(Updated 4/15/22) The reveal of the Mortal Kombat movie trailer and news that Street Fighter characters are joining the Fortnite roster has both legendary franchises on the minds of gamers everywhere. So, it’s only natural that fans have also started to compare and contrast the series.

Any of those comparisons have to start with a discussion about the franchises’ rosters. As two of the most notable fighting game franchises ever, it’s no surprise that Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat boast two of the greatest collections of characters in the genre.

Which roster is better, though? Nobody is ever going to write the definitive word on that topic, but if you’re looking for talking points, here are our thoughts on how they compare.

Mortal Kombat’s Roster

Notable Fighters

• Liu Kang
• Sonya Blade
• Shang Tsung

Strengths

The biggest strength of the Mortal Kombat roster is the story that NetherRealm Studios has crafted over the recent major installments in the franchise.

The idea of a substantial Mortal Kombat story seemed absurd for a franchise (and, frankly, genre) that so often ignores traditional storytelling, but Netherrealm has carefully constructed a compelling narrative that has not only evolved over time but finds a role for most of the series’ major characters. Granted, it’s not much deeper than say the MCU films or the Fast and the Furious franchises, but much like those movies, the games find something wonderful in combining spectacle with more serialized storytelling.

Those serialized spectacles have certainly elevated the Mortal Kombat characters in recent years, but they’re really just an extension of the things that the MK franchise has typically done so well. The MK games’ iconic use of fatalities has ensured that most players latch on to a particular Kombatant in a way that they may not necessarily do in other fighting games. It’s not unreasonable to pick a Mortal Kombat character on the basis of their personality. That’s quite the accomplishment from a storytelling and design perspective.

The Mortal Kombat roster’s star power is unlike anything else in the genre. There’s a reason so many people were able to name so many characters in the recent MK movie trailer even if they’re not big fans of the game.

Weaknesses

While recent MK games have emphasized the personality of the franchise’s roster, it’s important to remember that things haven’t always been that way.

There was a long, dark time when MK‘s designers relied on color swaps just to put an expanded roster on the box. They would try to introduce those characters to the franchise via brief backstories, but they usually just made things even more confusing.

There’s a degree to which that problem lives on in the modern MK games. While recent installments have trimmed the roster and done a better job of distinguishing characters, there’s a large chunk of the overall MK roster that remains forgettable. Furthermore, you can kind of tell that the developers are still fighting their reskin urges.

The relatively simple nature of the MK games from a mechanical standpoint also means that fighters are largely defined by their most elaborate moves. It’s nice that even new players can just kind of “pick up” most MK fighters, but the comparative lack of a larger learning curve means that some characters again start to blend together.

Street Fighter’s Roster

Notable Fighters

• Ryu
• Guile
• Chun-Li

Strengths

The best quality of the Street Fighter roster is the quality of their fighting.

Over the years, the Street Fighter series has become a favorite among genre fans who emphasize the mechanical elements of fighting gameplay. It’s not the most complicated fighting game out there by any means, but it is a series that has managed to maintain most of its roster over the years while evolving many of the characters in ways that stay true to how they began without feeling handicapped by those origins.

There’s a real joy in truly learning a Street Fighter character then growing with them as they grow between installments. You really start to feel like you’re connecting with a character in a way that makes fighting games so appealing in the first place.

The power level of the Street Fighter roster is also fascinating. Along with the “tier list” approach to fighting game characters, you have the ways that the series’ lore establishes the idea of a mythology-friendly power system without nuking the idea that many characters could beat other characters.

Weaknesses

Simply put, the biggest weakness of the Street Fighter roster is the narrative of the Street Fighter games themselves.

The Street Fighter stories have improved over the years, but it’s pretty clear that Capcom just isn’t that interested in telling substantial stories through these games. That’s fine, but their attempts to tell more of a story without really committing to that concept has left many characters feeling like they’re in a holding pattern.

Even if you accept that Capcom isn’t into Tekken or MK levels of direct storytelling, there’s the feeling that they’re missing out on an opportunity to do more with their roster. Many Street Fighter games focus on the stories of a select group of characters, leaving many others fighting for bits of narrative scraps.

It’s fine for fighters to be defined by their fighting, but as real-world fighters from Muhammad Ali to Connor McGregor prove, a little more showmanship can go a long way.

Which Roster is Better?

While the Street Fighter roster is undoubtedly impressive, the improvements made to the Mortal Kombat roster over the years are hard to deny.

By virtue of their star power, growth, abilities, and personal stories, the MK roster feels like the winner here. As for who would win if the major players from both rosters ever got the chance to square off…well, that’s a debate for another day.

Original Publish Date 2/19/21

I recently played Dinocide, a dinosaur-themed NES inspired platformer on Steam that’s still in beta and it really got me thinking; is it really acceptable to charge somebody for an incomplete game even if they know it? I knew going into it that the game wasn’t done, but it must have been close, right? Why else would a developer put their game up on Steam

Read the full review here

Necropolis is a third-person action title that pits players against the ever-changing maze once inhabited by the mysterious mage Abraxis. With plenty of arcane and mundane dangers to overcome, players will be hard-pressed to avoid the rogue like perma-death mechanics. McCain and his team also spent a lot of time developing the standout art style of Necropolis.

Having also been an Art Director on Shadowrun: Dragonfall, McCain was very excited to share some of his professional experiences, and how they factored into his role on Necropolis.

Jesse Tannous: Can you explain what your job as Art Director involves at Harebrained Schemes? Does it differ at all from the position as it would appear in other studios?

Mike McCain: Sure! It’s common for folks here at Harebrained to wear several different hats. My job has ranged everywhere from graphic design, UX, creative direction, management and production, concept art, illustration, marketing, PR, and game writing. We are not always very regimented in our job definitions, so my role as an art director here has probably been somewhat more flexible than you’d find at a larger studio. I enjoy the opportunity to tackle a lot of different challenges, though. On Necropolis, I would say first and foremost my responsibility is to make sure the game looks great and that it will resonate with players.

JT: What sort of technical, management, or communication experience is generally required for an Art Director position?

MM: You know, that’s a tough question! I think maybe you have to have “vision” more than anything. Be able to articulate a clear visual direction and rally others behind it. That can be very challenging. You should also know generally How Things Work, both within an art team and in other game-making disciplines. And be good at keeping your eye on the final product as a whole, not just individual components. (i.e., the concept art might look fantastic, but what’s the actual game look like right now? Does it feel like a cohesive thing?)

Requirements can also vary greatly depending on the project and the studio. Some art director positions are more managerial, while others can be more about establishing the right aesthetics. A small studio might be “we need you to do everything, and there’s one other artist.” Either way, good communication skills are critical. If you can’t explain your ideas, or collaborate with others to achieve them, you’re going to have a hard time of it. Lastly, you should have a well-developed sense of style and what’s “cool” – be familiar with trends in art, not just within games but in architecture, fashion, and so on. Everyone has a certain style they naturally gravitate towards, but the more you can become style-agnostic – be able to dissect, understand and recreate a variety of art styles and moods – the better you’ll be at defining a strong and unique vision that can hit a specific prompt. It’s definitely a lot to juggle.

JT: Describe the artistic direction that Necropolis is taking. How is it unique?

MM: I’m really excited about where we’ve been able to take Necropolis so far, visually. We’ve been very inspired by what I’ve been calling “contemporary low-poly”, a style that’s become really popular in graphic design over the last few years. I would say it’s a way of viewing polygons as a compositional tool, rather than a technical limitation. When you combine carefully thought-out geometry with current rendering, lighting, occlusion etc – you can get a really clean, modern look. You’ll often see this style used in graphic design to create a very bright & airy atmosphere. It’s been our goal to flip that into something darker. The Necropolis can be a bizarre and scary place…

Another big visual goal of ours has been to create a space that feels unique without being firmly rooted in a particular genre. There are many fantasy elements in Necropolis, but we don’t want it to feel married to either fantasy or sci-fi. It’s simply its’ own world that stands on its’ own visual rules.

JT: What has been the most challenging aspect of working as an Art Director in general? What specific challenges has Necropolis created for you so far?

MM: The most challenging thing about being an art director so far – at least for me! – is finding a healthy balance between being a director, and being a hands-on artist myself. This is something I really enjoy about working on a smaller team, it’s very fulfilling for me to be able to remain an individual contributor. I get antsy if I’m stretched too thin as a manager and don’t end up with the time (or energy) to paint.

Necropolis is a lot of new territory for me, there was certainly a period at the start where I struggled to shift gears from Shadowrun, which is very different both aesthetically and in the type of game it is. I feel like I was able to navigate that, fortunately, it just took a little time! Now, I’d say it’s probably just balancing the desire to continue to explore and noodle on certain ideas with production realities – some ideas may be really cool visually, but it’s best to sacrifice them if they don’t contribute enough to the core of what makes this game fun. Game development never stops being a learning experience (but I wouldn’t have it any other way.)

