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Yes, but with a huge grain of salt.

Super interesting UI design in that stacks systems inside of systems. Inside your mechs are many different parts including reactors which further break down into igniters, pistons, capacitors, heat sinks and more depending on the type, all of which you can research and build. Going even further is overclocking the OS to either make or break your unit. Weapons can have options tweaked like weight, accuracy, fire rate and so on. All this plays a role in how well your unit will perform in battle depending on the biomes they are in and enemy they face. It's a lot to take in, and I haven't even mentioned the city you have to repair and upgrade (which is how I lost my first game)!

Why "yes, but with a huge grain of salt"? Because none of this is explained to you. There's a cool in-game manual you can read but I didn't even know about 3/4th of the switches and doo-dads on each screen that you can press and tweak until I read a guide, and I'm still not even sure what everything does or why my dudes are dying when I'm in a certain biome when I thrived in another.

There's some wonky calculations at play as well. I take the starting mechs to the Engineering bay to tweak them and immediately they're overweight without even touching them. I'm playing around with tweaking weapons and my mech is 1 unit overweight so I drop 1 from the weapon and now I'm 2 units under. I'm not even sure what the pilot stat C.B.S. Test is and how it effects them.

There's a lot to love if you don't mind looking up guides online for answers and just messing around and just not knowing some things. You'll fail a lot, but sometimes the enjoyment is in the journey. I heard there's an endgame and I'll be excited to reach it, but I'm more interested to see what other crazy things this game has in store for me.

Fantastic! Dripping with style and truly immersive! Take command of a fleet as you wage war on a foreign land in the name of the Empire! This game is filled with a ton of unique systems that feel like mini-games from measuring distances, setting coordinates and sending detachments from the bridge to tuning in the radio to frequencies to listen in on communications to equipping ships and fighting. The art is fantastic, the music is great and as I've stated the systems are immersive and fun. Battles take a bit to get used to but once you figure out the controls, weapons and such you'll have a blast.

A cool game that doesn't live up to its potential because of wonky rules. You only get 3 turns per jump which isn't enough to truly savor each area but you extend your turn by collecting energy. The rules state as long as you don't run out of energy your turn does not end but my turn repeatedly ends despite having energy. My hulls at 0/2 but I'm still alive which is confusing (one more hit to truly die). In this instance 0 doesn't mean zero even though it's a hard rule with energy. 1 move isn't just one square so be aware of that. Enemy move and shoot even though your turn isn't over. I could collect scrap even though I'm jumping out of the system? It's a cool game that I would love to see get a fully polished sequel but only pick this up for free or super cheap.

Get it on a steep discount. The game has a lot of potential but it's wildly unbalanced at the moment. Some enemy you'll bowl over and some have advantages that make it impossible to do damage so you'll slowly bleed to death unless RNG turns in your favor. You get new modules for your ship but the descriptions are very vague forcing you to FAFO early and often. Using fuel to evade is cool but not being able to refuel in between battles takes strategy out of the game and forces you to stand toe-to-toe with your foe rock 'em sock 'em robot style hoping you will somehow gain the upper hand. There are better games of this style out there to play until they tweak this one.

FTL meets Warhammer 40k. There's A LOT of what you loved from FTL here: plenty of different hulls with variants that you equip with many different weapons and level up to a huge battle with the final boss. What didn't make it most noticeably is crew leveling per skill (piloting, shields, weapons, etc.), but let's be honest we all cheesed that early game anyway so good riddance. What we do get with the crew is different factions and the ability to hold weapons, armor, tools or psychic abilities to help fight when boarding other ships or being boarded. Every Commander has a different innate ability that changes how you tackle gameplay. Each run is shorter, but feels more densely packed with encounters. The game and final boss does feel easier than in FTL, but there are difficulty settings to up with that. The developers are pumping out patches and hotfixes nearly every day to add new content and make the game better.

