Recent reviews by Chopchop

It's exactly what it says it is, with no ads or other crap thrown in your face. Not bad, and a decent collection of minigames.

This game is also very kid-friendly, if you're interested in that. If your kid got interested in these games from a tablet or phone, get this game for them so that your kid stops downloading garbage.

For a minor complaint, the controls can be kinda janky at times. For example, with the test tube game, if you pick up a test tube and decide you want to pick up another one, you can't just click anywhere on the screen to put the tube down. You have to click the tube itself. In the parking lot game, you get arrows after clicking a car, but I'm pretty sure you have to drag the mouse to move the car instead of clicking the arrows. I found it was easier to use a keyboard for that game for this reason.

Edit 2: After finishing the game, I feel like it's still well worth playing, but it gets noticeably weaker starting at around the last third or so. The game's logistics system has trouble handling your station at endgame size, and the game's story starts to feel rushed. The game also doesn't necessarily resolve many of the plot threads that you were given over the course of the game, which was a bit disappointing. Overall I had fun though, and still recommend this game. It just doesn't quite stick the landing.

Edit: After playing further in, the game's logistics system is really frustratingly inadequate at larger station sizes, and requires a lot of babying to do basic things like deliver food from your farm sector to other sectors to prevent people from starving (drones helped). This micromanagement is far the worst part of what is otherwise a good game.

This game is basically a space-themed Frostpunk. It has a much longer campaign, it's more mechanically complex, and it has a much more developed story. I think for the most part it's succeeded in building on Frostpunk's formula, and while I think it does have some questionable design decisions, I don't consider any of them dealbreakers. If you like Frostpunk, you'll probably like this game.

While I do this game is more difficult than Frostpunk (on Normal) in some ways, I don't think I've encountered anything overly punishing and unfair as the negative reviews suggested.

Like Frostpunk, Ixion is a small city builder with an emphasis on survival. The gameplay is based around gathering resources and juggling your station's demands. That means keeping it supplied with the resources it needs, juggling resources to support your population, doing extra tasks to progress the story, and trying not to piss off your population so much that they mutiny and kick you out.

IMO what it does better than Frostpunk:
- For the most part, the mechanics are more complicated in a good way. The station is bigger, you have more resources to juggle, you have more people to manage, and your station's needs are more varied as a result.

- The exploration aspect of the game is more streamlined than Frostpunk's expeditions. Frostpunk did have resource gathering through expeditions and trade routes, Ixion's implementation of how your station interacts with the rest of the map feels far more fleshed out.

What it does *worse* than Frostpunk:
- From the reviews, the main complaint that I see about Ixion is its accident system. If you have more work than you have workers in a sector of your station, that increases the chance of accidents occurring and injuring/killing your workers. You avoid this by turning off buildings now and then, and this is something you do really often in this game. While a similar mechanic exists in Frostpunk, Ixion's implementation feels more contrived for a few reasons:

1) An accident happens really soon after your station gets overworked, and sometimes immediately. This leads to silly instances where you build one more building than you thought you could handle, your sector hits overwork, and in the seconds between hitting overwork and you shutting down a building to ease the workload, an accident occurs and maybe someone dies. This feels really contrived.

2) An accident takes your entire building out of commission for a while. So while in Frostpunk the injured workers leave and the building continues to function a bit slower, Ixion runs on a weirdly all-or-nothing system. So your factory of thirty workers can get taken out with an accident that injures five people, which leaves 25 people to go home and wait for the factory to come back into service.

3) The whole point of an overtime/overwork mechanic in these games is to have the option to work harder and risk your workers to rush construction of something you really need right now. But with the current implementation, there is no reason to ever do this. If you overwork your staff, you get injuries and building shutdowns, and if you don't immediately respond to it by shutting down buildings, you'll continue to get pelted with injuries and shutdowns until that sector grinds to a halt. The overwork mechanic goes from a risk/reward option to a strict line that slaps your hand the second you step over it.

4) Even when you're at a normal workload, minor accidents still occur, though they are never life-threatening. This is basically a minor annoyance that appears throughout the game, and makes your notification bar worthless.

