Möbius Front ‘83
I think this is my first Steam review; I watched a talk from Zach and he said that he takes feedback seriously so I figured, why not?
I love Zachtronics’ coding games, and I also love turn-based wargames, so I was pretty excited for this one. Unfortunately I think they’ve missed the mark this time. There’s a lot to like, but while it has the pleasing simplicity of games like Into the Breach (single-digit numbers for health, damage, range, and speed, grid map, etc.) it lacking some of the elegance.
– Real player with 53.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cold War Hex Grid Games.
Möbius Front 83 is a simple and good game. Yet to finish it, but played enough of it to say what I think.
PROS:
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Great presentation, graphics is aesthetically pleasing, great animations of units – I love how dust animation is used to indicate direction of movement of vehicles.
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Outstanding sound design. Muffled sound of weapon fire and explosion sound like you hear weapons firing in the distance or if, like I imagine it would be to hear sound of weapons firing while you sit in an armoured vehicle.
– Real player with 39.7 hrs in game
Guardians of Infinity: To Save Kennedy
January 2087. Mankind has no time to lose. The time continuum is inexplicably unravelling by the hour, threatening to destroy the planet Earth.
Only one man can save time: temporal physicist Adam Cooper, inventor of a miraculous time travel machine - the Time Sphere. Cooper traces the cause of the time crisis to the events of November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a tragedy that should not have occurred in the normal course of history.
Determined to prevent President Kennedy’s death, Cooper assembles the Guardians of Infinity, a unique and diverse group of five individual agents who will journey back in time to November 15, 1963. You assume the identity of Adam Cooper. Your mission: to thwart the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and successfully return to the future with all of your agents.
You guide your agents and send them to critical cities such as Washington, D.C., Hyannis Port and Dallas where they must convince the President’s family, friends, and associates that his life is in jeopardy. Send your agents to see Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, or confront assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. This sets the stage for your climactic face-to-face meeting with President Kennedy where you must convince him of the impending danger awaiting him.
Can you save President Kennedy? Can you successfully return to the future? Can you discover the identity of the evil mastermind behind the assassination and the plot to destroy time?
Paragon Software’s Guardians of Infinity: To Save Kennedy is a complex strategy text game challenging the imaginative mind. This revolutionary game features:
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Unique character interaction with sophisticated human communication and emotional response so life-like you will think you are carrying on an actual conversation with your agents.
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Over 125 historical figures from the Kennedy era to utilize in your plan to save the President.
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A background novel explaining the time crisis in detail and setting the stage for your historical mission.
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A highly classified picture disk containing top secret illustrations of the events leading to your mission.
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A climactic meeting between you and President Kennedy.
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State of the art, highly advanced artificial intelligence techniques.
Read More: Best Cold War Text-Based Games.
The Prologue to a Dream of Home
One hundred years before the events of A Dream of Home, Dr. Seth Schumann’s reality simulation is nearly complete. With the birth of the Narcissus Project, Eridean scientists have discovered a means to project the soul as art. Who will finish Schumann’s unfinished masterpiece?
Read More: Best Cold War Experimental Games.
Red Matter
I have to confess that since getting my Oculus Rift in January I’ve been underwhelmed by the lack of professional titles that are available on VR. However THIS game is the whole reason why I got into VR. I’ve grown hesitant in purchasing any VR title lately because of just plain bad programming. I’ve been burned too many times. Red Matter is definitely a pleaser. If it were just a 3D puzzle game like Myst, it could be said that it was just a “good” effort but add VR to the mix with the impressive graphics and artwork and that’s what made this one a winner for me.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
***** PLAYED ENTIRELY ON LINUX VIA PROTON. NO WINDOWS HERE. *****
Summary
Good short walking simulator puzzle/exploration game, a few shortcomings but on the whole it is fun and elegant.
Longer evaluation
The bad
- This is a good but short game - I took about 5h including the time to solve the puzzles. If you read or watch the solutions online it will take even less time, say 2 to 3h. Also, since it is a fixed story with no branches and there is no action involved, replayability is zero. So you might prefer to buy it on sale.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was not well received by mainstream reviewers, but I personally enjoyed it a lot. Overall, it feels like a stripped down version of Mass Effect, but the combat stands out above other cover shooters. The game has a lot of flaws, but I encountered no bugs in the core game. The Hangar 6 DLC, however, would freeze briefly every few seconds and rendered the game nearly unplayable.
The Bureau’s combat puts you in control of William Carter, a rather generic protagonist with a gravelly voice. Conversations in the game are carried out with a radial menu lifted directly from Mass Effect. The dialogue isn’t terribly interesting, and some of the characters facial animations appeared to not actually be finished. Their mouths move with odd robotic motions, and their eyes look eerily dead. Carter himself, and some of the other core characters have much better, albeit repetitive animations. The story is forgettable overall, but moves the game on well enough. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the likes of Mass Effect though, and the fact that the developers chose to base their game design so heavily on Mass Effect is unfortunate given the weak story. Even still, the combat made the experience worthwhile.
– Real player with 54.6 hrs in game
“The Bureau: XCOM Declassified”. There are three major aspects of the game to talk about.
