Neue Rezensionen von Smallest Kaiju

This is the best walking simulator I've ever played.
Don't expect gameplay- (though there is an eleventh hour timed platforming scene that came out of nowhere, so it technically has more than zero) - but it has a phenomenally engaging writing, story, and delivery.
It made me want to cry multiple times.
With adequate graphics and acceptable controls it delivers a outstanding experience through excellent writing and execution. There's nothing like it. I kind of wish there was.

Feels like a shorter, less polished version of the original. Voice acted plot, some new maps, nothing else new. Had issues alt-tabbing or resizing in game, and some kind of multiplayer focus I didn't experiment with.

A very cute spatial puzzle game with zero text or communication. Just figure it out.
Pretty decent at communicating through level design and presentation. Good aesthetic. Good puzzles.

Some stuff that's really tedious or annoying, but it's relatively minor. One place I was able to softlock myself and would have been very annoyed if it had ruined my save, but I would have had to actively save after softlocking.

7/10, fun game, about 8-9 hours of gameplay. Quite enjoyed it.

Maybe a 20, 25 hour game?
That's honestly the worst thing I can say about it.

This is a fantastic game. It's a genuine, visceral delight to play a game that knows what it wants to be and executes on it skillfully and with a singular purpose. You are not Firstperson McShootmans, you are RoboCop. This is not some random first person shooter that cribbed half its mechanics from Modern Warfare 17 this is RoboCop: Rogue City.

You are slow but that's because you are RoboCop. Cover? You mean that thing CRIMINALS take? You can throw people across rooms, bash through walls, shove vehicles out of the way, or make them explode with your Auto-9. You can use other weapons if you WANT (and the G-11 is pretty insane imo) but your sidearm is the best weapon in the game for 80% of any fights, especially with upgrades.

All of that is to say that the game dedicates itself with unerring vision towards making you FEEL like RoboCop. You're covered in armor plating. Small arms fire ricochets off you. Recoil is something Lawbreaking SCUM feel. You have no jump button. Your footsteps sound like a localized earthquake. You are immune to fall damage but god help anything you land on. Your servos whine, your circuits gleam, and your desire for Justice is at MAXIMUM.


There ARE flaws. I could give you a small laundry list of them. But they're honestly pretty tiny, and the only reason I'd bother to mention it is because I really loved the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.
* You're slow. Not really a flaw, since this is deliberate (See the part on Being RoboCop) but it can get annoying running around for quests.
* Sometimes you can keep a movement button pressed but press something else that happens to cancel it out, eg tab. Can be annoying if you're trying to bring up your map to check bearings and then put it away and then you stop and have to release-repress W. This is pretty trivial all things considered, only really mentioning in hopes that it gets patched out.
* ...I'm really struggling. Some of writing/behaviors get a little *weird* around 65/75% of the way through but it's not a big deal. It works, I guess.
* Oh, the crafting system for upgrades is kinda fun but a little gacha-y? Nothing like microtransactions, just collecting booster components, then having to reroll them into higher grade ones randomly, and there's four types (and four subtypes of each of those) that you might need a specific one and have no power to get beyond collecting more and rerolling them at a 3:1 ratio.


These are VERY minor complaints though. This is a solid 95%+ for me. Extremely strong recommend.

Anabasis+ XCOM + basebuilding + TRAINS + WWI bolt actions + handcrafted campaign is an unassailable 6/10 at *minimum*.
It's a phenomenal, flabbergasting result that Czech Train Ninjas (or The Last Train) then clocks in at a 6/10.

The russian civil war is a fantastic setting, the Czech Foreign Legion a modern version of Anabasis, it has every ingredient for a fantastic, world-class game and they just... fail to deliver on it in any way.

Pros:
* The game is serviceable, playable, few serious bugs, maybe one or two CTDs while I played it within a month or two of launch.
* The maps are not copy pasted or procedurally generated as far as I can tell; every mission is a deliberately designed 'mission', rather than just 'you do combat now'.
* The combat system is pretty serviceable and makes for a decent xcom-style real time wargame, but you won't be using it most of the time.
* Kooky looking interwar armored cars, unarmored trucks, light tanks, and heavy tanks are available to crew in various missions.
* Armored Train car!

Cons:
oooh boy.

