Recent reviews by amenomania

This is my desert island game. If you are at all a fan of traditional roguelikes, or Gamma-World-esque darkly humorous future-past settings, this is a beautiful, deep, and compelling experience full of emergent narrative, a great sense of danger and discovery, risk and reward, and wildly diverse character building.
I don't play it all the time, but I come back to it consistently. It's regularly updated, and the patch notes are poetry. Go ahead and browse through the patch notes, and if they don't make you want to try this, then it's probably not for you. I only ever play traditional roguelike mode. I haven't even explored past the halfway point of the map, but I have a thousand stories of a thousand weird and wonderful characters who lived in this bizarre and colorful world. Some grew fungal body parts after inhaling spores in dank caves, some possessed goats and had adventures in the salty deserts, some blasted waves of mutants with dual pistols in sweltering jungles grown over ancient skyscrapers. Some built their own gadgets from scrap scavenged in trash piles. Some fell in holes and died, some froze to death, some had their heads blown up by psychic cultists. Some injected chems and fell in love.
The graphics are minimalist and might put some off, and you'll know if that's the case for you or not if you look at the screenshots. They are beautiful though and serve the experience and atmosphere perfectly. The game underneath though.. it's beautiful, it's an endless well of fun and discovery. Easily in my all-time top five, and the others on that list are not ones I still actively play. Looking forward to the 1.0 release and beyond. My thanks to this team for being so dedicated and hardworking on this weird wonderful gem of a game.

This got its hooks in me the way that only certain games can. I play a bunch of the pixel roguelikes, chasing the feeling I got from FTL and Streets of Rogue, but few truly have that "can't put it down" quality. Slice and Dice has it with charm to spare. There are a lot of classes and items to unlock, the basic mechanics are straightforward and easy to pick up, and the challenge is balanced just right. There is a lot to fiddle with in terms of the classes and item combinations, and it's quite satisfying to make a weird combo work.

On the negative side, some of the functions of abilities/modifiers are not entirely clear from their descriptions.

After getting the "unfair" difficulty, I think I will delete the game just so I won't be tempted to make "just one more" run and have my life back. Though I'll keep an eye out for future updates or expansions. Certainly got my money's worth, and I can easily recommend it to fans of the genre.

I'm just here for my clown awards.

This kept showing up in my "players like you love:" but I hesitated a long time, because I saw several reviews saying, "If you liked Halcyon 6, you'll like this too." I did not like Halcyon 6. That game didn't grab me, it felt like less than the sum of its parts, it was trying to a bunch of things at once that just didn't gel into a fun experience. Star Renegades, I'm pleasantly surprised to report, is fun, and everything in it works together towards a more focused experience. And it you missed the tags somehow that experience is a turn based tactical combat roguelite.

The combat is fun, there are a lot of things going on with different attacks and defenses, damage types and abilities. All the characters have enough different abilities to make runs with different squads feel unique. Combat is deterministic, and you have a number of crowd control tools at your disposal to stun opponents or push them so far back in the turn order that they lose their turn, which is a cool mechanic I haven't seen elsewhere.

The art direction is great, the anime/mecha/pixel theme works well in conveying the setting. The giant pixel robots and the deterministic combat where your goal is to stymie often more powerful opponents kind of reminds me of Into the Breach, which is not a bad thing.

Overall, it's a good time, not amazing, but I wasn't expecting it to be as fun as it is and actually hold my attention, (when I finally gave in and bought it in a sale haha) I see some negative reviews from people who don't seem to get what a roguelike is. You will very probably lose the game a lot, and you can't save and then go back and retry a fight, so if that's not something you'd enjoy, this is probably not the game for you. And if you're like me and you are on the fence because you didn't like Halcyon 6, well, I think SR is a better game and is worth a try.

Enjoyable pixelly dwarf rpg romp. A bit rough around the edges, and not much in the way of a challenge, but it is a good dozen hours or so of exploration, looting and a little light base building. If you like the colorful pixel art visual style and cute, lighthearted kill-and-loot gameplay, you will enjoy wasting a couple days with this one.

Zavix Tower is a chill, relaxing classic party based random dungeon crawl. It's solid and fun to play. It's got low production values and has that one-man's visionary labor of love quality to it. the challenge is low initially, it isn't one of those games that's going to punish you for sticking your toe in. You will have time to enjoy killing, looting, and playing with the different classes as you level them up. Nothing revolutionary here, just a fun classic dungeon crawl, if that's what you're looking for, this game will scratch that itch.

It's also worth noting that the dev is very supportive of his game, and responds to the community in the forums. When I had a game-killing bug, he read my post, responded, and patched the game. That was for me unprecedented and made the whole experience worthwhile. I feel good about having supported an indie dev who really cares about his game and takes the time to listen to users and actually address their issues.

In short, this is a fun game, made by cool people. If a light classic hack and slash RPG is what you're looking for, look no further.

Might and Magic X doesn't try to reinvent the fantasy RPG, it sticks pretty close to the roots and the tried and true tropes of the genre. And that's precisely why it's fun.

You will create a party of heroes, and you've got a decent variety of options to choose from, enough that I wanted to play again after finishing to try out some different party makeups with different skills.

The game plays out on a grid, viewed from a first person perspective, which gives it a classic dungeon crawler feel, but you've also got some convenient modern concessions such as the ability to look around freely, and an automap. This gives you just enough of those old-school tingles to warm your aging nerd heart, without the frustration of trying to map the entire world yourself on graph paper or figure out which direction you are facing. (I know there are those who prefer that level of masochism in their gaming, I'm not among them, these are dealbreakers for me these days.)

You'll get a decent level of challenge on the default setting -- you will have to think about your own party's skills and spells, and how they will work against different monsters attacks and defenses. It's not coddling you but it's not so "hardcore" as to be unfun. There is no level scaling here, so you will need to explore around the world a bit at times looking for encounters that are appropriate to your squad's level. Personally i enjoy this part of the game, but if you're looking for an open-world experience where you can go anywhere you wish and always find beasties who aren't quite good enough to kill you, this isn't it.

This game scratches some of my chronic itches that big budget games just won't touch anymore, much as I love them. Namely:
It's turn-based
It's party-based
there's no level-scaling
it lets itself have fun with charming little gimmicks like riddle chests and open-ended questions.
It's not driven by a cinematic narrative
It doesn't try to reinvent the genre.

These last two points are the key to why I have enjoyed playing the game so much. There's something mentally taxing about playing a game that tries to introduce a lot of new elements, especially when it's a heavily story driven experience. I have to invest time and energy learning a whole new world, yes sometimes that's great. But sometimes the story or gameplay doesn't hold up and I end up abandoning the game. Sometimes I just want to kill monsters and loot treasure in a world that goes back to the familiar well of orcs, elves and dragons.

So, give me simple, give me palatable, give me something that feels old-fashioned, but looks nice and bows reasonably to modern game conventions like automaps and quest journals. Give me something that fits like an old shoe, without the stink. give me more games like M&MX.