12 orbits
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. For this price, I have never played a game with this much quality. The 3D graphics are stunning and are sometimes not seen in games worth $5 or more. Again, the game is worth buying just for its quality. Not to mention the control screen is as easy as pressing a button. The game is as simple as that, too! However, we haven’t even gotten to the actual game yet.
So, what is the game, you ask?
This game has 4 different modes with 7 total variations total. Arena and Trails are free-for-all modes, Blizzard and Multiball are team modes, and Arena, Trails, and Blizzard have practice variations. For every mode, there are 7-8 maps you can play on. On these map, there are circles of various sizes and location through it. After you select your button, you can press the button when in the circles to go around them in an orbit (hence “orbits” in the title). When you press your button outside the circle, you dash forward, which can be beneficial or hurtful, depending on the mode. You can always tell the direction of your character by looking at where the arow points. It never breaks physics, but it is helpful for when you have a lot of characters on the screen, and a small bit of color isn’t enough to keep your eye focused. In addition, there are modifications for the four multiplayer modes, giving you flexibility and countless arangements of fun! Lastly, if you are in a circle and an opponent or sphere hits you, your orbit will break unless you hit your button immediately afterwards. Alright, let’s go on to the modes!
– Real player with 25.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4 Player Local Minigames Games.
TL;DR - A simple look with a simple mechanic. Good amounts of options, yet feels pretty samey after a while. It’s a party game that really tries, but never reaches it’s true potential. 7/10
12 orbits seemed interesting. The ability to play with 12 players with the usage of just a button each is incredible. With simple taps, everyone would take control their character without losing focus on what lies ahead. The concept comes together in four different modes that anyone can get into easily. The major question is, obviously, are these modes even entertaining to play. Personally I had a hard time figuring this out.
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
Emoji Charades
We have had a wonderful time playing emoji charades, this game has become a new nightly fun routine! The concept is simple and works very well. You can see us playing it on our channel below.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ahsnl7qyQIg
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4 Player Local Funny Games.
emoj charades
– Real player with 10.3 hrs in game
Eight-Minute Empire
It’s very well done port of the Red Raven Games' board game of the same title. I played the analog version and I have to say that the digitized brother is more enjoyable. Things like glows, and victory point sum-ups are pretty obvious.. but now I can see how much this stuff works and it really does! Now I can tell who is winning and why - when playing board game it was always kind of mystery ;-)
Due to factions' leaders characters, soldiers, and soundtracks it’s much more climatic than board version (I have never supposed I can tell such a thing).
– Real player with 15.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4 Player Local Short Games.
I Beta tested this for a few weeks. I never tried online play, only local. It was rock solid when played locally. I found only one minor bug, and it was fixed before I reported it (someone else had reported it the day before).
I wasn’t even going to try it out, because this is (I thought) not the kind of board game I like. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong! Highly addictive, very fun, and super fast. My favorite play is versus 2 AI characters (you can play locally against 1-4 others, any combo of AI and humans). There’s some luck, but a lot of tactics (some strategy, but it’s often overshadowed by luck, so it’s mostly tactical). There are 3 levels of AI. I’ve lost to all 3, I’ve beaten all 3, but generally the AI levels accurately reflect their ability. I played only about 3 dozen games, so perhaps I’ll get to a point where the AI doesn’t provide enough of a challenge. But even if so, this definitely seems worth the money to me.
– Real player with 12.5 hrs in game
Istanbul: Digital Edition
It’s really cute. There’s something really pleasant about mooching about and filling one’s wheelbarrow and planning things and working out how to get your assistants back and just enjoying the mechanics. I enjoyed it more playing as a beginner against another beginner and exploring. I first thought there wasn’t enough interaction but actually the two lira cost to visit somewhere where one’s opponent’s assistant is standing can be subtly quite depleting. I really like it so far after two solo games and one online with a friend, who also liked it.
– Real player with 42.2 hrs in game
Istanbul is a new addition to my list of favourite games. I do not own the physical game but cannot imagine how it could be different from this digital version.
Gameplay is turn-based on a 4X4 grid. You move your game piece around the board, selecting your own route and performing a different action on each of the 16 tiles. The object of the game is to be the first to collect 5 rubies through the collection and sale/trade of goods. You can initially carry only a limited number of goods and travel only a short distance, but your abilities are augmented throughout the game by purchasing wagon upgrades and mosques. There are many paths to victory and the ability for some mild interference amongst players. I find the game a good mix of strategy with plenty of tactical decisions, and I like that you have control of your own fate and play style.
