Recent reviews by Whizzard

Attempt 1: No to child labor, no amputation. I promise to take care of everything, positive that I can make the city survive without sacrificing anything. Day 8, most of the people are sick and dieing. No one is working. Day 9, out of coal, out of food, out of healthy people. I watch the city die a slow and agonizing death.

Attempt 2: No to child labor! But we have to risk amputation, I need workers and they can't work if they lie in sick bed, waiting for things to get better. Things go well for the frist couple of weeks. Then catastrophe happens. People don't like me so much anymore, I can't do everything. There's not enough people to do everything! There's not enough people... as the angry mob throws me out of the city for not fulfilling their needs, I resolve to find more people.

Attempt 3: I need people to work. Children... go to work in the coal mines and kitchens of the city. Finally, I have enough people. I build the right buildings, I reseach the right things while planning ahead, I don't do just what is right for the people, I do what is necessary for the city, even if it means 24 hour emergency work shifts and a few lost limbs or lives here or there. Because the city WILL SURVIVE.


Frostpunk is a city management survival sim that does everything right on survival side where you constantly struggle to keep your people warm, healthy and well fed. There's never a moment where you have enough of everything. The situation is constantly escalating and moment of reprieve are a rare but welcome sight. And even when you may feel content and positive on the outcome, the game throws sticks into the spokes of your wheels. You are constantly adapting, planning, streamlining and sacrificing to survive. You are put into difficult situtations but with a little bit of thinking, any of them can be overcome.

The gameplay is engaging, the story is good, the music is EXCELLENET. And it's a feast for the eyes.
The downside is that it's linear. Once you have played through once to victory, you'll have little reason to go back to play again. Unless you want to challenge yourself to save as many people as possible or make the city as efficient as you can. But the game offers other scenarios as well that bring new fresh challenges like a temporary sudden severe drop of temperature or other cities in need that you must overcome... or ignore for the benefit of your people. Sadly, there is no random or endless mode where you tackle different challenges every time and that's a shame.

But I foresee that the developers may release an endless mode at some point. But for now, the game gives plenty bang for your buck. I recommend this for anyone. Unless you hate city management games.

I'm not a Street Fighter veteran, so I speak from the perspective of a newcomer to the series (I know, I know, 140+ hours since launch doesn't make me exactly a newcomer anymore) even though I played tons of Street Fighter IV (and it's Super Ultra whatever variations). But I never got as invested in SFIV as I did into V.

Coming into SFV I knew exactly what I wanted: good online fun against other players. See, Street Fighter 4 did not offer me that. The online matches were always not easy to find and most of them had a lot of lag and rubberbanding in them. I hoped SFV would offer me a better experience and for that reason I bought SFV on day 1.

And since that day 1, I haven't uninstalled it once. Because SFV gave me exactly what I had wanted: for me, the online worked exceptionally well and it never took me over couple of minutes to find a match. Not to mention I could play other game modes against CPU while waiting for the matches.

The game looks crisp and colorful, the animations are sharp and fun, the gameplay is intuitive and I haven't found any character to be bad. My favorite character of all is the newcomer Laura but I don't mind having fun with Ryu or Cammy with a bit of Akuma in between. Every now and then I learn to play another character to see if I may like them. Lesson is that I do very badly with charge characters. I admire people who master them. And speaking of mastering characters, the community help around that is great! There's tons of guides out there and thanks to the clarity of instructions, learning new combos is never a chore.

And then the storymode dropped in summer of 2016. Playing through it, I didn't find to be exactly great. As usual with fighting games, the story is so often plainly nonsensical. However, the cutscenes are all rendered in-engine which is a huge plus and they are greatly animated. The overall story is also pretty clear and satisfying enough to beat. And difficulty wise it doesn't beat around the bush, there are a few quite difficult ones, including M. Bison as the last boss which I found difficult but fair. Quite unusual for fighting games which usually throw a special boss at you with cheap moves and inhuman reaction speed. Overall, I'd say the storymode is good but it could be so much better. It's also quite short. So I'm kinda hoping more story will be added in the future.

What people most complain about is the lack of arcade mode but I personally don't mind it's absence. Survival serves a similar purpose but it also has it's issues. If you lose you start all over and it becomes an obnoxious problem on harder difficulties that make you go through 50 and 100 matches which can take a lot of time and you can't quit in the middle as you'll lose all the progress again. There's of course a possibility of Capcom listening to the pleads of the fans and a proper arcade mode may be added in the future.