Looking at what is available so far it certainly seems like McCain is doing his best to make the Necropolis’ art style something that hasn’t been seen before.

Jesse is a reporter first who just happens to love video games and enjoys writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals.

Reviewers generally agreed that The Banner Saga, released in January 2014 and developed by Stoic, did an amazing job of bringing a Viking inspired setting, incredible soundtrack and hand-created animation to life.

The Banner Saga is no easy journey because catastrophe is as much a part of the landscape as the unique and appealing scenery. Players will trek through rigorous environments and will encounter a variety of characters and it’s never easy to tell if they be friend or foe. It is up to the player to make the meaningful choices that will shape each narrative, but in the end, The Banner Saga is really all about the relationships and we wanted to know more about the how and the why surrounding its character development.

Stoic’s lead writer Drew McGee sat down with us and provided a glimpse into his perspective regarding some of the human liaisons that helped make The Banner Saga a storytelling success.

Jesse Tannous: Many games that have been commended for their strong narratives and character development (The Last of Us, Bioshock, Silent Hill) have featured father-daughter relationships. This type of relationship seems extremely important in The Banner Saga with Rook and Alette being the key focuses even in the menu screen. Why did you choose this type of familial relationship as a key focus, and what do you believe makes it so compelling?

Drew McGee: The father-daughter relationship pulled at us for a variety of reasons. Topically, it allows us to explore the importance of family versus clan versus humanity. Digging a bit deeper, it gives us views of gender in our Norse-influenced society. And beneath that, there’s the chance to glimpse a father’s knowledge – or lack thereof – of his daughter’s mindset and vice versa. These mysteries (and often, misunderstandings) are a timeless part of the human condition. The games you mentioned give us brief moments to consider empathetic views from various perspectives – powerful stuff that really seems to resonate with audiences on many levels. That said, if The Banner Saga comes close to The Last of Us, Bioshock, or Silent Hill in this regard, we’re just friggin’ lucky.

JT: Given the emphasis of this father-daughter relationship in the game, why did you decide to force players to choose between the lives of Alette or Rook at the end of the game? Didn’t you just destroy one of the most compelling, if not the most compelling, relationships of the game?

DM: While death certainly affects aspects of a relationship (for instance, hugs and conversations become remarkably one-sided), it rarely destroys the entire thing. In the wake of someone dying, there are opportunities for truly compelling growth, reflection, and even destruction. Emotions are either tucked away or worn on the sleeve and decision-making is affected along with the way. Others react to these decisions. Ultimately, the death of a hero should pave the way for greater character development and relationships with those still alive.

JT: It seemed to be extremely difficult in the game to juggle between providing for the caravan and upgrading your main group of fighters, with purchasing items being nigh impossible. Was this intentional or is this something that will be potentially re-worked for the sequels?

DM: It was intentional, which never means it was necessarily the “right” way to do it. Items in The Banner Saga are tricky on account of the balanced combat system. If too many characters have a chance to hit for double strength, battles are no longer threatening. At the same time, if no character has a chance to equip an item to hit for double strength, the RPG customization aspect is dinged. While we may look into ways of offering a few more chances for items, there’s something fitting in the dire world of The Banner Saga about a small inventory of items which are true boons if you acquire them, but a distinct gamble if it means going without food.

JT: One element of the game that many seemed to take full advantage of was the ability to revert back to old save points in order to modify decisions. While compelling in order to correct what were considered mistakes, it also seemed to make choices feel a little less meaningful. Was this effect noticed by your team during play testing? Has there been any consideration in creating a mode or difficulty setting that does not allow reverting to previous saves?

DM: Originally, the game only had a system of very few and hidden checkpoints. We’re older gamers who remember leaving the NES on all night because we couldn’t get to a save point by bedtime – when dying meant hours of replaying content and anxiety about winning that battle the next time. It’s fun in a damning sort of way, but alas, the outcry for more frequent saving was patched in. While we hear players mention that they went back at times, most of the Let’s Plays we watch forge ahead with comments of, “I can’t believe so-and-so died! I’ll have to try something different next time.” Obviously, we want people talking about the game, discussing their differences in choices, and not seeking out the “right” way to play it, so perhaps a type of “Ironman Mode” will be an option moving forward.

JT: Choice and consequence are obviously a huge part of the game that will be continuous through all three titles. However, will you perhaps hint, at one specific consequence or choice that will have a huge impact on a situation in the next game?

DM: So, you’ve already mentioned one decision that will have a massive impact on your saga moving forward. We’re hesitant to name the decisions that will carry forward because once out there, players tend to start “gaming the system” rather than enjoying the ride. We truly want you to sit back, play, laugh, cry, and worry about whether you could’ve made a better decision – that’s what carrying the Banner is all about.

Leaving much for the imagination in regard to the upcoming titles, Stoic’s The Banner Saga likes to keep us guessing, but that’s really the best part of this expedition.

Jesse is a reporter first who just happens to love video games and enjoys writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals.

Escape Goat is a prime example of the old adage “Never judge a book by its cover.” I first played the game some time back when it appeared on Xbox Live Indie Games. It’s still one of my go-to examples of decent games that are sadly drowned beneath the sea of junk that makes up the XBLIG ghetto. Unfortunately, whenever I recommend Escape Goat, people seem instantly turned off by the visuals, and I can’t really blame them. You can now find Escape Goat on both GOG and Steam, and while the presentation might not be particularly appealing, trust me when I say that if you give the game a shot you’ll find a pretty fun and challenging puzzle platformer at a very reasonable price.

The core gameplay of Escape Goat is incredibly simple. You are a goat stuck in a dungeon and must use your abilities to navigate rooms, each of which is about one screen in size. You can double jump and you have a dash move that can be used to dart forward to avoid obstacles or move certain blocks. You also have a mouse friend that you can send into areas that the goat is too big to access. Some levels feature a magic hat, which gives you the ability to swap places with the mouse and is vital to solving that particular room.

The goal of each room is simply to reach the exit. Accomplishing this requires a mix of both platforming and puzzle solving. The exit is always blocked in some way, and opening the path involves hitting switches, moving blocks, or otherwise manipulating the environment. Most rooms are also full of ways to kill you, be it traps, bottomless pits, or the skeletal reapers that will assail you with fireballs as soon as they see you.

The main game features over 60 rooms, divided amongst some ten regions with different tile sets. Each of these regions usually has about six rooms with their own unique set of challenges and themes. For example, there is an ice themed tile set with ice blocks that are too slippery for the mouse to traverse. Another tile set is based on a mad science theme and is full of moving platforms, traps, and electrical barriers that instantly kill you.

Despite the fairly simple base mechanics, Escape Goat throws some really clever and challenging puzzles the deeper you get into the dungeon. Rooms where you must use the magical hat in particular are usually pretty interesting, often requiring you to keep sending the mouse into areas the goat can’t reach so you can swap places to accomplish some task that the mouse is incapable of doing. The fact that the mouse takes time to scurry around the level results in some clever puzzles based on timing.

One in particular involved having to ride a moving platform through a series of traps. There were two sets of switches, red and blue, that would deactivate one set of traps, but activate another. You’d have to hit a blue switch to deactivate some traps, but then send the mouse to a red switch out of the goat’s reach to deactivate the next set of traps before you got to them, but after you passed the last set of traps. The fire themed region is another example of clever traps based on timing that often required you to maneuver exploding barrels and goad the reapers into shooting at them at the right time.

If there is one issue I’d levy against the game’s puzzles it’s that some require a bit too much trial and error, especially the timed puzzles. A handful of rooms drop you into a life-threatening puzzle that you must figure out within a few short moments before being killed. The limited time in which you have to glance over your options often means you have to repeatedly die several times before it becomes apparent what you even need to do. These timed puzzles become more common towards the end of the game, where the puzzles are often pretty complicated with little margin for error.

Once you beat the main game, which will probably take you a little over three hours, you’ll unlock another set of even more hellishly devised puzzles. These puzzles, numbering a bit over two dozen, are designed to push your platforming and puzzle solving skills to their absolute limited. Even the easier ones are more complicated than most of the puzzles in the main game, so expect a really tough challenge from this advanced campaign. If you need even more goat-based puzzle-platforming, the game comes with an editor that makes creating and sharing new rooms relatively painless. With the recent Steam release I think it’s safe to say that Escape Goat could find a decent little cult following of players devising unbelievably devious challenges for you to try.