– Real player with 30.4 hrs in game
Steam: Rails to Riches
Would I recommend this game? Perhaps, but if it has to be a binary answer, I tend to say “no”. Once you figured out how to play this game, it is some fun if you like strategic board games. But the in-game tutorial wasn’t any helpful to me. In the end, I watched a video on YouTube explaining the physical edition of this game, and figured out the rest by observing the AI and trying out stuff, taking a couple hours untill I finally knew what I’m doing.
There are also some glitches. Rotating track pieces, or changing the piece after you accidentaly picked the wrong one, feels quite clumsy. Undoing an action requires redoing the whole phase. You cannot always zoom out, which is in particular a problem when moving goods. If you accidentally attempt to do an illegal move a warning pops up and you have to wait until it disappears by itself, which is quite annoying. Some elements (like the action cards) are unnecesserily small, so unless you know where you have to click, you don’t have an idea what you are doing (in particular when playing from the couch).
– Real player with 23.0 hrs in game
Some of the physical map expansions don’t seem available (yet? ever?) but it’s a good implementation of the boardgame. Fully cross-compatible between Steam and iOS – I’ve had two games going at a time for a while, and I can play my turns on either platform. Game servers have had a tendency to randomly go down on occasion during my several weeks playing so far, but only delays playing for some hours or overnight. Touch play on iOS phones can be a little finicky in dragging and dropping hexes; the undo button can certainly be your friend! Animations could use an option to speed up. (UPDATE CORRECTION: such an option already exists under the options menu, and the fastest version is handy for me.) I’ve turned off the repetitous and somewhat shrill sfx.
– Real player with 16.3 hrs in game
Small World
I don’t own the boardgame of this yet but a couple of my friends and I spent several hours playing last night and well play many more in the future. A charming game that is much deeper than its whimsical appearance may suggest with a lot of replayability despite the (at least currently) singular map.
I would love to see more expansions for it, especially the modular map, to come to the PC version and more races and powers means more options and crazy combos. Some of these combinations were laugh out loud funny (flying ghouls, peace-loving barbarians, etc.) so even more of these would enhance the game immensely.
– Real player with 408.6 hrs in game
TL;DR: It’s broken
You don’t have 165 hours in this, all single player. Nobody does. Why would you?
So here’s a review from a person who is deep in this game.
The boardgame is amazing, this is it.
Until a month ago, it worked great. It had a few glitches (Leprechauns would get slowdown issues while fast forwarding through their gold collection, etc.) that weren’t game breaking. Maybe every twentieth hour there’d be a game-breaking non-reproduceable bug that you’d never see again.
Not anymore. After purchasing the Royal Bonus DLC, I had 6 drops tonight. Reloaded, dropped from the game again. No error message, nothing. There’s a race that when selected… the game just stopped. Twice for me, tonight. Crazy.
– Real player with 170.2 hrs in game
Cue Club 2: Pool & Snooker
I spent many hours playing first Cue Club and I was sure it’s the best pool&snooker simulator we can find. But later I found this one on Steam.
What else can I say? Graphics is very nice. Music is cool too. I think that the physics is one of the strongest points of the game. We can feel like we were potting balls on the real table, with full control of the cue ball. We have a possibility to adjust the gameplay, in almost every aspect. Snooker on the blue table? Why not. Balls are too fast? You can try changing table speed. Every match can be different, if we want. And maybe the most important point - the game is dynamically changing. We have regular updates, which means we have more and more content, some bugs or errors quickly disappears. Bulldog Interactive makes really great work.
– Real player with 914.7 hrs in game
I have probably spent a few hundred hours playing its predecessor Cue Club, but that was almost 15 years ago and that too on a CRT monitor.
I only got like 12 hours here so far but so far it has been quite nice.
A brief comparison vis-a-vis its predecessor is present below for reference.
Better in Cue Club 2 - Game dynamics, game types, improved graphics, multiplayer, music
Better in Cue Club (older) - Cue and ball varieties, Bar system, smoke on the table
I think I will give the older one a go if I can find my iso collection. Hopefully it will run in compatibility mode.
– Real player with 317.0 hrs in game
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Collection
I like Sonic games but I’ve never been a huge fan. I do however love an arcade racing game and this is the best one I’ve played. The list of games this is better than is long, but it beats out Mario Kart and the Nickelodeon clone by a mile. Drifting quickly becomes intuitive, the AI usually isn’t as cheaty as other games, and the items are well balanced. There’s a decent variety of characters to choose from, many of which are from obscure SEGA properties which really helps if you don’t want to just play as Sonic or Knuckles.
– Real player with 20.6 hrs in game
Equals Mario Kart
– Real player with 20.5 hrs in game