Source: Cashmoneys
Price: 6.99
Where To Get It: Steam

For a while, Alphabear was a sensation. Haha, look at the often strange things they say using words I spelled in game! Oh dear, Alphabears, I don’t think you really meant to say that! I’ll freely admit, I was mostly confused when this happened. Confusion is sort of my base state when it comes to what becomes a darling, so I think we can safely move onto the fact that Alphabear is now not just on your phone, but on your computer. So how is it?

Hehehe. When Thesaurus butts.

Well… It’s a word puzzle game. It’s kind of cute. And if you’ve already got it on your phone, you’re not missing out on special PC only content, just having it on a bigger screen. You make words with letters, which have point values that add up depending on the length of word and the kinds of bears you brought into the puzzle, and each time you make a word, the letters you used become bears (or become part of a bigger bear), the point value of any letters you didn’t use goes down by 1, adjacent letters get exposed, and if any of the letters go down to 0 point value, they become rocks that permanently block bear expansion. The bigger the bears you have at the end, the bigger the bonus, and you unlock more bears and levels by beating the score it asks you to. Did you get all that?

Thankfully, it’s much less of a mouthful to play than explain, although sadly, if you screw up spelling a word, you’re better off just clicking the big X to completely erase than to try and remember the specific letter you were trying to get rid of. That niggle aside, it’s pretty clear, it’s pretty accessible, and the difficulty curve is just that… A curve, rather than a spiky mess.

Yes, I quite agree. Thunderous Plagiarisers be warned, neither I nor an actual thieving bear like you for plagiary.

Indeed, pretty much all of my problems with the game are not problems, but niggles. “Leaderboard” just links to the limited Steam Achievements. The bear unlocks are pretty much random chance, although you’d have to be fairly unlucky not to unlock all non-legendary bears before the end of a chapter. But the core of the game works, it’s just as cute as its original mobile/tablet incarnation, its dictionary has the same limitations (Sometimes it doesn’t have a definition for a word, like Wastel, sometimes, it doesn’t know things that totally are words), and essentially, whether you like it or not is dependent on whether you like word puzzles, specifically this kind of word puzzle, or not.

I happen to quite like it, and would thus finish by informing you that wastel bread was perhaps the best kind of bread you could get in the middle ages. So now you know.

As much as you may hate to admit it, this is the perfect Alphabear body.

The Mad Welshman is very fond of word games. Alas, generally he can’t enjoy them as much, since they are his 1.5th epileptic trigger. Sad times.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £1.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Unreal Estate is kind of emblematic of tiny games that work, in that while it’s undeniably perfectly fine on its own, you can play with friends, and it’s easy to learn, there’s really not much to say beyond that. The art is nice, the fonts are kinda eh, and the sound and music, similarly, is there, and that, beyond it being a mere £2, is, uh… Largely it.

The card art is nice.

Essentially, it’s a turn based card game, in which, on your turn, you either grab a card for your hand, or play a card that matches the ones on the right for the card’s value times the number of matching cards on the right. If you have more than one of that card, it counts for more, and once all players (from 2 to 4) have picked up or played a card, the rest go to the right. Rinse and repeat, until all the cards are gone or nobody can play anything, and the one with the most points wins.

Similarly, the criticisms are small: It doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have a windowed mode, nor does it have volume sliders (just sound/music on/off.)

Cue perhaps the shortest review I’ve ever written.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £34.99
Where To Get It: Steam, Humble Store
Other Reviews: Early Access

Endless Space 2 is big. I mean really big. I mean, you may think it’s a long walk down to the chemist’s, but that’s peanuts compared to Endless Space 2!

Joking reference aside, Endless Space 2 is, as far as turn based strategy where you eXpand, eXplore, eXploit and eXterminate other alien races, most often while playing an alien race yourself, actually quite good. Even if I’m somewhat salty about Amplitude following the current “stance” of “Who even plays hotseat?” (Hi! I do! And so do quite a few of my friends!)

Making this clear right now… The Sophons are totally not my… Adorkable, irresponsible, space babies. Nope.

So let’s get that out the way right now: Multiplayer is online only, none of the playing-with-yourself or risk free theorycrafting shenanigans you’d be used to in some other… Well, quite a few other strategy games, up till relatively recently. If that’s a turnoff, I understand. Let’s get on to the good stuff.

In Endless Space 2, there are eight races, and they all play somewhat differently. This has pretty much been the charm of Amplitude games since the studio arose in 2011, and it’s a skill they’ve been steadily honing through their company life. The Unfallen, for example, with their “branch” system of colonising, are extremely interesting. They can only colonise in lines from the homeworld, and instead of sending a ship full of people, they send a ship that lures space-vines from the homeworld, entangling a system, and then they send the first colonists through the space-vines. On the upside, this means they can stretch out a web of influence, and colonise systems quickly once they have the technology to actually live on the bloody things. On the downside, if somebody happens to conquer a system along that branch, whether there were nice treemen living there or not, everything further down the branch is lost, and, unlike every other faction except the Vodyani, if you lose your homeworld, that’s it. Game over. Caput.

But interest comes in many flavours. A returning faction from the first game, the Sophons, are my dear little science babies, not because they have a different colonisation method, or because they’re game breaking, but because they have accepted that Science is a verb, a noun, a preposition, and… Look, they really like science… Often to their own detriment. And I love them for it, which leads nicely into the narrative end of things.

And it definitely isn’t because they acknowledge as objective fact that Science is a Verb.

Endless Space 2 has race specific questlines. The Sophons, for example, have found themselves in the unenviable position of having created the universe’s first (known) Super-AI, called ENFER, have plugged it into everything they can, and now have to answer a very difficult question: How the heck do we keep it happy? Everybody has their thing, and nobody is very nice. The United Empire, under very Stalinist propaganda, are influence wielding warmongers, the Riftborn just want to live, their perfect, ordered universe having been destroyed by our chaotic, quantum-fuckery filled one (Which, if you think about it, is very much Cosmic Horror), the Horatio (A race of clones) want to make things perfect (IE – All Horatio, because Horatio is perfection), the Cravers are perfectly happy being hungry murderbugs designed to devour entire planets (or are they?) , and…

…Look, there’s a lot of stories here. Not just the eight racial stories, but the stories of individual heroes, the universe (The fallout of a war between two ideologically opposed Super Races who appear to have killed each other, but may not actually be dead, is one familiar to science fiction fans, but is excellently implied), and even of specific worlds, come together in a well written and engaging universe that’s well worth looking at on its own. The UI is mostly friendly and clear (The research “circle” is a little confusing at first, as is how to get to ground force management), the ships have real polish and difference to them, and the music… Electronic heaven, whether its somewhat ambient, as in the title screen, or the more “Ohcrap, things are happening” of the combat tuneage.

Both ground and space combat, for returning Endless players, has had some improvement, with extra choices and tactics at the beginning, but remains “You make choices about range and tactics, then watch the pretty lights and explosions.” Or don’t.

Essentially, if you want to eXplore space, eXpand into new worlds, and eXploit and eXterminate new civilisations, Endless Space 2 is another good one to go for. Like Master of Orion 2016, its difficulty is fairly adjustable, and, as noted, my main bitch with the game is the same one I have with this genre all over in recent years… I just want to have a chill time smashing spaceships and aliens together, by myself, and nobody’s letting me.

The Mad Welshman can’t actually pick a favourite faction. They’re all moustache twirley in their own way, and he loves them all equal- AHAHA SCIENCE FOR THE WIN, YOU CAN’T OUTFIGHT ME IF I OUT-TECH YOU EVERYWHERE!

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