First of all, the enemy AI is nonexistent. They'll shoot at you but that's suboptimal. All you need to do is step out of cover, (or even just toggle your hold fire/free fire button too fast for your soldier to shoot) and they'll go ! and then ? and then walk a little ways over to you, look around, and go back to their patrol path.
But if you do that again they'll go ! and then ? and then walk a little bit closer... and a little bit closer... and a litt- and then they walked into your bush and you stealthkilled them with no risk or ammo expenditure.

You can do this on nearly every enemy in the game. Bodies don't persist; they can watch you stealthkill their squad made and they'll go ! and then ? and then walk closer to investigate so you can stealthkill them too.
You can easily finish some missions without firing a shot but with a double-digits kill number. Even a high one.
Because it tracks resources you're encouraged to gimmick and stealthscum every single mission.

Second, your Anabasis setting? You are initially pitched on how you've been ordered to remain neutral and both the Whites and the Reds mistrust you and you have to chart a difficult and uncertain course between two warring powers who you're under orders not to provoke if at all possible-

Then the reds declare war on you in the very first mission. That's it. You're going to spend the entire game fighting the Reds, only the Reds, and never anything else. 'Anabasis' and 'ordered not to side with one side or the other' just becomes "yeah kill every Red you have the opportunity to". Even when the Whites are occasionally portrayed as A Bit Dickish, the game bends over backwards to avoid you fighting them. (Maybe the norther routes are different, ymmv.) At the end of the game you fight one squad of whites and a tank.

Well at least it has XCOM style basebuilding and-
Actually just do every mission you can on the way and you'll never be hard up for supplies. It's pretty straightforward.
* Research passive upgrades (insulated cars, uniforms)
* upgrade cars (You'll never lose any)
* you can upgrade your locomotive, but you get exactly two chances to swap it out over the entire game.
* never needed to repair durability (or upgrade durability) on any vehicle.

You will get annoyed at having too many supplies and having to ditch or sell stuff because train storage fills up. There's consumables you can buy or manufacture; a couple are useful but really, you're not going to need anything but occasionally some moral-boosters and some medkits. Though you'll probably have too much medkits because again, most of the time you're busy avoiding all combat injury as Czech Train Ninjas.

Okay but at least the setting is pretty-
No. They have a fantastic setting, the background of the Russian Civil War to draw on, full of insane and wacky characters on all sides. Everyone's committing atrocities left and right and- No. All you get are the Mysteriously Popular Reds murdering/enslaving/robbing everyone. They twirl their cartoon mustache and somehow are overwhelmingly popular for inexplicable reasons. The Whites have about as similar two-dimensional depth. Beleaguered noble defenders of... the Tsar? Maybe? except they're losing everywhere for unknown reasons and, and, and. Words literally cannot express how they bungle this insanely cool setting, scenario, set piece.
I was holding out hope that we'd at least get Ungern von Sternberg as a villain in the final chapter. Like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ a ♥♥♥♥♥ up Buddhist Russian aristocrat who thinks he's the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, controls the Russian far east, and is fighting to restore the Tsar? How could you have the OPTION to include that crazy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and then just NOT? And just waste this fantastic historical setting on mustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain Reds Bad propaganda more braindead than something that came out of the US red scare?

And I'm not saying that because I'm mad that they depicted the glorious noble party of Lenin as villains! It's the Russian civil war, everyone's doing psychopathic ♥♥♥♥. The guiding arc of Russian history is "And then it got worse.". There's so much they could do with this and they just... don't. You have your Bad Guys and your Good Guys (occasionally rude). Instead of charting a path between two dangerous, suspicious parties who both fear you'll aid the other you're just fighting one of them and then maybe fighting the other (but not really).

(Even if you ARE a communist offended at this "commies bad" propaganda, it's... so inept, honestly, I think you'd find it more amusing than anything else.)


They had so much to draw on, so much real life material to use, and they just don't even care. That's the part that offends me. It's just so... BAD. If you're Czech maybe the thrill of seeing your country referenced at all in a big Steam title is enough of a high to soften that. It's got some generic Czech-PoV jingoism to it. That's fine. If you're Russian, egads. Let me know.

