Slipways
Okay so I’ve only played this for 28 hours. I might review this again at 250 hours and start a class action against Gabe for wasting my time. As it stands now this is my cup of tea. I like Euro games with a flow. Normally with a few people to balance the strategising. This is a solo game but captures the dynamic feeling of adjusting on the fly.
EVERYTHING IS IN FRONT OF YOU
You can connect the dots from the start or you can make incredibly predictive strategic placements to backfill.
I am not interested in games that make me go look at an Excel spreadsheet just so I can play. This game has all of it inside the game in an amazing way. Its inbuilt instructional tab is an exemplary way to get people rolling with all the components they need to know. Come back to this after a few runs and fill the gaps you missed.
– Real player with 57.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
SUMMARY: A must-buy streamlined space-empire management game that’s easy to play, challenginghas surprising depth, and plenty of game modes. The kind of game you can play in an hour - or constantly.
Slipways is a game of space-empire management that is so streamlined it approaches being a puzzle game. Yes, there’s exploring, tech trees, and more. But boiled down to basics, you get both the click-of-idea thrill of a puzzle game AND the fun of managing your space empire. The combination is heady, fun - and challenging.
– Real player with 49.5 hrs in game
Up Left Out
Up Left Out is a sliding block puzzle game where the primary gimmick is that the blocks have to be slid out of the pegs holding them before they can be moved around like normal. For the starting levels, removing the blocks from the pegs is all you have to do, but later on you’ll also have to create complete lines from red fragments on top of the blocks, as well as contend with other mechanics like rotating blocks and moving walls.
My main problem with this game is that it feels half-finished. There’s only around 50 levels, and considering how every time a new mechanic is introduced the game uses a few levels to ease you into how it works, it feels like only one half of the package is made of actual puzzles. Of those, the majority felt more like busywork than brainteasers, and when I reached the point where the game became engaging enough that I felt it was about to truly START, I suddenly got a “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING”, followed by a few bonus levels easier than what I just played. Disappointing, to say the least.
– Real player with 2.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Singleplayer Games.
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Up Left Out is another short minimalist puzzle game from the maker of Hook, Klocki and Push but this time you are sliding blocks around.
There are various goals to accomplish. It starts off simply, you just need to free each block from it’s holding pin. Other mechanics are slowly introduced, blank blocks that just get in the way, patterns and lines on top of the blocks that need to be matched together to end the puzzle, buttons that rotate all the pieces and walls/gates that can be manipulated to stop blocks at specific places. These walls demonstrate the fundamental mechanic, blocks slide as far as they can until they hit something. Some of the later and best puzzles contain blocks that can only be moved once that pattern on top of them is replicated on other movable blocks.
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Terraformers: First Steps on Mars
Interesting theme, the graphics are simple but cool, the music is nice, it does run on GNU/Linux, but after eight hours of repetitive play, I wouldn’t call this a civ strategy kind of game, but more like a deck building card game, with lots of randomness, which gets you nowhere. You just need to be lucky to get the right cards at the right time for the right random spots to get a better score. No matter how good your planning is, there is too much luck involved. Maybe the 30 days span of a gameplay is too short for seeing the bigger picture, this is just a demo after all, but that’s my take on the current game. I do wish the devs good luck and I hope the final game offers a better experience.
– Real player with 8.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
A pretty solid board game
Game is very reminiscent of the popular board game Terraforming Mars, with some slight changes.
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Your starting hand is always the same 2 cards
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Beyond Oxygen, H2O and Temperature, there’s a nebulous “atmosphere” terraform setting
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Ever 10 years you select a leader, who has special abilities and traits that can be used on your turn
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Pop happiness is measured and scored.
Overall its fun for a few play throughs, but with the same 6 leaders, same starting hand, and hard 30 turn limit, you’ll only have fun for a bit.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
Isle of the Crown
Right now you need a controller to play the game and a friend to play it with. Those are things that will be addressed in future though.
I think it’s a fun strategy game and would recommend it if you’re a fan of the genre with the above caveats in mind :)
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
Microcosmum 2
You are a collective microorganic alien intelligence.
You used to be the dominant species of a whole planet, but you had to leave your home since then.
Having spent many long years in space, you’ve finally landed on a habitable planet. You are to revive your “empire” and become small, yet great, once again.
A relaxing strategy game featuring unconventional gameplay. Your objectives include development, evolution, border expansion and protection of your hive.
Organism constructor:
Receive new details from defeated enemies and construct your own organisms. Every detail has a set of particular features, sometimes bestowing the organism with special abilities, such as slime bomb, spikes and much more.
World map:
The game takes place on a world map, split into locations. Everything is fully real-time. Opponents capture more land area, compete with each other, extract resources and develop said areas.
Environment:
All locations have particular environmental conditions. Organisms may freeze or overheat. They may mutate due to radiation or receive bonuses from alkaline or acidic environments.
Acclimatize your organisms to certain environmental conditions in the incubator.
You are able to terraform your lands, creating extreme environments - beneficial to your organisms, yet deadly to your opponents.
Extract resources, erect “buildings”, capture and defend land areas on the global map.
You can also feed your organisms, much like fish:)
Valknut
I have played the game over the last couple of days. The guide someone setup is quite good and some of the video reviews have good informations. While the game does run it still has some major issues to make it a fhinished game. I would say this is still in Beta for all practical purposes. Here is what I found so far.
1. As others have indicated it does not have tool tips when hovering over items either in on the map or in the screen showing things like inventory.
2. When selecting a dwelling it does not show how many people use it.
– Real player with 12.7 hrs in game
The game features a ten-mission campaign, randomly generated skirmish modes, and a three-scenario tutorial (although you can’t access the third mission). The interface is entirely too small at high resolutions, there a limited keyboard hotkeys for performing actions, you have to manually rotate buildings (it won’t figure out the correct orientation on its own), and informative tool-tips about population and resources are not present (I have no idea what half of the icons mean, nor how many people work in a building or live in a house). Raw resources (wood, iron, stone, clay) are collected at certain buildings and processed at others (pottery, jewelry, rope, tools); only certain resources can be produced on each island (typically limited to specific crops), which may have had interesting strategic repercussions if the rest of the game was better. People randomly die due to hypothermia or starvation before you have a chance to build the appropriate buildings and even if sufficient supplies are available. Also, resource stocks can fail to grow (especially wood) with no indication as to why (is the wood being used? do you not have enough population to collect wood? is there an extra processing step?). Valknut is an unfinished game that doesn’t provide enough information on how your town is running.
– Real player with 5.2 hrs in game