Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £3.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Aurora, a Roguelike by russian developers Sun Dog, is, on the one hand, a potentially interesting experience, and shows some promise in its ideas. On the other, it’s let down by writing that veers wildly between three poles: Serious science fiction… Memery… And seemingly random interjections of slurs and extraneous sexual details that, combined with the memes, bring the tone of the whole thing down. Not in a good way, but in a way that changes it from “Needs slightly better translations” to “Needs a serious rewrite.”

No, really… I DON’T NEED TO KNOW THIS.

So, before we get onto the good and the kind of eh, let’s get the shitty out of the way. I do not need to know the cup size of a journalist at a press conference about the fate of humanity. I definitely don’t need to know her tits are jiggling. Yes, I get that the two Bork in that one sidequest are not the smartest, but you can seriously bring that across without random slurs coming into it. Yes, Gordon Freeman is our science officer, and he’s an incompetent coward, ho ho ho ho ho. And, in a shock turn of events, the Aurora captain gets an email of “Selected Blog Posts” about his press conference that include talking about MLP and whether the captain has shagged an alien. Yes, ladies and gents, My Little Pony apparently still exists in 2203.

And this is a damn shame, because there are signs of potential here: I ran into an ethical conflict, where I could maybe have found a world for an overstretched humanity to colonise, if I had kidnapped a possibly sentient being. I improved the lot of Earth, at least temporarily, by finding a substance that substantially improved medical science. I started to feel involved in at least one big mystery, and a number of smaller ones. Solving the world’s energy crisis introduces a labour crisis, and interesting things happen.

Planetary exploration is, in many cases, a bit shallow at this current stage. Kill things, get rockses.

But I keep getting taken out of that. The inconsistency, sadly, stretches to the visuals and music. I can see what’s being aimed for here (A kind of early 90s DOS style pixellated visuals), but the quality widely varies, sometimes within the same image. As soon as I see the words “Meteor shower”, I decide not to land, not because those are dangerous, but because they slow planet exploration to a crawl. Similarly, if I’m understanding things right, proper exploration is grindy as hell, requiring you to physically explore the world to map it. I honestly don’t know if colonisation is implemented yet, but if it is, it’s oddly specific, as surely, if the atmosphere is breathable, life is there, minerals are there, and the gravity is right, the world can be colonised, right? And yet, despite finding possible candidates, nothing has happened. It really is such a mixed bag.

The fact that this is considered about halfway done (0.5.1) is, to be honest, somewhat of a concern, because the game needs to tighten up a fair bit. There are hints of goodness here, but at the present stage, I’m not terribly impressed. The game has promise, but I am genuinely uncertain whether the Sun Dogs team can really consider this the halfway point of the game.

Our ongoing mission, to see how it goes, find new patches and program updates, and to boldly go… Well, to stars! And things!

It isn’t often you find The Mad Welshman conflicted. Except between death rays and train tracks. Decisions, decisions…

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Birthday Gift
Price: £14.99 (£18.99 with Soundtrack)
Where To Get It: GOG, Steam
Other Reviews: Release

StarCrawlers, by Juggernaut Games, is the latest in a few games this year and last that’s exploring the ol’ step based RPG formula that we know and love, and… Honestly? I’ve never been more scared of those galactic punching bags, Space Pirates, even if… I don’t think that’s entirely intentional at this stage. More on that later on.

Encounter groups are visible in the main world, much like Might and Magic titles, although this won’t always tell you the whole story.

If you’ve played more recent step-based RPGs (So named because they involve taking single “steps”, rather than smooth first person movement) like Legend of Grimrock, and older step-based games like the Might and Magic series (A heavy inspiration), then you’ll know what to expect with StarCrawlers: You go into dungeons, occasionally solving simple puzzles, but mostly using your party to beat the stuffing out of various beasties and achieve their objectives with the power of TEAMWORK. The kind of teamwork that RPG heroes do, that is… Maximizing the amount of pain they can lay onto a group.

There seems to be more on the way, but the basic gameplay is already there: You kill things for XP (Although not as much as you’ll get for doing the job overall), and loot things in order to make your pretty numbers go up, and occasionally take on story missions that seem to hint at Shenanigans (Capitalised because these are Space Opera Villain Shenanigans, the kind that results in the death of worlds, rather than banana custard over somebody’s face), and allow you to pick your side between various players in a sci-fi universe (From the UFP, Corporate Overlords, to people like the Workers’ Collective, essentially one of the few unions left around in the far future, it seems.) In between said story missions, you’ll do procedurally generated dungeons, with the puzzles and encounters being based on the tileset and objective. Mines, for example, have Radiant Ore, which, as far as I’m aware, only an Engineer can deal with, while Corporate Offices are the Hackers’ main playground. Similarly, protecting a scientist means exactly that, with no sweet reward if he dies before you leave, while one of the few mission types that doesn’t involve pissing someone off involves doing them a favour while fighting off animal or robot type enemies.

