Age of Gladiators
The “potential scenario” listed in the “About this game” section is a surprisingly reasonable introduction to the game. The options suggested there truly are all available to you, and the considerations involved are also real. However, it also implies a bit more freedom of choice than is truly available. Regardless, if the ‘potential scenario’ looks compelling to you, that alone is probably enough to suggest you would enjoy the game.
The game is solid, and worth trying. I will list what I believe the strengths and weaknesses are, with a primary focus on the weaknesses. I will focus on the weaknesses because overall, the game works. The game is fun. You will see that I feel like it has a lot of as-yet unrealized potential, but that does not mean I do not think this is a solid title. It is quite solid, and while it does some things wrong, it does plenty right.
– Real player with 139.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Addictive Strategy Games.
So this game has been out for well over a year and there’s no one new buying this game anyway so there is no point to me writing this review. But I’m going to do it anyway because fuck you that’s why.
As you can see by my stupid number of hours played in this game I actually enjoy it. Seriously I don’t know how the hell I played this game for 41 hours without blowing my brains out even once still astonishes me. I suppose it’s because I am a big fan of management simulation games and what’s cooler than a gladiator simulation game?
– Real player with 64.0 hrs in game
Zeliria Sanctuary
Zeliria Sanctuary, produced by Salangan Games, is a visual novel that I had the pleasure to play as tester during these Christmas Holidays.
Allow me to start this brief review with this consideration: the team delivers what it promises.
The game did not disappoint my expectations in terms of plot, characters and quality of the drawings.
Especially the final arts in “ realistic style “, truly stunning.
Let’s talk about the plot: when people play a visual novel, they like to be the architects of their own fate, they like to feel as if their choices matters. And they do, in Zeliria Sanctuary.
– Real player with 37.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Addictive Visual Novel Games.
-
HUMKEY : I’m NOT a Hamster!!!
-
MAXX : And I’m NOT an Idiot!!
Maxx (our Male forces-trained protagonist) is a test subject during an experimental space project that seemingly fails for the researchers yet our adventures start when Maxx’s teleportation sends him landing onto the BURROW of the hibernating Salangan Humkey (the Rat who isn’t a Hamster Deity) on the planet Zeliria. Only Maxx can see & hear Humkey and, as the story develops and Maxx encounters female characters, he becomes known as the ‘Voice of Salangan Humkey’ - akin to a Messiah-like role.
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
Uplink
Out of a lot of the hacking games I’ve played in my time, this has to have it’s seat right next to Hacknet, as one of my ‘Two best hacking games I’ve played’.
To some extent, it is pretty much an RPG, just for hacking.
You take up a contract - Or a ‘Quest’ - You do what the contract says - Destroy a mainframe, or change a social security record, et cetera - and then you get paid with a handful of credits - Or “Gold” - which you then use to upgrade your system, be it a Gateway upgrade, a new processor, or applications that will further unlock your hacking capabilities. - Or in terms of the RPG comparison here; You level up your character, you get new weapons, and unlock new skills.
– Real player with 269.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Addictive Strategy Games.
This is really everything I wanted from an indie hacking game. It is a vast and glorious sandbox brimming with opportunity. To tell its tale, let me start the story about twenty-five years ago, with a little gem from Interplay called “Neuromancer.”
Neuromancer was an amazing piece of work, for its time. A point and click adventure game, yes, but with a vast collection of BBS-like “sites” in “cyberspace,” which could be accessed and navigated spatially, a sea of semitransparent polygons on a sprawling grid. They called the book “prophetic” in its vision of what a global computer network might be like, but the game was similarly visionary, in that it offered a classic milestone-and-unlocked-door-driven main story, but with a vast and layered world of enriching side stories and tiny details easily overlooked, that add depth and character to the world in which your character lives. This was a level of detail and nuance and supporting gameworld-enrichment that Bioware would go on to become famous for, in its epic D&D games of the Nineties, and in its later adventure games, but in the Eighties, on computers that were much more limited in resources, this was a bigger feat, and a bigger surprise to the player. You could just play Neuromancer to win it, or you could play it to learn about it, follow the exchanges on the PAX and on private sites, the private message exchanges between AIs. You could learn so much more that way, if you were clever and patient enough to retain it, to piece it together, and to make sense of it all.
– Real player with 109.0 hrs in game