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As someone who loves Tower Defence games, I have been disappointed by the Orcs Must Die series. Tower Defence games that are part Third Person Shooter (or vice versa) always fail to excel at either genre. In the case of Orcs Must Die the problem is just struggling to work out where to place the traps and determine the range of the weapons. The 3D environment leaves too much to guess work. The game forces you to juggle a stingy number of traps that never seem to be enough to spread around such large maps. It always feels like a compromise and you never feel confident that you are placing them in the most effective places. More than anything, it is just too stressful when the orcs get past your defences and you have to resort to standing in front of the portal and shooting them in the face at point blank range. In a traditional tower defence game it's a more distant spectacle and so not quite as frustrating.

I'm not saying that the game is not fun or well produced, but as a strategy game it just isn't very satisfying.

I like this. It's got everything that a typical match-3 type game has, but there's so much more going on. You really have to work out a strategy for achieving success on each level by choosing where to start and then using the various power-ups to assist you. You can get good at it, but it still tests you and you never quite feel that you've mastered it, even when you can complete most levels on high difficulty in one attempt. I am not so good at the bonus games or speed levels which I found tedious and frustrating. I may never get all the achievements due to rage quitting. Even though I finished the standard levels on advanced difficulty, I think I missed out on various achievements by not playing it on normal. Even after completing the standard 120 levels, I had still only got half of the power-ups. What's more, it turns out that there another 120 levels hidden beyond the first 120.

Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions is a beautiful and highly relaxing game. It's the perfect bite-size gaming session for when you have something else you should really be doing. You get the reward of the finished puzzle at the end of the level which reveals the image and some philosophical quote/poem that ties-in to the imagery.

Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break is very similar to its two predecessors. There is little to differentiate it and the core gameplay is identical. There are a few new units and the graphics are slightly better in some places, but don't let this somewhat faint praise put you off.

Everything has been lovingly crafted, especially the boss battles which are awesome. You can justify buying the game for the level design and the new content if you enjoyed the previous two games, or this could be a good entry point for a new player.

The game is a mash up of a marble-run game and a tower-defence game. The graphics and sound are really good and emulate Terry Gilliam's art style from the cartoons in the 1960s comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The tower defence element of Rock of Ages is a bit hit and miss, but it works. There is a level editor built into the game, which is a nice inclusion, but I haven't used it. Multiplayer is well implemented, but I've yet to be matched with a human opponent. From past experience, the multiplayer is fast, hectic fun. The various game modes keep the game constantly fresh and the frustrating nature of the gameplay drives you to demand 'one more go'.

MudRunner is probably the most frustrating game I have ever played. It is designed to be that way. In the game you spend a lot of time stuck or struggling to make progress or thwarted in achieving goals, but there is some satisfaction in overcoming these challenges. After the first job where you have to drive an articulated lorry to a parking place through a city, the second job has you driving completely off-road through a boggy, flooded forest to collect logs and deliver them to a lumber mill. What makes this difficult is the fact that apart from the mud, there are lots of obstacles like rocks, trees (obviously) and flooded ravines. The wilderness would be quite relaxing if it weren't for how stressful it is to navigate. I frequently ran out of fuel just short of my destination or rolled a truck in the middle of nowhere, so I spent far more time retrieving abandoned trailers or winching trucks back upright than actually delivering logs. I have to say that it has all been a lot of fun, but totally hectic and annoying at the same time.

A nicely presented minimalist puzzle game. I found it very easy, but it does require you to remember the simple rules, such as direction of flow. The circuit resistors in the game are one thing that really didn't make sense to me because they don't have a specific function as far as I could tell (like actually resisting the current!). I must admit to being confused by transistors too. My excuse is that the instructions were very brief and also inaccessible during play.

Towards the end of the game, there were a couple of levels that involved a tiny bit of trial and error, but often the levels could be almost completely solved by just arranging the tiles so that they connect up in a loop.

I would like to see a more complicated game where you have to deal with electrical current and not just the formation of a viable circuit. Nevertheless, I sort of enjoyed this and it was sort of educational. I just thought it could go a lot further. It was fairly weak as an electronics simulator, but okay as a simple puzzle game.

My first impression of Ancient Enemy was that the story and atmospherics were a bit dull. I also found it a bit confusing at first, even after playing previous card games from Grey Alien such as Shadowhand and Regency Solitaire. It didn't take long to overcome this initial disappointment, but it still seems a bit under-cooked.

I would say that Ancient Enemy seems too easy, even on Nightmare difficulty. I have cleared the game without having to replay any levels and got all the achievements. I only once ran out of cards before the end of a hand. I'm actually in favour of games and achievements being not too difficult, but in this case, it is not really challenging enough for a seasoned player. I think that's a consequence of all the special ability cards stacking the advantage for the player against the AI opponent. You start every round with a playable card. There is also an ability that lets you turn any playable card into a wild-card. I ended up with so many wildcards that I started using them up quickly, just to get rid of them.

Unlike some similar games, the AI opponent does not take a turn at playing against you, so there's no jeopardy in leaving a run of playable cards on the table. The opponent just plays ability cards at the end of each turn. It's like a game of tic-tac-toe where they signal their next move during your turn so that you can block their attacks and launch your attacks when they are undefended. The only real challenge is surviving an entire map level without replenishing your health.

Ancient Enemy seems less impressive than similar Grey Alien Games, as if they didn't throw as many ingredients into the mix. The game could benefit from some rebalancing in my opinion. That's not to say that I haven't enjoyed playing it or that I don't recommend it.