An example of the Void Psyker’s personality, and the character art (Which is also good)

There’s quite a cast of characters, too, with eight being playable off the bat, and at least one unlockable through the first story mission, each with their own uses, quirks, and mechanics. The Prototype (A stupidly advanced killer robot with some programming issues, and the aforementioned unlockable), for example, is all about massive damage, but with the caveat that if you use their powers too much, they’ll malfunction, and odd things will happen, eventually leading to them being out of the fight. So far, of course, this is reading more like a feature list than a critical review, but it’s important to get across how complex the game is under the hood, before examining how accessible it is, and whether that complexity is good or bad.

Funnily enough, it’s fairly easy to get into, as the first few story missions are balanced around a single character, two at most, and it’s entirely possible to either get three out of the nine or so characters in your party (Four can be taken on any one mission), or two well kitted ones by the time you hit the Aurora Starliner (The third story mission, and the one where the game’s story starts kicking off.) There are also multiple saves, skill respecs (There aren’t, currently, enough skill points to achieve all of more than a single tree, out of three per character), and each character’s role is well explained, even if their quirks may take a little getting used to. Also helping is that characters are not, strictly speaking, gendered (Male or female is fine), although their characters seem firmly fixed at the present time (And are likely to remain so): The Void Psyker is a bit monkeycheese, because it turns out messing with the dark between the stars messes with your perception of reality, the Smuggler is morally grey, the Prototype is torn between being violent braggart and friendly, poetry creating nice person…

…The writing, as a result, is okay. It’s not going to win any awards, except perhaps Good Use of Archetypes/Stereotypes. But the combat is accessible, the tilesets are pretty nice, with some variation between them (Grimy starship, Nice starship, and various Plot Starships, as one example of the subsets), and their own little quirks (Including, in some missions, faction loot, which, if you take it, will worsen your relationship with… Very possibly the very person who hired you.) So far, it’s seeming like it’s well worth the money if you like step-based RPGs, with some cool stuff. And yet, as I often say, no game is perfect, and definitely no game that’s still in development. So what do you have to watch out for right now if you buy it while it’s still being made?

Some characters even have loot you gain for exploring their mechanics. Malfunction a lot? have a haiku!

Balance. As I’ve mentioned, this is a complex game under the hood, and while it tutorialises quite well, new things get introduced, and then have to be fine tuned. A good example of this would be the aforementioned Space Pirates. Yes, I did get there.

I don’t take Space Pirate missions anymore. At least, not until they’ve been through the balance grinder… Because that “Normal: For Level 3” or the like? It Lies. Space Pirates come in groups of 1… to 5. And there’s rarely just one group. They have pretty average hit points for humans, and pretty average damage for humans… But they’re the only human group right now that I know of, that can start with a full group… Nearly everything else is monsters or some variety of robot, mostly individually weaker than the party. Space Pirates, on the other hand, are only “below par” because they don’t have the wide ability grouping that the party does… And this actually makes them more dangerous. They take time to whittle down, and all that time, the only thing they’re going to be doing is a constant stream of damage, damage that, of course, whittles you down. As I mentioned… There’s rarely one group, and nearly all of my sadquits (I can’t really call them ragequits, because I wasn’t angry, just resigned) have been through either missions involving them, or missions involving Corporate Officers (Who have at least twice the normal human HP, and can summon other monsters.)

The latter set of encounters, by the way, was my fault. This game already has the beginnings of a faction system, and, as it turns out, pissing off Chimera Biopharm (Think the Umbrella Corporation) was a bad idea. Because the very next mission after I’d hit the “Okay, we want you dead now” threshold (Something like -60 Reputation), I’d decided to raid Chimera… And they welcomed me with a series of encounters that rapidly picked my party apart, even turning up in some missions only slightly related to them because… Well, they really wanted me dead!

Sometimes, there are interesting and… Odd bits of furniture. This was in a Corporate Office.

So, right now, StarCrawlers is in a place that interests me critically, but I’ll freely admit isn’t for everybody: The midgame so far (About Level 5) currently feels a little grindy, and is about where the missions started blending into one another for me (Mainly because I had to do more of them to get to those aforementioned Story Missions), and I’ll happily admit that I have yet to get to the current “endgame”, the full levelling of my characters, because sooner or later, I run into one of those balancing issues, and it kills my interest in that save.