I fully admit that Escape Goat doesn’t look too appealing at first glance. It is easy to write it off as “just another retro-inspired indie puzzle platformer.” We certainly aren’t lacking those these days, and Escape Goat‘s 8-bit aesthetic (which doesn’t even look as good as many other games out there with 8-bit pixel art) doesn’t make it stand out too well among its peers. However, if you give it a chance, you’ll find a solid game that is pretty good at what it does and has a nice amount of content for the meager $5 price tag. You can currently find the game on GOG, Steam, the developer’s website, Desura, IndieGameStand, and GamersGate. There is also a sequel in development that is expected to come out sometime this year.

I started playing Papers, Please around 7:00 on a Thursday night. Around 45 minutes into my session, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I couldn’t see how the game, while fun, could keep being compelling for much longer. My wife then poked her head in the door to tell me she was going to bed. “Isn’t it a bit early for bedtime?” I asked her, looking at the clock on the wall to my left. It read 10:15. Not a mere 45 minutes, but a full three hours since I had started working the Grestin Border between Arstotzka and Kolechia, and I wasn’t even close to calling it a night yet. Papers, Please is a triumph of indie game development, and one of the best games I’ve had the pleasure of playing this year.

On the surface, Papers, Please is not a complicated game. You are an immigration officer working for the fictional Eastern Bloc nation of Arstotzka. Your job is to check the papers of people trying to enter the country, and grant or deny access based on whether those papers are all in order. The basic gameplay hook is easy to spot, too. You get paid by the person, and must process enough to keep your family warm and fed. Make mistakes, however, and you start to receive docked pay. The key is to go fast enough to pay all your bills, but slow enough to make sure you get everything right, and the game strikes this balance very well.

Of course, it’s not that simple. By the third week, all foreign visitors must have a passport, an entry ticket, an ID supplement, and a certificate of vaccination. All these forms must be legally issued, match each other, have valid information, and not be expired. Diplomats, asylum seekers, workers, and Arstotzkan residents have different papers. Entrants must look like their picture and be of matching height and weight, with fingerprint records available to check discrepancies. You may be ordered to refuse all entrants from a certain nation, or confiscate all passports issued from a certain district. Your pay per person doesn’t increase, but your rent might. Or you might need to buy medicine. Or a birthday present for your son. The increasingly complicated puzzles coupled with the fine balance between speed and accuracy makes for quite a compelling game all by itself. But Papers, Please is much more than a simple puzzle game, even one as well done as this.

Where Papers, Please really starts to stand out is in its attempts to get you to willingly make a mistake. Do you separate a husband and wife when one has legitimate paperwork and one doesn’t? Do you reunite a guard and friend of yours with a girl he met during the war, even if she has no papers? Remember your family, and that doing these things will get you penalized. Do you condemn people with false papers to your nation’s prison system, or simply send them away? What if a guard cuts you in on the bonus he gets for each detainment? Is it worth taking a 10 credit bribe to let someone with bad papers in? What if you know they’re smuggling a bomb and plan to kill people with it? What if you couldn’t afford food yesterday and your son is sick? Without getting too much into spoilers, there are many of these questionable decisions spread throughout the story’s 31 days, and they elevate Papers, Please high above shuffling papers and stamping passports.

Speaking of shuffling and stamping, Papers, Please does a great job of conveying a real-world feel in a virtual space. Moving everyone’s papers around by hand on the small desk makes everything feel very tangible, and it isn’t long before you figure out your own efficient way of checking names and dates and seals that works around the limited desk space. The color scheme, art style, and lack of music all accentuate the grim feel without making it oppressive, and the satisfying “ka-chunk” of the stamp wonderfully punctuates each inspection. Papers, Please just feels satisfying, which is important considering the otherwise quite depressing subject matter.

At its core though, Papers, Please is a game that defies solid explanation. Any attempts to explain it to friends and family have made even me feel like it can’t be that much fun. Words have a hard time explaining the pride of knowing an issuing city is wrong purely from memory, or the paranoia of knowing that no matter how careful you were, you probably forgot to check something. It’s difficult to convey the range of feelings you get when you spot a mistake early, get excited because it means that you might be able to process an extra person and maybe afford a birthday present for your son, then realize that you’re happy because of the random misfortune of another human being. All in all, Papers, Please is a game that everyone should know about, but also a game that must be played to truly understand. Luckily, it’s absolutely worth playing and comes at a bargain price, leaving most gamers without an excuse to not pick up this masterpiece of indie gaming.

Papers, Please was created by Lucas Pope, and can be purchased on Steam, GOG.com, and via Humble Store on its own site.

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is a top-down space shooter that came out several weeks ago and has largely flown under everyone’s radar, at least according to the developer’s Twitter feed. The game has the misfortune of still being stuck in Greenlight limbo, and being released right before the money black hole that is the Steam Summer Sale.

Ring Runner starts out with you escaping a space station after having a snarky AI implanted in your brain. After outrunning the explosion and fighting off mysterious bounty hunters, you embark on a quest to figure out who you are…At least, that was the plan before being captured and caught up in a war between rival factions of space junk collectors. The dialogue ranges from humorous to bizarre, but it is all pretty well-written and the game doesn’t take itself very seriously. The game’s setting clearly has a lot of lore to it; you’ll frequently encounter odd terminology, races, and techno-babble. However, in a refreshing twist, the game never tries to bog you down with all its lore and concepts. You are always given just enough information to piece things together, and never bombarded with pages and pages of codex entries like some other sci-fi games might try to do.

While the game promises an open universe to explore and highly customizable ships, the first nine hours of the roughly 20 hour campaign consists of a linear progression of missions with fixed ships and equipment. This first half of the game largely acts as an (overly) long tutorial, slowly introducing you to the various gameplay mechanics and classes of ships. The pacing of this part of the game is fairly schizophrenic. Sometimes the game will quickly introduce a mechanic one mission and jump to something unrelated the next, while other times the game will drag things out a bit too long. The arena fights in particular went on way too long. On the other hand, these missions do a pretty good job of introducing you to the core play style of the half dozen or so classes of ships. You’ll usually spend around six to eight missions in a basic ship from a particular class before being given a new ship from a different class to play around with.

It isn’t that these missions aren’t any fun, it’s just that the whole first half of the game is rather poorly paced. It takes too long to get to the real meat of the game: exploration and building your own ships. It doesn’t help that these early missions tease you by allowing you to earn hundreds of thousands of plex (aka money) that you can’t spend until many hours later. A new patch a few days ago allows you to skip the tutorial galaxy, but doing so would cause you to miss out on a lot of plex that is needed to research and buy new ship parts.

The game gets pretty addicting when things finally open up. Missions in different systems still follow a rather linear progression path, but now there are more side areas to visit. There is even a place that is full of minigames inspired by old arcade classics like Missile Command and Breakout, and another area that is basically nothing but AI practice matches to help you learn how the multiplayer works.

The ship customization has a lot of depth to it, with around six classes of ships and hundreds of parts. Each ship chassis has bays that you slot parts into, with unique bays depending on the class of ship. For example, fighters have a bay for fixed cannons, while rogues have a bay devoted to their stealth systems. Many parts grant active abilities to the ship. The most obvious of these would be weapons, but there are other active abilities based around evasion, deploying decoys or turrets, backup power systems, spare munitions bays, and so on. You can have upwards of eight active abilities/weapons, four utility abilities, and a couple of special abilities, in addition to a variety of passive perks granted by certain parts.

There is a lot to consider when building ships. Some weapons cost energy and generate heat. Other weapons and abilities consume heat. Some weapons are designed to take advantage of the game’s Newtonian physics. Rockets will travel faster and further depending on your speed. An entire class of ships, the “grapplers,” are built around the game’s physics system. These ships tend to have tractor beams and repulsion fields to pull and push enemy ships into debris, and more advanced ships in the class may have melee weapons like giant flails that follow the ship around and must be “swung” by spinning your ship or slamming on your brakes. The game has a large variety of interesting and fun weaponry, from the physics-based melee weapons to plasma trails that work by venting your ship’s heat.

In addition to the lengthy campaign, Ring Runner also has a pretty good multiplayer component…At least, in theory. I could never find anyone to play with to really test the multiplayer, which seems to be a common issue for the handful of people who own the game. Ring Runner just simply hasn’t sold enough copies to build an active multiplayer community. The game has the usual selection of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but the developers are working on more, like a Dota-style lane pushing mode. It’s a shame, because I think the game’s solid combat mechanics and deep ship customization could make for a great multiplayer experience. Perhaps a Steam release would give the multiplayer community the boost it really needs, which is all the more reason to visit the game’s Greenlight page.

