Recent reviews by ShrubNinja

This game is a fun twist on all the "restaurant staff" style games where the appliances you get at the end of each round are randomized, and you have to put some thought and planning into the layout of your restaurant. The game is fun solo, but it really shines when you're playing it with friends.

In multiplayer it feels a bit more like a party game where you're trying to do your task while keeping a bit of an eye on your friends' work. The resulting banter from something like Bryan bringing a burger to a table with no plate is hilarious, and I was laughing the whole time.

If you play coop I would definitely suggest assigning a role and a space to each person to reduce the chance two people will mess something up while both trying to do the same task. You don't want a pie in the sink when somebody is trying to wash the dishes that you desperately need.

Pros:
This game is what everybody wanted Dungeon Keeper 3 to be. I knew I'd love it from the moment that I heard they'd hired the same narrator as the original series. The game has all the original mechanics of DK2 but in much larger numbers. There are more rooms, more creatures, more spells, more traps, and so on and so on. The mechanic of choosing what spells and rooms etc to unlock as each map progresses is fun and lets you build more towards your preferred playstyle, although you'll unlock everything after the game has gone on for a bit.

The base building is fantastic, and you get to plan out your lair and use your rooms to encourage the recruitment of a particular type of creature to emphasize your playstyle. You can also use spells or traps to get ahead of opponents, like digging out a room full of cannons near your opponent and then using magic to weaken their walls for a surprise forward position. There are a lot of ways to play and I've enjoyed each one that I've tried.

The story is also a big draw for me. It's just campy enough to be funny without making my eyes roll out of my head like some other games that have attempted the "evil overlord" style. There's enough content to be well worth the asking price with a lot of variation in the levels and the missions in the "Pet Dungeon" mode where you're more or less free to build whatever you want.

Cons:
The graphics are decent but not highly detailed since you'll usually be seeing things from a birds-eye view, so don't expect to see any incredible scenes. It can be a bit jarring when you use the possession spell to go into first person and see all the models that look like they belong on a PS2 game, but that's a pretty uncommon scenario.

The combat isn't great, and usually it amounts to just grabbing all your minions and putting down a flag in the enemy base to tell them to go fight everything there. Then it's kinda reminiscent of when you'd grab your action figures and slap them together as a kid. There isn't much strategy in this aspect of the game.

This game is a wild ride, and is has way more content than I thought it would. I started it up after I got home intending to just play it a bit then put it down to run some errands, and I ended up playing through the whole thing in one sitting. It took me about 10 hours, and I'm sure there's a bunch of content that I missed as well. This game is fantastic. I wish I could say more but I don't want to give anything away.

I really wanted to like this game. I love Pathfinder, Baldur's Gate, Divinity, etc. but this game's voice acting just ruins it for me.
Every character delivers their lines in the same stiff, lifeless way and it shatters the immersion every time someone opens their mouth.
In addition to the voice acting, the controls felt super clunky. I turned on "RTS cursor" but right clicking enemies still did nothing, and pressing the button for the kineticist blast ability on my hotbar just opened another bar that I had to click to use, making the hotkeys useless.
I've heard that there's a ton of content to play through in this game, but I just can't get invested in any of the characters or their stories when they sound so lifeless.

I really enjoy the rpg and story elements of this game, especially how your characters change visually over the course of a campaign. They gradually show aging over time, every piece of equipment has a graphic, and you'll come across opportunities for fantastical transformations. The combat is fun and rewards tactical play (although I still suffer from the typical X-com hit chance percentages) and each of the weapon types feel fun and powerful when used against the right foes.

The single player game is great, and I've really enjoyed both the prewritten campaign settings and the procedurally generated stories. I particularly liked that your characters from finished campaigns can come back and rejoin you in later stories through story events.

Unfortunately the multiplayer is a bit... unpolished. I still enjoyed it but the simultaneous turns and ability for both players to click the buttons shown on screen has caused several mishaps, where you're either forces to slow down the combat significantly by planning out every turn together beforehand or you accept the chaos where you're about to move a unit into position and your friend charges them into the monsters. Also every time your partner takes an action it interrupts anything you were doing to move your camera to look at them, so interruptions are frequent and jarring. The worst is when you both click a button at the same time in a text box and end up skipping important things or equipping an item to the wrong character. It's not a dealbreaker, but it could definitely use some more work to make it flow more smoothly. I've found that the best solution is to designate one person to click options outside of combat and to designate who controls which characters with a bunch of additional communication about what you're planning to do.

Overall I definitely still recommend the game for both single and multiplayer, but multiplayer will take some getting used to and will probably proceed much more slowly than you'd like.

This game is the first I've seen that allows for coop gameplay with the roguelite deckbuilder format, and I'm hooked. I'm having a great time both with friends and solo, trying out new combinations of heroes and new deck strategies. You don't even have to play with one of each role. I've recently been enjoying a team that consists of two warriors and two clerics.

Don't be too discouraged by the early difficulty. It might take a few tries to get past the first act and some of the fights might even feel "unfair", but as you increase your hero perk points and unlock more cards and town improvements you get a lot of really tangible progress. I haven't even really touched the New Game+ setting yet because I've been messing around with all the different team compositions for new characters.

The game does have its issues with card balance and stability, but the dev team is super responsive and is constantly working on patching and tweaking it. I've only really had one day so far in my fairly extensive gameplay where the game wasn't playable due to a bug, and it was pretty quickly handled after reporting it on their community discord.

I highly recommend this game with the disclaimer that it is in early access and you should expect a few stability and balance issues along the way, though they will likely be handled pretty quickly.

The choices you make actually affect the gameplay and storyline, and the deck building system allows for several different strategies in both negotiation and combat. This game is easily worth the money, even in the current early access state. The value is only going to get better as they continue to add more playable characters, each with their own set of possible cards, unique mechanics, and story campaigns.

It's super immersive, and it's a different experience each time. With the huge library of mods you can make just about any colony you'd want to, from super advanced androids to a cult of Cthulhu worshipers.