Recent reviews by Qix

The first thing you notice about Coin Pusher Casino are that the graphics are amazingly realistic. Then you notice the music which is very cool. Unfortunately, then you start to think that this is a very boring game where you just have to push coins off a ledge. That is partially true but there is a steady progression of working up bigger and bigger scores. The bonus items you can earn on each level include casino chips, gold and silver bars, collectable items, rolls of paper money and treasure chests. There are also numerous power-up tokens. Collecting these items becomes compulsive. Even when you've run out of coins, you keep hoping to nudge the table and get something to drop.

The basic premise of the game is to exceed the buy-in cost for each level. That enables you to progress to the next level. Of the game modes, Zen is most relaxing because it has no time limit. The more challenging mode is Classic, where you have a strict time limit. Finally there is Arcade mode which is incredibly frustrating at first but eventually you figure out how to overcome it using various perks and power-ups so that you can keep achieving jackpots within the time limit and so get a bigger payout.

The first arcade mode is a wheel of fortune with a built in dice game. The second arcade mode is a fruit machine / one armed bandit. Other than sheer luck, success in the arcade modes involves collecting 500 coins and then trading them in for a buy-in continuation. In and of itself, that becomes very addictive. I can attest to it being so after playing for nearly 50 hours. To begin with I thought this was going to be a game that got about 1 hour of my life in total (just a bit of nostalgia for old-fashioned amusement arcade games). How wrong can you be ?

Every bit as good as the previous Kingdom Rush games but now you have two heroes at the same time. This is the best of the best when it comes to tower defence games and I absolutely love the presentation.

Robocop is a good single-player FPS which stands out for its dialogue and voice acting. The game really captures the essence of the Robocop films from the 1980s and having the original actor, Peter Weller, voice Robocop makes all the difference to the recognisability of the principal character.

The gameplay is quite good fun and the game is not too difficult so I recommend playing it on hard mode. There are a stack of guns you can fire in addition to your trusty side-arm. You can pick up and throw objects, punch, stun, bludgeon, electrocute and grab people and also charge forward. The enemies are a range of punks, bikers, paramilitaries and robots. They have a slightly humorous aspect, frequently complaining about a particular injury or that something hurt in the moment after they have been killed. It's not clear whether it is intended to be funny but the radical punks do come across quite comical anyway. They are just canon fodder for the game so there's no point thinking too deeply about it.

The interaction with NPCs was some of the best I have encountered, with some really interesting characters. The dialogue and how you treat them can have an influence on the progression of the game. More than that, some of the choices you have to make are quite thought provoking in a way that challenges your biases. Robocop's directives compel him to enforce the law, including issuing parking tickets on cars and fines to street drinkers, but the choice is yours as to whether he actually does or not. It's the times when you want to let people off or there's no clear right or wrong that make these choices tricky. Although you investigate crimes and use a special ability to scan for clues, you don't have to spend ages searching. I think the balance between gun-fights and situations is about right and it helps to keep you grounded in the character because you frequently have to deal with matters as a police officer. In many games it is easy to forget about the character you are playing but not here.

There are some annoying things about the game. The slow plodding footsteps and lack of ability to jump, kneel or even step up is quite restrictive compared to most similar games but it wouldn't be Robocop if he could do these things and you soon learn to accept his movement limitations.

I played the game on a high end PC with 14th gen Core i7 and an NVidia GeForce 4080. Despite this, there were quite a few graphical glitches, particularly with reflections. I varied the reflection type and changed the DLSS settings, but these aberrations continued. There were also numerous times that the game froze to a black screen at the start or end of a cut scene. The frame rate suffered in some of the most intense battles. On one occasion I reduced the screen resolution from 3840x2160 to get past one of these crashes and also make the thing run more smoothly. I did notice some other graphical artefacts where squares would appear or edges would get pixelated. The game's bleak cityscape looks stunningly good with all the graphical effects turned on but some objects close up could have come from a game ten years ago.

One annoying thing I was not expecting was the lack of a save game feature. This seemed like a throw back to games from previous decades. It wasn't even clear where the checkpoints were. It certainly didn't save every time you entered a new area or anything like that. Sometimes there were twenty minutes or so between saves. I really don't understand why the game was made this way. In fact, I did not find it to be the sort of game you would need to save in case you died because it's not that difficult. It would just be nice to be able to save the game and walk away when you are tired or have something else to do. The game can turn into a bit of a marathon because you will do anything to avoid having to sit through cut scenes multiple times or repeat some trivial mission just because you exited at a time that suited you.

Overlooking the gripes about the graphics, the crashes and the lack of a save game feature, I would highly recommend Robocop: Rogue City for its story, gameplay and voice acting. It is good fun in a fairly superficial way but really captures the essence of Robocop if you are a fan of the original movies. Even if you never saw the movies before, I think you would want to watch them after playing this game. While Robocop is an action hero, the story asks deep questions about where the line between human and robot lies for cyborgs which is a question that will resonate down the ages.

