February 4, 2024 - Day 400 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 436

Game: S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster

Platform: Steam
Released: May 23, 2019
Installed: Feb 2, 2024
Unplayed: 2d
Playtime: 32m

Rating: 3 - OK

S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster is an isometric real-time tactics (RTT) strategy game, about a war between armies of rabbits, and pigs.

It seems the universe has a sense of humour, because my complaints about the lack of tutorial in yesterday's game were met with a 16 minute tutorial in S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster.

S.W.I.N.E. was originally released in 2001, and the remaster involved some of the original devs. It's a reasonably solid game (if somewhat basic), but it scratches a bit of an itch I wasn't aware of.

With that said, there are some rough edges to the game. Having never played the original, I'm unsure as to whether they've been left that way to maintain fidelity for fans of the original game, or if it's just some stylistic choices.

The most grating, though, is the voiceover work. Within the universe of the game (by way of spoken accents), the Rabbit army are presented as French, and the Pig army are presented as German.

The accents seem very much like someone trying to imitate the respective accents, rather than a native of those countries speaking English, and while not a gamebreaker, it does grate a little.

Overall, S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster is just:

3: OK

January 11, 2024 - Day 376 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 412

Game: Chess Ultra

Platform: Steam
Released: Jun 21, 2017
Installed: Jan 11, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 21m

Rating: 4 - Good

Chess Ultra is a 3D turn-based strategy... chess game.

With a name like that, you'd expect it to have gun battles and all kinds of extreme weapons and it's just a very good 3D chess game with online multiplayer, and reasonably good bots to play offline.

It has several different options for the location of your game, with appropriate sound effects, as well as several difference chess sets you can choose between.

Given my complete lack of chess games on Steam, it was nice to just kick back and play chess for a while. Chess Ultra is:

4: Good

December 29, 2023 - Day 363 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 393

Game: Mindustry

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 27, 2019
Installation Date: Nov 6, 2021
Unplayed: 783d (2y1m23d)
Playtime: 1h12m

Mindustry is a top-down automation strategy game mashed up with an RTS.

I've always had a thing for automation games, which I suspect is a largely #autistic thing. Most games of this type are about systemisation, finding efficiencies, then building (and rebuilding) automation pipelines to produce a particular outcome.

These are games that I avoid because they suck me in to the point that I've lost entire days inside them, with Shapez & Production Line being just two examples. I've seen at least one person whose *entire* Steam 2023 review was one game played, no new games. All Factorio, all the time.

A game in this space has to bring something different to the table; for Mindustry that's planetary domination, leaning into the RTS side.

Build factories, research technology, build tanks, and defenses, seek and destroy.

Unfortunately, this is where Mindustry leaves me a bit cold. It's not that I don't like RTS games: I cut my teeth on Dune II. I went on to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, then finally StarCraft.

Unfortunately, Mindustry feels it doesn't quite pull off either type of game that well. The gameplay elements are not explained clearly, and the UI is *really* clunky, making it difficult to find critical information, and not always making it clear what the next step is.

Unfortunately, the RTS side of things feels like (at least in the early stage of the game) like the only real strategy is Zerg rushing.

I finally quit out of the game, entirely unsure whether I'd completed that stage of the game, or needed to do something else.

There are a bunch of nice ideas in the game, and I think it's the work of a single dev, as far as I can tell. I just feel like it needs a lot of polish.

Mindustry is:

3: OK

December 29, 2023 - Day 363 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 392

Game: Mini Motorways

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 21, 2021
Installation Date: July 27, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 34m

Mini Motorways is a minimalistic cozy top-down traffic puzzle strategy game from New Zealand developers Dinosaur Polo Club. It's a follow-up to their previous railway puzzle strategy game Mini Metro.

Following on from the design aesthetic in Mini Metro, Mini Motorways presents you with a grid, initially containing one stylised house, and one stylised destination, in the same colour, and provides (n) road pieces to join the two.

Cars in that colour will then travel back and forth between the two locations. The destination building will tick, adding an icon for which a matching car is required, with each building having a certain capacity. If the building reaches capacity without enough matching cars reaching it, it's Game Over, man. Game Over.

Each level is presented as a specific major world city, and achieving certain goals in one city will unlock one (or more) cities to play in further levels.

Levels are played on a "weekly" basis using an in-game clock; as the in-game week passes, new destination buildings are added, often in a different colour, with a matching house in the same colour.

These houses can be on the other side of a river, or the other side of the map, or both, and you must use the roads to enable enough vehicles to reach each destination before the building "fills up".

At the end of each week you are given one of two options to choose from for extra pieces for the following week. One option may be 30 road pieces, with the other being a roundabout, with 20 road pieces, or a bridge crossing, with 20 road pieces, or one of several other options including the titular motorway, allowing you to connect distant areas of the map in a single hit.

I broke my guideline of mentioning the developers because in spite of them having only released these two games, I love both of them. Mini Motorways is:

5: Excellent

December 21, 2023 - Day 355 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 375

Game: Warstone TD

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 24, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m

Warstone TD is an isometric tower defense game with some basic RPG, strategy, and city building elements (so says the blurb).

I've started hammering my unredeemed keys list a little bit harder, with the challenge to get it down under 200 before the 1st of January. Just to make the next 10 days a little more gruelling!

Warstone TD was one of them, from Feb 2020; the "TD" is for Tower Defense.

It's a little bit different to most tower defense games I've played, as the game starts with several (I guess they're called) warstones along the path that the mobs follow, and you can choose to build from several optional unit types at each location.

