Nylige anmeldelser av Orthopraxis

A wonderful little city builder. Relatively light in the city building mechanics, it's almost more of a resource management game, but light there as well. Ultimately -- I think there are games that set out to be relaxing. For me, they often stray too far into the "Creative Mode" style of relaxing -- where nothing *needs* to be done and there are no consequences. I respect the existence of such games, but they aren't for me.
Airborne Kingdom, you have to build with some considerations. You have to manage some resources. Some of those resources, if you run to zero, your kingdom will fall out of the sky. There are indeed consequences.
BUT -- I never once ran out of that specific resource. I rarely felt challenged past a need to plan ahead a little bit. In other words, Airborne Kingdom straddles the line very nicely of relaxing, without becoming creative mode boring. For that, I loved it.

Really fun run-based deck builder. Played it for 10 hours and never beat it before giving up. I enjoyed those 10 hours, and the art and music is absolutely fantastic, and it plays great on the deck.

What killed it for me in the end is that I simply don't see a way to win. While I enjoyed the 10 hours, the difficulty ramp can be brutal, and the progression mechanics aren't helping.

If I have a singular gripe with the game, it's that something like 80% of my losses are not because I got outplayed, boxed into a corner, etc, but because I missed a detail of who was attacking who, when they were attacking, or what the chain effects of some things would be. The end result is those don't feel like legit losses, but like I simply missed a detail and lost the entire run. That isn't learning, that's punishment. The game would benefit greatly from some increased player information similar to Slay the Spire, where it calls out things like "This character will die this turn!" or gives some previews of information.

To sum up - I'm recommending this because I enjoyed it for 10 hours and feel like I got my moneys worth. I am also quitting in anger and frustration, so take that as you will.

A fantastic mix of:
- turn based strategy
- horde mode survival
- run based game

Has a ton of stuff to unlock, and critically, the unlocks increase depth.

To sum up the gameplay loop:
- you have a town
- you have some heroes
- each night the town is attacked by waves of zombies
- each hero has move points, and action points, and skills based on their equipment
- you use up all your moves and action points, and end the turn. The zombies advance and make attacks.
- when the night is over, if you survive, you have a sort of strategic layer where you level up heroes (choosing how to improve their stats), upgrade their gear, improve the town, and improve your defenses.

Repeat until dead or victorious.

Final note - the music in this game absolutely slays.

This game is exactly what it says it is, and it's fun! Some things that weren't obvious on the store page that I would have liked knowing up front:
- the eponymous "Tin Can" is a single room escape pod, not a whole ship.
- The character of the game is a little silly, and not at all "creepy" or anything like that.

A fun little strategy game. It has a modest deck mechanic, but I wouldn't call it a deck builder. The buildings you can build each turn are decided by choosing from a random selection. That's all.

I mostly game here to provide a positive review for this specific reason (other than I am enjoying the game, great music) -- I wasn't clear on the mechanics of the "Road Paver Depot", so I looked it up online. Want to know where I found the answer?

In the *game manual*. These people went through the trouble of making a pdf manual for their game. It's like 1996 all over again, bless their hearts. 10/10, A+, 2 thumbs up, etc.

Game is horribly optimized. Can barely keep a stable 50 fps on low, while GPU consumption is at 50% or less. It seems they wedded the tick rate of the whole game, to the rendering, which is absurd.

What is about 80% a fun and strategic experience is inevitably ruined by design decisions that force the player to be punished for rule ambiguity, a lack of info for the player, or missing 1 of 10 different moment to moment modifiers that can spell doom.

IMO the two critical missing elements that would turn this ok game to great:
- an Undo feature. Every turn is immediately committed once it is made. Inevitably, you will make a mistake and in later stages that mistake will often kill the entire run. It won't be a mistake of planning, or a mistake of strategy, but a mistake of remembering of the 4 enemies on screen, the specifics of their paragraph of rules.
- Better player info and explanation. Will this enemy turn around to face me after I do this move? Does counter-attack fire if I just move them around? Take for example 2 very similar cards - "Swap" and "Back push" (maybe back attack I can't recall) - My run just ended because while you can "Swap" enemies with counterattack and not be attacked in return, backpush WILL cause a counter attack. This is not made clear by anything the game tells you - no iconography, predictive info, warnings, rules explanation, etc. -- you just need to get punished for it and learn the hard way. Given the complete absence of an "undo" or save states, or restart scenario, or any such features - such incidents will often mean the entire run fails, and you start over. A frustrating capstone, and in my experience, the typical end to a good time in Fights in Tight Spaces.

My original review was frustrated by the poor performance of this game - somehow it gets bogged down running at 40fps, while CPU and GPU are are are like 70% utilization.

Turning down some settings did help this however getting me closer to 60-70 and a much nicer experience - mind you this doesn't really make much sense when you consider system resources were available, but whatever!

THE GAME is a ton of fun - everything I would want from X-Com meets 40k. Your Space Marines are dedicated, full of bluster ass kickers. Lots of fun to play, the flavor is tremendous. If I have a gameplay gripe it is that the ability to "re-spec" seems reliant on the perma-death of other troops, and I havn't had that happen yet in my game so... nobody can respec, which is disappointing as it seems some combinations of abilities are not too good, where others are fantastic.

Edit having reached the end of the game:
-- Final feeling on this game is that I loved it - I enjoyed the whole trip up to the very end. I feel like they kept the spirit of 40k pretty solidly, fun ways, and in grim ways.
---- Additional edit: I finished this, uninstalled it... and then reinstalled it a week later, startling another playthrough on a higher difficulty and grandmaster mode. I've become quietly addicted -_-

Original review was frustrated with bugs but... it was the only bug I found, and I lost no more than 15m of effort.

In the end, I loved playing this and would gladly keep playing if I didn't run out of ships to break :)

Amazing. Sony's first party games are really a cut above. It's a shame they insist on separating their releases out the way they do, trying to drive Playstation sales. Putting that aside though, this was a great deal of fun:
- a tremendous "serious business" adult reimagining of a character who, in our youth, was a no-depth near-faceless murderer.
- combat system is fun but not too difficult. I'm an old man and beat this on "Give me a challenge". Most of the game was fine, but I certainly spent the occasional hour on tougher fights (Valkyries).
- If you are a Norse lore nerd, bonus points.