Do I think the game has promise? Yes, it’s pretty damn clear that Juggernaut knows their RPGs, and knows how to put them together. They’ve shown, over previous updates, that they do know they have to balance things, and I’m as confident as I can be that they can get that mix right. Similarly, a lot of effort has gone into both accessibility and environment, and even the placeholder designs for newer enemies such as Security Turrets shows that mix of wanting to give an impression of the final design, while concentrating on how they work. Do I think it’s worth a gamble of £15? Yes. But the usual Early Access caveat applies: Be Aware It’s Still In Development. It may only start to seem obvious after your twentieth or so mission, which hints at why I feel this game has promise, but it will happen.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep plugging away until release. The game definitely seems worth that.

This is a screen you’ll see a lot of. It’s actually quite friendly, and intuitive.

The Mad Welshman drew the powers of the Dark to him, and giggled. He had such sights to show!

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Defect is possibly the oddest premise I’ve seen for a build and fly game in a while, but before we begin, like the game, I’d like to make clear which version of the word the title’s using. You’d think, considering the “Spaceship Destruction Simulator”, that it would be as in “Problem or flaw”, but no, it’s actually “Join an opposing side or political group.” Because that’s what your crew does. Every. Sodding. Time.

Every. Single. Bloody. Time.

It’s amusing the first five times it happens. Then you get horrified. What kind of civilisation encourages such disloyalty? Then you just get plain angry. How dare they steal your… Okay, for the first few missions it’s not going to be a sweet ride. But part of the difficulty curve is that you’ll be going up against that ship you built last mission in among the others. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m kind of hoping it’s got a little more nuance than the same set of events each time. “Oh hey, this is now the most powerful ship in the sector! G’Bye Cap’n, we’ll put it to good use!” “Oh… Well, surely that won’t happen next time, huh?”

I’m thinking of defecting myself, engineer lady. It comes from working for a navy that’s obviously a big shower of assholes, the way everyone keeps mutineering. Speaking of, why do they keep letting Crewman Bowie back into the Navy? Why do I keep letting him back onto my ship?!?

Well, okay, we all know the reasons, but still… Everyone in this universe is dumb. But is the game?

Not really, no. The main variation is in what you can build, which increases after each mission. Good example, after I’m done with the tutorial missions, I finally get a shield. Which, unfortunately, I can’t use without some other facet of my ship suffering right now… Like decent guns. Or steering. The UI, and the music, are nice and minimalist, and I do like the caricature designs of the characters who, variously, advise and annoy you. The one problem I have right now, though, is a bit of a weird one…

Take a look at that zoom meter on the right. That will give you *some* idea…

…The maps are too big. On the one hand, this is to allow the frankly huge designs you get later in the game, and fight pretty early on. But for at least the early missions? You’re quite small. And that means you don’t really get to see your ship in action, except as a tiny thing on screen, shooting at other, possibly as tiny things on screen. An automatic zoom helps with this, but it unfortunately doesn’t help that much in the early game. Also not helping is that you are very limited by your Core, and you have to work with that, which becomes… Very fiddly. Seven or eight missions in, and you’re going to wish you had something better. Which leads to the other problem… It’s not very balanced right now, and it seems like you’re pretty much expected to grind missions you’re good at so you can have the equipment to deal with those you don’t. Good example, the game is reminding me why I hate escort missions.

“Oh yeah, defend this freighter against some pirates, and… OH NO, TORPEDO BOMBERS.” Fuck. You. My choices at the time this mission comes up (And three others of its ilk) are something nippy and tough, but with next to no firepower; something able to turn on a dime, but with only forward firing weapons (Because turrets take up more crew than I’m comfortable with); or something that shoots well, shoots in many directions, but has armour thin as tissue paper. This is about where I got frustrated, because everything currently needing work starts giving you a kicking, like a schoolyard bully and his mates. The camera wants to encompass as many enemies as possible, so you have to fight the auto camera to avoid the torpedoes, which will kill you in one, maybe two shots. The game’s preference for forward firing weapons means you have to fight the steering of your design, and the fact that nearly everything is faster than you, because the engines aren’t quite balanced, means that you’ll die… Again… And again… And again, because you can’t quite build something useful.

Yeah, um… Good luck with that!

Then you go back to grind, and realise most of the rewards up till now have been mission rewards. So your rate of new equipment slows to a crawl.

