Recent reviews by Just Kidding

Originality? nope, none at all. TD has been a thing since old school Starcraft. Most units feel like a reference to blizzard content. And all the waves are always the same: Online, VS AI, campaign, custom, always the same waves in the same order.
Apparently some things aren't covered in any of the tutorials, campaign or other game info, because after my first online match, despite the scoreboard saying I was best in 2 stats, my teammates called me a troll and reported me. One of those stats was leak coverage, since I had to go a little harder on defence I fell a bit behind on income, that's all. wave 14, our kings at 64%, other team 100% can you blame me? and.... Oh fun, now the slow grind mechanic is slower from my newly reduced rep...
-25% multiplier on my account from my first match
Gosh I sure feel motivated to continue doing the same waves I've done a 100 times, but with a punishment on.

I feel like there's potential, but I don't see it. As far as I can tell no matter what group of units you pick, some are trash, so you're meant to use the reroll units function to swap some out. There's a mechanic to see what types of builds other people use to complete the weekly challenge, but you can only see that if you do better than them and not anyone you do better than, only whoever was above you in the list before you started, so after succeeding and not using all units for some bonus points, I can now see the build of someone who failed and that's all.

My take is need friends to play with, or come up with a formula build and do it the same every time (which sounds boring af to me since it's already grindy) or you need to be starving for any TD experience, not welcoming to new players, so probably an ammount of stagnation in the community.

Also, why do I need to hold control to see the information on units, why can't I just see the information on the units? A lot of them the info box has basically nothing in it, then I hold control and it adds 1-3 small lines of text, no difference in the amount of screen covered. I moused over it to see information about the unit, so why the extra step?
+Can't seem to check info on units already placed in lane, if it's a basic version I can just check it in build bar, but upgraded, nothing

As an MMO, so far it feels weak and kind of meh. But it's free.
The biggest perk is that if someone wants to play real DND, it looks like all the rules and mechanics are preserved in this.
I'm 2-ish quests in, so I'm not a great source on overall content, spent a chunk of time fiddling with character creator since I didn't like a lot of the appearances. Most of the races and a number of classes are gaited behind purchase. So character creation is like you're just using a core rule book. But again, free.

I didn't pick up dead island when it was new, because I saw a friend play and very much disliked the levels of the zombies. It adds nothing to the game for the zombies to have levels and not knowing their level until they're up close and you aren't going to be able to escape, useless. The only in game function it serves is to gate areas they don't want you to go yet, which they do with other things anyways and it always struck me as foolish design that a very short distance from where they drop the new player in, is a hotel with high level zombies around it. You fight through beginner zombies, then suddenly one of them is catastrophically high level and you die. It's wasted effort when games do this and it's dumb. The enemy is a set level UNTIL you reach that level, then they level up with you, making their level mean nothing except that while you're low level, you auto die to random ones.

When I did get around to trying it, I got... somewhere past dealing with scientists in the jungle and took a break since it was boring. I never felt compelled to return from the break. Been years finally try playing that fifth character and his own campaign. Bad. Go over here, infinite running zombies, go over there, same, go somewhere they can't get to, suddenly they standing slide up or down to get where I am. Sewer mandatory after easy fire fight with humans. In the sewers... more infinite running zombies from both sides.
Fine, more stupid running. Pop an explosive ahead when a thick mob was coming from ahead. Doesn't affect them, creates impassable steam vent wall in front of me. Doesn't affect them at all, but prevents me moving forward. Dead. Load last save. Insta explosion ahead and steam wall for me again. Stuck. Bad.
Level 15 the entire time. No skills the entire time. No map the entire time. Not fun, not interesting and since the setting is prequel to the regular game story, we know they fail.

Cons
There are a couple dead ends you can hit easily, so effectively game over. You need metal and/or plastic for everything, fair, the only ways to get metal are: spending a chunk of metal and power for a landing pad and to wait and hope and gather other disposable supplies to trade for the metal, or mine+refine. Mine+refine clearly being the way to do it right, but in mining incrementally your workers can receive injuries. Those injuries turn them invalid. They'll take supplies but not work until they get healed, can you heal them? Did your few workers all get injuries before you built a medbay? Honestly it's a pretty fair mechanic, but it can happen easily.
If your colonists only eat basic meals, eventually they get an injury from poor nutrients, another fair enough mechanic, BUT even if I prepare the entire variety of types of food to make the more complex meals, I have zero control over what food stuff gets loaded into the machine to be prepared into said meals, so I may just continue getting poor basic meals, which is a bit frustrating.
Likewise there is a lack in controls for which things go into which storage rooms, so while I may make one intending for it to store food for an emergency, then it fills with extra starchs and metals. No food, little bit frustrating to lack that control.
My biggest issue is there's an odd scenario where once in a blue moon, my peeps seem to stop loading food, or I don't notice my food stores have started draining until too late. Suddenly my 80 or so people start collapsing from starvation, then after a bit they die where they collapsed. No way to save them, collapse = dead and whenever that happens, my biologists never seem to be the ones to eat food (The peeps who actually make/maintain food supply)

