themed, but never introduces any unnecessary stress or time management.

Overall, a very good game with quit a nice amount of content (judging from what I've seen thus far) and polish that almost makes you forget it's just in Early Access.

A beautiful simple iOS game with a very basic port that leads to several major issues.

1. performance - on an i7 and and rtx 3060RTX this game struggles from the start to meet 60 fps with constant lags and frequent pauses.
2. controls - it's a game with a very annoying control scheme that detracts from the experience - it's a direct port of a touch input to a mouse and with no ability to rebind the controls, you're stuck with an annoying, unintuitive solution - two basic actions in the game - placing and rotating blocks are bound to the same key.
3. performance + controls - with the blocks snapping and the blocks being physics sensitive, any even minor performance hiccup affects how the game is being played.

I gave the game another try to see if anything got fixed, unfortunately this is not the case.

The game has a very confusing UI due to being a mobile port, so I actually uninstalled the game and reinstalled it to try to get back to the starting levels, because I didn't know how the chapter selection screen worked - apparently you swipe it :(

The game itself isn't bad and is quite beautiful, but the port is pretty bad, demands a strong machine, handles terribly and the game is very expensive for what it is. Buy a starter constructor set of bricks and you'll have more fun with that.

A personal nitpick is that the building process isn’t very lego-like, the blocks often just float around without any proper support. E.g. you take a long 6-stud log and attach it at the end, and still the character jumps on it as if it were supported from both sides. It feels off.

An excellent puzzle game, with great art and interesting core mechanics, though extremely short. I've finished it under 2 hours and I'm quite mediocre at puzzle games. Was it worth it? Totally. The game was very fun, the puzzles innovative and none of the mechanics felt overused - there's basically no filler puzzles in the game and very little reused content. Though the game is short, it clearly took a lot of work and love to deliver such polished experience. I strongly recommend this one.

Nice little relaxing game. Puzzles are well balanced - not too hard, but also not too easy. The game makes clever use of its mechanics. While it doesn't push the applications of each mechanic to their limits, it's probably for the best - the puzzles are fairly rarely reused and the game feels pretty fresh throughout the whole run. It never strays off course, never asks the player to complete a time or dexteriety challenge - by which it lends itself to being a really relaxing and welcoming experience. There were a couple of times where I felt the game didn't communicate well what was expected of me, forcing me to run around the map and try to interact with everybody and everything, but in general the instructions are pretty clear and the pacing is fun.

The game looks and sounds very nice, I found the visual aesthetic especially pleasing. Though I must admit, I was surprised that the game constantly jumped between locking the framerate at 60 and 30 fps - which resulted in some visual incoherency. The music is pretty simplistic, but doesn't get annoying and conveys well the nature of each biom. While the story itself isn't all that riveting, the funny, likeable characters inhabiting the lands make up for that, making your adventure more about the journey and less about the destination.

This is a very nice, relaxing, coherent puzzle game with a bit of a story and some fun characters added as the background. It's not a "must play", but if you enjoy this type of games, you will enjoy Carto.

Novel and interesting take on a war game. You don't get to directly control the ground troops during combat, instead you provide support and do the management between skirmishes. The amount of land covered is pretty impressive from a technical standpoint. So far I had 0 technical issues despite running it on a low grade machine.

While at first the game may look like a random assault on your senses, it actually seems to be very well thought out, both from the art style and gameplay perspectives. These times rarely do you find games that have the courage to be what they are meant to be - and this is one of these gems. A very focused effort with little compromise being made and with every decision dedicated to delivering one goal - an extremely fast paced shooter with an incredible feel of flow. I'm sure it's not to everybody's taste - frankly, it's not exactly right up my alley either. But that's a part of what makes this great - it challenges me to try something different, to learn the game's flow and rules from scratch. I'm up for the challenge, and if you're reading this, you should be too.

HoMM III is an excellent game and if you haven't played it yet, this is probably the best way to try it out.
However if you already own a copy of the game and have no trouble running it on a modern pc, you'll be better off with mods.

Overall the game by itself is arguably the best entry in the series and one of the best fantasy strategy games ever developed. At a base level it's about building up fantasy castles, recruiting armies and training their commanders (the eponymous Heroes). At a meta level the grand strategy is mostly about economy and logistics. The combat usually boils down to very simple encounters with a clear favourite, however - when the game delivers, it does so in style. Lengthy battles between evenly matched armies can produce a series of amazing moments, tactical twists and turns and - at the end - a feeling of achievement when you save that castle by the skin of your teeth. The gameplay clearly still holds up today and the base campaigns and scenarios provide enough content and challenge to be well worth the price.

When it comes to music, this is a pure masterpiece, with some of the most memorable themes ever composed for a video game. At times all you want to do is to just sink in your chair and let the music transport you to Erathia. Battle sounds still do hold up well and from a technical standpoint there's little if anything to complain about in terms of sound quality.

The visuals are clearly the weakest part of the game. While the overall style still gets the job done, technologically the game aged poorly and the HD makeover didn't work any wonders - yes the graphics are much more crisp and your eyes won't bleed from the pixels, still in terms of detail the visuals are serviceable at best and in some cases the HD edition made some things look worse - especially some of the buildings inside castles now can stand out from their surroundings.

Arguably the main selling point of this version of the game aren't the upgraded graphics but it's reliability. It gets along with modern PCs quite welland without any hustle, which unfortunatelly can't be said about older versions. I'm also yet to encounter a game breaking bug which were pretty common back in the time of the original release.

PROS:
+ excellent gameplay - easy to learn, hard to master
+ remarkable soundtrack
+ robust and convenient - works with modern PCs with no effort

CONS:
- dated visuals and unimpressive "HD" conversion
- no expansions