If you play this game, you're going to get the tone set very early on. The first in-game cutscene in Moscow. Your elderly colonel steps out to negotiate with the Red Army General Morozov, both flanked with their own soldiers. About ten feet apart, Morozov draws his sidearm and shoots your old man. Then RUNS AWAY in the cutscene while the Red Army guards shoot at your Czech legion guards like Imperial Stormtroopers and vice versa. By the time control is returned to you he's managed to run three blocks and the mission is to catch up to this guy who, again, *was ten feet away from you* to perform his sudden and inevitable betrayal.


Honestly, it's just kind of disappointing. Sailing the Rail Sea and Mobile XCOM with Bolt Actions is such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ neat concept. The combat system they set up is pretty decent! There's an insane amount of potential here... it's not shovelware... But it has all the soul and execution of shovelware. It takes this fantastic niche concept, fills up the space in which a game can be made with that concept, and is so utterly mediocre it's almost depressing. The use of this cool ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ piece of history is literally just a skin, an aesthetic. Like a $40 real-time DLC for XCOM 2.

6/10.

Edit: OH ♥♥♥♥ I FORGOT they go to the trouble of modeling the kooky dual-turret interwar armored cars and then they don't even use the dual turrets. mad/10

I have some complaints, but overall I really like the game.

The idea is a city builder with a plot. A campaign.
How do you make a city builder with a campaign? It's hard to do that because cities don't move and you know, how do you make a series of city builder "matches"?

They solve this pretty well. 1) your city is inside a space station/mothership. It does move. It's even got an FTL drive. 2) Any time you want, you can expand to another segment of the torus you're building inside. You start all over (but with the neighboring segment you've already built up also in play, and your tech progress etc). Each sector has some minimum self-sufficiency (housing, mess hall, recreation) but you can shunt resources in and out at will. (You can have a food sector, an industrial sector, a recycling sector etc.)

It works really well. I'm delighted. Every sector of my ship wound up characterful and specialized and organized in its own uniquely suboptimal way. The upgrades you get are visible. When you research trains you can optionally have them visibly running over the ceiling of every compartment you've installed them in. It's really endearing.

All of this is a vehicle (hah) to advance the plot. It's a citybuilder with plot, and it's a very nice and surprisingly soft-touch narration. Good storytelling. Lotta weird science and space anomalies. Makes you want to know more.

Complaints: It's basically one. Because it's basically an engine builder in the disguise of a city builder, it has limited raw resources in every area that you have to work based on. Because of that, running out of what you need or entering a death spiral is basically "You lost three hours ago and didn't realize it until now." That kind of behavior is very tedious and painful. This can basically be resolved by setting star system resources to maximum (400%).

Some minor followup:
There's also some frustration in managing resource harvesting, intake, and loading up outbound cargos. Perhaps this isn't an issue if you aren't playing on 400% resources but getting my loading bays jammed with resources, trying to resolve an anomaly which requires a shipment of steel and food, then realizing an hour later I'm still waiting on that because the spacedock that the ship trying to ferry that is assigned to is jam packed and hasn't been emptied at all in several in game days is extremely tedious.

Maybe I haven't played enough games like this but the logistics settings allow you to set "desired resource levels" in every sector managing a given resource; it'd be nice if there was a "have this minimum" "but up to this maximum" option, rather than just one value. Cargoships automatically rerouting to appropriate docks for the resources they're bringing in or out would be nice but is maybe meant to be part of the management puzzle.

Accidents happen a little too frequently even at minimal risk; that's pretty tedious.

It would be nice to be aware of what sector specializations are available. I attempted to set up Cargonia, Kingdom of Plunder. It turned out that cargo intake/sorting/storage were not an available specialization. A research will let you see progress towards Specialization Level 2 but even that doesn't let you see all Specializations available in the first place.

It's a story to explore and the game is a good medium to do it, but the nature of the story means that replay value is limited. Discovery and the event writing is quite good, but being a linear sequence of events replay value is low (even if there are multiple endings).

Very nice. Well written. Pretty. Space city-management, engine builder, and exploration of a strange and hostile galaxy. Deeper than surface level story if you're interested in it. (I was by the end.) 7/10, maybe 8/10 if you're at peace with the one-playthrough-value of a good story unfolding. (How you can never go into it blind a second time.)

I could understand wanting to wait for a sale but I appreciate the production values and effort that went into it; it doesn't seem obscenely priced and sales were reasonable. It's pretty, slick, and I think I had maybe one crash in my whole time with it.