Can't win 'em all... Unless you were still stable and recoverable in one of your last couple auto saves, then nobody knows they were supposed to die.

Pros
If my supply feeds are getting clogged up, I can try selling stuff I don't really need when a trader visits. (But if I sell a lot the ship sits there until my people transfer the contents of the deal one by one)
At times I can leisurely let things run without micro-managing all over the place. There were times where I felt burnt out and like just sitting back and watching something, I could do that and this at the same time.
Each planet has it's own environment challenges. (Always struck me as odd that the snow hazard seems like the safest one to deal with, but planet 1 you get -potentially- lethal sandstorms and meteor strikes...)
If you have spaceports open to visitors and you have security you can suddenly notice your security fighting off purple pirates. (All your colonists are color coded, but purple isn't one. I don't know what happens if you don't have security, I generally have security before I open to visitors or soon after) Breaks things up if they get monotonous.

I feel like I make this sound bad, but this is getting long.

If I had 3 seconds to describe this I'd say, "50% similar to FTL"
With that as a baseline reference, combat seems to be geared more toward a rock, paper, scissors fighting unit deployment of drones, fighters, frigates. The main ships can shoot and I do use mine to shoot at the opposing ship, but the main ships weapons charge rate seems to usually be 20 seconds or more. Require your units to go attack directly to win, since officers can repair damage.
There are also ground missions, but those are handled RNG style. It will offer estimations of the results you can expect for each officer, so you choose which one to send. It doesn't say how many encounters there will be, or what types of encounters there will be, so you may be there because the ground encounter is to find a cryo stasis pod and the only officer with decent stats for loot and minimal troop casualties is going through the mission using their skills, to decent effect. 2 Troops dead, 3 injured, 40 scrap found along the way (At a trading post troops cost 10 scrap each, so net positive) but then you get to the cryo stasis pod and surprise, needs a skill this officer doesn't have. Can still gain from the mission, but no guarantee you'll be able to get what you're actually there for. If your officer has to retreat from injury/death you lose the stuff. If you retreat you'll also lose troops who are injured.
There are other noticeable comparisons, but the things I know of are hardly worth mentioning. I haven't completed a full game yet, at almost 3 hours in, so I can't speak to full breadth of content.

All the hud assets are fairly monotone in shades of similar light blue, which is OK, but when I go somewhere with a ground mission, after whatever event pops, my eyes glide over the monotone blue of send a ground team and I almost leave each time until I remember that there is an optional ground mission. Feels like I'll keep almost forgetting until I forget and jump away from one, realize too late and kick myself. A little contrast would help me out there, at least until I'm used to it.

There are certain things that it seems like devs frequently loose sight of; half way through making their game, see something seemingly done well somewhere else, then trying to mix it in, often in a... lesser way.
To put it simply:
-This game is sort of like left 4 dead.
-It has minimalist side perks you can unlock, but they are randomized so you don't know what you'll unlock and they require toooooooons of farming. You also unlock a few slots to put them in through the same tons of farming.
-Any time you round a corner, even for a second, mobs can respawn in the space you just cleared.
-Other than abilities that move your character, like the standard spinning human tornado chop attack that appears in every top down game these days, all basic attacks for every character, you're stationary.
-The levels are always in the same series sequence, 1, 2, 3, in order, every time.
-If you play solo, you're forced to take at least one bot, but since there are objectives, like gather planks AND guard a door from mobs at the same time, the help is kind of required.

Another game that I would describe as a left 4 dead like is WWZ. It also has the unlock of perks, like this, but there it doesn't feel like even half as bad a grind. There when you prestige, you lose access to basically every skill and have to re-level and re-unlock for each class, but there it also doesn't take a lifetime to do so. There I have a sense of progression that brings me back, there I have story elements. There I can pick whatever level I feel like playing.