The art style and the dialogue are what make The Outer Worlds interesting. Beyond that, it is a fairly run-of-the-mill first-person adventure game. It seems like a game you've played before but with a different theme. To that extent I might say it is unoriginal and maybe even a bit boring, but perhaps that is unfair given that I am quite enjoying playing it, but not that much. Mostly it just feels a bit shallow.

The missions are well scripted and the voice acting lifts things to another level, but the characters you meet all look a bit 'off the peg' if you know what I mean in terms of body proportions. The landscapes are quite pretty to look at, but the level of detail is not that fine and the areas you can explore are somewhat limited compared to a truly open-world game. It is very colourful and in fact the landscapes are a bit unconvincing in some ways, even though the unusual colours add to the impression of an alien environment. Unfortunately, it's so busy with colours and movement in the foliage that it is quite hard to notice things.

++Update++ When I reviewed the game it was on an NVidia 1080 card and a 4k monitor. I have just been playing it on a laptop with an NVidia RTX 3070 card hooked up to a TV and the graphics popped in a way that they hadn't before. There seemed to be layers of effects that were just not present on the older graphics card, even though the settings were identical.++

My biggest complaint about The Outer Worlds is probably something which could be directed at the genre rather than this game specifically. That is how it encourages you to search for loot all the time. I spend the majority of time in the game compulsively checking hidden corners for one of the bright yellow bins which contain all manner of useless junk. At least you can see when they've been opened. When rifling through the pockets of corpses, you're never quite sure if you've checked before, given the mounds of bodies lying around the place. There is actually a shortcut which enables you to sell all your junk with a single button press. This helps to whittle down the amount of luggage you have to haul slightly, but there are so many other things not classed as actual junk that the encumbrance limit is quickly reached. After that, you can only move at a slow stroll. The truth is, you don't actually need any of this stuff apart from armour, weapons and hacking tools. All the food, drink, medicines etc raise your stats slightly, but they generally have a short duration.

Before going into combat, you are supposed to eat an apple, drink a bottle of vodka, inject some stimulants and put on a special hat to improve your chances of not dying slightly. Given how easy the combat is and that it is usually over almost as soon as it has started, there's really no point unless you want to interrupt the flow because the modification of your stats is barely noticeable and it causes you to panic in combat having invested so much time preparing for the fight.

After a fight has begun, your companions have a habit of charging forward to engage the enemy in melee combat, which blocks your line of sight if you are using ranged weapons. I decided to set my companions' combat stance to 'passive' to stop them taking all my kills and blocking my weapons. This resulted in them standing with their back to the enemy and stopping them charging towards me to attack me in melee while I was able to pick them off with a pistol. I also found frequently that I could provoke combat by shooting enemies with my sniper rifle at long range. They would charge towards me right across the map, start fighting me and then inexplicably turn around and run away back where they came from (only with their health fully restored). I have seen this sort of thing before, but it was quite immersion breaking because it happened with regularity and caused combat to break off mid fight, even though the enemy had run probably half a mile to get there. It suggests that the range of sniper rifles is almost exactly the same as the maximum range for a particular mob's pre-defined movement radius.

I would like to compare The Outer Worlds with Bioshock because I think that was a similar game with a similar vintage-futuristic theme, but the weapons and power-ups in Bioshock were much more useful and had a far more important impact, changing up the gameplay in interesting ways. There is a great variety of weapons and armour in The Outer Worlds, so many in fact that you probably won't even get time to use two thirds of them. That would be okay if the game had replay value or multiplayer, but it doesn't. In the Outer Worlds, your space-ship acts as your home, so you can stash loot there or anywhere else you care to, but it's easier to sell or break down your loot at vending machines and workbenches. The optional perk to Fast-Travel while encumbered is a blessing, but only serves to support the collecting/hoarding instinct of most players.

On the point about collecting useless junk, it's also exceptionally easy to steal in the game. You can be clanking around in a shop wearing a space-suit, then walk behind the counter and provided the shopkeeper doesn't turn round and ask you what you are doing, then you can just strip the shelves of merchandise. Similarly, you can have an interaction with a very sympathetic character who you decide to help out of a sense of charity, but without thinking, you then pilfer their few meager possessions to sell for a couple of bits at the nearest vending machine. On the one hand you feel like if the game doesn't stop you doing it then it's okay. On the other hand, you can soon find yourself role-playing an amoral, murderous bandit with no respect for other peoples' property and an uncontrollable urge to steal and to hoard. You could decide to role-play the whole thing as an all round good person, not just someone forced to make ethical choices in the set-piece dialogues, but I can't believe many people choose that path.

Philosophically, the game has some interesting concepts to wrestle with. It focuses on the unfortunate consequences of a corporate system which has become all encompassing and the struggle to overturn it. It makes for a thought-provoking story and I think that's the thing that stands out the most about the game and makes it worth playing. All I would say is, you might want to try playing it casually without worrying too much about getting the best armour and weapons or maximising your character's stats. Unfortunately, years of playing similar games makes the habit of endless looting difficult to kick, so you will need iron discipline to avoid just behaving like a rat in a maze.

Very similar to previous Kingdom Rush games in that it has great tower defence gameplay and cute fantasy graphics with humorous voice acting and a dramatic sound track. The main difference this time is that there is a greater variety of towers, but you only get to equip five of them at the same time.

As somebody who preferred Pinball Arcade to Pinball FX, I must admit that Zen have done a good job on the Williams tables since acquiring the licence and taking it off Farsight. My early concerns have been overturned and I look forward to many more conversions of real-world tables.