Source: Early Access Purchase
Price: £22.99 (£29.99 for extra lovely stuff, including the first three Master of Orion games, an art book, and the TERRAN KHANATE [Evil Humans])
Where To Get It: Steam, GOG
Other Reviews: Early Access

I’m going to start this review with what will most likely be an unpopular opinion about the older Master of Orion games: They’re dated. Yes, you heard me, I, a fellow 4X player, just told you he thinks one of many games that laid the groundwork for the space 4X genre is dated. Maybe not as good as you remember it. Still good. Still one of the games that laid the groundwork. And I hold this opinion for two reasons.

It isn’t *too* likely you’ll have this many ships in one fight. But god-damn, it makes for a lovely intro!

Firstly, I’ve played enough of it, and recently enough, to know. Secondly, because comparisons are inevitable, and it seems some comparisons are being played up… And others down. Let’s start with what seems to be played down. Let’s start with how much attention has been paid to the feel of how grand Space Opera should be, and how it tries very hard to be more accessible this time around.

Just a brief look at the IMDB page for this game leaves no doubt that vocal talent was a focus of the game. Michael Dorn narrates, leaders and advisors alike are played by such luminaries as John Kassir (The Cryptkeeper), John De Lancie (Q, among many others), Mark Hamill (Do I even need to say?), Nika Futterman (Asaji Ventress, among others), Kari Wahlgren (The english voice of the Fate series’ Saber), Kat Cressida (Dee Dee from Dexter’s Lab), and Sumalee Montano (Arcee [Transformers] and Katana [Beware The Batman], among other voice roles), and each one seems to be giving their all. Similarly, the music and art direction (David Govett on music, and a talented art team including Bill Willingham… Yes, Fables Bill Willingham) show a deep love of the genre, with gorgeous landscapes, solid, characterful animations, and music that, my first time hearing it, I’m not ashamed to say I happy-cried. So the game is undeniably beautiful, both in sound and visuals. The UI, similarly, is well designed, simple, mostly self explanatory, with few interactions required to get to any one feature, only rare occasions where a tooltip will obscure a thing, and, of course, visual consistency. Similarly, there’s a lot of good writing in there, showing each race both as it is seen, and as it sees itself.

GNN… Bringing you the clickbait for the New Diaspora!

Accessibility wise, on top of the UI, everything is visually distinct, and the game is highly customisable in terms of difficulty and length. Don’t want to spend 10 hours on a game? You can up the tempo. Finding a full medium galaxy too tense in the early game? Knock down the number of opponents, make the galaxy bigger, tone down the difficulty… The choices are there, and they definitely have an effect. Myself, I don’t tend to do well in a crowded universe, so I knock the opponents down to 3 rather than 5, although I tend to prefer a medium universe. As in previous Master of Orion games, you can also create your own race, in much the same fashion as Master of Orion 2. And the tooltips are genuinely helpful, and the advisor interruptions are by no means unwelcome in the clear information they give. These are two factors that open this game up to newer players, and I think that should quite rightly be praised.

Now… I mentioned some things have been played up, and all of them have the same, dubious core idea: That Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars (To use its full title for the first time this review… Most folks I know refer to it as MoO2016) is somehow more simplistic or easier than the older games. As someone who has now, since release, been bumrushed several times by races absolutely itching for space, who have obviously been concentrating on the shipbuilding end of things (That, or redlining their taxes), I would quite heartily disagree. In MoO2, I could quite happily spend 60 turns, or even 100, just slowly building up, sometimes without meeting anybody at all. In a Medium galaxy, populated by 5 other races, on Normal difficulty? The early game gets surprisingly tense, and I’ve often had to shift gears quite quickly. Knock the players down a bit, and it calms down a bit. Knock the difficulty down a notch, and similarly, it calms down a notch. As to simplicity? It’s a somewhat refined version of MoO2’s rules. Not a huge amount of changes, not a huge amount of additions or subtractions. Mostly, it’s been refinements, and y’know what? I’m okay with that.

An early game buildup…

Finally, there’s the combat system. I don’t mind it either way, as it retains elements of the older, turn based system that MoOs 1 and 2 had (Complete with ship customisation elements), and the rock-paper-scissors of Energy/Missile/Mass Drivers remains, but with the real time strategy elements allowing skillful micro to outplay a superior enemy, or, if you so choose, being able to sit back and watch the combat resolve itself automatically… But more cinematically than just hitting Auto-Resolve itself.

Now… Overall, I’ve been positive, and if you’ve read my work before, you’d know I will always try and balance things out, even if I’m not always successful in doing so. Master of Orion is not without its problems. For example, selection of craft can get finicky at times, as it sometimes seems to want to drag craft as an interaction rather than the old “click select, click [if you want to select a specific ship], click move.” The AI’s primary interaction before you establish embassies is to be extremely aggressive toward everyone else, and production, in Classic pacing, feels a bit of a slog. I’m not going to accuse the AI of cheating with its builds, but I am going to say that their emphasis mostly appears to be on the Conquer side of the Paths to Victory rather than others, especially in the early game. As with many 4X games, once you get to the end game, you will probably be able to pick and choose which of the six paths to victory you go for, rather than having to choose. Those are a select few criticisms.

Overall, though, MoO2016 seems a good introduction to the Space 4X genre, and a well crafted one in the artistic sense to boot. Also, I can confirm that the art book expands a little on the lore of the galaxy, and has a fair amount of cool concept art. 😉

…Followed by an early game beatdown from some extremely irascible Russian Space Bears. I will never mock the Bulrathi again.

The Mad Welshman is now idly wondering whether anyone can do a similarly good job with other strategic games set in space such as Ascendancy, Millennium, or, just maybe, Emperor of the Fading Suns.