- The game's logistics system gets tedious after a while. Every sector needs a set of warehouses to contain several types of resources, and you need to manage how each sector imports/exports resources. The annoying part is when you need to build an extra warehouse to hold a material that is needed to build something specific, but isn't needed for everyday use. It's also annoying when you're trying to build something vital, and construction hangs on that thing due to missing a resource that is sitting uselessly in the warehouse of a neighboring sector due to logistics rules. Then you need to tweak the logistics menu to get the other sector to send stuff over.

- Some quests, resources, and buildings have unique mechanics that make them counterintuitive. Sometimes you're trying to do something, and it just doesn't work because you're missing some specific mechanic. This is solved by checking the tutorial pages and/or asking online, though.


YMMV depending on your own preference:
- There is no option to change difficulty. There's just the default difficulty, which IMO I would place at slightly higher than Frostpunk's Normal. However...

- Unlike Frostpunk which tends to give you time pressure with its events, Ixion often lets you take things at your own pace. This makes the game easier in many ways, because you can tackle the game's challenges as fast or as slow as you like. Personally I think this is really welcome, because the game is so complex that sometimes you want to slow down and focus on getting a particular part of your city working more smoothly (food production was a big one for me), and the game lets you do that because your station doesn't actually burn through that many resources irreversibly just to stay afloat.

- Ixion's complexity works against it at times. While Frostpunk was generally pretty good at telegraphing what you needed to research or stockpile next, Ixion has so many things to juggle that it's pretty easy to miss something important. There were multiple instances where I missed a particular menu option, resource or upgrade that I didn't realize I needed until it was almost too late.

- Physical space is scarce, and the game's buildings have odd dimensions that make it difficult to use space efficiently without leaving gaps everywhere. This means you spend a lot of time building, tearing down, and rebuilding large parts of your city as you learn more about what each building needs. The game allows this because you get back all of whatever resources you used to build any building, but the way you're constantly playing building tetris is either enjoyable or annoying. Personally I had fun at first, but I think it's wearing out its welcome for me.



Steam Deck notes:
- At full power, this game goes through the battery in about two hours.

- I turned the game's settings as low as possible, 720p, with anti-aliasing on. This got a semi-steady 30 fps (more like 15-20 at endgame). The game seems to have memory leaks, so restart the game if you've been playing a while and you find your framerate tanking.

- Control-wise, the game is playable, but slower because you're still using a trackpad instead of a mouse.

- The text is very small but readable. There is no option to change UI or text scale.

I'm very glad that this game even exists. Granzella (which, as far as I can tell, is made up of many of the same devs that made the original R-Type games) brought back this dead series in a Kickstarter, and has been very good at delivering what they promised. They released the original R-Type Final 2 campaign, and has been very good about supporting it with DLC and content updates.

While the vanilla game was pretty serviceable, it was clearly made on a budget, and some levels look pretty barebones. They clearly focused on gameplay, which plays just as well a typical R-Type level.

But what makes this game really shine is its post-release content. The vanilla game launched with a handful of ships, but the devs have continued to release more and more ships for free (except for a few backer-only ships) on a continuous schedule, so now you have a huge variety of ships to play with. I think it currently has just as many ships as R-Type Final 1, if not more so. The DLC level packs contain remakes of previous levels in the series, and they tend to look far more detailed than the levels of the original game. You can clearly see the devs finding their footing with this new engine and doing more and more with it as they go.

R-Type Final 2 is mechanically very solid. It's true to other games in the series in that while it's generally less visually flashy than many other shooters, there is more of a tactical/puzzle element to it in that knowing where to put your ship and where to place your ship's force (the orange glowy orb thing attached to your ship) is extremely important to surviving certain sections. Keep in mind that this does mean that memorization plays a somewhat larger role in this game than in other shooters.

R-Type is not like bullet hell shooters in that it doesn't give you a tiny hitbox. Your hitbox is slightly smaller than your actual ship, but it's still huge if you're used to bullet hells. So while the game doesn't shoot that many bullets at you, it's harder than it looks because you will take hits very easily. Your force helps offset this because it's able to destroy weaker enemies on touch and can also block most bullets (again, playing into the tactical/memorization component of the game).

Speaking of difficulty, this game can get extremely hard, especially in its DLC stages, even on Normal difficulty. The game gives you infinite continues (I think it's an early unlock?), and expects you to use them. It's not uncommon to get stuck in an area and wind up dying repeatedly while you try to figure out how to recover from the checkpoint. This is an YMMV sort of thing - you might want this level of difficulty, or you might find it frustrating.