In summary, while Defect is definitely interesting, it’s looking right now like it might be a good idea to wait and see. The mission requirements definitely outpace the equipment right now, the camera needs a bit more work, and it gets frustrating once you’re out of the tutorial. It undeniably has its cool moments, it’s UI is pretty nice (Although Symmetry mode, also, needs some work), and I kinda like what’s going on with the visuals. Thankfully, it’s a pretty early version (0.12.22076), so there’s plenty of time for the devs to balance things, and fix hiccups.

The Mad Welshman sighed as he tumbled through space, waiting for the pickup. You’d think, after the 253rd time, that he’d remember to lock the bridge door.

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access 2, Early Access 3, Release

Subnautica is a game that takes a while to get going, and then GIANT SQUID happen. It’s also a game that takes a little while to learn. While Starbound does strange new worlds, and games like State of Decay do the zombie survival thing, Subnautica does Blue Planet. Ocean everywhere. And it does a good job of dissuading you of the idea this would be boring… But some things do require a little bit to learn. Thankfully, with the exception of Creative Mode, you get to enjoy the story in the manner you want, with a choice of Permadeath and Everything on, and varieties of Not-Permadeath with or without the need for food and water.

Being underwater may seem confusing in screenshots, but feels natural in game… Also beautiful.

Funnily enough, the base Survival mode (No permadeath, but you need to obtain food and water) is the right mode for me, it seems. Because fish are assholes, and once the world opened up to me? Wow, did I suddenly feel very small… In the best way. So let’s talk progression, to give you some idea of why I like this game.

It begins with an escape pod. Yours. Your ship, a coloniser, got shot down over an ocean planet, by strange energy beams. You’re the only survivor, and you can hold your breath for 45 seconds. You’re slightly hungry, slightly thirsty, and rather irritable. So you explore this salty “paradise”, and grudgingly admit that yes, it does look beautiful. Kelp forests, caves, underwater gardens of red weed, and… Thank fuck, the fish are actually edible. One of them, the Airsack, even filters water for you if you run it through your Fabricator. Okay, that’s one worry gone. Now for building a home, because it looks like you’re going to be here a while. Titanium and Copper, it seems, can be found in limestone nodules that are thankfully easy to break apart, and the wreckage of the Aurora, your ex-ship (Which is making some worrying noises, and will explode soon, kicking off the story.) But you can’t find any silver, which you’re told is useful for all sorts of electronics, vehicles, and Lead, for a radiation proof suit (Important, because large areas are irradiated now.)

Once you get past the hump, you too can make a home away from home!

It takes you a while to realise that there are two kinds of nodule in the Kelp forests, and you have to brave Stalkers (Asshole Fish #1) to get that Sandstone, which gives you silver and gold. Luckily, building a base mostly takes Titanium and Glass, and you don’t have to build very much to make it a home away from home: Couple of solar panels (Titanium and Quartz), rooms and foundations (Titanium), maybe an observatory (Stalker Teeth and Quartz to make Enamelled Glass), and some lockers and a fabricator (Mostly titanium, some glass). Along the way, you will probably have discovered Asshole Fishes #2 and #3 (A large, carnivorous burrower and EXPLODER FISH.) But food and water are still largely not a problem. You can even completely leave the escape pod behind if you want.

But until you realise where the silver is, you aren’t getting to the really interesting stuff. And that can be a pain, some games. But once you do? Oh boy. Both the kit and the world get bigger. The Aurora is explorable. You build personal mini-subs, and probably get them blown up exploring cave networks. Jellyfish that hang out in cave networks. Massive blue and green glowing creatures that seem harmless… And Gigantic, toothy beasts. Oh god, the Gigantic… Toothy… “Squid”. Subnautica is one of the few games that can claim to have caused an underwear replacement, and my first encounter with this beastie is exactly why…

…Picture the scene. I’m trundling home in a somewhat damaged minisub (The Seamoth), and I keep hearing… Noises. Big noises. It’s dark, even for the depths I’m at, and something is on the edge of my limited vision. There are bumps. Big ones. My console starts sparking. I turn around…

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

OHGODITLATCHEDONTOMYCOCKPITBAILBAILBAIL!

…Faced with so many teeth, I take the option of leaving my Seamoth just in time. Seemingly satisfied, the creature (Many times bigger than I am) slinks back into the darkness, leaving me to try and make my way home the slow way.

