Recent reviews by Hus

Stellaris gives you the feeling of running a space empire. The loading screen artwork shows fantastic, alien landscapes, the music has the standard space exploration, epic, feel to it, and the alien portraits are numerous and look great. The superficial ingredient are all there, it looks great and it feels great.

Then you actually play the game for a while and the gameplay problems come tumbling out one after another. The central problem in strategy games is what to do about the fact that the guy with the biggest army/empire wins. Paradox's solution to this problem is to make science scale with your empire size and to limit gains from wars to a few planets and throw on a limiting timer. There are no interesting victory conditions, just dominate 40% of the planets. There isn't very much strategy beyond the standard rock/paper/scissors of weapon and defense choices. I almost get the impression the design choices were made to just drag the game out so long, that the ending becomes irrevelevant because no one ever plays that long.

Ok, so maybe it's more intended to be a story thing or an empire simulator as opposed to a strategy game. For story, not enough happens beyond the standard mid-game invasion of 3rd party aliens. As an empire simulator, it just feels incomplete. There are clearly mechanics that hint at this, with all the choices to be made for empire traits and their consequences. However there aren't enough input mechanisms - buildings and policies which allow for interesting gameplay with these elements.

Stellaris is like someone took a lawn mower and put an awesome space age car shell on it. It's great to drive around and feel everyone looking at your cool car, just don't actually try to race anyone.

Magic, as a card game, has always struggled against its blatant cash grab design, the randomness of lands, and temptation of overpowered cards. The various PC versions over the past few years took the basic formula and heavily restricted the cards available so as not to compete with the physical version. Overall, this worked surprisingly well as a semi-casual game.

This new free to play version takes the same form as the previous entries and basically throws in tons more cards enabling actual creative deck building. Sadly, the problems pop up right away, a crappy ui, no two headed giant ai, and a glacial card unlocking pace. Play is especially painful early on, as unlike in earlier iterations where you unlocked cards for a particular deck, here you unlock a few cards from the huge pool available, resulting in decks that are a comical hodge podge of random cards. This is probably par for the course for free-to-play, but the prices mimic the physical version, in other words, more than I care to spend.

If Magic weren't a popular, long running game, this game wouldn't be worth mentioning.

As for the current card designs, Magic has slowly improved over the years. The new cards play much smoother than older iterations. The transforming creatures, in particular, add a solid choice element to the game. It's all constrained by the core outdated design of the original game, but Magic is popular for a reason and it has improved over time.

Space Food Truck is a brutal deck building game. On my first play through, the game felt absurdly random and frustratingly difficult. Slowly I started developing a strategy and noticing tricks that enabled me to build up to hard mode and counteract the randomness. The game functions quite well as a challenging optimization problem and it's fun to get better, although on the harder modes it can still be frustratingly random.

Unfortunately, I bought the game with co-op in mind and here I think it falls down badly. If you try playing with someone who doesn't yet know the strategy of the game, you're just going to lose badly. Once you know the strategy, there's not much left to do other than crank up the difficulty and try to fine tune things. The game lacks the depth for trying out various playstyles compared to something like Civilization.

I'd recommend this game for solo play to people who like developing a strategy in a brutal environment. It fails as a co-op game and it has limited depth for replayability once you know what to do.

I've finally played enough that I think I owe this a review.

Pandora's very clearly inspired by Alpha Centauri, but the underlying mechanics are quite innovative and different. At core this game is about super specializing your cities, micromanaging the population in your cities, and fighting the other factions. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really *tell* you how to manage your population or make the interface intuitive to focus around it. At best, it offers 'lock buttons' on population types. The combat is so-called multiple unit per tile, which removes some of the problems of Civ's one unit per tile.

The game falls down badly in diplomacy, where the AI seems to essentially perform a force count comparison to decide whether to attack. Get behind in military force and you'll suddenly find yourself under attack. Lose or even have a few units weakened in the skirmish and suddenly the other AI will all decide to join the fray and you might as well restart. The tension, of course, is if you're building tons of military to avoid the AI pile-on, you aren't shotgunning ahead in science.

In combat, the AI seems to be decently competent, although late in the game they build tons of lower-tech units as opposed to higher tech ones. They will brutally shell your cities with artillery and destroy modifier tiles. The guy who rewrote the AI deserves a pat on the back for the challenge they offer in combat.