The large variety of ships is really nice, and a soft way to adjust the difficulty of the game. Some ships are clearly way more powerful than others, so your ship choice can make the difference between breezing through a level and struggling through it. The game lets you set a roster of about a dozen ships when starting a campaign, and you get the option to swap ships between levels.

Some ships play very differently from each other, so you can pick ships that complement the way you like to play. Some ships have an extremely powerful wave cannon (your charged shot), and you wind up relying mostly on that instead of shooting normally. Some have great normal shots but weak wave cannons. Some ships have really good forces that can carry you through some areas all by themselves, while you just try to stay out of trouble. And the most powerful ships (which you can get after unlocking all other ships) let you customize all of those things into a single ship.

Ship unlocks run on a currency/resource system. You get resources from clearing levels, and you spend those resources on unlocking ships. This is a much better system than Final 1, which forced you to clear stuff with specific ships to unlock specific other ships. Having said that, the game does expect you to play through it multiple times and/or grind the most "lucrative" levels to get enough currency to unlock everything.

Other thoughts:

- For the most part, the game looks very pretty. Your ship's wave cannon charge creates a glow that shines on the level around you that's pretty satisfying. Some of the DLC stages look really good, especially when you recognize their original SNES or PS1 incarnations. It's nice to play an old school side scrolling plane shooter that's in full 3d/60 fps.
- Having said that, most of the explosions are kind of underwhelming for some reason. Boss explosions are particularly bland.
- Speaking of bosses, I found most of the bosses not particularly fun to fight. A lot of them are designed around just surviving long enough while the boss is invulnerable and waiting to reach a point where the boss shows a vulnerability for you to shoot, and personally I didn't find it that interesting. Some are downright tedious.
- Stage 3 in the vanilla game looks like crap for some reason - so much so that it's almost a meme among the community. Maybe it was rushed.
- The music is serviceable but mostly unremarkable.
- The way the DLC levels pull from all over the series can make level progress in DLC campaigns feel disjointed. While in a standard shooter campaign you get the feeling you're flying deeper into enemy territory with each level, some of the DLC campaigns have you playing stage 3 from one game, then stage 6 from another game, then stage 1 from another, and so on. It can feel like you're going all over the place, because you are.
- Some of the level recreations also recreate the drawbacks of those levels as well. For example, R-Type Final 1 has a problem with long periods of downtime between waves in levels, and that happens in the remade levels here as well.
- On the other hand, some level recreations were improved. The stupid vent section the recreated level of R-Type 3 now has tells before they fire, which was sorely needed because there used to be a lot of straight memorization deaths in that section.
- The graphics can get a little too visually busy at times. Sometimes it's hard to tell what parts of a stage are part of the background and what's something you can actually interact with.
- The game runs fine on steam deck. It stays at 60 fps for the most part, though it does lose frames at times.

I wouldn't say this is for everybody because it's a very specific style of side scrolling shooter, and its level/enemy design does lean towards a slower and more planned out approach than some people might like. But if that *is* what you like, then this game has it.

This game is really underrated. It's a fantastic immersive sim that is probably overlooked largely because of its (very confusing) episodic release format. It's a great mess-around-in-a-sandbox game in all the best ways.

I'd most closely compare Hitman's levels to something like Dishonored or Deus Ex in that every level is very well crafted, full of things to discover, and encourages creativity, though obviously the games are very different in other ways. But the main point is that every level in the Hitman trilogy encourages and rewards exploring and experimenting.

If you want this game to guide you through a small story in each level, there are scripted stories and guides that do that for you, and you play them out like mini quests or side quests within each mission. But if you want to ignore all that and explore yourself, you can do that too. The way it tells bits of story either through the environment or through overheard conversations feels much faster than the standard way of stopping to reading other people's letters or listen to recordings or something. Every level has its short scripted stories, but there are also other things to find that the game doesn't handhold you through if you want to explore.

The game is IMO pretty well written. It's surprisingly not that edgy, given the subject matter. The game ensures that pretty much every target you kill is a terrible person, so you almost never feel bad about any of your missions. While the main story is serviceable, the game mostly doesn't take the whole hitman thing that seriously, and the feel of the game veers into dark comedy territory pretty frequently. Some of the side stories you can do are downright comical.