I don't know. I wanted to like this game, but it just feels tedious or slow in every aspect, so it makes me feel frustrated.
I WANT to say I might have enjoyed it more with friends, but I think they would also have felt the slow drag and just uninstalled after one pass.
I have beat the whole campaign, but I haven't necessarily done everything. For instance, I noticed thieves guild crates. Never opened one, since it requires one of those farmed out random perks.
Doesn't feel worth it to grind for days... maybe weeks... a month? Just to find out. There could be some neat perks that fix half my issues, I don't know, but if you're interested in this game, I suggest you figure that out for yourself.
Good luck.

I originally didn't think I'd like Factorio, at one point someone offered to buy me a copy to have someone else to join in, but I said no, not expecting to get any amount of use to make the investment sound. I guess with time the idea started to grow on me.
When I picked up my own copy I tried the 'campaign' it's one of those campaigns that doesn't hold your hand. It gave me a task and left me to figure it out. I felt like I needed a bit more guidance and got caught in old OCD tendencies for a while. Once I completed those and switched to a free play map, I found access to a ton of things that weren't available in the campaign, more to research and build. At the time, the campaign was way out of date, so the UI changed on me, but that was updated prior to 1.0.
Taking on mechanics that I hadn't figured out in the campaign seemed a bit daunting, but you can start a free play map with aliens turned off, or with their spread turned off so they stay far away until you go to them. There are also more standard tutorials that show and tell you what to do.(Which after completing I stayed to figure out what the default behaviors were for trains on split tracks)
Now I've done everything in the game except speed runs, or carelessly die to one of my trains. Well, haven't really done anything with logic circuits yet, but I'm ready to. One of my go to saves is a world totally over run with bugs and I've strategically been reclaiming ground, with outposts, artillery, trains feeding supplies where needed.

99% of peoples complaints: I don't have all the weapons and armors unlocked from the end of the tutorial? RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE
Everything in the game can be gotten free, name one game where you advance through a story and nothing has to be earned. (and that you get as much content or playtime out of for FREE)

-Click adventure
-Not hard to solve
-Obviously a bit abstract (His head in the image is a lightbulb, duh)
-Kind of goofy (Specifically avoiding spoilers)
-Not much replay unless you achievement hunt without using guides
Just not to my tastes

=Revision=
I generally like the majority of the games that fall under the Paradox banner, but their purchase of Prison Architect was a mistake. In Introversions hands it was a semi-simulator: you manage a prison, but with over the top actions happening from time to time. You build a classroom to begin reforming those filthy animals, so you can prepare them for life on the outside... Then they burn down your laundry room. Or you try being lenient and don't search your inmates often, are lax on security measures, allow plenty of time for inmates to meet with their families from outside the prison... And then they riot and attempt to break out, with a fire fight between them and your guards.
It's a simulator, but can go off the rails too because it's a game. When paradox bought it up, this is what changed: In the newest patch!!!!??!!!? More floor tile skins
And uP NeeEeeEeXT, more wall tile skins
wowowowowow, and then a nooother class for the inmates to sit in.
Aaaaand Paid DLCs and more bugs and more bug patches.

So, what Paradox is doing, isn't a bad thing, but it's also not a good thing. Firmly put it's a bland thing... So for practicality sake, the game was and is 100% complete from the date introversion sold it, nothing worth noting since then. You can see why I say it was a mistake for them to buy PA
====

Things you need to know:
-You can still run into bugs sometimes
-Many of the things you think are bugs, are not bugs, but systems that are usually more specific than you expect
-Between saves +auto save, "losing" doesn't matter
-For at least one run you should go WITHOUT gangs or the other things turned on. Those are basically difficulty modifiers
that will make the game harder/crazier. Suggest you only use those if you want the prison to go insane.
-Workshop. Load other peoples prisons and burn them to the ground.
-Updating the game over a looong time, hit full release and released another game, still updating this game.

Examples of things people think are bugs. Because of things like prison labor, inmates can work in kitchens, you can dictate what canteen is serviced by what kitchen so they don't set a path that takes an inmate through an area you don't have fences/walls around. Or one time I made an outdoor prison, but laundry couldn't service any of the cells, I figured out that the space on the other side of cell door has to be interior, as a space for the cart to sit while the worker goes in to take out dirty clothes. Probably connected to the mechanic of staff: janitors do inside work and gardeners do outside work, so laundry being an inside job, needs indoor access points to work properly.