Recent reviews by Winterous

It's like Slay the Spire, except instead of hiding most of the random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ three characters deep, it wears it on its sleeve.
Oh and the gimmick is cool, but I can't complain about that so it's secondary.

Game's great, has fun animations, a great sense of humour, very chill music, and a bunch of interesting stuff.
I mean it's not perfect, it's too easy in ways, needlessly frustrating in others, arguably incomplete in some (but they're still updating so I imagine most of that's gonna get chipped away at), but it's a good time and you can do some very silly things.

Also when you win for the first time you will laugh. This is not a suggestion, it's a fact.

Game's pretty great, mostly just one of those unhinged "see how crazy stuff can get" build generators, but has quite a good depth of strategy as well.
Also quite a few people on the discord server who strongly appreciate it as a work of literature, which I find kind of funny.

That said, it's quite daunting to begin with; there's a lot of things to read, a few quirks in the systems that won't make sense until you've started playing and looking at how stuff works.
But everything can be figured out pretty easily, if you care enough to pay attention (which a lot of people seem unwilling to do)

TL;DR: There's a reason people like it, it does a lot of things well, but I think it takes a special kind of person to really enjoy it.

It's fine I guess, there's a lot about it that I'm sure is really good but I wasn't really enjoying it.
It's not Factorio if that's what you're expecting, it's very much an RTS with heavy factory-building elements.

I think that Supreme Commander is a pretty good thing to compare it to in terms of RTS, but there's a lot of things that just don't sit right with me. Take what I say here with a bucket of salt because I didn't go super deep into the game, but I read about the units and stuff on the wiki and I've got a fairly good feel for the game I think.

There's 7 basic units, and each of those can be upgraded down a linear path of 5 total tiers. Each tier is a completely different unit, not just a bigger version. The result of this is that is that unit variety isn't stellar, the tier 1 units seem kinda negligible, the tier 2 units don't nearly seem to compete with higher tier stuff. Unique and interesting roles suffer from being at a certain point in that power scale, and thus a certain range of health, armour, and firepower.
This would be less of an issue if the unit cap wasn't (as far as I've seen) the same number for every individual unit, so you can't have 30 little guys and only 5 big guys, you can have, say, 16 total of every unit. This is from what I gather something that can be defined by the map for multiplayer, so might be only a campaign thing.

Anyway, ultimately this seems like a game for very specific people. I kinda dig it but it was a bit overwhelming for me.

TL;DR: It's ok, you'll be entertained, but it really doesn't live up to its potential. Very pretty art though. Don't buy full price.

This is a weird title, and it clearly had a lot of problems during its development, the game is riddled with evidence of such.
There are an enormous number of features and systems that feel very incomplete, I'll give some of the major examples.

1. The 'loot box' system.
All throughout the game you find a bunch of crates containing weapon mods, and you take them back to your base to a special machine that opens them. The opening process takes an annoyingly long time, but the system itself kinda makes sense; you've gotta fill your ship's cargo bay up with something right?
The weird thing is though, through most of the second half of the game, they start putting these opening machines nearby where you find the crates; it's like they realised that the entire system was just kind of dumb and wanted to mitigate its impact on the game, but stopped short of just giving you the weapon mods instantly.
Also when you've got all the mods of a certain tier (3 per weapon per tier I believe, there are 3 tiers), they just give you some money; but when they reach this stage it takes EVEN LONGER to finish the animation and let you open the next crate. WHY does it take longer?

2. The buff plants.
Throughout the early game you'll see a bunch of these things, they're like little melons on the ground that you pick up which give you a temporary buff. But they completely vanish on most of the higher-level islands. In fact in the very late game areas, I think there was ONE place you'd ever see one.

3. The treasure chests and gold coins.
Scattered around the world you find little X marks where you can dig to find treasure, and for the first bunch of them you find letters telling a story; all well and good. But this adds a third currency, which is used for one merchant who appears in two places, and I'm pretty sure you can't even buy all of his items with the total amount.
He sells a bunch of weapons (which you'll probably never really use) and then has a large number of mod crates.
It's just kind of strange, doesn't seem to be fleshed out enough to justify its existence.

