Recent reviews by Runner

Not a "maybe" vote, just a simple "no, there are better options" for me, personally, as I have precious little spare time for gaming due to all this adult stuff.
On to the details.

I have played pretty much every Wolfenstein, DOOM, Heretic, Quake, Half-Life and so forth there is.
I say this as a preface, because I barely played this game half an hour and am already giving it a thumbs down.
Here is why:
The weird "kinda 2D" look and feel really is a big downside for me. It just does not work for me. While this may differ for you, I would strongly recommend testing the game on this specifically.

More than that though, the entire core game loop of shooting people, how things feel..it just does not feel enjoyable to me.
Sound design, the feel of impact, heft, generally just being a presence in a shooter, having enemies be a presence, it is all fairly crucial to an enjoyable shooting experience and here, well, it just feels a lot more like a shooting gallery with enemy popups, which I suspect, here, too, may also link back to my initial complaint at least partially, of the entire look and feel design choice of kindasorta 2D.

Do not get me wrong - early days pixel shooters like DOOM, BLOOD or Shadow Warrior did just fine with pseudo-3D and 2D pixels, because they FELT great to play regardless. Here...just not so much.
Sorry, just an honest opinion from a very long term FPS fan.

I for one do NOT enjoy unbalanced randomness. I don't mind having to manage, balance or just be good at things, but being at the mercy of the game's ongoing "I will just let you starve, because, well, I guess gamebalancing was either not done or our understanding of roguelike means FORCING people to die no matter how well they play".
Not an approach I can condone and after giving the game a genuine hour of showing me that doing several runs might maybe improve the situation - it simply did not. If you do not get food, your game ends. You regularly do not find enough food - so there is an artificially forced too early start-over cycle which really ruins the game for me.
Sorry, just how it is.

This is pretty much the series that made me permanently fall in love with the Tower Defense genre and this particular iteration does what the earlier ones did quite well, too.
I know others enjoy nitpicking some details (tower loadout selection), but to me its another new, pretty release of a thing that scratches that one specific itch of managing ideally no-pass perfect runs that I never realized I liked so much.
I can easily recommend putting up 5-10 bucks for any of the Kingdom Tower Defense titles individually or just getting the entire franchise (though Iron Marines is not of the same kind, sadly), they are very much worth it.

Look I mean....if you are going to waste your time, intellect and potential by idling or clicking into a game that does nothing for your personal development, life or other things that make you human, you may as well do it with a really pretty graphical interface.
Plus you don't have to spend any cash on this if you don't want to as daily rewards and regular check-in will already scale you through the prestige process pretty okay.
Oh and there's like 3D dinos, so that's pretty cool.

tl;dr:
I got this for just 7 bucks and yet am giving it serious thought whether to see if I can refund it somehow still.

Slightly longer..

What I thought this game was: A modern Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm tactical WW2 shooter.
What it is: At year 4 still an unoptimized, horribly implemented mess of ugly ingame bugs, half english, half german interface without a way to change it to one and an incredibly awkward ingame general feel and navigation and basically 3 servers if that being played on at all.

I mean..holy steaming pile of dogsheet Batman!
Now, to be clear: I am a big fan of the tactical, hierarchy based "bang you are dead" shooter genre. I've left several hundred hours(in sum with stuff like Counterstrike and such: thousands) in the absolute pinnacles of the genre from Tripwire Interactive(Red Orchestra and Rising Storm series) and have been looking for a modern, fully 3D successor ever since.

Well. Fail let loose wasn't it, and Post Scriptum, sadly, isn't it, either.

Both utterly fail to capture the clear cohesion and tangible "togetherness" of your own movement and your environment that Tripwire managed so well. This is not only due to a lack of understanding of how things like comfortable leaning and weapon resting / cover hugging with pop-in-and-out-aim / enemy spotting is absolutely essential to an instant death shooter, but there are also just plain horrendous buggy things in the game after four years of public development. One of the very first things I saw was a machine gunner that clearly was shooting from "inside" the ground/grass he should have been standing or at least crouching on.
Meanwhile even at high quality, vegetation and gamma - which you cannot change ingame- looked like someone had vomited some 1990s pixel bush onto my screen and then turned down brightness to 5.

I am quite frankly getting to a point where I wonder what it is that is blocking the industry from just making a really good modern copy of what Tripwire has done. Because, honestly, thats all I want. Another Tripwire game thats ongoingly populared and people enjoy playing. These crappy attempts of copying the WW II setting with far worse outcomes are definitely not doing any justice to how far we have already come.

I cannot recommend anything not made by Tripwire so far and I am most certainly not getting paid by them or affiliated, either. I just wish we had better quality in this genre, because, truly, I really love it.

Bad. Like really, genuinely bad. Fast running and some metal-ish music does not a retro FPS make.
Sorry.
DOOM - the 90s one - was so terrific, because things had heft. Guns went BOOM. Enemies went splat. Levels had intrigue and atmosphere (I still listen to the music or rather the IDKFA remake today).

