Recent reviews by nixed

the people who made this game are sickos.......

i'm not convinced anyone actually play-tested this.

i'm genuinely shocked at how poor a product this is given the studio's history

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the change to the core cooking system is a huge let down. i used to love learning the different recipes through typing them out and that variations therein. the new four button system is very boring to me, and means the recipes you select for the day/shift don't really matter. this new direction really does move away from the core key thing i loved about the CSD series.

huge disappointment of a game. the original had a fantastic campaign with very natural progression that was a thrill. this game? it wants you to restart from scratch every three hours. that and the constant fiddly fuel and medical needs of your park make this a pretty consistently annoying or frustrating process, with none of the satisfaction of builder bigger and better parks over time.

Game tries to balance the incremental progression of an RPG with the severity of a rogue-like and fails at both. Skill and strategy are ultimately useless as the power of RNG is far too strong, you either get lucky and win or get unlucky and everything falls apart. Systems in place to deal with failure fall way short, which ultimately means that you will regularly lose hours and hours of investment due to a dice roll. Bad game.

One of my favorite games this year, much more than I expected it to be. This War of Mine is not simply Papers, Please thrust into a crafting/scavenging game. Instead, This War of Mine does a phenomenal job of conveying the desperate situation civilians find themselves when in the middle of a war zone.

Every scavenging decision feels like a gamble. Address short-term needs or long-term investments? Steal from the elderly? Kill? Managing and crafting in your home shelter a continuous process of managing losses. Do you use the wood for fuel to stave off the cold, or do you board up your walls to protect against bandits? Can we really spare the last of our meds on an old man who will probably die anyway? Combat is messy, often unexpected, and traumatizing.

You will not encounter very many fail-states in this game, as that would be contrary to the theme of desperate survival. What you will face is a slow march of ever worsening conditions, with the dim, almost non-existant hope, that a cease-fire will be signed to end all of soon and bring the game to 'victory'.

In the mean time; however, two of my survivors have died, the remaining two are depressed and are coming to blows, and I only have enough food for one of them today. Who do I feed?