The Last Wulin
The game is simple and fun.
The game cycle is fight a battle, earn xp and money, use the upgrade your buildings to gain more warriors, equipment and modifiers to decrease healing cost or increase income and caps. Fight next battle. Repeat.
But each round the bandits get stronger so if you don’t pick the right upgrades, or put your warriors in bad starting positions, then you won’t be able to keep up. So while it seems very simple, there’s planning and decisions to make that cost. I played for 18 minutes and lost three times. It was fun, look forward to learning more about it.
– Real player with 0.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cold War Management Games.
ICBM
ICBM is a great way to kill an hour, along with a few hundred million people. It’s got a bit of a learning curve to it but it’s simple enough that you can pick most of it up in 2 or 3 games.
What I find interesting (and a little terrifying) about ICBM is how nothing is permanent and how the game always keeps you at the edge of your seat, because much like a real nuclear war, you could find yourself and everything you’ve built being vaporized by thermonuclear weapons at a moment’s notice. If you build an airbase, the enemy can nuke that. If you build missile silos, the enemy can nuke that. If you build submarines, the enemy nuke that. The game effectively works out to be a scramble between you and your enemies as you try to keep tabs on where they’re keeping their city-melting goodies, as well as protecting your own, either by keeping them well-hidden, or building enough defences that the enemy can’t smash through them until you’ve already turned their continent into a giant radioactive parking lot. Then there’s also the question of “Should I attack first or is that going to end horribly for me and 85% of my country’s population”, which then promptly leads to the question of “But If I don’t do anything, are all my cities going to be on fire in 5 minutes” which means you’re always guessing, or always trying to find out.
– Real player with 385.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cold War Destruction Games.
I had to go back and change my original positive review to inform you not to buy this. Multiplayer community is dead and its been less than a month since the game lauched.
Game already has rampant hacking which ruins the game for everyone. Not to mention that the actual game itself is not really that fun after a few games.
Matches are 95% build up and 4% figuiring out who to attack and 1% fun combat. Most games you’ll build up for 35mins to literally not be able to use a single one of your nukes due to the game ending due to nuclear contamination via a massive barrage two guys release at once and even if you launched right then your nukes would not hit the ground before their nukes end the game.
– Real player with 43.3 hrs in game
Xenonauts 2
XENONAUTS-2 is a vast single player strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending our planet from alien invasion.
Battle the extraterrestrials in tense, complex turn-based combat across a variety of maps and missions, recovering and researching their technology to unlock new weapons and equipment!
Take a global view with the real-time strategic management layer: you must establish and develop your bases, conduct research, battle for air supremacy and try to keep the panic level in your funding regions under control.
The strategic and tactical layers of the game are directly related, with ground missions affecting the overall balance of the Geoscape and your research efforts on the recovered items unlocking new equipment for your squads and aircraft. Every management decision you make filters down to the troops you control in battle; every shot you fire could change the balance of strategic power.
Can you hold off the invasion long enough to discover a way to defeat the alien forces?
No knowledge of the previous game is required to play - XENONAUTS-2 is a standalone title with its own setting and narrative.
Key Features
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Ground Combat: The highly-detailed turn-based combat system gives you fine control over your soldiers as they battle the aliens across multiple different mission types and numerous varied environments. The day / night cycle and destructible battlefields open up endless tactical possibilities to defeat your enemies, and your soldiers will grow stronger as they gain combat experience - provided you can keep them alive!
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Strategic Management: A complex strategic layer allows you to coordinate the defence of our planet. Establish bases to extend your reach and use customisable interceptors to shoot down attacking UFOs, then deploy your soldiers to secure resources. Capturing crash sites can secure alien technology and live specimens for research, whereas protecting regions from alien activity and terror attacks will protect your funding and prevent them surrendering to the aliens.
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In-depth Simulation: The structure of Xenonauts-2 is not linear; no two campaigns unfold in exactly the same way. Every element of this complex interlocking simulation has been designed to create maximum coherence between the strategic and tactical layers: small decisions can have an impact across the entire game.
