Recent reviews by Spartannell

As someone who has been very creatively burned out recently, Tiny Glade has been a wonderful source of inspiration to me. The time spend doodling on the canvas - small as it is - has been relaxing and engaging and it's been a delight seeing how all the different pieces interact so smoothly with one another. There are still a number of things that would be wonderful additions such as being able to build bridges, put down items such as benches or wells etc to just help create more of a sense of life but as something to simply pass the time and get creative with, it's proven to be an absolute delight.

The game is thoroughly inoffensive. It exists. It doesn't do anything particularly bad but it doesn't do anything particularly well either. Its biggest sin really is simply that it is boring - and I say this as someone who really enjoys slow burning games where not much happens. I don't have high expectations of brain twisting puzzles or gameplay loops from Lego games normally but this really just mind-numbing. As such, I wouldn't personally recommend it. Might just be that it's not for me so if you're really wanting to play it, I would at least suggest waiting for a sale.

Afraid I can't in good faith suggest anyone purchase this. I personally experienced a crash to desktop immediately upon launch. I tried basically every trouble shooting option available and none worked. From a Google check, this seems to have been a consistent issue since 2021 that nobody has found a consistent fix for. Possibly getting hold of legacy drivers may solve the issue but I can't make any guarantee. I wouldn't suggest taking a chance.

This is an interesting one. Let it first be noted that this is not an easy game. You're doing alone what in reality took dozens of people working in coordination. There's a lot of information that you have to be keeping track of and it's easy to get overwhelmed, especially when you have multiple contacts attacking the convoy and you're starting to lose ships. For an early access game, it runs very stable, I don't have frame drops of any kind and the graphics are pretty good. Except the sky box. For some reason the skybox is incredibly low resolution for me and none of the graphics settings change that. That said, you don't spend much time looking at the skybox so it's not exactly a deal breaker.

That said, it's not impossible and if you press on through the steep learning curve, it's a really rewarding and fun experience. The learning curve though isn't really helped by the fact that, imo, the tutorial could do a slightly better job of describing how certain things work and how to make use of the tools. It's all good and well to set the TRR automatically for me for tutorial sake but when I'm out in a battle, sometimes it's just easier to do it myself instead of waiting for the game to decide to set it up. It's good and well to set the plotter to do things automatically but I only found out you can draw a line plotting target course by mistake. I shouldn't have to go to YouTube to find those explanations. If the tutorial gets updated a bit more in future, I will amend this accordingly.

Now something that seems to come up a lot is the number of charges it takes to sink a boat. Of course, it's hard to say just how lethal depth charges were. When they worked especially well, we don't exactly have the data on how many charges landed how close and what exact damage was done to the boat. The only data we really have is from boats where the charges didn't manage to sink them. The manufacturing standard variable between boats also doesn't help as some would have been destroyed easier than others. However, I would think that on times where I've gotten a really good run - to the point that the charged explode INSIDE the uboat - that that would be a pretty lethal experience for the skipper. But it's not. Sometimes I've sunk a boat in 2 or 3 runs with well placed charges and other times I've gone an entire battle with charges exploding basically alongside the uboat without the thing sinking. As such, I'm not actually sure how the damage is modeled? It sometimes feels more RNG than anything but I may just be missing something. I bring this up mainly because I see it's the most complained about thing in the reviews so it would be amiss to not address it.

My only suggestion to the devs would be this:
Implement a hot-key system to swap between stations. The menuing can get kind of tedious or annoying especially when you're having to jump between several stations at once to keep track of things. A silent hunter type of hotkey system where you can just jump to stations instantly would help a great deal. And to go with this, if at all possible because 10:1 someone will complain about it, for us to be able to rebind those controls if desired.

Honestly, just a really chill way to pass time. Though if you want to get competitive with yourself and stress yourself out making perfect placements and maximising your points, go for it! Your efforts are rewarded with additional tiles to unlock etc. Overall a wonderful experience and given its cheap price, there's no reason to not pick it up

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I wish I could give a middling review here instead of a simple yes or no as I don't fully lean to either side of recommendation...

The first Huniepop game was a surprising success that many, including I suspect the dev, didn't quite expect. A lot of its fun came out of the simplicity of the gameplay, a very basic simple premise with likeable characters. That said, there was also an underlying tone that the player is something of an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, saying everything the girl wants to hear and giving them all the right gifts to get your way with them, be that the hard nosed girl who actually wanted more meaningful connection, a single mother or a mother and her daughter (Separately of course).

Huniepop two delivers much the same and more and yet somehow also feels less appealing. Your character is still just as much a ♥♥♥♥ from a moral point of view, being the exact partner each of the girls would ideally want though I will admit that the moral aspect is perhaps one that I myself simply project. However, the game feels as though it has spread out wider, while still maintaining volume. i.e. the wider is stretches, the less depth there is to it (Not that the first is a very "deep" game in itself.

The number of dates required for each pair has been dropped down to two, (Thankfully though as the sheer amount of pairs you have to go through is already overwhelming and to do 4 dates with each would be far too much) and yet it still somehow feels too much. The huge volume of pairs (24 I believe) still means that you have to complete 48+ dates just to move through the story. Even in the original where I believe the total number of dates you had to do if you passed everyone first time was around 36, the puzzle game began to wear thin, let alone now where you have to do even more.