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

Siralim 2 is, if you’ll permit me to be blunt, a Skinner Box. But it is a moderately entertaining Skinner Box in its present state, and while not much of it is original, it’s pretty competently put together, and takes its ideas from sources that have pretty much already refined the concepts it’s using.

I’ve unlocked a few things. Y’know, simple things: A Chef, few tens of citizens, a pub, breeding ground, alchemy lab…
…Simple things.

So I’m going to get this out of the way right now: If you do not like grind, stop reading. It’s a grindy game, nearly everything about it is grind, and the words “Skinner Box” should have clued you into this from the word go. Do badly, too quickly, no cookie for you. Do well, repeat your tasks in the manner intended, get various kinds of game-related cookie.

From Pokemon and the SMT games comes breeding and evolution. From other JRPGs comes magic, magic items, not-so-magic-items, and turn based combat in a first person perspective. From games like Dark Cloud comes building up your home base, so as to better equip, customise, and breed your monsters (Which, naturally, involves grind.), and, also from some other JRPGs comes Deity relations. Which involves grind.

This is not to say there isn’t game behind all this. There’s a story about an evil demigod that wants to go full deity, and must take McGuffins to do so… So obviously, our job is to get them first, and become a God(dess) first to beat the stuffing out of evil thing. The more deities on your side, the more monsters you own, the better equipped you are once you’ve gotten all the orbs, the better your chances will be. There’s a combat system involving physical attacks, magic, and special abilities such as casting an area effect Cold spell 1 in 5 times when you’re hit at no cost. You can revisit earlier levels if the current ones are too tough for your current party, and, since the levels are essentially small, procedurally generated theme arenas, with a deity somewhere, a quest for that deity (Usually involving getting X things or killing X things), an overall quest, and boss fights. There’s even the thing that the Pokemon games, and other linear progression RPGs would do, where there is the plot appearance of urgency, but in actual fact… Yeah, go hog wild, fill out your breeding library, get friendly with all the gods… It just takes longer if you don’t unlock the higher levels to level your beasties more efficiently.

Imagine a Carrion Worm smacking an Ebony Ent. Forever.

And this is precisely the problem with critically engaging with Siralim 2. It’s competent. It does its job okay, and, beyond a common problem that the game has also inherited (Monsters at higher levels tend to just be palette-swaps with different powers), it’s actually somewhat difficult to judge how well or badly it’s balanced, because if something is too difficult? Use an earlier level to grind up your captured monsters (Told you it was a bit like Pokemon and the SMT games!), and you can nearly always guarantee your creatures will be able to beat a boss sooner or later. I highly suspect I’m overlevelled for the next three or so boss fights, and only my desire to find breeding combos and new monsters to gawp at is stopping me from going to town. Once you’ve seen all the themes the game has to offer, it doesn’t seem to come up with new surprises so often, but, again… Too busy grinding up new monsters. And their breeding combos, because the monsters vanish once they’ve bred, probably to limit you just banging different rocks together until something happens.

So if you like that sort of experience, where, on the one hand, the gameplay can feel a little flat if you’re too efficient, and there’s grinding for new things out the wazoo, then good. If not, it’s possibly not for you.

Sometimes, you get extra bosses. I like to call them “Loot/XP Pinatas”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just found out I can make a new kind of Angel, and it looks like it might have some cool powers later down the line.

We haven’t seen The Mad Welshman for a week. Could somebody knock on his door?

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99 (£18.99 with More To Explore, £5.29 for More To Explore if you have the base game already)
Where To Get It: Steam

I missed Renowned Explorers the first time round, somewhat irritating considering I liked their previous offering, Reus, enough to put in 41 hours and 71% of the achievements before annoyance set in. Thankfully, with the DLC, I get to review not only this charming explore-em-up, but the DLC, adding two expeditions, some extra mechanics, and bonus treasure effects and events in the form of the Campfire Tales. So, before we begin, a quick summary of what Renowned Explorers is, for those who haven’t played.

My first main team. I have all of them as Captains now, but still have some fondness for playing this lil’ group. I mean, how could I not?

Renowned Explorers is an adventure strategy hybrid, where you pick three explorers, a Captain and two Crew, from a pool of 16 choices (Although only 4 of them are available as Captains from the beginning.) Once chosen, their skills and stats work along one of three complementary paths: Aggression (Beating the tar out of things), Deceit (Making people feel bad, lying, cheating, etc), and Friendship (Being the Good Example to all tiny Explorers and Natives everywhere.) None of these paths are, strictly speaking, closed off to you, and good strategy involves mixing the abilities of all three to maximum effect (Only Friendship skills, for example, seem to heal, while Aggression Skills can lay the hurt on a number of foes), but it’s important to know your strengths, because by playing to them, you’re going to do so much better in beating your rival Explorer groups to the top spot, unearthing ancient artefacts, and discovering awesome things, sometimes involving sheep drugs.

No, I’m not entirely joking with that last sentence.

…sometimes, the implications of the unique game overs makes me want to go have a lie down [fans self]

…And also kick righteous buttock, such as out fighting Tommy, the not-bright, but tough member of the Rivaleux, out charm Cassandra Shafiq, the temptress of the same team, deal with a possession by the evil Erzbet Bathory (She of the controversial Virgin Bloodbath Makeover Treatment), and rob tombs all over the world, from Ireland to the Andes…

FOR SCIENCE, HELL YEAH!

…So if you like feeling like a combination of Carmen Sandiego, Indiana Jones, and Lara Croft, don’t mind turn based combat, and love a good procedurally generated exploration story game, then Renowned Explorers just got more awesome, and while the DLC isn’t necessary to its enjoyment, it most certainly helps, and is worth a look!

The Mad Welshman is currently on indefinite vacation with Erzbet Bathory.

Let’s end it on a high note. FRIENDSHIP!

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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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