For one, this game was created for XCOM fans, with an extra layer of associations from the 60’s era. The player will see all the major events of an alien invasion on Earth, from the first contact to the last repel battle, which, by all standards, will unfold on an alien ship, from where the entire invasion is organized. Keen on the setting, the player will be able to examine in detail the sequential construction of the XCOM base, go over all its iconic locations, from the headquarters and medical unit to laboratories and workshops. The player will take part in the capture of aliens and in their interrogations (without vivisection). He will have to defend the base from a full-scale attack in one moment… All in the third-view perspective. If this is not a quality fan-service, then what else? Unfortunately, not all XCOM fans appreciated the change of genre from strategy to shooter, but for me personally, the Bureau in this aspect is a very successful project.
– Real player with 44.9 hrs in game
Project Blue Book: Hidden Mysteries
Pros:
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good artwork for scenes, hidden objects, and characters
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interesting storyline and plot
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cutscenes and audio that get the player immersed
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the player is given a “why” to what they are doing, rather than just mindlessly finding objects
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Steam achievements
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good price compared to some other hidden object games (I’m looking at you Artifex Mundi)
Cons:
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minor bugs
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limited options to alter gameplay to player’s wants/needs
Pro/con (player dependent):
- Explicitly hidden object orientated (if focusing on progressing in the game; the minigames are optional)
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Survive-able if you stand tutorial you can’t turn off.
Well I guess it expected for Blue book hidden object.
I was hoping for more. Like animated videos.
Like or dislike: Wait after 1 hour.
Other opinion:
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
Stellar Monarch
If you are familiar with Eurogame style tabletop games, then the abstractions and economic focus (vice military control) will feel very familiar to you. The game’s pillars are not based on American-style wargames.
Many devs who make 4X games seem to have the souls of engineers; Aurora 4x being the archetype. In those games micromanagement focuses on design, production, and use of things like ships. Mastery of those concepts leads to victory.
This game requires micromanagement and is numerically obtuse as well, but it focuses on the qualitative values of game elements (i.e. cards) instead of design, production and use of things.
– Real player with 30.3 hrs in game
There’s a lot left to be desired in this game. The UI is clunky, the artwork is amateurish (think early D&D), and there are some strong biases (no female officers, everyone is Caucasian). Maybe there’s a button to change that - but if there is, I havent dug it out from the UI yet (oh, that tiny button on the map pulls up a list of worlds? Which cannot be ordered to tell me most populous, most rebellious, etc?).
For all that, however, the game does two things well. It lives up to what it says it is - you’re the Emperor, not a warehouse clerk. You dont deal with the minutae of the empire, you have People for that - who are, admittedly, often trying to kill you. Or skim off the top. Or are just idiots. But you’re the Emperor, you have People for those People too; people with sharp, pointy objects - my purges havent reached Stalinist levels, but every once in a while, I do feel the need to prune my court of the more corrupt or stupid couriers or officers (‘fire’ all corrupt governors except the loyal ones? Meh heh heh heh).
– Real player with 23.5 hrs in game
Kosmokrats
I have no words.
This game is truly a hidden gem. I cannot understand how this game has only around 30 reviews.
Sure the gameplay might not be that much, yet it’s still fun, but the story is just so good, I was literally excited to see how things go in diffrent paths, I got all of the 17 endings and almost all of the achievements. Nearly all details are there, even the smallest ones. There’s quite a lot of humour too.
There are so many refrences to pop culture and other games. I still cannot fathom how this game was made by ONE person, with little help from others.
– Real player with 101.2 hrs in game
This is a narrative game revolving around completing drone assemblies of spaceships made out of tetris-like pieces. The central mechanics are serviceable and make for some interesting puzzles and an alternately frustrating and satisfying experience as you try to get pieces to connect by bumping and pulling them.
Whilst that wouldn’t be enough to make a great game by itself, the narrative is the real draw here, running a pastiche of soviet-era space and sci-fi references into the exploration of various characters - and enables you to change how the story turns out as these characters vie for power and try to keep Space Force going in very trying circumstances.
– Real player with 96.3 hrs in game
M.A.R.S.S.
Great game that I was surprised to see how much it has improved since the first version I played months ago. The color palette is perfect, the music fits in perfectly with the atmosphere of the game and the art is quite original.
I can say that this game is not made for people who want to go as fast as possible but for people who like to do puzzles and be patient. This does not mean that the game is slow and boring since it is made in a way that you can not get bored at any time, either because they add something new (mechanics, obstacles, robots, etc.) or because of the dynamic obstacles.
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
I have not yet played this game for hours on end. YET! I have to say this. This game is very VERY fun. It is funny and a well played game. Easy controls and the cartoon like appeal is even better. So far all I have seen are three different type of units to play but this game has potential to an epic level to keep building. Do I recommend? By all means YES. It is a fun pass time game and has funny story to it.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Ningakki XXVI FPS
It would be a decent idea to have a halo style multiplayer, and less mountain terrain. also possibly some horror aspects?
– Real player with 1.8 hrs in game