That said, the mechanic of having to balance out two different characters likes and dislikes, sentiment, passion, stamina etc is an interesting one and forces more careful thinking through each puzzle. The emotional baggage system is also an interesting one that adds modifiers to each date with some being more of a hinderance than others (Example: Not being able to do more than 1 match of a type in a row vs. increased number of broken hearts falling but the character is no longer hurt by them.) and works to keep the gameplay interesting on at least some level there.

There is a wide range of characters in which you will be sure to find some more appealing than others (Sarah was humanities biggest mistake) which is great. That said, they tend to hit the check boxes for a 2D character and nothing more. Jessie actually has some depth to her as she regrets past decisions and a bad relationship with her daughter but she's possibly the most interesting one for breaking out of her stereotype.

On the characters, the game has a potential match system now in which the huniebee will detect which two girls might be compatible with each other. Spoiler: they always are. I think this is a bit of a missed chance. I would have found it really fun to have pairs show up in the world that weren't compatible and the conversation there would be the girls being simply friendly to somewhat passive aggressive or downright ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with each other. It would have given the player more chance to A) learn about the characters and B) more opportunities to get the currency used to buy items from the store as well as being just a humorous interaction. It might have complicated the world system and made it a bit more difficult to consistently get compatible matches to show up for the player but I think it would have still been an interesting system to be explored.

Other than that, the art overall is well done with good voice acting all round (Sarah's VA does too good a job in making her detestable in my opinion - props to her) though the lip sync feels... off? Minor detail/gripe though there.

The biggest problem I have with Huniepop 2 is simply the lack of depth it feels like and the puzzle system being stretched to it's absolute limit in terms of how fun it is before it just gets boring. Other than that, it's a perfectly good and fun game. As I said at the start, I wish I could give a middling review rather than a downright yes or no. If you want more of the same as huniepop 2, way more of the same, and a chilled way to just kill some time, you could do waaaaay worse, especially with all the crap that got pushed out into steam as lazy devs just tried to imitate what made Huniepop 1 so enjoyable. If you want to stay engaged however or generally find yourself getting bored of repetitive gameplay however, you'd probably be best giving this one a skip.

It's Halo on PC. What's not to love?

Now to be fair; there are bugs as one might expect with any game. Biggest problem there is that patches are generally reserved for whenever a new game dropped and presumably going forward, whenever a new season is introduced. The overall size of the game is also a bit painful and if the 70Gb+ patches for console are anything to go by, you might be cautious of that here as well... The battle pass system for seasonal unlocks is annoying but not awful - especially as (at the time of writing) there are no further micro transactions available to speed you through the tiers.

On the positives, while some of the launches were a bit janky, a lot of the issues in my experience have been fixed. The games are all pretty stable (I've had a handful of crashes) and some of the graphics - especially H2A - are just gorgeous. Further more now with Halo 4's launch, there is the option for different frame rates instead of just the 60fps or unlimited option there was before. Halo at 120fps feels as great as you might hope.

I'm aware that most people would probably be buying this for the multiplayer. I'm not one of those but I've done my hours in the mp. Overall the community isn't as toxic as some other online multiplayer games and the games are probably about as fun as you remember - good or bad. The recent update also allowed us to choose which servers we want to be playing on according to optimal ping. Coming from South Africa, that's almost none but the option is there for those with better internet connection or who are privileged enough to live closer to a server that 30 thousand kilometres. I would caution that the player base is somewhat low with spikes around each new update. The graph of players shows a spike when there's an update with a significant drop off to around 5K concurrent players a go. So it's highly recommended that you have a group of friends to play with.

Overall, a pretty good experience. I don't regret buying the collection and I'm playing it pretty much everyday and have raked up more than 400 hours so you can clearly have a pretty good time with it.

Ultimately, yes, I'd recommend this. In some ways I prefer the first one but this keeps much of the same spirit. I dare say that it does feel shorter though. There is much jankiness in certain mechanics - notably the 'sweeping' function amongst others. In some ways it's a product of it's time. Worth it on sale though.

Warning: For people like me - there are spiders in here . Plenty of spiders. One of the games acts revolves the spiders. Spiders...

I bought this just after it came out on disk and played through the game on a computer that couldn't handle it at more than 4 fps. I got it again on console and played it through multiple times. After getting a decent PC, first game I bought was this. I can damn near speedrun this game by now and I still love it to bits! One of the best Batman games to exist in my opinion. Don't ask questions, just get it. You won't regret it!

Having purchased this game a long time ago, I really struggled to get into it. The survival mode at the time was not well explained and I never succeeded at getting beyond the first two swarms. Admittedly, I may just be terrible at the game.

However, the new "controversial" campaign mode has really provided that gateway into the core game. The story is bare bones, yes. I wouldn't be playing this for the gripping narrative but in many ways the campaign acts as the tutorial/introduction that the game sorely needed. The hero missions are very straight forward bu they do serve as a fun break away from the normal survival-esque game play loop. The tech tree serves as a way for you to become slowly familiar with the purpose of each building and unit - paving the way for a much more enjoyable survival experience as well.

Overall, I've been having a fun time with it in my hours that I've invested and I don't regret the original cash spent on this when it was in early access. Would I recommend it now at full price? I'm not sure honestly but definitely when it's on special it's a good grab. I wouldn't suggest this as your next massive 80 hour straight time sink but as a way to just spend some time after work for an hour or two, definitely a load of fun to be had.