Recent reviews by WarMom

I've played Thea for nearly 25 hours, plus a few more on console, and I still don't have much of a clue how to describe it. It's a...turn based strategy RPG? 4X where the first X only partly exists? Survival game? Party-based card battler RPG? King of Dragon Pass having a baby with D&D? All wrapped in a roguelike blanket?

Thea is an ecclectic mix of genre-blending that tasks you, a deity, with managing a small village of post-apocalyptic survivors, surviving and thriving in a dark fantasy world based on slavic mythology. You must gather resources to supply your villagers with food, going out on expeditions to find new resources, fight monsters, find new allies, and undertake quests to discover why the world ended and what to do to revitalise it.

Your village is made up of individual villagers, all with their own stat sets, ultimately creating an adventuring party that needs to be balanced and prepared for every eventuality. Out in the world, you encounter natural disasters and creatures, and depending on the adventuring party that are in that situation, they can fight their way out or possibly undertake an alternative challenge - social, hunting, stealth, testing magical knowledge, and so on. These challenges all take place as a simple card battle drawing on the stats of the characters involved. See what I mean by genre-blending?

You will make mistakes in Thea. You will lose characters. Runs will end in disaster. And that's where the wider game comes in. Every game that ends gives the god you played as experience points which unlocks buffs for subsequent runs, varying from god to god as they lean to different playstyles. You'll learn a little with every loss, how to craft, how to hunt, the shapes of different encounters, how to build your strength to face the world that gets stronger with time. This roguelike wrapper feels like the one true sharp edge on Thea - after 25 hours, I've come nowhere near making good main quest progress, let alone finishing the game. Maybe I'm learning too slowly. But a single game of Thea can last as long as a game of Civilization, and the hours the game demands to see all its mechanics might not be reasonable.

With that said, I'm happy with my 25 hours and I'm ready to - eventually - put in many more and try out the sequel. Thea is truly unique, and its weirdness brings some growing pains and a tricky learning curve, but I absolutely recommend you try it and support unique strategy games.

Nearly essential software. Lets games that do not feature a borderless fullscreen mode (renders in a window but stretched to fullscreen, no windows frames, can alt-tab without any pauses) to do so in effect, by hooking into windowed mode. Doesn't work for every game, but exceptions are few and far between. The 'favourites' menu lets you automate this, even with unique settings for different apps.

Can be bought on Steam or compiled from the Github - Steam is essentially a 'pay for convenience' option. Even when purchased from Steam, can be automatically run in the background at startup independent of Steam. Highly recommended.

Though this DLC more or less just exists to give another avenue to get money to the devs if you felt Thea was a great experience, you do get something in return: 243 art cards, which are the in game assets used for every character, party member and monster during the card battles. Each card is an 825x1125 jpg at 72dpi, so pretty good quality. Could be useful for people who run tabletops!

It's not just nostalgia talking, this is still a classic. Funny, cute, and with a lot of content for a completionist to slowly burn through. It might become ultimately irrelevant in a few months when The Skywalker Saga comes out, but it's a good look back at where the Lego games started.

A bold experiment for the rebooted XCOM franchise, and one that is mostly successful in my opinion.

The biggest change is that turns no longer operate in a 'allies then enemies' pattern, but every individual unit has their own turn in the queue. Consequently, the focus shifts from piling on as much alpha damage as possible to strategic takedowns and manipulating the turn order with stuns and delays. Some players were turned off by this, but I loved it. It's very similar to Final Fantasy X or the FF Tactics games, so it might have just been an easy transition for me.

Generated class-based characters are out, predetermined unique characters with prewritten personalities are in. Build your team from a set of characters, and get to know them. There is, however, no permadeath. If a character 'dies' on a mission, they go to hospital. If it's a teamwipe, the mission restarts. You still have some scope to customise your characters and have them build around each other, with synergising abilities, items and unique equipment to create your own playstyle, and you'll still develop attachments to them, but the flip side is that some of the characters just aren't as fun or as useful as others, while some are situational. It'll be interesting to see if 'unique' units stay with the series going forward.

There's no more searching for enemies, creeping forward with overwatch. Instead, missions are divided into 'rounds' of combat which start with your team breaching entry points as a pre-emptive strike. This is part of how CS captures the 'fantasy' of being a police force rather than freedom fighters or a defense team (although it isn't without its issues for that design choice. Owing to real-life events, the game's concept aged very, very rapidly).

Chimera Squad's weak point, however, exists outside of the missions. The game's equivalent of panic management is utterly trivial. Whereas trying to manage the desires of different nations in Enemy Unknown / Within had you juggling short and long term priorities, tackling terror missions you're not prepared for and clutching out last-minute satellites in order to keep members in, district management in Chimera Squad has too few consequences to trade-offs and too many tools to mitigate panic. Your own greed easily becomes the chief motivator and compromise rarely becomes important. Coupled with the overall lower difficulty - I beat it on Classic with a lot more ease than I did Enemy Within - it sometimes feels like the game doesn't demand to be taken seriously and like it really is just an experiment that you can ignore rather than a building block for the next installment.

Still, at its budget price, it's absolutely an experiment worth playing.

Review is based on two thorough playthroughs, with wildly different character builds and dialogue choices in each.

There's two halves to Disco Elysium: a video game, and a role-playing experience.