The main drawbacks of this game are its confusing episodic releases and its always-online enforcement. The episodic content is a bit daunting because Hitman 3 is capable of running all the levels of the previous Hitman trilogy games (and you should probably play them in Hitman 3 because it is the most polished setup of the three), but on Hitman 3's item unlock system. So any items you unlocked playing Hitman 1 and 2 do not carry to Hitman 3, though you can port over your unlocks from Hitman 2. Except that overwrites any progress you made in Hitman 2 levels in Hitman 3. This is what I mean by confusing.

As for the always-online thing, it's a classic case of needlessly enforcing a continuous online connection in a single player game. If you get a wi-fi hiccup or something, the game will pause you and try to reconnect in-game, sometimes fail to save mid-level, or in the worst cases, it will punt you back to the main menu. This is dumb and feels just as bad as it sounds. It weighs down an otherwise fantastic game. But thankfully, this doesn't happen that often.

Overall I'd highly recommend this game. I think it's criminal that this series isn't talked about more.

Deathloop's premise sounds like it should encourage experimentation and creativity. You're in a timeloop where death is basically a small inconvenience, so you can play around, right? Try whatever you can think of and do whatever you want to reach your goals. And if you mess up, you can just try again. Sounds great.

Then somehow, the game's design seems to deliberately shoot this premise in the foot every chance it can get. I don't know how they managed to take such an interesting setting and make it so boring.

Death is a bigger inconvenience in this game than in other stealth/immersive sims because you can't quicksave. You can't experiment and try something dumb because it might ruin your run for the day, making you have to do whatever tasks you needed to do earlier in the day to get to that point. You have limited deaths too, unless you turn the slider to max.

You have Dishonored powers and while they are just as cool as they ever were, you can only carry two at a time for some reason.

You're placed in levels where you slowly learn where everything is, but you can only ultimately accomplish those tasks in one way. The nonlinear-looking story is actually extremely linear - you're solving the same checklist of breadcrumbs and tasks in the same way everyone else is. You might find them in a different order than other players or solve individual levels slightly differently, but it's a lot less free and open than it looks.

None of the characters or locales are that interesting. Certainly not interesting enough to stay fresh when you have to revisit them again and again and again. Pretty much the entire cast is made of one-dimensional self-absorbed jerks, though each jerk comes from a different field. The only interesting characters are Colt and Julianna, and even then their interactions are far more flavor than substance.

The gunplay is decent but not interesting enough to carry the game. It's also weighed down by bad enemy AI. That poor AI makes it easy to plan out stealth (which is a good thing), but it also makes gunplay boring when you're actually fighting them.

The level design isn't as complex or as interesting as in the Dishonored games.

The puzzles/sidequests to get extra weapons and the like are tedious.

The pre-mission setup UI is awful.

The gun animations, to their credit, are pretty nice.


Personally I really like the Dishonored games and think they have some of the best level design I've seen in any game, so I was really surprised to see how dull Deathloop came across to me. I feel like if you want an immersive sim, Dishonored 2 did everything better, and if you want an open ended playground where you can accomplish your goals in different ways, you'd be better served playing Hitman or something.

Edit: Deathloop is not exactly a *bad* game, because it's solidly made, it looks good, and has pretty high production values. But it feels like they took a premise full of potential and removed almost everything that made that premise interesting. So as a result, it comes across as a pretty mediocre game, which isn't good enough when it's not hard to think of games are much better at doing the things that you're looking for.

Library of Ruina is a deckbuilder game that takes place in a dystopian megacity. Its story is told through visual-novel style cutscenes (though there are almost no choices), and covers multiple factions and storylines at once. It takes place directly after its predecessor Lobotomy Corp and spoils its true (canonical) ending in the process, though it doesn't go into enough detail to reveal everything that happened at L. Corp.

Like its predecessor, Library of Ruina is an excellent game that tries to mix a lot of ideas together, but is hamstrung by the fact that a number of those ideas, while interesting, do more harm than good to your enjoyment of the game. To its credit, LoR is IMO a far more fun game than L. Corp, and it has far more good ideas than bad ones.

Pros:
- Absolutely fantastic music. Easily one of the best soundtracks I've heard in a game.