A very accessible and atmospheric strategy game that is best played in winter. The scenario is a climate catastrophe set in an alternate reality in the period of the industrial revolution (basically steampunk) where people are forced to abandon cities and head off in steam engines to find a place to escape the weather. You are a colony leader and you must manage the resources in the locale of your steam generator to keep the colony alive and develop technologies to mitigate against the ever worsening cold weather. In the meantime, you may explore the wilderness outside of your colony in search of abandoned resources and other refugees. The population of the colony is subject to a mixture of hope and discontent which you can manage through enacting various laws. It also helps in this regard if you build things that give colonists a comfortable existence and you avoid working them too hard or causing them to become sick, injured, freezing or starving.

Battlesector is reminiscent of XCom. Although the turn based mechanics are quite similar, the game feels a bit different because the landscapes are broader and flatter and some units are grouped into squads. That actually doesn't make too much difference because they still move as single units.

I am impressed by how much the units look like the miniatures from the tabletop game Warhammer 40k. The art style and presentation are first rate. The voice acting and cut scenes are superb and the music and sound effects are too.

After playing through the campaign, it became apparent that Battlesector is too easy on standard difficulty. After getting completely wiped out once in an early mission, I never again had much problem surviving with all but one or two units surviving. The sense of jeopardy starts to feel a bit fake after you have been encouraged more than once to throw your troops forward on an unachievable rescue mission where you could have just left those units to their fate and looked after your main force without much effect on the outcome of the mission. The level design also misdirects the player quite often. There are several massive doors on levels that look like they hide a massive enemy but are nothing but scenery. The objectives of certain levels also leave the player underwhelmed as something spectacular is expected, but the level ends without anything happening.

Battlesector is still a lot of fun but I must acknowledge that turn-based strategy games can have slow-paced gameplay. It makes it quite easy to master the game if you have time to review the strengths and weaknesses of units and calculate the chance of success without the pressure to react immediately. The uncertainty in turn-based strategy games like Battlesector results mostly from the fog of war. One of the hardest things about this game is enemies appearing unexpectedly from all directions and you must therefore keep checking all angles. This is especially true for the annoying flying units that can approach from behind you, fire from a distance and cross any obstacle as if it wasn't there.

It's the best pinball game on Steam in my opinion. A lot of effort has gone into faithfully reproducing some of the classics and there's a constant stream of new tables with some decent licences. After all is said and done, I'm very happy with it, even if I did already own a lot of the same content on previous incarnations of Pinball FX and on Pinball Arcade. Zen have really delivered. I can appreciate the splitting off of mature themed games into the separate platform Pinball M but quite frankly I don't really want a whole lot of 1980s horror movie themed games.

Much more fun than I thought it would be. It's all just Wild West shootouts, but the underworld theme is successful and the cell shaded graphics are nice. The voice-acting and soundtrack are great too. The thing I am struggling with, however, is that you keep being forced to upgrade your weapons just when you got comfortable with a particular load-out. Then you turn a corner and step into the proverbial hornets' nest with multiple enemies with different attack styles and no cover to escape behind toting a sniper rifle that takes three seconds to aim and two seconds to reload.

There is one nugget in here that makes the title worth buying above all else and that is Fortune's Foundation. You basically have to sort not only the suits in order but also a full set of tarot style cards. It adds a layer of complexity that forces you to think several turns ahead. Much comes down to the luck of the draw with how the cards are distributed. Fortunately you can just re-deal which is what makes the torment bearable. You can feel rightly smug when you sort away all the cards.

If you like solitaire, you will love the challenge of Fortune's Foundation. Moreover, you will enjoy the beautiful style and relaxing music. Zachatronics Solitaire Collection is worth it for this if nothing else. The other games are a mixed bag, but I quite enjoyed some of them. They all stand out in terms of the interesting themes and challenging difficulty level.

As a fan of tower defense games I did not enjoy Go Home Dinosaurs. All round presentation is very good. Unfortunately, the game just isn't much fun. The cartoon graphics are so big that they take up too much room on screen. There are too few places to put towers and there's a pointless need to move around collecting coconuts and sweeping up coins during game-play. It's really a casual game and that's what I expected but I'm not going to waste any more time after getting bored early on.

It's a tough choice to recommend Brass Birmingham. The presentation of the game is very good, the artwork is very nice and the theme really works. There is a solid strategy game here, but one that lasts only a few minutes each game. The game is 16 to 20 rounds and no more.

I have found it difficult to understand how the scoring system works and to be honest, I am still struggling to beat the AI on easy mode after playing for five hours. The rules are actually quite simple but connecting up a canal network and making it high-scoring is confusing. The tutorial doesn't go into enough detail. I have even sought out the board-game instructions online to try and make sense of it.

This is like a casual strategy game in every regard apart from the difficulty level. I am sure after multiple goes it becomes easy to beat the AI but not straight away. Essentially, you need a deep understanding of the points system to know whether your choices are good or not. For a casual game, you might not have the patience to persevere. One more grievance is the lack of local multi-player.

If it sounds like I haven't enjoyed playing Brass Birmingham, that's not the case. It is one of those challenging games that keeps you coming back for one more go. At least unlike many other strategy games, making bad decisions is only a short term problem because the game is over almost as it has started. I am tempted to buy the board game and I can imagine it takes far longer to play and involves some hilarious disputes over the rules and totting-up the scores.