KingSim
Alright first that 12 hours is probably 4-2 hours off, I used steam remote play to play the game for some of my play time, I believe the game was left running well I was doing other things, I find this convent as I can return to the game where I left off with my phone, but it dose inflate the hrs on record. It’s likely closer to 8 or 9 at the time of this post.
Kingsim is a game of choice and resource management, it’s ment to played much more then once, likely you won’t reach the end on your first attempt unless your very lucky, but dieing in this game is an achievement, and you can save at any point. I find this game really fun and have played it quite a bit and I still haven’t gone on all the paths that are in the game. I’m trying to avoid spoilers in this review, so it’s been a bit akword writing, next I guess I’ll address some things from the negative reviews that are here
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Diplomacy Political Sim Games.
A very fun, but very short game. A lot like Long Live the Queen but less VN style… Sort of. You can marry monster girls, or humans if you’re into that sorta thing. I married a mermaid and summoned an adorable Cthulhu to spread joy and death across the world.
There are very many possibilities but the game generally ends around 10 days and then you can go into an endless sort of sandbox mode where the only thing to do is conquer or make peace with your surrounding neighbors.
Honestly I’d say my 3 hours was worth $10, but I really hope to see more content from the devs for this game soon. There’s a lot of possibilities yet.
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
Eloquence
Learn a fully functional symbol language by interacting with villagers that settled on an active volcano! Collect and apply phrases and words you may not immediately understand and discover that language is an expression of humanity.
Eloquence is a point-and-click language puzzle game. You learn to understand and eventually express yourself in a symbol language. The languages found in Eloquence are living and are used by the characters inhabiting the world. Test collected phrases and words on villagers and study their response, to find out what the symbols mean.
Read More: Best Diplomacy Conversation Games.
Europa Universalis IV
I’m a divorced woman of color. Recently, my ex got our son Larry a video game called Europa Universalis for his 14th birthday. It seemed good for him, because it takes place in the distant past and he’s always been interested in history, so it seemed like a nice enough game, no graphic violence or anything, at least until I sat down and watched him play at it. I don’t know what sorts of racists made this game, but it’s basically a colonialism and genocide justification simulator. If you want to survive, you need to have access to money and soldiers, and the most (only) reliable way to ensure you have enough is to attack and conquer your weaker neighbors. If you don’t, you can be sure someone else will eventually come attack and conquer you.
– Real player with 4558.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Diplomacy Grand Strategy Games.
So EU4 was a good game. Then they released the 450+ ‘bug fixes’. The entire game outside Europe has now been put back behind a new paywall unless you have the paradise DLC as it is now impossible to develop your provinces to spawn institutions as army tradition gives you impossibly high dev costs. I played one game and when I needed to dev an institution from a 1/1/1 grasslands province and starting cost is 120. That is only with 33 army tradition giving a 150% penalty. This was a custom nation and I had -20% dev cost. Good job paradox forcing everyone to buy your shittiest dlc in order to use any of the other DLC’s you have paid for. The game is now broken outside of Europe without the paradise dlc. You make me sick Paradox!
– Real player with 1819.5 hrs in game
HighFleet
Great game that combines strategic gameplay similar to submarine simulations with tactical air battles between flying tanks.
You command a fleet with the aim of capturing the enemy capital city, while fighting off enemy fleets searching for you. Fleet movement is a game of cat and mouse using a very well realised radar system, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, intercepting enemy radio signals and much more. When two fleets meet, the game switches to tactical battle in which you directly pilot a ship and fight against the enemy. You can design individual ships in your fleet from the groundup and then use them.
– Real player with 233.4 hrs in game
The all-time best ever flying submarines in the sky game ever made. Although I have spent most of my time obsessing over ship design, “submarine airship game” is the best description for this FTL-like rogue-like UNFORGIVINGLY Difficult game I can come up with; in campaign, you spend a lot of your time trying to manage 15 different simple things (signals analysis, threat tracking, resources and fleet management, navigation, combat, landing, and then the global story/factions/political overlay of story driven decisions). The ship editor will drive you on the express train to crazytown; every. single. decision. carries huge implications for your campaigns when you start running custom ships, and this gets into the infinitely complex fleet design (what roles do you want your ships to play is critical, and the game lets you figure out your own ways to fail). This is one of my favorite games of 2021.