I do recommend this game for survival and extraction shooter fans, but there a few caveats to consider before purchase. This game is early access so things can and will change, and as it stands it's really fun to play. It gets the core elements correct from scavenging to hunting in various procedurally generated maps ranging from the forest to the city. You meet various characters and find keys for secret locations and generally have a blast. The things that make it hardcore are the survival needs (food, water, fatigue) and combat. Food is easy to come by even before collecting all the things needed to build a kitchen to cook your meat. Water however can only be made from dirty water which would be fine if there was a water collection mechanic but I haven't seen any. You rely on found/bought dirty water and other liquids which are in short supply. Combat is tense because animals/creatures will swarm you often to melee hit forcing you into a run/shoot/reload loop. Humans are deadly accurate even at night. There are lights you wear and NVGs later on in game but I think the moon blew up in this world because there's zero light at night except around man-made light sources. Even the fire anomalies don't emit light? It's kind of strange. Don't go out at night, I guess. I ran into a couple of bugs like being killed by an invisible wolf, but they are few and far between. That said, there are ways around what I've talked about even if it's not how you want to play and the developer is working with a roadmap on improvements and new items for the game so I'm giving it a thumbs up.

All the other reviews are spot on. It's a fun ride. They fumbled a few things along the way, but that doesn't make the journey any less enjoyable. By the time you hit the end, you'll feel like you're in a movie with everything swelling to epic proportions. A solid 6/10

I've played through the four chapters of this game twice now and I've enjoyed myself both times. Adam Wolfe is like The X-files or Supernatural - each chapter an episode on its own that pits you against some supernatural threat but also adds to the over arching storyline which revolves around your missing sister. The game is casual for sure, but its an entertaining ride with its many different puzzles that are actually creative and interesting. It doesn't take itself too seriously allowing for players to overlook the cheesy nature of everything, but it's still mature enough to be coherent and fun.

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is an interesting game that can border on the tedious (you are going through the monotonous daily life of a police officer, after all), but has the potential to come close to the great police procedural adventures like Police Quest with some work. As it is right now, the game looks and sounds great. You'll go along your varied tasks like handing out tickets, catching speeders and answering calls to crime scenes; however, once you try to dive deeper you'll realize the bones are there but the meat is rather lean.

I've had a decent variety of things to do in the game from issuing tickets to answering crime scene calls to traffic stop locations, but most of this gets kind of tedious after a bit. Depth is lacking - upon coming on a crime scene there really isn't much for you to do. You can't interview the victims even if they seem to be fine (walk to the ambulance). The descriptions you get from a witness may be enough to give you something to search for, but if they give you nothing that investigation just ends I guess? If you do track that person down or you confront someone on the street you'll find some with multiple infractions but you can only arrest them for one for some reason.

The car handles poorly especially at high speeds which doesn't bode well when traffic doesn't pay attention to you and the lights don't change. You'll be fishtailing in and out of traffic and most likely crashing many times before you get to the scene. This is seemingly fine however as you don't get docked for how much damage you do to your or anyone elses' car. Your GPS gives you the craziest route to your location. 9/10 times I found a better route by opening the map.

There are a bunch of bugs in the game that cause cars to clip through each other, people to float across streets or through the ground or vehicles stuck in a "pulling over" loop where you can't do anything further so you just leave them to their own devices. These need to be fixed.

Despite all this the game is still "fun" to play in spurts. The devs appear to be working on improving the experience, though whether in the correct direction is another story since I hear they are working on adding multiplayer even though the single player experience needs so much fleshing out and improving. It's a middle of the road affair right now, but because of the unique nature of the subject matter the game stands out and that is, as of right now, enough to warrant a thumbs up.

3/5

Cloudpunk follows you through the daily life of a newly minted delivery driver as she goes through her first day on the job. The atmosphere created through the visuals and audio is beautiful and fitting, but it feels only skin deep as the missions and other activities you can do largely feel like they don't carry any weight in the world. You have to sit through long conversations that help build the world but seemingly provide little other info, but It isn't until later when the story kicks in that you begin to understand what they are trying to tell with the environment and characters. At that point, I just wasn't invested.

It's hard to recommend this game on atmosphere alone. Buy if you have money to burn or you're bored and want a cyberpunk fix, but even then it will only barely scratch that itch.

PROS
+ Beautiful voxel graphics
+ Wonderful Vangelis-style music
+ Great sound effects
+ Decent characters

CONS
- Slow burn story; didn't feel investment
- Driving across mult. sectors got boring
- No dialogue trees; forced to sit through conversations
- Purchasing a lot of food/items is pointless
- Spend most of your time fetching pointless items

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