Recent reviews by Fireslide

Stealth killing everyone is pretty fun. Just a good mashup of all your cyberpunk tropes in one game, solid story, looks beautiful with raytracing on.

I've only played for the first few hours. This may change after 10s of hours.

I tracked down contact of first victim, spoke to them, later broke into their apartment early in the morning after having been in the sewer. At the same time, the murderer also broke into their apartment and shot them in front of me, all while complaining about the smell. I chased the murderer into the lobby, punched them unconscious, but then I got mobbed by helpful citizens.

I wound up arrested and the murderer has walked free, but I know what they look like and I have a first name only. I don't know how I'll track them down, but I will.

Performance suffers in a few areas, but the experience it gives of being a freelance detective trying to solve crimes is unparalleled. As the game gets more polish and more systems are added it will continue to improve.

Currently there's a few quirks. You can use a computer while someone else is sitting at the desk. Most citizens are really unwilling to give you their name for $50, but will happily take $30 to let you poke around the backroom of their workplace unsupervised. Procedural generation may generate a toilet block with 1 stall and 5 sinks.

Unlike a scripted detective game, you can easily waste time chasing down red herrings. Making your own murder board with bits of evidence, you can flood it with irrelevant crap, or customise it. There's a heap of tools you can use, maps, blueprints air vents.

I hope that future version continue to iterate on the systems. Different security systems, locks, people perhaps being more willing to share information. Perhaps a grievance system, so people close to the victim adopt different routines temporarily. But I'm excited to see what the game will become. Even if it doesn't change from what it is now, you will get your value from it

Absolutely brilliant rogue lite city building game.

Contains enough variance between runs that what worked in a previous run won't necessarily work in your current one. The biomes, population, resources and buildings provide for endlessly configurable and reconfigurable production chains. It has a cornerstone (perk) system that lets you choose game breaking powers.

The aim of the game is build enough reputation before the queen gets too impatient, so it's a bit of a race, and there's a storm every year where the resolve of your population is tested, too little resolve and they'll leave. If you have set up everything correctly, they'll be very content and generate you reputation.

The sequential unlocking of blueprints within a single run means your production chain and how you set it up will be different every time. There's a quest system where you can complete orders to gain reputation and rewards.

Definitely check out the demo or some videos on youtube, it's chock full of interesting decisions, and when you win you get to try it again in a different biome, with different species and modifiers, the storm will have different impacts.

120 hours in and I'd recommend this, but it's important to know what type of game it actually is.

Primarily this is a multiplayer game and the sessional based nature of it provides easy entry points for your friends to join you. Unlike Valheim, minecraft or others where you establish a new world once with a group and then spend weeks/months buiding something amazing until people get sick of it. Icarus provides time boxed missions called prospects that give you a generous amount of real time to finish them. The missions involve starting from scratch technology wise and building up, which provide a nice entry point for your friends to feel as invested in a prospect.

The survival elements of a PvE game are fairly trivial to overcome (at the moment), but with the regular release schedule of extra content and fixes there will eventually be legitimate challenges to overcome with managing storms, wildlife and timing.

The main reason I enjoy the game is it provides a shared experience and space where there's not so much going on it's a bit like having a digital pub to hang out in that you built yourself. If you enjoy banter with your friends on different schedules on discord, the game provides the right vehicle for that to happen.

There's definitely bugs and performance issues, some talents are nonfunctional but they will be fixed with time.

If you enjoyed Slay the spire you will enjoy this.

There's some meta progression, but overall it satisfies the same itch and provides a new puzzle and gameplay loop to enjoy

Great core gameplay loop. It's like a big first person shooter bullet hell where you need to use every tool available to survive.

Good remake/remaster by some fans of Half-life 1, enough small tweaks to make the gameplay hold up better to the current day's standards. The Xen overall was great.

My brother suggested we play this.

First game, none of us had played the tutorial, I was the traitor. I ran around opening up traitor crates, I put a land mine somewhere and it later blew up and killed my friend. I revived him so he wouldn't think I was the traitor. Some point later I found a gun and killed a different friend. It was then I discovered you can swap clothes/appearance with a dead body. Listening to everyone saying x is the traitor was fantastic. Made all the better by the guy I was pretending to be was a ghost and couldn't say anything the entire time, but had to watch as I sullied his good name.

That alone would have been worth the price of admission but we've had several games since and some incredible memorable moments. There was one time we saw a guy drinking an energy drink, which is something usually only traitors get, so we murdered him for it. Turns out he was innocent. Snow justice is brutal and fast.

Only downside is you need 5 people minimum to start a game, so you better round up your friends.

If you like deck building games and roguelikes you'll love this.

It's still early access but there's enough content and variety to get at least 20+ hours of play out of it.

Surprisingly fun. XCOM crossed with Dota. Highly recommend it.