– Real player with 84.1 hrs in game
Shutterbug Stud
Shutterbug Stud is a fun, character driven, scavenger hunt, where the player is commissioned to take pictures of local girls for a calendar. As such, the player must roam the town and countryside looking for willing girls to photograph, and fulfilling tasks for ~almost~ willing girls. For every (quality) picture you deliver you are paid, and are one step closer to the goal of a finished calendar and, hopefully, a fat wallet.
An RPG Maker game, enjoy exploring the town, seeing the sights (and the girls) and maybe finding some hidden secrets to discover.
The core game is filled with characters and pictures that range from cute to a little suggestive. A planned expansion has pictures ranging from suggestive to very suggestive, but still fairly tame. Further expansions (or third party art) may push these limits even further.
FEATURING:
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• 12 Major Characters
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• 24 Reward Pictures
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• Scenic Morlock Lake (Town and Environs) to Explore
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• Standard RPG Maker Controller Support
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• Art package free (found in core game files)
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• DLC Coming Soon!
Space Wreck
Inspired by classic western isometric RPGs (Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum), this is hardcore role playing game set in space 20 years post major conflict over asteroid mining.
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Built on classic RPG fundaments
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Post-apocalyptic space exploration.
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Focus on role-playing (…sometimes to the extreme!).
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It’s ok to fail - because there are many ways to solve every problem.
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Completely optional combat.
Role playing
This is the most important part of the game - you can play whatever character you wish, play however you want to. You can be smooth talker, sneaky hacker or brawling bully; or something else - it’s your choice: distribute the points in character creation and make decisions when playing.
But once the character has been created, be ready for not only abilities but also limitations.
For example, characters with low CHARM value will find that often NPCs won’t even talk to them because of how repulsive they are; or speech - if low, that means you are a shy introvert, unable to initiate the dialog yourself. Lacking computer skills (scitec)? You accidentally crash terminals when trying to use them. Low tinker? Tools might break in your inept hands. Sometimes even too much is not good - too strong (PHYSICAL) and you cannot squeeze into vents thus unable to make use of some shortcuts. And so on - your character stats will signifcantly affect your gameplay style.
Multiple solutions
There are always multiple ways to solve problems (quests), usually tied to your character skills and abilities - play to your character’s strengths, work around its weaknesses. For example, if you cannot convince someone to help you, hack his computer and blackmail him. Or just straight-up pickpocket the guy - all items are always realistically placed in NPC inventories.
Note: there are usually 3-8 ways to complete a quest in the game. They can trigger related events in near future or lead to a different ending in the end slides.
Choice & Consequence
Your actions, your decisions matter to the game world. Make an enemy, you may need him/her later on. Opt for an easier solution to the current problem and you might have to deal with a bigger problem later. And in the end, you will get a unique game ending showing you the future fate of your character and those who he/she impacted through gameplay.
Non-linear world
You have an objective but how you approach it - it’s up to you; the game map is as open to you as reasonably possible (it’s a stranded spaceship after all) and there is no single true path to the end. If you know where to go, what to do - you can try to sequence break the game. Combine that with multiple solutions to every quest and you’ve got freedom to spare.
Optional but unlimited violence
You can complete the game without killing anyone. In fact, combat is completely optional. But if you want to fight - there are no immortal or “essential” NPCs - everyone everywhere has finite amount of HP and is fair game.
Turn-based combat
Game features old-school tactical turn-based combat with grid based movement, action points and dice rolls.
Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall
It’s hard to really describe what makes this game so much fun.
Is it the ability to save the Warsaw Pact? Maybe, but that’s not quite it.
Is it the possibility of reforming the Eastern Bloc? Hm, perhaps…oh, no, got it!
It’s the ability to do both those things, while building an excessive number of TV towers and imagining that you’re broadcasting the amazing in-game soundtrack to every citizen of Europe, constantly, at 100 decibels, forever.
