Recent reviews by A Big Hairy Monster

Much more challenging than previous entries, still great fun, if a tad expensive.

Constant, utterly horrendous screen stuttering and FPS drops on Steam Deck. Don't believe posts claiming it works in spite of the unsupported label.

If it weren't for that, Id give it a rec, as when it works properly the game's a blast.

It's ARK with 'mons. If you loved ARK, love monster collectors, and can handle EA ARK levels of bugs? You'll 100% love this.

Bought this on a whim after both Yogscast and the Spiffing Brit did streams on it. Turns out its an incredibly wonderful hidden gem of a game. There's very little not to love here in a game that's effectively a multiplayer co-op version of Slay The Spire with a bit of Darkest Dungeon thrown in.

If you like Roguelike Deckbuilders, definitely give it a try!

Very well fleshed out for a just-released Early Access Game.

Base building is nice and relaxing, thrall management is interesting, and the boss fights are pretty challenging both solo and in pairs. Worth the $20, imho.

Surprisingly challenging for a relatively simple and highly random board game.

This is probably the best, most accessible base-building sim in the vein of Dwarf Fortress that's out there, barring DF itself. Certainly the best Sci-Fi one.

To be honest, not much to say here: it's an excellent example of the Advance Wars style of top-down tactical wargame, with pretty standard rock-paper-scissors type unit classes. More Advance Wars than Fire Emblem, since it's pretty much 100% skirmishes and nothing else. Bonus points in my book because it has both a campaign editor, a skirmish map editor, multiple factions to play, and a built-in custom game browser.

Basically, if you've ever played Advance Wars on handheld and liked it, you'll also like Wargroove provided you like cute/funny fantasy settings.

Gonna be honest. When the first like 20 lines of dialogue are actually voice acted but have absolutely piss-poor grammar and don't match the dialogue boxes?

Not a good selling point. Didn't even get through the tutorial before it annoyed me enough that I tried to quit.

Oh, and you can't actually quit the tutorial, because you can't bring up any kind of menus.

Its been pretty decent fun. If you played ARK during its initial release, really enjoyed it in spite of its bugginess, and want what amounts to a fantasy version of ARK - this game's for you.

PRO's:
Basically Fantasy Themed ARK - plays and feels pretty much the same with slight mechanics changes in taming and schematics.
Excelent creature models, textures, and expanded building options over what ARK had, including the ability to retexture buildings with illusion spells.

CON's:
Still very early alpha, basically. Its very buggy and server performance, at least on unofficial is very poor. Expect lag and rubberbanding.
There's a lot of features which simply don't work right now, but show what the dev team is looking to do. Examples include broken elemental creature abilities (treant greenhouse effect, water elemental irrigation aura), unfinished structure types (dwarven manor type is listed but currently unavailable), and items currently without obvious use (clover, golden fleece, goblin contract).

Overall Impression:
I played ARK starting about a week or two after it came out. This game is essentially using the old ARK engine - many of the old bugs ARK had are present here. If that annoys the ♥♥♥♥ out of you, skip this. If on the other hand you don't care about lag or rubberbanding and just want to have a fun, casual time building a base and taming gryphons and dragons and goblins, have at it. I feel I got my money's worth already after about a week on unofficial.