During each round you might unlock an extra warstone to place somewhere else, but I think this is where the element of strategy comes in.

Also, after some rounds, you get a double-strength warstone which increases the range of the units (not sure what else it does).

So far it doesn't seem like you can change or upgrade a unit once activated, so it's an interesting twist on the genre, and I don't have a lot of traditional TD games anyway, so it's kind of fun.

After the initial gameplay introduction, the game sets a story about a wizard who's seen the future, and that he's going to be handed over to a group of invaders by the town, and so he enlists the help of the player (fourth-wall break, nice), to do the city-building thing, and build and arm the city so he doesn't meet that grisly end.

It's a cute framing device and gives some nice RPG elements to push the game outside of the standard tower defense genre.

Warstone TD is kind of fun, and definitely something I'll return to when I'm the mood for that kind of game; it's

3: OK

Building on an older thread about #solarpunk #gameDesign , I recently played #againstTheStorm and I think it's a brilliant example of what I meant with the mechanic above:

You keep building an outpost. It might succeed or fail, but it's always eventually blown by the storm and you need to start anew. Yet every time you learn something, you improve a little, and the #rougelike element keeps the game fun.

November 21, 2023 - Day 325 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 344

Game: Starpoint Gemini Warlords

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 24, 2017
Installation Date: Aug 15, 2022
Unplayed: 463d (1y3m6d)
Playtime: 20m

Starpoint Gemini Warlords is part third-person space combat, part 4X strategy, and part RPG.

I'm unable to review the 4X strategy & RPG elements, because I couldn't get past the utterly dire ship controls.

Going into the game blank, I had no idea it had space combat elements, which is pretty much "OK, joystick time".

I tried using the keyboard controls, and the ship handled like a stoned snail. Switched over to the Xbox controller, and that was actually worse, because while the ship still seemed to be handling like a stoned snail with the left stick, the right stick had the camera whipping around like a hummingbird on speed.

I went into the options to try and see if I could adjust the settings, and with the controller turned on, it just completely blacked out the options, so it's buggy too.

After 15 minutes of fighting with the game to try and get it to the point it was somewhat playable, I pulled the pin.

There might be a reasonable game buried under all that hassle, but am I going to put any more time into Starpoint Gemini Warlords to try and find it?

1: Nope

October 21, 2023 - Day 294 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 313

Game: Rebel Inc: Escalation

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 14, 2021
Installation Date: Oct 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 29m

Rebel Inc: Escalation is a top-down political/military strategy sim.

It's the fourth game in the October Humble Choice Bundle, and is by the same developers as Plague Inc: Evolved.

Plague Inc is a game about pandemics, released in 2016, and it's game that, while it wasn't "fun" in the traditional sense, it's even less so now.

Rebel Inc: Escalation brings that same sensibility to taking control of a war-torn country to "stabilise" it, and needing to "deal with a deadly insurgency".

The game doesn't really hold your hand, but it's fairly easy to work out. You have a budget that's provided by... the UN, and you need to spend the money on local initiatives to improve support, and remove support from the insurgents. You also need to create government and military strategies to build towards a win-state, which appears to be finding a way to remove the insurgents while maintaining your own popularity.

While I "won" the first level, it vas vaguely disquieting to play a game about war and "insurgents", and would probably feel a bit on-the-nose at the best of times, but even more so at the moment.

Rebel Inc: Escalation is (only just):

3: OK

October 13, 2023 - Day 286 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 305

Game: I Am Not A Monster: First Contact

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 27, 2018
Installation Date: May 14, 2019
Unplayed: 1613d (4y4m29d)
Playtime: 18m

I Am Not A Monster: First Contact is billed as a "retro sci-fi tactical turn-based strategy" game.

By retro sci-fi, they mean early-mid 20th century pulp sci-fi.

If you like that kind of sci-fi, this might be right up your alley. Unfortunately, it's not really my cup of tea, and I couldn't really get past that to lock into the game.

Graphically, it's a weird combination of pulp sci-fi stationary graphics for menus, full-screen pixel-art animated transitions, and high-res gameplay, and it feels kind of jarring switching between them. It just feels a little incoherent.

There was almost something there with the gameplay, but when the game was making me feel like I wished I was playing a completely different tactics strategy game, that pretty much sealed the deal.

I Am Not A Monster: First Contact is just:

2: Meh

October 10, 2023 - Day 283 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 302

Game: We Are The Dwarves

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 26, 2016
Installation Date: Sep 11, 2020
Unplayed: 1124d (3y29d)
Playtime: 20m

We Are The Dwarves is, apparently, a real-time tactics strategy game, about space-faring dwarves.

The game provides an intro, which is... confusing. It seems that this particular universe is made of stone instead of dark matter.

Our trio of stonefaring dwarves get into an accident, and then you have to... I don't know, and I don't really care to be honest.

Firstly, this is another game that uses a version of Unreal Engine 4 that uses a known buggy implementation of OpenSSL; the bug is only triggered on >10th Gen Intel CPUs. There's a workaround for it, but without the workaround, it will crash right after starting. It's the third game I've encountered with this bug since upgrading my PC, but it's a bad start to a game experience.

The game gives you a Steam achievement called "We all hate tutorials", and I don't, particularly when your odd game is so frustrating to try and play. I'm not even going to get into the voice acting.

I finally worked out where I was going wrong after wandering around a level over and over for ten minutes, but that pretty much meant that I'm just not interested in fighting with the game further.

We Are The Dwarves is a:

1: Nope