There is a lot of enjoyment to be found in Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, even with the rather poor pacing of the first half of the campaign and the sadly nonexistent multiplayer community. While the developers recently introduced the option to skip the first part of the campaign, this isn’t really an ideal solution. Its best to just power through to get to the really good stuff. Ring Runner has really fun combat and an extensive ship building component to give you many hours of enjoyment for the $15 price tag. You can find Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages on GOG.com GamersGate, and pretty much every other major digital distributor besides Steam; you’ll have to go visit the game’s Greenlight page to get a Steam release.

At its heart, Expeditions: Conquistador is an RPG about exploration. Yes, there is a story, with quests and a surprisingly solid turn-based combat system, but most of your time will consist of exploring a new and uncharted world. In many ways, it feels like the recent King’s Bounty games, if you set them during the Age of Discovery.

Expeditions: Conquistador starts out by letting you select your crew before departing for the New World. You are a conquistador leading an expedition to Mexico, a few years before Cortés. The game is divided into two campaigns: Hispaniola and Mexico. There is plenty of content here, as both campaigns combined will take you well over 20 hours to complete, if you are really interested in trying to find everything.

Your time in Expeditions will be divided into several basic parts: Exploring the map, managing your party and resources, dialogue screens, and combat. Exploration is by far the dominate of these activities. You can move a set number of times around the map before you must stop and set up camp for the night, which leads into the party management system. Your characters have many important uses outside of combat, which comes into play when you set up camp. You’ll have to protect your camp with guards, send out patrols to look for anything interesting in the area, establish a hunting party to find food to supplement your rations, and so on. Each character has stats that determine how good they are at these tasks, which is in turn dictated by their class. Soldiers make better guards, while Doctors can heal injured characters or turn herbs you find into medicine. This character management can occasionally get tedious, though luckily the game remembers who you had assigned to what task last time you set up camp, so you won’t need to make too many changes each night.

As you’d expect from a game about leading expeditions deep into uncharted jungles, resource management is a pretty big part of the game too. You have four primary resources, four secondary resources for the crafting system, and two perishable resources. Valuables (In other words, gold), medicine, rations, and equipment are the main resources. Valuables are your main currency, though you can use other resources for trading as well. Medicine is used to patch up injured characters. Rations are used to feed your expedition whenever you set up camp. Equipment is how gear is portrayed in the game. Unlike most RPGs where you find actual sets of armor or weapons to equip you characters, here you just have this generic “equipment” resource that you allocate to your primary fighters that increases their attack damage or damage reduction.

Wood, rope, metal, and oil are all used to craft traps and barricades that aid you in combat. This is typically done by allocating someone to “tinkering” when you set up camp, but some merchants also sell traps. These traps are deployed before battle and range from damaging spike traps, to net traps that immediately end an enemy’s turn should they enter them. The perishables are meat and herbs. Meat is gained by sending out hunters, and any extra meat must be preserved and turned into rations before it spoils. Herbs never spoil, and are used to create medicine.

The actual exploration can be very compelling, at least when you are making interesting discoveries. It can have that addictive “one more turn” quality to it at times, but it gradually becomes rather tedious the further you get into the game. Sometimes you just aren’t finding anything interesting, or sometimes you just want to get back to town to turn in a quest. A fast travel system could have helped here, but at the same time I understand that such a feature could have been hard to implement because of how the resource and party management works. The camera is also a bit of a problem here. You can’t zoom out very far, making navigation a bit more difficult than it should be. Still, the game does an admirable job of trying to keep exploration fresh with random events, optional ruins to discover, and resources scattered about.

The combat is solid, if fairly standard for a turn-based, grid-based system. Each character can move and perform one action in a turn, or sacrifice their action to move extra spaces. Characters can have up to five special skills, based on their class and rank. One nice part of the combat is how clear and unambiguous it is about line of sight and cover, something that not all games pull off very well (I’m looking at you, XCOM: Enemy Unknown). One complaint I do have is, once again, about the camera. Buildings and trees don’t become transparent when units are behind them, making it hard to get the camera into a position where you can properly see what is going on in some maps.

The combat also isn’t particularly hard, at least on normal. There were only a handful of times, mostly in the Hispaniola campaign, where I found a battle to be challenging. Combat isn’t properly balanced over the two campaigns either. The campaigns are designed to be somewhat standalone, but your progress in Hispaniola is saved when you go into Mexico. This means that you’ll absolutely dominate battles in Mexico because of all the experience and equipment you gained in the first campaign.

Character progression is a bit lacking as well. You gain experience throughout the game that you spend to promote characters. With each promotion, the character learns a new ability, you get to pick one perk from a list of a few dozen or so, and you get some points that you can allocate to their noncombat skills. My problem here is that there is nothing really unique about each character, at least as far as stats, performance, and abilities go. Of the five combat abilities that a character can learn, the first three are dependent on class and the last two depend on if the character is promoted to sergeant or lieutenant. So, a Soldier will always learn Perfect Defense, Stun, and Guard. The only way you can really individualize characters is with perks, but the perk pool is once again the same for each character. I understand that the game is most likely designed this way because of the sheer number of characters you can get, and the fact that characters can potentially die if their injuries aren’t treated, but I would have liked more ways to make each character’s role a bit unique.

The role-playing in this RPG is fairly well done. There are no cutscenes or voice acting in Expeditions. The story is conveyed through written text, dialogue choices, and pretty nice-looking character portraits. You are given a decent degree of freedom in conversations, and there are some pretty tough choices to be made. Members of your expedition will occasionally pop up during dialogue to voice their own opinions, which adds personality to each character where it is otherwise lacking in the progression side of the game. You’ll also occasionally get random events when you set up camp that allow you to converse with members of your expedition.

As well-written as the characters, dialogue, and story are, I do think that the developers missed an opportunity to craft a more meaningful and provocative experience. In hindsight, this period in history was a very dark time for the natives of the foreign lands that were discovered and conquered by European explorers. These issues are certainly common throughout the game, and many characters in your expedition may seem like terrible human beings by today’s standards, but the game still allows you to approach it a bit too much with a modern mindset. There are a surprising number of open-minded, tolerant characters in the game. So many, that you can easily make an expedition that consists entirely of such characters and develop a very friendly, positive relationship with the natives, something that seems a bit bizarre given the time period. Oh, make no mistake, you can still play as a complete monster in this game, but I feel that the game allows you to skirt too many of the issues inherent with the time period. It all just feels rather jarring, and it is hard to explain what I really mean without playing the game for yourself. With that said, you do still encounter many tough moral choices, especially in the Mexico campaign.

Expeditions: Conquistador is just a bit of missed potential shy of being a really great game. Some mechanics are a bit wonky and tedious, and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the game that just aren’t as fully realized as I wish they were. Expeditions is by no means a bad game, and in fact I found it compelling enough to recommend it at its current $20 price tag. I just feel that, with some changes here and there, it could have been so much better. As it stands, Expeditions: Conquistadors is “merely” a pretty good game instead of a truly great one. You can grab a copy right now on GOG.com or Steam.

Gunpoint‘s opening might seem familiar to anyone with experience in noir detective stories: freelance spy Richard Conway is contacted by a mysterious woman with a problem that needs to be solved. The twist that sets the stage for Gunpoint‘s blend of noir with snarky humor is that Conway is contacted after he inadvertently threw himself out of his apartment window while testing his new Bullfrog Hypertrousers. In any case, in typical noir fashion, the woman ends up murdered and Conway is the prime suspect. What starts as a mission to clear his name and find the real killer gradually unravels a plot about corporate espionage, blackmail, corruption, and betrayal.

Each level in this stealth-puzzle game requires you to navigate your way to a room containing either a computer terminal that needs to be hacked or some device that needs to be stolen. Your two primary gadgets for accomplishing this task are the Hypertrousers, which allow you to jump great distances and climb walls, and the Crosslink.

The Crosslink is the core gameplay mechanic of Gunpoint and your main means of solving each level’s puzzles. This device allows you to rewire various electronics throughout the level, affecting how they work and interact with other devices in the environment. This is done by simply opening your Crosslink and using your mouse to delete current connections and draw new ones. The most basic example of this might be rewiring a locked door so that a nearby light switch opens it, but cunning players can come up with some truly ingenious solutions.

Things gradually get more complicated later on with the introduction of multiple networks. Some devices will be locked behind secure networks, so you’ll need to figure out how to get to their terminal before you can tamper with them. Devices on different networks can’t be intermixed either, so you can’t connect a light switch on a red network to a light on a yellow network. The interface in the Crosslink mode gives you everything you need to know about what devices are connected to what network.

You get paid for completing each mission. Money can be used to buy a variety of secondary gadgets that give you more options to solve a level, like redirecting electricity from a socket to knock out guards or even the ability to connect a guard’s gun to objects so that they’ll turn off a light or open a door when they try to shoot you. Many of these gadgets require batteries to be used, which can be found in some levels or bought in the store.