The game is a point-and-click detective RPG without combat. The game is built on active and hidden passive dice rolls in a series of conversations - with other people and inanimate objects - all corresponding to different aspects of your personality in place of standard stats and skills. It's unique and intriguing to play a game that is itself a deep dive into the player character's psychology, with a 'fail forward' approach to failed rolls that makes failure (almost) fully accounted for and fun to see the results of. It takes place in a story about a city trampled under neoliberalism, and how people live with that reality. It's a story about being confronted with crushing inequality as an outsider, about questioning your own role as someone who enforces that inequality, about living with personal and political heartbreak, about trying to fight for your sobriety when the world drives you to alcohol and drug abuse. Despite the 'choices matter' tag, they honestly don't; you'll almost assuredly arrive at the exact same conclusion, but that tag speaks to the strength of the illusion.

And that's where the role playing experience comes in.

Though the story is, mostly, pretty heavily linear, the journey matters so much more than the destination. After finishing the first playthrough that left me in tears, proud of my empathetic, apologetic cop starting his path to clean living and moving on, I came back months later, to start a playthrough as a physical, aggressive fascist whose only understanding of social skills was 'I am a cop, I am a god'. And that's when the game got its claws in me all over again.

It was this second playthrough when it really set in for me that Disco Elysium truly is an RPG instead of a visual novel with dicerolls attached. That illusion of choice is strong because of the range of self-expression that the game's dialogue trees generally allow. I absolutely despised my second character, but I was enthralled by the performance art that playing the game became, watching a story evolve where he developed a crippling addiction to magnesium antidepressants to offset the morale lost from alcohol and racist rants. It's a game that knows how to be both funny and emotional in equal measure (albeit not without its own pitfalls), and I'm excited to have a third playthrough after a couple months of 'cooling off' before starting a playthrough as another type of detective.

Absolutely, completely recommended. Oh, and show that phrenologist who's boss.

Gets a 'Not recommended' for two reasons.

1. The game, while fun for a while as a relaxing solitaire game, has two achievements which are incredibly tedious to complete. Completionists routinely resort to changing the level files, then leaving the game running with an autohotkey script playing to automate playing the same level over and over to hope RNG finally gives out. It's more effort than the game's worth and I'm frankly embarrassed by managing to rack up 84 hours of leaving this game running in order to get one final achievement.

2. The developer is constantly remaking this game. Constantly. There's no point to buying this when there's so many alternatives by the same dev.

Review is based on completing all content in the game and all DLC.

It's kinda weird to look back on Shadow of Mordor in 2020. At release, the prediction was that its 'Nemesis System', which sees you building antagonistic relationships with orc generals, would be aped by every game after it, only for it to happen in its sequel and, at a stretch, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Watch Dogs Legion. In hindsight, the game's defined and ultimately constrained by being Yet Another 2010s AAA Open World Game, albeit a highly polished one. That's precisely why I enjoyed it, and the Nemesis System is just flavouring on the side.

Pursue a main storyline or roam the open world and engage in sidequests to attain power and upgrades. Fight enemies using the same combat system that we've been using since Batman Arkham Asylum in 2010. Start out slightly overpowered with instant-kill stealth and finisher attacks, and become stronger to get way, way overpowered, and that's where the game starts to undermine its own selling point.

Yes, you'll have stories where a demented, furious orc survives death over and over, pursuing you filled with fury. But as the game progresses, these stories happen less and less as orcs become much less of a threat, because nothing can actually pose a danger to an upgraded Modern AAA Game Protagonist. The game prompts you to engage in skullduggery and backstabbing by recruiting Orcs to your cause and having them rise through the ranks...but it mostly feels like a formality when Talion alone can eventually take on armies without breaking a sweat.

So after all my kvetching, why do I still recommend it? Because Shadow of Mordor, at its core, is a well-made AAA Open World Game, with presentation and mechanics polished to a mirror sheen on the backs of crunching overworked developers. I like these kinds of games. The combat's fun. There's a varied checklist of activities in each zone. I'm overpowered as hell by the end of the game. At its discounted price, it's worth picking up, especially with the bundled DLC adding ven more variety to the package. It's just hard to ignore that the Nemesis System is, at least in this game, really just a gimmick and I look forward to finding out if it's better integrated in Shadow of War.

Tolva is a game that mixes indie scope and aesthetic sensibilities with the gameplay loop and structure of modern AAA games, and it's right up my street. Rossignol's penchant for humanoid robots shines through in the game's atmosphere and mechanics. You don't control a singular character, but rather hack into clunky mining robots on an abandoned backwater planet, lurching and stumbling across the landscape and firing weapons that feel utilitarian rather than comfortable. The game's slow-paced, but feels like that presents an opportunity to drink in the environment and atmosphere between bouts of long-range gunfights.

Tolva is a game about exploring, moving from map marker to map marker to undertake a variety of tasks, earn currency, and unlock new equipment and weapons. It's a design template that's been popular in mainstream open-world games for years, but the little tweaks from the game's aesthetic design and compact play space make it a good, focused dose of that design. A free second map and campaign was patched in after launch, making for even more content. Recommended.

A unique, 'semi-simulationist' game about going on a road trip with your uncle in a car that's falling apart before you even fire up the engine. Strikes a wonderful balance between relaxing driving and white-knuckle gripping the wheel, begging your engine to last until the next town so you can replace it, bottles of beer clanking in the back ready for sale across the border for a profit.

Unfortunately, the publisher ultimately forced the developer to abandon updates for the game. To support the actual developer, look into Landlord's Super.