As for personality, Pandora doesn't have any wonders or memorable personalities like Civ's Montezuma and Ghandi, just the brutal optimization game of managing your population and keeping up your military. The game's systems are too brittle to allow for casual play. If you're not carefully optimizing everything from the beginning, then you're not going to have fun. This game was a missed opportunity. Civ needed some competition or at least someone doing something new and different. This isn't it.

This game is sadly, a failure. Beautiful graphics. Really fantastic voice work. The combat seems quite interesting at first with lots of mechanics that interact in clever ways. And then you gradually realize your two year old cousin is smarter than the AI and most fights become a comedy of spamming minions next to the baddies. There are subtle problems with the underlying leveling/scaling mechanics (forget about most hybrid builds like clerics, tanking is mostly a waste of time, shields are terrible until late game, etc), but many players probably won't notice.

Where the game falls down into "why did I pay money for this garbage" pain is the quest system. You're actually supposed to read the spam of NPC text and the diaries and notes that litter every room like cigarrette butts in a gutter. I personally don't read quest text, so I skipped straight to an online walkthrough. It didn't help. When you're spending 1/3 to 1/2 of your time playing a game wondering what you're supposed to do next, tabbing back and forth between a guide and you still can't figure it out, the game has failed. Waving your mouse all over hoping to land on the secret few pixels that activate the thingy to open the door - yeah, you'll be doing that.

Some people like the open/exploratory quest style that doesn't hold your hand and that's why they play games like this. I don't, but I claim even on those terms, this game fails. The structure of the story is way too linear. If you happen to not realize you have to light every candle to get the secret passage to open, too bad, because you probably can't skip it. Want to go explore and fight some monsters, nope, they're all the wrong level except for where you're supposed to go.

It's really unfortunate actually. I think this game had a lot of potential and it's very clear the developers put their hearts into it.

I really liked the idea of KAG. The graphics look fantastic. I laughed quite a few times the first 15 minutes of playing. The game has potential.

Unfortunately, it just isn't fun. KAG tries to pretend you can have an objective based game where people can join which ever side they like and leave at will. While trying to play you will experience massively un-even teams and a constantly rotating roster of teammates. You may even be autoswapped to the other side so you can work against whatever you were just doing. At some point, you'll give up trying to actually win and just pick a knight to go charging in and slash people to death for giggles. This gets boring very quickly.

The developers needed to either go the League of Legends route and have teams that can queue, a ladder, and a total focus on objectives OR they needed to make a silly action game where you jump around slashing random people for 15 minutes (a game which would have a bunch of fighting classes and possibly quick objectives like first person up the hill or last man standing). They picked the middle point and it doesn't work.

On the surface, Sanctum 2 is a basic tower defense shooter, with much better than indie graphics and voice overs (I want to marry Sweet), and a strange fixation on irrelevant details (why all this modeling of bars and security points that have nothing to do with the game?). In contrast to Dungeon Grinders.. I mean Defenders, Sanctum eschews the farming and looting in favor of straight game play. It does have experience and levels, but they're mostly a minor annoyance. Like DD, the first person shooter element isn't strongly emphasized as the enemies are all very predictable and tower placement usually dominates your chances of success.

Where Sanctum really shines is the point after you've beaten the normal levels by randomly throwing down some towers and running wildly around blasting everything. Flip on all the bad guy boosts and suddenly you have a very serious co-op puzzle game. Which perks to take, what guns, and how to lay out your towers become hard questions, with different answers for every map. Climbing the leaderboard becomes a competitive challenge.

If you enjoy cooperatively solving hard optimization problems, I strongly recommend Sanctum 2 with a friend.

Sanctum 2 does have some weak points. The experience/level system just gets in the way and should've been scrapped. There are too many perks and even when you know them all, it can be hard to find the one you want. Number of players scaling is sometimes a factor. Hoard avoided this by having specific maps for specific numbers of players. Sanctum tries to pretend boosting the health of enemies is close enough. It isn't and it makes leaderboard comparisons problematic. The mind control tower introduced in the dlc substantially changes the game and ruins the leaderboard for people without the dlc. The developers should've had separate ladders for dlc and without.