Unlike many puzzle games, Gunpoint offers a fairly impressive level of freedom to approaching each level. A lot of the fun is in trying to figure out new, insane ways of beating each level. I’ve gone back and replayed several levels just because I liked the level’s layout and wanted to try a new way of completing it. There is a rating system in the game based on how many guards saw you, how much violence you used, and how long it took you, but in an interesting twist, Gunpoint actually rewards you for taking your time instead of trying to speed run a level. Your clients may also give you optional objectives, like minimal violence. Each level contains a laptop as well, which can be hacked to gain more information about the characters and setting. These ratings and optional objectives have nothing to do with how much you are paid after each mission, serving only as a scoreboard for the completionists.

The story in Gunpoint is surprisingly engaging. There is no voice acting; the story is told entirely through text messages before and after missions, and emails on the laptops in each level. The dialogue is well-written and the snappy humor is genuinely pretty funny; the game manages to hit that perfect blend of a serious story with enough humor to keep the seriousness from being too overwhelming. There is a small degree of choice and decision-making as well. Some of your choices lead to slightly branching dialogue trees, and the final mission has a bit of a moral dilemma attached to it. None of it really affects the story all that much, but it is a nice touch.

The graphics and music are simple and do a nice job of complimenting the gameplay. The game has a sort of pixelart, zoomed-out view that looks pretty nice in motion. The soundtrack mostly consists of soft jazz that fits the setting and themes of the game, and more importantly it isn’t distracting or too loud during the actual gameplay.

If there was one downside to Gunpoint, it would be that it isn’t very long. You can complete the 20 or so levels in under 5 hours, maybe a bit more if you want to replay missions to get better ratings. That said, the quality of the content is pretty high, and I’ve replayed missions multiple times now just to experiment. There is also a level editor, so we’ll likely see tons of devious new levels crafted by the community.

While somewhat short, Gunpoint is loads of fun. It’s probably one of my favorite games thus far this year. The gameplay is simple and pretty easy to grasp, with most of the fun coming from figuring out new and interesting ways to solve levels. It can be really satisfying to link electronics together into some insane Rube Goldberg contraption. I’m normally pretty bad at puzzle games, but like Trine, Gunpoint offers so much freedom in solving the puzzles that I could eventually work out solutions that may have not really been “intended.” Even if the experience is a bit short, it is still well-worth the $10 price tag. Or, you can buy one of the two special editions that offer extras like a copy of the soundtrack, developer commentary, or access to betas for future Suspicious Developments games. You can find Gunpoint on Steam.

Reus markets itself as a 2D god game. Indeed, at first glance that’s exactly what it looks like, as the player controls four planet-shaping giants on a mission to help humans survive and thrive on a once barren wasteland. However, after putting over a dozen hours into Reus, I’d describe it as more of a puzzle/resource management game, where you are trying to figure out the optimal placement of resources in a very limited space. In any case, Reus can be a hard game to accurately describe because of how unique it truly is.

Each game of Reus starts out the same: The planet is an uninhabitable wasteland and you must use your four giants to create an ecosystem that allows humanity to survive. Each giant has some sort of terraforming power that allows you to create mountains, forests, swamps, oceans, and deserts. Once you have biomes you must then place resources (minerals, plants, or animals) which in turn attract nomads that set up a village near these resources.

As villages grow, they’ll start projects. These projects usually require the use of a certain number of resources, like food, tech, and/or wealth. These are generated by the resources that are within a village’s borders, which gradually expand as the village grows. Once a project is complete, it will add bonuses to the village and push it towards a certain specialization, like giving a village more wealth for each mineral within their borders or giving more food for each plant. The types of projects a village will start largely depend on the biome they are in. Deserts usually start wealth-based projects, swamps start tech-based ones, and forests food-based ones.

Besides allowing a village to grow, projects also give you ambassadors. Your giants can pick up these ambassadors, unlocking new abilities. The ability that an ambassador unlocks depends on what biome they are from and what giant is carrying them. Giving a giant more ambassadors from the same biome is useful because the extra ambassadors upgrade the power associated with ambassadors from that specific biome. This creates a situation where you have to carefully consider what ambassadors to give to what giants. You’ll need to consider what abilities you’ll need in order to advance the villages the way you want them to go. You’ll also need to think about if you would rather spread out ambassadors from specific biomes to gain a wider range of abilities, or give all the ambassadors of a specific biome to one giant so you can make his abilities more powerful.

While it can be tempting to just throw resources at a village to make them grow as fast as possible, there is a greed mechanic that makes this more difficult. If a village grows too quickly, they may become greedy and demand more from you or attack other villages. The growth of greed can be managed by awe and danger, which are generated by certain resources. Placing predatory animals is an easy way of generating danger, thus slowing a village’s expansion and keeping their greed at bay, but if there is too much danger it can cause the village to struggle to survive. Like most mechanics in this game, it can be a very fine balancing act that requires a lot of experimentation.

The way resources interact and how you can transform and modify them is a lot more complex than I originally thought it would be. Each giant has abilities that generate a generic resource like precious minerals or fruit plants, with the actual type of resource generated depending on the biome. Using the Swamp Giant’s ability to create exotic animals will create a poison dart frog in swamps, but desert tortoises in deserts. As you can imagine, this already means that the number of resources can get a bit daunting, but things get further complex with the use of Aspects.

Aspects serve two purposes. Firstly, they can increase resources generated, or modify them in different ways. Secondly, you can transform resources if there are certain Aspects attached to them. For example, adding a Leaf Aspect to blueberries allows you to make strawberries. In addition to Aspects, there are also Symbioses that give bonuses to resources that are next to certain other resources. Predatory animals typically generate more wealth or food if they are near smaller prey animals, certain plants generate more food if they are near mineral-rich ground, and so on.

This level of complexity in how specific resources interact and what Aspects are needed to make each resource can be really overwhelming later in the game. The game would greatly benefit from an in-game tech tree of some sort. As it stands, all you can do is pull up a wiki, which makes it more difficult to reference things while actually playing. As you gain access to more resources, the massive number of them and how they interact can get fiddly too, as you try to figure out the most optimal arrangement of resources for a village’s specialization. It doesn’t help that villages often start on projects that make no sense considering previous projects, like a village that focused heavily on plants suddenly starting a project that requires a lot of animals. The limited space of the world makes matters even worse. I understand that this game is mainly about managing resources in a limited space, but I’d like to see larger worlds in future updates.

Despite my complaints so far, I actually really enjoy Reus. The graphics style and music are incredibly charming, and despite the occasional awkwardness of the resource management, the game can be almost zen-like. For the most part it is a relatively stress-free, relaxing game. It’s satisfying to see your villages gradually grow and become bustling cities. The giants and their animations look great in action, and their idle animations add a lot to the game’s charm. They’ll occasionally lean down and just watch the villagers as they go about their daily lives, as proud parents watching their children play.

While the resources and the way they interact can become very complex later on, the game’s learning curve is actually brilliant. Most of the resources are locked at the start; you “level up” by playing and completing developments. Developments are a bit like achievements, but they serve an actual gameplay purpose. As you complete developments and level up, you’ll unlock more resources and tougher developments become possible. The actual game modes themselves are designed to slowly ease you in. After the tutorial, you start with 30 minute games, where many of the more complex resource interactions won’t really come into play. Then you’ll graduate to hour-long games, and eventually two hour games, where you need to carefully consider resource placement to make the best use of Symbioses, which Aspects you need, etc. Greed, and how villages may lose their faith and attack your giants, also doesn’t become a major mechanic until the two hour games. In addition to these primary modes, there is also a free play sandbox mode where you can play as long as you like, but you won’t make progress towards new resources and developments.

Reus is a really unique title that deserves your attention. I don’t think you should really go into Reus expecting a true god game along the lines of Populous, but rather a puzzle game with the façade of a god game. I’ve heard some people say that Reus lacks a real focus or objective due to the way the game is designed, but I’m not so sure I agree. It is a very charming and beautiful puzzle game that rewards you for experimenting and trying to figure out the optimal way of creating thriving villages in a limited space. If you’re looking for a relatively slower-paced, charming, and relaxing title, then Reus is definitely worth a look at only $10. You can find it on Steam and GOG.com.             

The original Anomaly was a unique twist on the increasingly popular tower defense genre. Billing itself as a “tower offense” game, in Anomaly you had to guide the convoy of attacking units through the towers, using the special abilities of your character’s suit of armor to protect the convoy and help you achieve the mission’s objective. Anomaly 2 contains everything needed to make a good sequel: more of the same core gameplay, but with enough new features and improvements to keep things interesting.