4. The weapon modding system.
All the 'standard' weapons minus the pistol have 4 mod slots, they change the icon appearance and adjust its stats. I believe there are 3 different mods per tier (3 tiers), + to stat 1, + to stat 2, and then + to stats 1 and 2 and - to stat 3.
The stats changed vary based on the slot and the weapon.
Anyway, the system is fine, it works, there are decisions to make with it, options to balance out. The weird thing is, on two of the weapons with low magazine size, the mods that increase magazine size get a little wonky.
Sniper Rifle has 5 rounds base, Shotgun has 4. Tier 1 +magsize mods give 1 extra round, tier 2 give 2 extra rounds, and tier 3 ALSO gives 2 extra rounds. I guess they made it a percentage based modifier, and just didn't notice or care about that quirk.

5. The camera.
Oh boy, easily the worst part of the game's design.
When you're on your ship flying around you can see pretty far, and you can even hold a button to see further; in reality there's no reason to not be holding that button at all times while flying, it doesn't zoom out it just lets you pan further.
But when you're on FOOT, the camera sucks; the main issue is not that you can't see as far as you'd like to, it's that on the vertical axis you can see like half the distance as the horizontal one.
The sniper rifle can get a bunch of range increase mods, and it ends up being able to shoot much further than you can see horizontally; that's not so bad. But you can't even see far enough vertically to shoot people outside of their vision range.
This kind of widescreen-based unevenness is a huge pet peeve of mine.

6. The base structures.
You get resources like wood and stone and you use those to construct things on your home base, during development there was farming and stuff but clearly that got cut. Anyway, the materials for this are used for absolutely nothing else, and if you keep collecting it just because it's there you will end up accumulating a ridiculous amount.
Worst part it it's not even worth collecting to sell, you get a pitiful amount of money for selling it, and like many things in the game you have to hold the button to confirm; that's a good feature for many things, but not when you have to sell a stack of 30 things one at a time taking a full second each.

7. The bird.
At some point in the story you befriend a giant bird, and unlock the ability to call for it at bird nests to take you somewhere else.
This mechanic serves absolutely zero purpose outside of the mission you unlock it in. There's literally like 3 or 4 other islands which feature these nests, and it's just locking away a bit of random loot, not even anything special.
This seems like it's probably one of those features that they intended to use for more, but got scrapped during development.

Anyway, overall the game is fine. It works, it's fun at times, it plays fairly well, the writing though bad is not horrible, the art is very pretty.
But I found myself fairly disappointed, the world wasn't nearly as big as I expected, the big airship battles were pretty simple and inconsequential when they could have been really cool, and the ending kinda sucked.
I mean I got a full day out of it but most of that wasn't fun so much as mindless time wasting. Not worth the full price.

Overall a very good game, nice visual style, dope music, fun exploration, solid controls, etc..
Not without its flaws, notably most of the upgrades are very vague about what they do and how they work.

Honestly one of the things that made me uncomfortable about this was its core mechanic of death not being final; I'm hard wired to feel that dying is failure, so I want to grind healing instead of respawning with full health. It's a weird position the game puts you in.

One thing in particular I have to praise about it, your wizard character Algus feels like a legendary figure; in most games magic feels mundane, in this it feels SPECIAL, like Gandalf type of special.

Yes it's an incremental idle/clicker game, but it's far more strategically engaging than you might expect.
Also it has a great sense of humour.

A tragic, emotional arthouse film written and directed by Ryan Gosling, set in 1960s California, depicting the terrible oppression endured by brave sufferers of the debilitating disease, Boneitis.

Probably want to wait for a sale, but good.
Quite an interesting little tower defence game, with a fairly unique construction mechanic.

Has a quite nice seeming post-game procedural mission generator, and a custom structure mechanic, which is pretty cool.
So for some people you'll get quite a bit of time out of it.

Negative only because of the price.
It's a cute game, it's a fun waste of time, but I bought it for half off and still think it was a little steep.

Literally the only thing to complain about is that it depicts dwarves without beards.
I mean someone SHOULD go to jail for that, but otherwise it's great.