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Extensive Tech Tree: XENONAUTS-2 contains a vast variety of aircraft, vehicles, weapons, armour, and battlefield equipment for you to experiment with. and a deep research tree with over a hundred projects to unlock. Play the game the way you want to play, devising your own tactics and strategies to defeat the extraterrestrial threat!
Key Improvements from XENONAUTS-1
In addition to the new modular upgrade systems mentioned previously, here is a very small selection of key changes and enhancements:
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Improved visuals across all parts of the game, including full 3D tactical environments with a rotatable camera!
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A more detailed and immersive Geoscape simulation incorporating greater player choice and stronger elements of territory control!
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More environments and maps to fight in - including our new Jungle and Boreal biomes!
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New aliens have been added and many existing ones have been redesigned, all of which will benefit from our new and improved AI system!
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A larger research tree with more lore and an expanded variety of equipment for your soldiers to use in battle!
Read More: Best Cold War Turn-Based Combat Games.
Xenonauts
More faithful than the modern XCOM games. You can build multiple bases to your own style and needs! Multiple drop ships, not a single one and an anthill for you to save the world with. Troops are expendable like they should be! Yay!
Eagerly awaiting the sequel, and hopefully eventual Terror From the Deep spiritual successor.
Only thing letting it down is lack of final polish - quicksave works, quickload doesn’t for some reason, and there’s a few minor glitches like the camera being stuck panning in a direction after an alien turn which requires a quick reload to fix, etc. Sometimes the AI acts a little omnipotent, such as sitting in a corner in a building never moving until the moment you get close enough for it to take a fair shot at your soldiers and then dip back into cover again, even though it shouldn’t have known you were there.
– Real player with 347.6 hrs in game
Good: Mostly faithful recreation of XCOM UFO Defense but with significantly better controls and a cool Cold War setting. No class restrictions like Firaxis XCOM and fewer restrictions in general. You make your own classes. Four gun and explosive tiers.
Nice, detailed lore with the Xenopaedia. Great music overall. Overall good weapon design, with humans getting their own distinctly designed plasma weapons. Sound effects are fantastic, especially for high level weapons and explosions. They even have different sounds for the weapon reloads.
– Real player with 140.7 hrs in game
Mr. Prepper
I’ll be honest and say that I wasn’t sure if I liked it the first few hours but boy did I change my mind. I was expecting to actually have to survive in the shelter I created and see the aftermath of the wasteland left after the world goes to hell and I was puzzled as to why this sort of game play wasn’t added in but it’s still a fantastic base building , survival game and I hope they’ll add DLC in the future, where you’ll actually be able to survive in the bunker or even get to experience what happens after landing the rocket .
– Real player with 448.5 hrs in game
Mr. Prepper. A survival base building game that’s not about survival and not about base building but purely story-driven.
TL;DR: If you can get it cheap (10 USD/EUR), give it a shot. But if you want a survival challenge or expect another game like This War Of Mine, STAY AWAY. It has SO much unused potential. It could be so much more.
PROS:
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Interesting story. Mr. Prepper is not your average guy.
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The typical “just one more day” game design that sucks you in.
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3 (4) NPCs you interact with that are all kinda likable.
– Real player with 27.6 hrs in game
Mr. Prepper: Prologue
The Meta:
This is a free prologue, as a feature-limited demo of the full game which expands upon the content that was made available in the demo from July. You have absolutely no reason not to try this.
I’ve played rather extensively through the beta testing, and can attest that the devs are incredibly responsive to the player community, both for bug fixing and implementing player-suggested improvements or modifications, and I fully expect that behavior to apply to the full game.
The game includes no microtransactions.
– Real player with 70.7 hrs in game
Originally, I thought the prologue would end in 30 days at most, but later I found out that I was still too young and naive. On the first day of the second month, I angrily ate all my food. I have many cans which used all the money I made to buy, and with lots of blueberry milkshakes and carrot soup. It’s ridiculous that I didn’t have diarrhea after eating it all! Ok, I have to quit the game in dismay!
Talk about the advantages and shortcomings of this game. This game is still very creative, painting style is good, it is said that the official version has more content. In terms of content, the game is undoubtedly a success. But the game also has some shortcomings:
– Real player with 7.6 hrs in game