In the years following the events of the first game, the alien machines (aka the towers) have returned to Earth and reduced it to a barely inhabitable wasteland stuck in a perpetual winter. It’s your job to lead your convoy in humanity’s last ditch effort to win the war with the machines and retake Earth. The writing and voice acting in Anomaly 2 are a step up from the original game, but it can still be pretty cringe-worthy in places. Luckily, that isn’t what you play this series for.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Anomaly games, the basic formula works like this: At the start of each mission, you have to buy units to fill out your convoy of up to six vehicles. You then plot your route through the map to your objectives. Each mission’s map is actually quite big and allows for many potential pathways to your objectives, and because of scripted events you’ll often find yourself returning to the tactical view to re-plot your course.

Once you are in the actual mission, you control a single commander in an advanced suit of armor that allows you to deploy various special abilities to protect or buff your convoy. This adds an element of twitch skill micromanagement to the game, as you’ll have to run your character all over the place to collect suit powers and deploy abilities at the proper time to maximize their effects. The Repair and Decoy abilities from the first game return, but the Smoke and Airstrike powers have been replaced with EMP and AIM. EMP allows you to temporarily disable towers, while AIM makes your convoy focus their fire on a particular tower, gaining a damage bonus in the process.

One of the major new features of Anomaly 2 is the introduction of the Morph mechanic. Anomaly 2 has reduced the number of units in the game down to five, but each unit has an alternate form that it can transform into by double clicking on it. For example, the basic Assault Hound is a small tank-like unit with miniguns. The miniguns start out firing slow, weak shots that gradually build up to a constant stream of fire over the course of several seconds. In its alternate form, the Hell Hound, it becomes a mech with dual flamethrowers that it can fire at two different towers simultaneously.

The Morph mechanic gives you much more flexibility. You’ll be constantly swapping modes to counter specific towers, and it also ensures that every unit will get regular usage. The larger number of units in the original game created some redundancies later on in the campaign. Once you got the tank there was little point in taking the APCs anymore since they both served similar roles–that of a heavily armored spearhead to your convoy–but the tank was just better at it.

The campaign is 14 missions long and has a nice variety of objectives and scripted events that change things up and keeps the experience fresh. The game also does a great job of pacing itself and gradually introducing you to harder and more complex objectives. The early missions are simply get from A to B. Later missions have you destroying specific towers, or giving you fragile units you must escort that take up slots in your convoy. Mission 8 is particularly memorable, where you must defend a central building as waves of towers spawn from all sides. The battles can get really hectic as you must micromanage your commander and his abilities, morph your units to best counter the current situation, and even alter your routes or switch around the formation of your convoy.

The campaign will last you a little over six hours or so, more if you obsess over getting all gold medals in every mission. Unfortunately the Baghdad Mayhem and Tokyo Raid score attack modes don’t make a return, instead being replaced with a new tower defense vs tower offense multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode is a fun distraction, but there isn’t really enough content to keep you playing it for long. From what I’ve played, Anomaly 2 does a solid job of balancing the two sides and their special abilities, but it could use more maps and gameplay modes. I feel that the campaign is where the most enjoyment will be had with this game, with the multiplayer just being a side mode to occasionally dip into with friends.

The graphics also got a nice upgrade in Anomaly 2. The original was always a pretty nice looking game, but this time around the particle effects and explosions are noticeably better, as is the texture quality of the units, towers, and environments. The game also plays around with your keyboard’s lighting effects if you are playing on an Alienware system, a feature that you only see in a handful of games.

Anomaly 2 is a great sequel that improves upon the original in just about every way. Any fans of the original cult hit should definitely look into getting Anomaly 2. If you’ve never played an Anomaly game, this is a good place to start. It is a unique and frantic take on what is traditionally a somewhat passive genre, and there is a nice amount of content for the rather cheap price of $15. You can find Anomaly 2 on Steam, where until May 31st you can get it for 10% off if you own the first game. Alternatively, you can buy it straight from 11 Bit Studios and get a free copy of Anomaly: Korea, which as far as I know is the only way to get this mobile/tablet spin-off on PC.

A quick disclaimer before I begin: despite being a fan of 4X strategy games, I’ve never played Eador: Genesis. This means that I can’t really pull up the original game as a reference point when judging Masters of the Broken World. From what I’ve read, Masters of the Broken World is less of a sequel and more just Genesis with a new coat of paint and some redesigned mechanics anyway.

Eador: Masters of the Broken World is a new fantasy 4X strategy game by Snowbird Games. The basic concept of Eador is that the world is broken into many shards floating in space. You play as a sort of godlike being, one of many Masters, who is trying to rebuild the world by conquering the shards and reuniting them. To do this, you travel to a shard, establish a stronghold, and start conquering provinces by any means necessary until you rule the shard.

This is the basic format of the game’s campaign. You pick shards to invade, with each shard giving you access to new structures and various buffs once you conquer it. In this way, the campaign is almost like playing a bunch of custom skirmish maps, except you gradually gain more unit and building options as you progress. There is also a karma system that changes what other Masters think of you. Your karma is generally based on the sort of units you favor (each unit has a different moral leaning) and your actions both on a shard and in the pre-invasion screen.

Each game will start you off with a single province, your stronghold. This is the center of your empire, and losing it results in defeat on that shard. It is here where you build structures, recruit hero units, and form armies. Structures are divided into various districts, each with four tiers. One important thing to always remember is that there is a limit on certain types of structures. For example, there are around a dozen rank 1 unit structures, but you can only have four in any given game. This means that the game forces you to pick and choose what you feel would be the best choices for the current shard. Even still, the sheer number of building options can get rather overwhelming later in the campaign. It doesn’t help that the UI can be rather confusing and unresponsive at times. I’ve had times where the UI just wouldn’t register my input at first. It can be difficult to figure out prerequisites at a glance, and the advanced view can be even worse.

The main focus of your armies is the hero units. You must recruit a hero to move units around the map, much like in many games of this type. Your heroes gain experience, can use various spells and abilities, and can be equipped with items and weapons. The heroes themselves are very powerful units in battle, and can be resurrected for a price should they fall. The four hero types are Warriors, Scouts, Mages, and Commanders, and each type caters to a vastly different play style. As you recruit heroes, the price of recruiting another one gradually goes up, particularly if you already have a hero of that type. This encourages you to have a good mix of different hero types to perform different roles.

There can be a ton of things to consider in any given province of Eador. There are various structures you can build in provinces to modify income, allow heroes to recruit units and study spells, improve the population’s mood, and more. While the only primary resources in the game are gold and gems, many provinces have secondary resources like lumber, horses, iron, and so on. These resources aren’t spent like gold and gems, but rather modify the income from those provinces and provide discounts to the hiring of certain units and construction of some buildings. Random events can also cause various positive or negative effects on a province, like a serious forest fire wiping out a large chunk of a province’s lumber supply and screwing with your income.

Each province also has locations that can be visited by your heroes, and more locations can be discovered by having your hero spend a turn “exploring.” These locations vary from shops where you can buy powerful items or special units, to battles that provide experience and loot. Exploring a province doesn’t just feed experience to your army either; it also has an effect on the province itself. Sometimes you’ll discover secondary resources or random events that change the province’s income. Exploring the province also increasing population growth, and once a province is 100% explored then you’ll get an income bonus.

My main complaint with the exploration mechanic is that it can take forever to explore a province, unless you are using a moderately experienced Scout. This is especially annoying in the early stages of a game, where many of your early turns will be exploring provinces to find weaker enemy encounters to level your hero. This means that the game can get tedious and downright boring in the early stages, when you just don’t have the income and forces to expand too rapidly.

I can be here for a while talking about all the various factors in the overworld map of Eador, but that is only part of the game. The other part is the actual combat, which takes place in a hex-based grid. Much like the world map, the combat system has quite a bit of depth to it that must be learned. Units have morale and stamina that affect their performance, there are various terrain types to consider, many units have unique passive and active abilities, etc.

The tactical combat is quite fun and satisfying, and the AI is actually pretty good. The AI will use terrain to their advantage, attempt to target your weaker support units, and even focus their attention on wounded units. However, like many things about this game, there are various gameplay and technical issues that need to be addressed. Even with the recent patch that sped things up, some animations can take a while to perform. The audio, animation, and damage numbers are also all out of sync. It is pretty common to see units die before the damage numbers and attack animations have finished, resulting in units slashing at the air or taking damage from a unit that died before its own attack animation went through. It can also be difficult to tell what type of terrain a unit is currently sitting on.

