Recent reviews by Vexing Vision

While I am not a fan of the pixel art (what's up with that weird vodoo doll image of the vulnerability ray?), I am absolutely in love with the clever gameplay and tricky combinations.

Despite the relatively few modules, there is a ton of replayability and enjoyment from this utter gem of a Slay-The-Spire inspired Rogue-Lite.

The wiring mechanic is something I haven't seen in games before, and it absolutely works after you wrap your head around it.

A poor Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley clone. Very little customization in how you want to progress, everything is following a set path, down to where your buildings are placed.

The NPCs all have the same three lines and are utterly indistinguishable.

The initially charming graphics hide the very poor gameplay, but become stale soon.

Stick to Stardew Valley.

I've spent a thousand hours in Mount & Blade 1. M&B 2 is everything part one was, only prettier and bigger. If you liked M&B in the first place, you need this in your life.

If you did not enjoy M&B's repetitive gameplay, maybe stay clear of this.

For me, rallying my cavalry troops to follow me, telling them to get into a wedge formation, then circling the enemy infantry, crouching my lance and just charging in never gets old, not after a thousand gameplay hours.

Finally a stealth game for people who hate stealth games - your colourful band of undead pirates comes with plenty of killing skills.

It's still stealth if noone's seeing you... in the end. Right?

It's a bit good, innit?

There's a lot of cleverness hidden in Malmyr's design that's not initially obvious. It forces you to unlearn all the things you've learned while playing city builder games - you NEED to remove existing structures, you MUST plan several expansionist moves ahead, and just playing around will help you solve the first few maps, but eventually will crash you hard into a wall.

That said, Malmyr could be improved lots by better writing. It's so clearly a German game, with all the worst writing and cheap humour you'd expect from a German game, that it hurts the game overall. An engaging story with better presentation would elevate Malmyr to something really good.

With this, my recommendation is: Play the demo. Get it on sale. Enjoy something unique.

There's probably a great game hidden behind those controls.I'll get back to it if I ever get my hand on a controller - with a keyboard, this is impossible.

Nice visuals, boring level design. Wants to be Mirror's Edge, but fails by controls that require an incredible precision while also feeling weirdly clunky.

The game feels like a continous, linear quick time event without the prompts.

Wow.

They made the impossible true - a usable Dwarf Fortress interface.

Oh, you can still play by using inane key combinations reminding you of programming Perl in an EMACS editor, but you don't have to anymore. Playing with mouse is FINE, it WORKS!

Mind you, you'll still lose. Your animals will starve, because apparently they need to get told that yes, this grass out there is edible. Your dwarfs will starve, because you didn't notice that Spring turned to Summer which means crops have to be reselected, because of course they can't do this on their own. Look, I need to put 8 beds down here... what do you mean, I only have 7 stockpiled? No, I need to find my workshop first and then build a bed and then wait until it's finished before trying to build the bedroom again.

It's still dwarf fortress. It's still ridiculously complicated and complex.

But now at least this is not the UI's fault.

Galaxy Squad is what happens when someone watched FireFly, played some XCOM and wanted to cross it with FTL but had no idea about game design.

It's a mish-mash of a lot of ideas, none which really work together and all of them with a substandard quality. The rogue-like approach is great until you realize that there's a very limited amount of items, enemies and events to find.

The promise of the game is great, the writing is atrocious, and the storylines don't even conclude after the final battle.

And yet, it's a fascinating game design bit, especially coming from a single developer. Grab it on a sale, spend a few hours saving or selling out the galaxy, then get back to XCOM.