Recent reviews by redtieguy

This VTT does one thing right: creates a straightforward way to emulate playing a TTRPG with minis and block terrain on a board. Everything else is secondary, and frankly can be handled by mods or other features you bring to the game.

Building is straightforward to start, boards can be expansive, and sharing on the TalesTavern site allows you to import most when you want something large that's already built. There are minor things to work around (such as multi-floor buildings make it hard to move minis to the right floor) but other aspects make up for it (roleplay from cliffs or flying characters).

Only thing it lacks is a multi-player mode.

Great replay value. A good combination of small characteristic differences and RNG having large strategic changes, which spread out for wide changes and replay value. Hit that space bar! Plan if you should flee, fight, suffocate, or burn your enemies? Intact or destroyed ship? Buy missiles or repair? Weak repair crewmen or tough, flameproof rockmen? Jump from point to point, lose your ship, start over.

The great, creative grind. This is game is what happens when Diablo 2 had a baby with old-school 8-bit grind-small-battles games, and the result is a retro piece that keeps it to a series of small choices that adds up to a grind of whether you can get the equipment/perks needed to fight a big boss... or you can take your loot. A constant risk/reward and weighing perks of new/old equipment keeps you on your toes. Plus there are a few classes as you go on. HP matters more to the tanky Fighter, but the rogue is all about speed and evasion to land crits to wipe off parts of the group, and the necromancer is about speed to summon a group to take down the heavy single fighters. One part that moves this up is having to take down certain enemies in order to obtain the right resources. Some require large groups, others require taking down magical enemies, and then just various types. You walk in with different goals, either to take down the boss focusing on some skills, or making a layout centered around farming for resources you need and wondering if you can squeeze in just one more lap before they slaughter you.

This is not a game of nameless city defense. This is a game of story-telling and random events. While not deep, the deep mod community works well to allow you to do almost whatever. Want to do a sandbox with medieval? Got a mod for that. Colony of cannibals? Got a mod for that! Wild West? Mod for that! Fall-out/Halo? Mod or two. Want toilets and tubs in your colony? Got a hygene mod with clogged pipes to fix!

Since the latest hotfix, most of the issues seem less frequent, or at least limited to more isolated areas. It can still be improved, but otherwise is a good, fun game. I advise caution early on, as you should not assume your men will naturally move to where they're told 100% of the time.

It comes off as a more strategic, and more detailed version of Infested Planet, but focused on four people rather than the constant struggle over an expanding map. There's some deep strategy here, such as when you're on floor 15 of a building and wondering if you have enough ammo to make it to the top... should you search rooms looking for ammo, switch weapons, or keep the fight limited to the hallway? Also, the skills and personalized teams help to make the strategy more adjustable. I've focused on strictly an efficient firing team, complete with sniper and explosives experts, only to curse when I could really use a medic and suddenly have to tiptoe to preserve health.

Otherwise, maybe I should have had more medics, or equip a sniper rifle to someone rather than have a trained 'sniper skills.' These open up the door to future playthrus.

My one recommendation would be for the developers to look into more difficulty settings. I would like to switch up the team and put them in a greater challenge, as some points in this game feel like repetative mowing down, but exciting in searching for better supplies.

You play an intergalatic bug-catcher. I BS you not.

You explore your crash-landed world, build a butterfly net, and catch 2 bugs from your planet. You build a bedroom and put the bugs in jars, leaving them in your bedroom.

You dig to the center of the planet to repair your ship so you can travel within your galaxy, getting more bugs from nearby planets. You catch two more bugs from a desert planet and an ocean planet. You now have 6 bugs and have to make a second shelf for more bugs in jars.

You save a mining colony from ugly, fleshy mutants. It is a violent struggle. They repay you by repairing your ship for intergalatic travel. You harvest fuel from a moon. You travel to different galaxies, exploring for bugs. Along ythe way you find temples, tombs, villages, underground dungeons, and a variety. You steal their furniture.

You now have a bug collection room, complete with shelves. You have to start creating a catalogue and squinting to make sure you don't have two of the same bug displayed. You've built more rooms for the furniture along the way.

In order to keep building your nice furniture and showing off your travels, you have a forest of trees and cacti on your left. On your right, you have a farm of fruits, veggies, and coffee that spans five systems.

You have statues of Avian bird-gods, walls made out of dense "plantstone" that makes it looks like a forest, and a sandstone room filled with bookshelves raided from the robot race.

You expand your bug collection, color-coordinating them and moving them to the basement, since it is easier to expand as you find more bugs. You make more lights so you can see these bugs.

You track planets to find the right ore for armor/robots/applicances. You make a radioactive protective suit. You use said suit to explore radioactive planets. You hope these bugs glow in the dark.

Misleading advertisements. You're buying a game I'd expect on a phone or iPad. Too low tech to do any customizing or have long-term advancement. Instead, you're just playing in attempts of perfectly timing when to switch people around.

Sure, there's some strategy in the game, but it's not beyond switching around people, or shuffling your team for a ridiculously long amount of time to try to get the perfect line-up before starting.

Things missing...
-Personalization.
-Leveling up your characters somewehre beyond just that one session.
-A better pause feature.
-Better animation.

A medi-eval Minecraft with an addictive soundtrack and build-features. You can either do a peaceful city free of invaders and master your gnomes learning legendary crafting skills or defend against goblins and large Mants.

The unchanging settings can be annoying, such as suddenly finding out skeletons are spawning without properly planning how to counter them, so carefully pick which Kingdom is your peaceful SimCity and which is your combat, trap-ready fortress.

Don't pick this up if you don't have time! The level of depth and tactics is intense, and those with a love for detail (or OCD) will love the degree of customization. But if you enjoy playing with pixelated blocks, you'll love gnoministering a kingdom.

UPDATED REVIEW:

Probabl the biggest example of a game that started ou as a great idea, and went downhill with updates. The early version was left to right, sidescroll, and at each stop you fought 3 or 4 hordes of zombies. Then they increase numbers and difficulty. It was fun, an idea so simple it was hard to screw up.

A few appropriate weapon upgrades led to handling challenges. Upgrade characters right, and you start to get a team strategy. Next thing you know, you have all 4 set up, and they pull back, reloading while running, and take cover at the fall-back position. All fun!

Now... you wonder a city, in the dark, and just try not to let them get ambushed. The excitement isn't there, and rather than death seeming like an inevitable, it feels like a dumb mistake. When they made the exploring map, it was too dark, and it still is. There's no strategy other than preparing who gets which weapons, and then choosing "this corner" when the ambush happens.

While still fun, it is a shell of the game it once promised to be.