Seriously though, this is one of the best ‘small’ games I’ve played in a while now. It’s fairly short, spanning three ingame years, and although you can go longer, not much really happens after 1992, but what happens in those years is enthralling.
– Real player with 258.0 hrs in game
Reminds me of the old-school Paradox Interactive games. You want tooltips? Clear explanations of what is what? Too bad. Stare at a statistics screen for a while, you’ll figure it out.
There is a neat game here, but good luck surviving for even a year. It is very hard.
edit: Okay, I have played enough I can write a little more.
Did you play Crisis in the Kremlin? It was about leading the USSR through the time of political turmoil and reform when there were many factors that would eventually bring the country to its collapse into many autonomous states. In the game you had a lot of freedom to pursue your goal. You could become a liberal reformer, play as a hardline-communist or somewhere in-between with many other variations. However, you were the main actor. You could decide how you would play. The only real condition of the game was “don’t let the USSR collapse outright.”
– Real player with 250.2 hrs in game
At Eve’s Wake
High-quality visual novel with multiple endings, fantastic graphic and sound component, and intriguing premise.
The Good Parts:
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Fascinating set-up of family ties based on cult-like faith, bloody competition, and something outright paranormal with overall dysfunction taken to the next level.
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Great writing throughout. It manages to introduce a complex fictional idea in a manner that captures attention and makes you ponder.
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Atmospheric world-building. There’s sinister feeling intertwined with some outright shocking moments. “At Eve’s Wake” isn’t horror in the pure sense of the word, but more in a psychological one, so it has a very well-done horror element burning its way through the game, sometimes on slow simmer, sometimes as a wildfire.
– Real player with 11.3 hrs in game
Ahhhhh I was so excited for this to come out and it’s finally here! I’ve just finished my first playthrough and it lived up to my hype, if you’re having any doubts about picking up the full game then please try out the demo and you’ll see what I mean.
-Gorgeous art and music, just a delightful atmosphere throughout
-A well developed and intriguing story of mystery, murder and mishaps
-An incredible amount of dialogue choices with a variety of endings seemingly possible depending on them.
I love visual novels and narrative-driven games, so I feel that I know what I’m talking about to some degree, and I say this- At Eve’s Wake is a beautiful and eerie story that deserves your attention if you’re at all interested in Lovecraft, mysteries, visual novels, or graverobbing. Trust me on that last one.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
China: Mao’s legacy
I would definitely recommend this game probably the best Kremlin Games has out insofar as the whole political dynamics are concerned (you are able to fully shape your country' s policies and the factions are much more ‘real’). The economy however could have been dealt with better and have a proper blend between it and Ostaglie (placing individual buildings alongside the investment).
Alike Ostaglie, relations with individual western European Countries are generalised as NATO and it would be better to not have done it in this way so we can see how the worldwide socialist movement is doing at the time, which in turn, could affect individual countries rather than having it all generalised as ‘NATO’. This would have been much better as China often had more interaction with Western Europe (with the initial funding of left-wing guerrilla groups then to investments) as the WPO did (which mainly tilted towards its own bloc, which China interreacted less with whereas the game sometimes focuses too much on Chinese-Soviet or Chinese-Middle Eastern Relations, whilst relevant it mises opportunities with Western Europe) as well as making the international playing field (which takes up a large bulk of the game) more active, especially seeing how the Years of Lead, the Spanish Transition, the German RAF and the French Maoists pan out with China still being a beacon of Maoism. Or it could show how China has been integrating more with the west and encouraging the growth of the EEC or NATO (if not becoming a member then associating maybe if you take a hard anti-Soviet line).
– Real player with 131.3 hrs in game
I write this as a gamer who has played Kremlingames previous simulations, Crisis in the Kremlin, and Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall. As such, I can’t write this from the perspective of a person who will be exposed to this type of gameplay and Kremlingames' unique idiosyncrasies for the first time. I can only write subjectively from the viewpoint of someone who has played both games already.
First impression: it uses the same map as Ostalgie, with some haphazard modification to add Malaysia, Indonesia, Rhodesia, and the USA to the nations you can interact with. It’s better than the huge scrolling map of Crisis in the Kremlin, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. Go with what works.
– Real player with 76.8 hrs in game