That’s really the problem I have with the game: It is full of rough mechanics and glaring technical issues. I already mentioned the rather awkward UI, various issues with the combat system, and the tedium of the early stages of a game, but late game can also be rather tedious too. By this point you’ve pretty much done everything you can leveling up your heroes and improving your kingdom. Now you just have to conquer the enemy, be it a faceless local lord or another godlike Master such as yourself. Sieges against an enemy stronghold can take more than a dozen turns, assuming you don’t have siege weapons. Problem is, it can be a while before you get said siege weapons in the campaign, making the endgame of your early campaign missions seriously drag on.

Another annoyance is the general lack of information in some parts of the game. Not all of the mechanics are explained all that well, and looking through the manual didn’t help. The screen before combat is also mostly pointless fluff with very little true information. Telling me that the enemy force contains three giant slugs tells me nothing about what giant slugs are and if my army can take them on. It gets worse when you consider that units also level up, though the Scout has the ability to determine what level the enemies are before you enter the encounter. Sometimes a screen will pop up with your hero saying something vague like “Looks like we can win without casualties” or “If we win this, I’d be surprised,” but these only appear some of the time and are often misleading.

If rough mechanics where the only thing wrong with Eador, I wouldn’t mind giving it a recommendation. This game can be pretty engrossing and downright addictive at times. However, I’ve also encountered numerous technical issues as well. The game is obviously poorly optimized, with a very inconsistent frame rate. This isn’t an isolated issue either, I’ve heard reports of people with PCs far better than mine getting choppy frame rates and bad performance. Occasionally, the AI will lock up during their turns, forcing you to exit the game and reload your last save. Even when the AI isn’t locking up, in larger maps they can take upwards of a minute to perform their turns.

I’ve not encountered them personally, but I’ve read quite a few posts on the GOG and Steam forums about the game not starting or crashing with an error message. I’ve consistently encountered a glitch where the game won’t display the name of my Scout hero during battles, replacing it instead with “hero.4.name.” I’ve also encountered, and heard reports of, enemy units with glitched out stats that make them far harder to fight than they should, or even accounts of buffs and debuffs not working correctly. There have been several instances where the game just wouldn’t let me click certain buttons, forcing me to restart. In one bizarre situation the game actually took control away from my army, like the game got stuck on auto-combat even when I had it turned off.

I don’t play multiplayer in these sorts of games, but I’ve heard from others that the multiplayer component is pretty much broken right now. It wasn’t working at all on launch apparently, and even with the recent patch it is still full of issues. If you really wanted to play Eador with others then this might be a huge problem for you, though given how slow a game of Eador goes I can’t really imagine this game working well in a multiplayer setting anyway.

Because of these numerous technical issues, I have a hard time fully recommending Eador: Masters of the Broken World, at least in its current state. The game is far from being unplayable, but the technical issues are common enough that it can really hurt your experience. It’s so frustrating because I really want to say that this is a good game that is worth your money, but I simply can’t do that right now. Despite my complaints, I have managed to get quite a bit of enjoyment out of Eador. When everything is working right, Eador can be quite addicting despite its rough mechanics. If Eador‘s faults were just these rough mechanics then I would probably say go for it. Eador has the foundation of a solid strategy game, and I can see a ton of potential in this title, but as of right now I’d recommend waiting until the first time it goes on sale on Steam or GOG. Hopefully everything will be ironed out by then. I may come back to this one after a few more patches with my updated impressions.

You can find Eador: Masters of the Broken World on GOG.com and Steam for $20 or your regional equivalent.

You are a newly recruited inspection officer at the Arstotzkan boarder. Your wife and children are counting on you to accept or reject the right people who mean to live, work, or travel to the country. Failure to do so will result in their sickness and death.

These are the stakes in the interesting Papers, Please, now available on Steam Greenlight.

As of right now, there only exists a beta version of the game which contains 8 days of your toil in this clearly Soviet-inspired, crucial decision making game.

Visually the game has an amazing sense of style capturing the bleak and drab colors and setting of the era and location. Graphically is looks like a really great looking Commodore 64 game. There is a sharpness to the sprites that just stands out in a really striking way.

There is only one piece of music in the game. A tuba plays a few notes as citizens trudge up to the desk and hand you their papers. It fits the mood of the setting perfectly in a way that reminds one of the Communistic time period.

The game-play consists of evaluating the potential immigrants’, workers or vacationers’ documents as they pass through your check point. Each day the rules will become stricter and the player will need to adapt accordingly, such as checking for a work visa or citizen card.

It’s hard to explain how interesting this game is on face value. This setting shouldn’t be fun. Checking people papers shouldn’t be fun.  Communist Arstotzka shouldn’t be a place you enjoy. But you know what?

I do.

Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation has just recently released Signal Ops, a retro multi-FPS stealth game that allows you to do all kinds of neat super-spy stuff like assassinate targets, steal information, plant incriminating evidence, and sabotage enemy hardware all from the safety of a multi-monitored control room. What Space Bullet has done here is implemented a rare way to interact with some familiar gameplay mechanics that we all have seen in a few prominent game genres and set the whole experience in a charming little world that doesn’t take itself too seriously. On uproxx.com the game was described as “James Bond meets Deus Ex” and I could not agree more with this label mash-up. After a few delays to polish up their product, Signal Ops was officially released on April 2^nd 2013 at GoG.com.

My favorite aspect of this game was the art direction. It was truly a painter’s delight if you take the time to soak in the details. While not anywhere near the more high-end graphics of some games that utilize the very popular first-person perspective, the ambience and atmosphere were definitely augmented by the look of this game. Environmental lighting looked cool and really worked to showcase some of the more detailed and open areas of the game. For a game that incorporates so much stealth in the gameplay, I feel that there could have been more overall contrast between dark and lit areas. It was somewhat difficult at times to differentiate where my agents were hidden and where they were exposed but that is my only complaint about the visual side of this title. The sound design was functional but nothing spectacular. There were moments when I thought the ambient mechanical sounds were a bit loud and obtrusive; however, that did not happen often.

The writing of this game was superb and there was a dark sense of humor about the whole experience that fit perfectly in the game. There were mock-motivation posters around some of the interiors that cracked me up, a sign that states “Basic Training Tutorial….. Do it or Die!” is a perfect example of what I mean. Dialogue was also very quirky with serious activities and consequences being discussed in a snarky, comical tone. After stumbling through one of tutorials, the quest-giver says “Ahh… the uncomfortable sting of failure…… I am not surprised.” This writing style definitely added to the experience and I caught myself laughing out loud at some individual lines.

The espionage-focused gameplay had some flaws in my opinion. I liked the multi-perspective views that allowed you to see each mission from the view of all four agents; however, the screens were sometimes so small that it made missions harder than they should have been. Combine this with the difficulty of telling the difference between light and shadow areas, and some missions seemed downright impossible. Strategically moving multiple units opens up a lot of fun gameplay options but I found that the importance of the radio location ended up overshadowing everything else going on. You have to closely manage both the radio and a power source to keep it juiced up and in many of the missions, this was the biggest challenge. I like the realism this part brings to the game, but it quickly became a repetitive game of “where-to-put-my-radio-so-I-can-see” over and over again. Lastly, some clunky keyboard controls and a lackluster tutorial that had me more confused than enlightened dampened my initial excitement for the title. Right now, Signal Ops is available on GoG.com for $14.99 and I would rather see it for $9.99 but there is good quality to be found here if you spring for it.

Title: Signal Ops

Platforms: PC

Release Date: April 2^nd, 2013

Available at GoG.com

I must admit, I have a bit of a soft spot for Puppy Games and their work. I’ve been a fan of them since Titan Attacks! first made its way onto Steam a while back, and, with the recent Steam release of Ultratron, I now own all four of their titles. Their games are just so genuinely charming, featuring a unique mix of old school gameplay with an interesting graphics style I’ve often heard referred to as “neo-retro.”

With the exception of Revenge of the Titans, each offering by Puppy Games is essentially a spiritual successor to some classic game or another, and in Ultratron‘s case that game is Robotron. Like the arcade classic that inspired it, Ultratron‘s core gameplay is very simple: You are in an arena and must survive waves of evil robots that spawn from the sides of the screen. Dead enemies drop coins you can pick up that give you money, and between waves you have a chance to purchase various upgrades.

Like in many of their other games, the upgrade system is surprisingly pretty extensive. You have your typical stuff like buying extra health and upgrading the power of your gun, but other upgrades can be quite drastic. A major emphasis of the upgrade system is buying friendly drones that follow you around and automatically attack enemies. These pets have their own upgrades, like increasing their targeting speed, fire rate, range, and other aspects. Other upgrades give you interesting new weapon options in the form of plasma grenades or the ability to nullify a fatal hit by using one of your screen-clearing smart bombs.