Deeply torn. On one hand, it's annoyingly low-budget for a grand strategy game, turnbased or not. Paradox, for all their many, many flaws, brings some nice polish and UX and optimization to their games. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure this mechanically blows Imperator out of the water, and I've had to uninstall it again because it's like a live wire into the pleasure center of my brain.

So, to preface: It's clunky. It's slow. It requires too many clicks to end turn and get to the next, and those turns generally take much too long. It has much too few tooltips and context clues for its mechanics, though it **works**.

It focuses on trying to convey the lack of control. It doesn't quite do real time delay on orders (though every turn is about a year so who knows) but there's a good deal of *lack of control* built into it. Each region proposes a project of six categories and you can choose which to build, or spend a turn reshuffling. If you have most of a region, you can form a province at which point resources are pooled and divided; you can have one region focused on food, one specialized on industry, etc etc.

There are *almost 200* buildings that can be proposed, having 3 buildings of a tier and type in a province unlocks the next highest tier (and some can be upgraded) and the type of terrain as well as where it is in the world may provide it special resources that add bonuses or allow certain industries. The continual procession of minor decisions to make the best use out of a given region, its province, your random deal of options, and the vague plans you may have for the future, is so addictive it should be regulated by the FDA.

This is the reason I have done no work for the past two days and have to uninstall it again.


Trade is arcane and vital, difficult to see. Diplomacy is jank and slow, a little deliberately. Combat is hit or miss, but makes an effort to explain army composition and unit features/utility to you. All of this is **functional** but less intuitive and pleasant than it could be. In some cases it feels like a confluence of "we're trying to give you less control over what happens for realism purposes" and "it's a clunky, unpolished system that's hard to use", working together, synergistic, to achieve the same end result. In other cases it feels like it's an ambitious big-brain strategy game made by three guys in a shed, and if they'd just been able to afford a fourth guy to do a UX pass and a fifth guy to do some design feedback, we'd have a real gem here.

It's frustratingly close to excellent. It remains merely good, or perhaps decent. It's an era that deserves more coverage and a game category that deserves more service.

Definitely not perfect, but definitely a thumbs up. I desperately desire that they make a sequel or something with about 2x the budget.

I did not pay attention and did not expect to like it because it was both faerun and 5e and I didn't think there'd be any appeal.
It's a good game.

If you liked the Pit and like the idea of trying to play a roguelike as an FPS, you'll probably like it.
It's unpolished. There's lots of signs of it being an elaborate, high-graphic-fidelity game made by three people in a shed etc., but it's functional and it doesn't really impinge too much.

It's got a fairly unique feeling in being a roguelike FPS. You're running and gunning (or swording) and levelling up but you're still a roguelike character, bound to die over and over again, and certain to find yourself frustrated, killed cheaply, or otherwise outrageously annoyed.

Yet despite that it's pretty neat. Going to a new floor is a feeling I associate with the original System Shock- every floor of Citadel Station felt like I was invading a new floor of a megadungeon, encountering new traps, terrain, enemies, and more. A discrete and qualitatively different feeling from "oh new shootums level" This literally is that- you *are* descending into a megadungeon and each floor *is* like that.

Because it's a 1:1 copy of the original Pit, it's got a rather impressive enemy variety for a shooter- even discounting the ones that are more dangerous recolors of another baseline enemy.

Feel free to play The Pit original to practice your stats- most everything (except recipes for some reason) carries over. Level Up heals you to full and may be tactically stored (but if you get enough XP to level up again...)

It's kind of cheap and unpolished, but it's distinctive and neat. Wandering gloomy steam-filled corridors desperately wishing I had a quicksave button is very... immersive, perhaps.

disclaimer: I was not paid for this review, but the only possible way they'll remake sword of the stars 2 into a playable game is if they have enough money to do so.

I sat down and played this for ten hours straight. I'm uninstalling because that's like the third time it's happened and I want to do other things on my sundays.

Very good game, though it presents itself as "this is a hard game and you're not expected to win every scenario" and then starts you off on the super duper easy mode and makes you unlock harder. Not that that takes long, it's mostly forcing you to have some idea how the game works before you get to the Hard Modes.

Very good, the turnflow is pleasant and the continuous gameloop of making decisions tends to be extremely rewarding. "So good I have to uninstall it so I can get on with my life" is a rather rare and narrow category it shares with very few peers.

3/4ths engine builder, 1/4 4x.