This game is..none of this.
Even the starting enemies take several shots, headshots don't seem to do any extra damage, ammo feels sparse, everything just feels..sloppy, quite honestly.
Low production value. And I say this as someone who these days very much prefers indie titles to AAA games, because indie doesn't have to equal bad or low value, quite the contrary.
None of this here though.
I suspect there was a lot of effort and all, but its just not actually FUN to PLAY...and sadly, that is what we are all here for.
I'd sooner play the original 90s DOOM with a mod or two than this.

Holy moly, how did this game not gain vastly more traction?
The mock narration is fun, the graphics are fast enough for being very pretty and the general mix of loot vs monster pew pew is also really cool.
Such a shame this game is just kindasorta okay successful, this is really fun to play with people co-operatively.
Sure, it coulda been a bit more on the Serious Sam side of things, i.e. more ammo at once and a bit more pew pew, but as is I am surprised this did not take off more.
If you can snag the complete edition under 10-15 bucks and have friends who will play this with you OR can tell your local area still has players, I would say go for it.
Really a nice trot out in the wild, this, very decent production value, even if made for a, choke, ew, urgh, gamepad control mode, too.

Delicatessen (1991 movie) meets Time Management game.
If you like those two, buy it. Zero regrets.
Visuals: nice. Story: Exists. Upgrades and development feel: Indeed!

Big writeup follows.

I am pretty sure this must be a mispricing, because 4 EUR seems way too low a price for something that actually has lovely art, decent writing and really good animation quality for what it is. I think even at 5-6 EUR this would still be a very fair offer.

What this game has:
As a time management game, the usual suspects such as upgrades to help you buffer customers, as well as extend the audience (tables - beware, do not buy it before the oven speed upgrade! I would go so far as to say back up your saves before deciding to buy a table). There are also new recipes, rooms to unlock. So you have a few hours to go to move through it all. But, even more - there is an ongoing story as well, that staggers itself through the game's "days", which is the usual autosave / upgrade cycle increment.

All of this is quite well done and not at all with that kind of amateurish feel you would normally associate with low price, "macabre" / different humor kind of settings. I keep coming back to this, because I was pleasantly surprised at how well put together everything is. I don't feel like going over the basic genre needs to be done if you are already aware of time management games, but finding something with a touch more...dark setting on steam in general is tough - but finding something that is cheap, dark AND actually qualitatively well done was a huge surprise to me.

I spent less than an hour checking it out to know this game was a no-brainer to buy, if just to support the kind of people who are willing to go out on a limb to make a game that is 100% sure to make some people upset, get some press coverage panties in a bunch and generally stroke some people the wrong way.

For me, who has now spent three decades wondering whether we'd ever find the courage to use the actual infinite freedom of games to explore all kinds of darker subjects past generic horrror shooters / jumpscare games as well, I am just happy there is something to support and point at at all.

Well done Bad Vices Games.

I hope to see many more indie folks pick up the gauntlet and just do something different. Its definitely not games allowing us to be evil that risk mankind or any individual becoming evil. Its the real world incentive structure propagating money, power and control over everything as valuable that does this, coupled with cultural degradation and the ongoing atomization and isolation of the individual instead of integration and community.

This here on the other hand, this game, this is entertainment and catharsis and I am here for it!

Fair price, ongoing patches and feature addons and a nice, open to input Developer.

Guys, you always say you want to support those kind of "No DLC milking, no copy protection, underdog developers" projects. This is one of them. Do it.

Here we have proof, that:
- You can still make games based around your own imagination that are fun
- You can still have 1-man-dev-teams building something good over time
- Community matters, as a lot of input, help, fixes etc. come straight from the Warsim Community

Game itself lets you roleplay being king with moderate-ish moral flexibility in choices and a decent-ish amount of ways to gain money, power or, quite frankly, just spend some time being silly in court.

There will be better, more detailed reviews than this one, but to be honest, at this price point and with the screens already giving a fair idea of what to expect - have a look and have a go, I would say! :)

tl;dr: Fantastic. Tower Defense-y with a "Dungeon Keeper Evil" feel. Worth it even at full price.

(Edit: 6 hours of playtime later, I just want to emphasize that my first impression remains 100% the same. This is a wonderful "Kill the good knights" dungeon trapmaster game and I wish we had way more like it.)

This is one of those games that thankfully pleasantly surprises vs its screenshots, as in that it feels nice, fluid and the graphics are well-fitting for that oldschool little-bit-of-cruelty that some of us oh-so-enjoyed in the early days of computer games.
There is a special satisfaction in pushing people down holes, skewering Knights and overall creating bloody kill boxes, that really comes at an incredibly affordable price here. I feel almost guilty for how little I paid for this game, considering just how much play time there seems to sit in this guy and that it even has a map editor..

I am so convinced by this title (and not sponsored) that I am going to get the sequel after barely an hour in, because I already know this is _exactly_ the kind of game for me (Kingdom Rush, Defender's Quest and other TD games fan) that I want to support, own and play through. Its a shame guys like these are so far less recommended by Steam than the already bestsellers. Go on, get it, you know you want to! :)