It can’t be stressed enough how damn charming everything made by Puppy Games is. The “neo-retro” graphics are very aesthetically pleasing. Their titles have this 8-bit look to them, but the graphics are very clean and crisp with lots of bright neon lights and colors. The music and sound assets are great. The character designs are also quite adorable. The pets even have hearts floating above their heads as they follow you around. You can tell that a lot of effort went into creating the visual design of Ultratron and everything else by the company.

That’s more or less the game in a nutshell. It is a very simple game, but also extremely fun and pretty challenging. There are around 40 levels and 4 bosses, and like many arcade classics it is designed to be played over and over again to try and get better high scores. I don’t really care about high scores, but I do enjoy Ultratron enough to keep coming back to it. For the next few days the game will be $5 on Steam before going back up to its normal price of $10. You can also find it on Puppy Games’ official website, puppygames.net. While you are at it, check out Revenge of the Titans, Titan Attacks!, and Droid Assault for more retro-inspired fun.

Spelunky fans looking for a similar experience may want to sit up and take notice of this one. 99 Levels to Hell is a recently released action-platformer with light rogue-like elements by B-evil and Zaxis Games. The main idea is simple: Jump and shoot your way through 100 randomly-generated levels and 10 bosses. But, as you’ll quickly learn, that is much easier said than done.

As I mentioned, 99 Levels to Hell will be pretty familiar to anyone who has played Spelunky before. Each level is randomly generated with an entrance and an exit. Before you can use the exit you’ll have to find a key somewhere on the level. Each level is also populated with monsters, traps, various power ups, and gold that can be spent in certain rooms that are randomly scattered around. Each level can be completed in just a few minutes, and if you stick around too long invincible ghosts will spawn and hunt you down.

The rogue-like elements come in the form of permadeath. Once you die, that’s it. Every 10 levels you fight a boss and move on to a new area of the dungeon with more challenging enemies and traps. Every 10 levels also serves as a form of checkpoint system, so you can start a new game further along, but this will make things more difficult because there has been less time to collect items and get health upgrades before moving on to these more challenging levels.

At the start of each playthough you’ll have a chance to pick a character, each with different starting weapons and stats. More characters can be unlocked by finding and saving them in rooms throughout the dungeon. Each character starts with a certain number of health points, some bombs used to get to otherwise unreachable areas, and a weapon that varies between characters. The Magician, for example, starts with a shotgun, while the Major starts with a machinegun. As you explore the levels you may find various new items in the form of weapons, orbs, and spells.

Item variety is pretty good. Weapons range from various rods that shoot magic bolts like fire or ice, to a cannon that fires projectiles that do heavy damage on a direct hit but also bounce and roll around momentarily. Orbs circle your character and have different effects. Some are obvious, like how the Fire Orb shoots fireballs whenever you shoot your gun. Others will need to be figured out, like how the Red Orb restores a health point to you if it kills an enemy. Spells occupy your third item slot and are very powerful items that can generally only be used every so often. Some outright kill all enemies on the screen. Others are more support-based, like restoring health or giving you extra time to explore the level before the ghosts appear. After they are used, spells must be recharged by killing enemies.

Occasionally you’ll find rooms that you can enter. There are casinos where you can spend money (Or even health, in some cases) to gamble with slot machines. Stores allow you to buy or upgrade items. Elevators allow you to go up or down levels. There is another type of room that provides some insight into the story, and occasionally these rooms will have a cage that can be destroyed to unlock a new character.

The core gameplay of 99 Levels to Hell is simple and pretty easy to get into, but also fun and challenging. The weapons, orbs, and spells can be very satisfying, and the way they interact can create interesting combos. Enemies tend to explode into chunks of gore when killed. Both the platforming and shooting are pretty solid, and the controls are good regardless of if you are using a keyboard and mouse or a controller.

On the other hand, this being a light rogue-like with randomly generated levels can lead to some frustrating moments outside of your control. For the most part the game is very challenging yet fair, but I have had some playthroughs where I just never found any good items. I have had a few times where I exited a room right into a monster, thus putting me in a situation where I took unavoidable damage. A handful of times the level generated in such a way that reaching the exit was actually impossible. After a while you’ll also discover that the levels aren’t quite as random as advertised. It seems like the developers created a bunch of templates that rearrange levels in random ways, so eventually you’ll start to see some pretty similar layouts.

The aesthetic is a bit mismatched too. I actually like the cartoony art direction, even though the animations aren’t as smooth as they could have been, but the music and narration is darker and creepier than the actual visuals would suggest it should be. I’m still on the fence in regards to how well the two blend together.

There are some performance issues here and there, too. The game’s initial load time is pretty long, to the point that I thought something went horribly wrong the first time I booted the game up. A few times I encountered bizarre drops below 30 FPS that could only be fixed by restarting my PC. The frame rate problems were very few and far between though; I’ve put about 10 hours into this game so far and it only happened twice.

Overall I really enjoyed 99 Levels to Hell. The core gameplay can be very fun in short bursts, and the randomized nature of item drops makes replaying the game over and over again satisfying. Unlocking new characters can change up your playthroughs quite a bit because of their different starting items. At $10, or your regional equivalent, 99 Levels to Hell offers a lot of fun and replayability in a fairly cheap package. Many of the issues I had with the game were rather minor, and not bad enough to detract from the game as a whole. You can find 99 Levels to Hell on GOG.com, Desura, and IndieCity. It’s also struggling in the limbo that is Steam Greenlight, so remember to go give it a thumbs-up to help it get on Steam.

                Driftmoon is a quaint little RPG released by Finnish developer Instant Kingdom. This title has been in the works for a long time, the website claims seven years, and it was part of Steam’s Greenlight program for the summer of 2011. Since then, there has been a demo available which the user community has been very supportive of and there are already a ton of mods available for those that want to continue their time in the world of Driftmoon. Everything from simple aesthetic alterations to complete missions and side-quests are available and the game just officially launched at the end of February 2013 in its final form.

The magical story that IK has put together is amazingly immersive and a blast to play for old-school RPG fans like me; give me a sword, a bow,  and some magic and I will defend/save whatever kingdom you have programmed. Now, when I say quaint and little, I do mean that, Driftmoon’s main campaign takes only about ten or eleven hours to play through but there are enough side-quests available in the game’s various locations to keep you occupied for about twice that time. You play as a young man whose world is flipped upside down when he returns to his home village, Northrop, only to have his own mother push him into a well. It turns out that this was the only way to save you from the evil descending upon the people of Northrop in the form of angry magic-capable lizards known as the Rakan who are searching for the broken pieces of an Amulet of Life. These “lizard wizards” are being used by an evil king from the past, Ixal, who is also the creator of the amulet.

                As you embark upon the main mission to locate all the pieces of said amulet and purify it so that it will never be used for evil purposes again, there are plenty of memorable characters you meet along the way that have as much riding on Ixal’s final defeat as you. A firefly by the name of Fizz, an uppity panther queen whose attitude about your current actions was her most memorable trait, and your own brother, who spends part of the game as an actual person and the later part as a skeleton are a few of the personalities that assist you throughout the story. The story itself is really, really in-depth and fleshed out, the time I spent reading notes, books, and old newspaper articles was relative to ten hours spent in a much bigger example of the genre such as Bioware’s Dragon Age or Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series. I even noticed many passive and obvious references to established fantasy worlds like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail.

                The combat system was a bit watered down compared to some other RPGs but it worked well with the scope of the rest of the project and the story was more than enough to make up for the lack of action in this title. You have the option to carry a melee weapon, bow, and eventually a magic staff but this serves as your melee weapon, there are no magical spells to hurl at enemies so no pure mage gameplay here. Each enemy vanquished as well as completion of the various quests provide experience points to level up your character, I ended the game at level twenty-two and I liked that I was able to level up right into the end-game. The only issue that I had with the game was the camera angle, it is a top-down perspective which is very normal in a game like this, but the levels were sometimes difficult to traverse in this restrictive viewpoint. Speaking of the levels themselves, I loved the visual style of this game! It was perfect for the story that was being told; the color palette and environments could be described as absolutely enchanting and were possibly my favorite aspect of this experience.

                Overall, I enjoyed my time in the world of Driftmoon, I got it for fifteen bucks at desura.com, through their app that is very similar to Steam or the GameStop app and I am perfectly okay with spending that money on a game like this, the editor and availability of so many mods work to extrapolate the value. If you are a fantasy fan of any level and you long for the warm fuzzy feeling that you used to get when you booted up Baldur’s Gate, try out Driftmoon, it is a move in the right direction for Instant Kingdom and I will be watching hopefully for more of their releases in the future.

Title: Driftmoon
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
Release Date: February 25, 2013
Where to find this title: InstantKingdom.com, GOG.com, Desura.com, and GamersGate.com