- A very fresh and interesting take on a dystopian world that, unlike many other dystopian games, doesn't borrow heavily from common existing tropes such as cyberpunk stuff. Project Moon borrows ideas from the SCP Foundation, but adds enough of its own stuff to make the world feel entirely their own. Their games have a very unique feel that I really like.

- I liked the game's story, and finding out what happened next was my main motivation to play more.

- The game's card system offers a lot of opportunity for experimentation when deckbuilding. If you like building, rebuilding, and tweaking decks a lot, this is a good game for that. You never sit on one deck for long.

- The game's fights are thematically and mechanically very varied. Different factions in the game all have their own fighting styles, so you have to figure out how to fight them as you go. The more difficult fights can get so mechanically complicated that they remind me of MMO raid bosses.

- The game is very open with its information. You can see your enemies' cards, which card they will play, and all card descriptions. The only issue is that there can be a lot of information to process at times.

- I rather like the game's art style and voice acting.

- The game as a whole is a lot more slick and well-made than L. Corp. The devs have really improved across the board.

- The game has built-in modding tools, and there are mods available that bypass a lot of the cons I list below.


Cons:
- The game is grindy. The way you get new cards is by opening books, which drop from your enemies when you defeat them. Books are basically in-game lootboxes, and opening one doesn't always give you all the cards that are available from that book. Meaning that if you want more cards, you need to redo a story chapter and defeat more of that enemy to get more books to open. This can get *really* tedious, but there is a no-grind mod to bypass this.

- The game is brutally hard, and there is no way to change the difficulty outside of modding it. Starting at around the 1/3 to halfway point of the game, it's not unusual to take multiple tries before you can clear each new chapter. While that on its own is fine, the problem is that this game pairs that high difficulty with a high barrier to retrying as well. Most difficult games counterbalance their difficulty by making it easier to retry, but LoR does the opposite. The next point explains why.

- Playing a chapter in the story consumes a book (or more than one) that drops from the previous chapter as an entry ticket, which means that if you fail the fight in that chapter, you need to go and redo the previous chapter to get more books to use as entry tickets before you can try again, and the books you need don't drop 100% of the time. It feels pointlessly grindy and unnecessarily punishing to do this.

- The game doesn't explain its own mechanics very well. I felt at least partly lost pretty much through most of the game, and the fact that so many new chapters introduced new combat mechanics in the way different people fought didn't help with that confusion. It's a lot of information to take in. I get the impression that this is one of those games where you feel lost for pretty much your entire first playthrough, and you only start feeling comfortable with its mechanics either at the very end of the game, or if you do a second playthrough.

- The storytelling can be hard to follow at times. It tells multiple storylines at the same time, with each storyline following a given faction of the game. It can be hard to keep up with all the new factions and characters being thrown at you, and it's easy to forget at least a few characters along the way.


Points that can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking for:
- This game is really long. It's probably around 100 hours or more for one playthrough. I took about 90ish, though I used mods to make the game easier and remove the grinding halfway through.

- Some of the late game fights are very complicated and very, very long. Some fights can take well over an hour to complete, even if you're sort of familiar with them. More difficult enemies will phase change, spawn adds, or transform halfway through the fight, and each time this happens, you want to stop and read all the new cards and passive abilities to figure out what you're supposed to do. It's a lot of information to process, and that in itself can take a long time. To top it all off, if you fail any part of that, you'll wipe and have to start over. It's not uncommon to wipe in phase 5 of a boss fight 45 minutes in, then have to go through those 45 minutes again just to get to the part you were trying to figure out. That's the kind of game this is.

- The game leans hard into its dystopian themes and gets very grimdark at times. The recurring theme of the story is that life sucks for pretty much everyone in the city, and the game does not shy from showing you just how many ways life sucks. Whether this comes across as interesting storytelling or anime edgelord stuff is probably entirely up to your own tastes. Personally I think that while it's very dark, it's too well thought out to be edgy crap, and is much more in line with horror writing. The Love Town storyline in particular is some of the most unsettling stuff I've read in a while.


Overall I really enjoyed this game, but the grindiness and difficulty really put me off at the same time. I ended up installing mods to get around those two issues because I was about to drop the game otherwise. I'm glad I did, because I felt that the good parts of the game were too good to pass up. I really enjoyed both L.Corp and LoR despite their flaws, and will keep an eye out for Project Moon games in the future.