Now what sets Street Fighter V apart from the rest of fighting games? Tactics. SFV is not about long combos. And button smashing gets you nowhere. SFV is a very tactical fighter that allows some serious outsmarting of your opponent. Which is why I love playing it online. Of my 140+ hours with the game, I have spent about 120 alone just fighting online against other people. I started out mashing buttons, grew into flowchart Ken (it worked for a while but it's a dangerous habit to learn, which is why I haven't touched Ken since) and finallly graduated into a tactical thinker. That took me several hours of practicing whiff punishes, counter grabs and how to beat up a turtle. But I made it. There's quite no feeling like being able to figure out your opponent and then reading them like a book. The only dangerous opponents for me are people who never use the same tactic often. I still have long ways to go in mastering the game but the journey has been fun and there's a sense of accoplishment when defeating a strong opponent with your wits.

I also really appreciate the ability to rewatch the matches. Whenever I meet a player online that plays my character better than I do, I rewatch the matches to see what I did wrong and he did better. It's quite a powerful tool that even allows you to look up professional players and watch their matches with even inputs visible so you can exactly see how they play.

So to conclude, Street Fighter V's strenghts are:
*great online
*crisp visuals
*smooth gameplay
*tactical combat
*good tools to practice
*easy to learn, hard to master
*great characters, that share similarities but also are very much different

It's weaknesses are:
*lack of arcade mode
*no tournament mode online
*slow rate of updates
*Capcom doesn't always listen to it's players

But your mileage may vary on all of those.

I'd recommend this game to people who appreciate easy to learn but hard to master games and to people who appreciate mind games. I wouldn't recommend this game to people who want to just mash some buttons.

A classic sidescrolling roguelike, extremely difficult and defeat means starting over with a new character. You'll keep some things but the level layout will change. Despite it's difficulty I never felt like it was frustrating.

This game will remain gold even when it's old. In it's classic timeless pixelated style, it'll be good to play even 25 years from now.

To anyone who loves sidescrolling platformers, I recommend this heartily.

When I was a wee little lad, my first experience with Homeworld was Cataclysm. I enjoyed it immensely and to this day I wonder how could I beat it at the age of twelve. Of course when Homeworld 2 came out, I played it into bits. But I never played the original Homeworld.

Now, finally I got to experience it, well not in original form, but as remastered form, imported into Homeworld 2 engine and prettied up. And it was great. I played both campaigns of remastered games from start to finish and had a blast. While I understand that with the transition to the newer engine some of the original functionality of HW1 was lost but it never stopped me from enjoying the Homeworld 1 part of the remastered game. Everything functioned and it was a blast to play. Oh and how pretty it is. Really. I think I killed several hours just oogling at the pretty visuals and exploring every ship model inch by inch.

However, the Homeworld 2 part of the remastered collection is nigh perfect. While the ship models may not have gotten the same amount of attention as HW1 remaster got, they still look stellar and with the extra modern graphical options, I got even more oogling hours of it. Oh and the campaign of HW2R is just as hard as I remember it to be. When you finally beat a mission that was giving you a real hard time the feeling of accomplishment is real. I love it.

As for multiplayer, not all is well there but that's why it's still in beta. The combined HW1 vs HW2 multiplayer needs more work but if you strictly stick to playing Kuhsan vs Taiidan or Hiigaran vs Vaygr, you will have a good time. You also have a good time with playing the races of HW1 against HW2 but it can feel unfair at times, especially when HW2 ships are fully upgraded. But Gearbox is hard at work balancing the races out, so by the time it exits beta it hopefully will be as fun as the rest of the collection.

And if you really really want to get that Homeworld 1 feel back, it is included in the collection in it's original form.
Also, missing from the package is Cataclysm but... I don't personally miss it that much. If it's one day remastered, great, if not, meh.

Verdict: Beautiful, plays well and has great value as a whole package. I definitely recommend it to anyone who has interest in experiencing the Homeworld universe and I really recommend it to Homeworld 2 veterans as for you there is nothing wrong with the remastered collection.

PS: You can find on community hubs that people have had issues with bugs, glitches and crashes but I personally never encountered any, except in multiplayer. Few crashes while joining a multiplayer game and one case of AI controlled opponents being forever idle in a players vs CPU match.

Most fun I have ever had running the same missions over and over to get all the achievements and 100% a game. Every retry plays differently, every corner is full of discovery and sometimes it's even extremely relaxing. Even if you do a intel retrieval mission for the tenth time, you can just pull up an iDroid and listen to some music or character diaries that are full of additional information and story elements. And the story that lays the foundation for the upcoming Phantom Pain just rocks.

It was every bit worth the time and money.

Fun to play and not hard at all to master. There's something different to getting close and personal from shooting other players from afar with a gun.