So yeah… Although the ocean in Subnautica is beautiful, and it seems, at first, like a slow game with little combat… The ocean is also deadly… It just takes a little while to make you realise that. It’s a survival game which could do with a little more help for the player, but lets you mostly play at your own pace, and I’m definitely looking forward to when it becomes a release candidate. As it is, it’s worth checking out if you like the genre or the ocean… Just be aware… The Squid Is Out There, and It Is Always Angry.

Not everything that’s big is lethal. Maybe. The jury’s out.

The Mad Welshman loves the ocean. He loves some of the… Things that dwell in it a little less.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Release

Capitalism sucks. There’s really no easy way around it. It’s biased, it’s unfair, and it promotes shitty attitudes that make everyone’s life a misery. Which is, in its way, a good segue into talking about Gremlins Inc, a computer board game about a steampunk capitalist society of Gremlins being dicks to each other. It’s a game that needs a little polish, a little toning down of the single player AI, and a somewhat more clear tutorial and UI… But it’s also got the same ingredients that give certain well known board games their rep as awesome games that destroy friendships.

A little hard to read parts of the UI at times, but the art style is *gorgeous*

Ruleswise, there’s a lot to go into, so I’m just going to sum it up: You have to achieve X victory points (With 20 being average), while stopping anyone else from doing the same, and you do it by moving around a board (using cards), and playing events when you’re able to (using the same cards). Sometimes bad things happen to you, and there doesn’t appear to be any single “OP Strat”, as it were, because everything is out to get you, including large portions of the board. It’s a little more complicated than that, and the tutorial doesn’t cover everything (Like the existence of a collective pool of “EEEEVIL” cards, as a prime example I wish I’d known about), but it’s effectively in a very solid beta (Meaning there are bugs, but not as many as a release would have, and nothing that appears game breaking), and board game afficianados would definitely enjoy it. Why?

Let’s start with how it encourages a wide spectrum of good, strategic thinking. I have three cards. One can be used relatively nearby, but I can’t afford it. Yet. One can be used right across the board, and one can be used back the way I’d already come. All of these options are technically viable, but to play any of them well, I have to think. The first option just requires both time and not being dicked over. It’s do-able, but requires me to either not be seen as a threat, or to pre-empt the threat from whichever player I think is going to threaten me. The risk there is that I’m either wrong about which player is the threat, or don’t keep a low enough profile. There are shortcuts I could use, but they have a chance of screwing me over just by taking them, especially on the shortcut through the middle of the map. I have to be adaptable. I have to play the players as well as the game. I have to risk assess. And I have to be lucky.

Even Jail can be used to win the game, if you’re clever about it…

This turn, I am not lucky. “Who rolls a 1?” I ask jokingly, as I refuse to bribe my local policeman so as to stop any searches without risk. After all, if I do that, another player gets to profit off my loss. And I roll a 1, immediately being sent to jail, and watching one of those options evaporate. But that’s okay. Even jail can be used to better my circumstances. In the long term.

Secret and Criminal cards. Evil cards. Elections. Bribes and Searches, and the role of the buildings… The game has somewhat of a learning curve problem, which means the tutorial has to be spot on (And currently, doesn’t show off everything you might need to know). A good system of tooltips somewhat helps, but new players will want to invest time in the single player to get a feel for things, and those of us who can’t invest an hour or so into a game? Probably shouldn’t get this, as a 20 point game might take as long as 4 hours, and the first single player challenge is 30 points to victory.

Similarly, the aesthetic is both a good and a bad point with this game. I love the art style, having always been a sucker for some good ink and pencil work… But the UI suffers in readability because some of the parts of it are small and relatively unhelpful (The turn log, for example), and the board looks busy because light value contrast isn’t as clear as it could be (Although, again, the tooltips help somewhat with “Where can I go?” and “What does this do?”) The music is pretty good, just the right, farcical feel for a farcical fantasy dystopia.

I am a moustache twirler. This is a moustache twirler’s game. QED. :V

However, when all’s said and done, I look at this game, think “This cost me as much as Dr. Lucky did, back in the day”, and smile. It’s a fairly well crafted, competitive game, and the devs know exactly what they have on their hands, with a tournament already having been started in the Early Access phase. If you want a competitive, multiplayer computer board-game, and have the time to spare, I really don’t think you could go wrong with Gremlins Inc. I would, however, mention one final thing in regards to the multiplayer… Er… How do you make a game friends-only again? Wasn’t a problem right now, but best to nip it in the bud if that hasn’t been thought of. I had a lot of fun with this, and expect to have more fun in the future.

The Mad Welshman cackled with glee as he dipped freely into the Widows and Orphans Fund for Disenfranchised Gremlins. Campaign Contributions, it seems, were always there if you knew how…

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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