Dinosaur Fossil Hunter: Prologue
This exceeded my expectations, and was very satisfying to play. For a free to play demo, I think this is great for a sim. A nice backstory, and a great taste of the full game. The idea of going from GPR to dig, encasing the fossils, shipping them, THEN cleaning the bones and building the displays was the entire spectrum, and it’s hands-on, not teleporting to the site. You have to drive there, set up the perimeter, and dig that stuff out yourself! Inspect what you dig, encase it in plaster, put it in the case, ship it, it’s the entire process, and that’s what I want in a sim. Also, you get achievements for a demo! One of them is still vexing me, but I’ll get it. Photos in the slideshow have images not in this prologue, but there is plenty here for an afternoon of fun, and I’m going to purchase day one. There’s a bit of noise about the lack of an avatar driving the car, but that is not an issue for me, and will likely be fixed in the full release of the game. Perhaps if/when gender and identity issues come up, but honestly there is no spoken dialogue, and gender-neutrality should be important in a game like this. Put tinted windows on the dang car, with a shadow, and it’s not an issue. There is enough depth and flexibility in gameplay for me.
– Real player with 6.4 hrs in game
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Nauseatingly bad.
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Don’t get me wrong, there’s a good idea for a young children’s game here. Visually it’s interesting and there’s an attempt at adding variety with mini-games.
Unfortunately everything about it is just done poorly. The controls are slippery with a terrible lag even after turning up mouse acceleration. The camera is nauseating and just kind of floats and drifts, not always in the direction you wanted to go. I can’t go more than a few minutes without a glitch either visually or functionally, with something getting stuck on something or something falling through something. I’ve seen amateur games with more polish and less problems.
– Real player with 3.7 hrs in game
Brink of Extinction
Brink of Extinction is a small but rich tower defense set in a post apocalyptic future. If you enjoy tower defenses then I would give this a try, especially if you enjoy strategy and planning ahead.
The game certainly leads on the difficult side. You start of with a large pool of credits, and get a couple of bucks for each enemy you kill, more money the stronger they are. This results in your initial placement and planning being crucial; not to say you can’t change things up mid game, but it can be quite hard to recover from a really bad plan at the beginning. Make no mistake, this game is hard, and you will need to play some levels multiple times to see which strategies do and don’t work. If you don’t enjoy repeating a level and getting better at it each time till you win, you might not like this, however I found that to be part of its appeal. It forces you to really think about what you’re doing.
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
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Warcraft III was my first exposure to tower defense games, and I became a fan of the genre many years ago. The great thing about Steam, is there are just so many options. There are many enjoyable tower defense games on Steam, some can be quite deep with mechanics and level layouts. Brink of Extinction is not one of these though.
First of all the game runs fine, I completed it and even tried out one of the endless maps for the score achievement. This game is just not very enjoyable, combined with some bad level design and fun ends up being at the Brink of Extinction. Most levels consist of a few predesignated building areas in a claustrophobic environment with the same few car assets peppered throughout. You have a choice of towers and some power ups you can use. It seems best to just spend all your funds on one or two towers to upgrade the stats as you wont do enough damage if you build on all of the limited spacing you do have. The power ups in my opinion are just too overpriced in the campaign to be viable, but they are useful in endless mode once funding is not an issue. So you place your towers and giant insects and Arachnids begin to spawn. Now you play the can my towers tank and kill these before they wreck what I’m suppose to protect game. Eventually you figure out that there are really only two viable towers which adds even less choices for your limited area.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
VIP Rebels
" The horn sounds…, the gate opens,… YOUR RUN STARTS NOW! …"
How to play
You will start each game selecting three VIPs, each with their own unique special skill. After you select your VIP, you start your run. Whenever you start a run, you’ll choose how many villagers you use to collect resources like wood, food, and gold. The villagers drop resources at your treasure wagon and look for new sources automatically throughout the run.
When the gate opens, you will enter the procedurally generated lands of the Red, where you’ll need to get as far as you can in order to claim the best rewards. Venture further and further and more secret rewards and treasure will be granted.
You’ll have VIPs such as King Midas who has the ability to turn enemies into gold, the Viking, a dragon-summoning Nordic god, Blackbeard the pirate, ordering deadly cannonballs to obliterate enemies, or the Rocket Man with the power to land two rockets simultaneously on top of your enemies. These are just a few of the 25 VIPs that you’ll encounter along the way. More are planned and I’m looking to bring this number closer to 100.
There are big pirate armies that lie ahead of you, with bands of rebels hidden away in bushes and villages to slow your progress. Whether castles stand in the way or not, you will need to overcome the odds and create an army with the right mixture of units to counter the enemies ahead of you. Will you pick archers to mow down the slow infantry and risk them being charged down by cavalry? The choice is yours.
Once you finally get stopped, you’ll collect treasure and rewards, unlock, and upgrade more VIPs and return to the open gate once more.
So in short:
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Select unique VIPs giving you strategic advantages.
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Collect resources and build your army.
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Take control of dragons and transform sheep into bloodthirsty warmachines
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Win & lose big battles in your fight for loot.
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Claim big rewards, unlock and upgrade new VIPs as you progress.
Quick note of the developer
_Hi there,
I just wanted to say thanks for showing an interest in the thing I’ve been passionate about for the last 3 years. We’ve made this journey together and I hope that you’re as hyped about this project as I am. :)
I started out wanting to create an RTS game for the Age of Empires fan inside me that doesn’t have the ability to sink hours into playing a game. The game is a bunch of quick fun runs, intertwined with big battles and resource gathering. On average, each run should take between 10 and 15 minutes.
If you like what I’m doing here and want to keep updated, please add the game to your Steam Wishlist to support me.
I will always love you for it!
¯_(ツ)_/¯
R._
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Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This was a beautiful game. It’s a game you could theoretically finish without much effort and time, but the world, the side characters, and the cultures played so deep a part in the story that I found myself sinking 200+ hours into it and not thinking twice. There is so much here in lore picked up in scraps and holograms hidden on your travels.
The thing that stuck out to me the most here was the relationships. Helping the people of the world was as important to the story as anything else, and it comes full circle
! at the end when those people that you choose to be compassionate to (or not) show up in the final epic battle (or they don’t, depending on how you interacted with them) . There are as many opportunities to show compassion and to be human as there are to kill things. It is such a human story that sets itself apart from your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. It’s exploration and mystery as much as it is combat. It’s learning about people and cultures as much as it is learning about the machines, the world, and the secret of what Zero Dawn really is. This is not to distract from the story which was absolutely unique and incredible in how it unfolds, especially as you get closer to the heart of the truth.
– Real player with 226.4 hrs in game
Horizon Zero Dawn is an awesome and fun game, definitely up there at the top of my list of favorite games.
It feels a bit like a fusion of the Tomb Raider reboot series and The Witcher 3 to me. Many of the game mechanics seem very familiar from either of the two but are somewhere in between. The climbing especially feels like somebody wanted a TW3 like game with climbing, was inspired by Tomb Raider (or Uncharted for that matter) and implemented a light version of that. Saying this however is not to diminish what the game achieves in any way. The net result of it is a very entertaining, fun to play set of game mechanics, from combat to stealth, a bit of crafting, riding, etc. (As with the other games many of the combat subtleties you only really learn on the harder difficulties.)
– Real player with 149.3 hrs in game