Band of Defenders
lol this game is FREAKING AWESOME the more I play it the more I love it,
seriously (not sarcasm) this is easily one of the best games on Steam,
takes fps ‘skill’, has all kinds of upgrades and weapons and turrets and barricades to get, all kinds of strategies to try out and test,
has solo and multiplayer etc etc
-Easily- one of the most under-rated games on steam, and maybe one of the biggest ‘hidden gems’ I ever played in my whole gaming life.
Anyone down-voting this either came in with massive preconceptions about the game or was expecting something else, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this game other than it’s too short (lol),
– Real player with 194.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Sandbox Real Time Tactics Games.
Initial Reaction:
The Good:
I like this game a lot - really fun co-op with friends. Small community which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. You can share weapons you craft with friends which is pretty cool. The game has a lot of potential and I’m excited to see where the developers take it. I like that you can instantly reorganize your defense between rounds (if you misplace a turret or wall, there is an “undo” option which can be used immediately or in any round after).
– Real player with 31.1 hrs in game
Moonstone Tavern - A Fantasy Tavern Sim!
Where to start… Well, first off, I got this game for free to play, enjoy and do Let’s Plays of. When I first started, I started with out a class, which in all honesty, was funny. Other than that, starting out, things worked great! Tutorial was pretty straight forward, (im just an idiot at times XD ), Things start off easy, getting customers and making food and all that. I like how you have to manage things, like making sure you have money to pay any employees you hire, cleaning up sick guests messes, the diversity of the races you have in your Tavern, etc.
– Real player with 36.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Sandbox Crafting Games.
Moonstone Tavern is a combination of a city builder (or tavern in this case) and an ARPG, similar to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon type games, but in real time and focused on the development of the tavern, which then adds stat bonuses to your character and extra party members. It has both a main quest line and repeatable quests of various difficulty that strengthen the main character in different ways.
Pros -
Lots of depth to developing the tavern
Enemies are fairly difficult to start
Marriage, familiar system, and hired heroes for a fairly large party (main character + 7 others that I know of)
– Real player with 16.2 hrs in game
Veil of Crows
So when I bought this game I believed this to be a cross between total war and mount and blade. The reality is its closer to a cross between stronghold and mount and blade. That said I’d still definitely reccomend the game. Even in its current state its worth buying and is great fun with decent replayability. It also has a very good death system. For starters death is an actual fear unlike mount and blade and if someone ticks you off you can put them to the sword. When you die you can start in the world your last character died in. Meaning even though your previous person may have died their faction can still have an impact on the world and you can monopolize on it. For instance I had a bandit run through where I occupied a key mine cutting off a factions only source of metal preventing them from fielding units. I died and had to come in as someone else however taking that mine caused the faction to ultimately collapse in external wars, allowing my new character to seize several villages before they did. Resources are important without metal and leather troops don’t happen, without wood or stone buildings don’t happen, and without food villagers will starve and turn to banditry. The AI, like you, needs all of these and without them they will collapse (although it takes a while).
– Real player with 52.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Sandbox Medieval Games.
So I’ve put some time into this game, not as much as I would like to, mostly due to real life things. With that being said, the game is not in the best of shape. It has it’s bugs, some more irrating than others. While there is no argueing that, I do have to point out in the short period the game has been released, there have been many updates that significantly increase the playability of this game and the overall enjoyment. I’ve seen some of the other reviews and don’t feel it does this game justice. Is the game rough at the edges? Yes. Are they being polished? Absolutely and the response of the developer is quite amazing. In the couple of months the game has been out, the content has significantly increased, and the quality of the game has increased as well. This is not the most coherient of reviews, but I do feel like this is a good game and is going in a great direction. I would and do recommend this to my friends, and do to you as well.
– Real player with 46.0 hrs in game
Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution
Species: ALRE is a game for those of us longing for the glory days of SimEarth and though those days are long gone we can atleast see some semblance of evolution happening here.
The Good
Species ALRE gives players a wide range of options to steer how evolution will occur throughout their playthrough. There are map-wide effects such as raising or lowering the sea level, increasing or decreasing land fertility, screwing around with the global temperature and more.
Other effects are to introduce artifical selection pressure for traits that the player finds (un)desirable. This is achieved through rovers, spawnable autonomous entities that are given a single mission, to either feed or kill those with the trait in question. This allows the player enough freedom to have his creatures evolve however he wants, such as giving them enormous necks or creating a biome consisting only of hyper-aggressive huge herbivores.
– Real player with 49.7 hrs in game
I want to be clear: this is not a “game” for everyone, but if the idea is intriguing enough to you and you have some spare cash I would say take the risk and invest in it. There is nothing like this anywhere else. This isn’t some sort of half-assed early access stuff that will poorly mimic other titles then end up abandoned. This is a legit playground for anyone with a fascination with biology, genetics and evolution. If you want to make it a “game” and actively set goals you can. However, a good question to ask yourself is whether you’d be interested in letting the simulation play out without any interference.
– Real player with 45.5 hrs in game
Uncrewed
Being someone who has been burned in the past due to games that attempted this, and failed (Petroglyph’s Forged Battalion comes to mind as a PRIME example), I’ve always had a little bit of a spot in my heart for this game, and its developers.
My favourite moments are the meticulous testing I can do. I do a lot of Function over Form, though some of my more… shall we say Ugly-Duckling creations took me through harder areas than some of my pretty, yet expensive creations.
There are major difficulty jumps throughout the campaign, but you learn. I remember my accidental recreation of D-Day with pontoon skimmers with wheels. They barely made it across, and it took around 20 minutes for even a small ‘beachhead’ to be taken. However, did I once rage because I thought the game was hard? Not in the slightest! In fact, the difficulty made me go back to the drawing board and rethink my design approach.
– Real player with 66.4 hrs in game
For the niche demographic of patient builders, this is fairly easy to recommend, mostly because of the level of polish.
The game runs at a consistently high framerate and without stuttering. Also very stable, no crashes during gameplay, which is especially impressive considering all the silly custom 3D shapes you can mold from the stock unit parts.
Full working options menu with key rebinding, multiple audio sliders for sound level customisation or turning certain sounds off if they are annoying.
– Real player with 64.7 hrs in game
Nuclear War Simulator
Nuclear War Simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the question: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals?
You can design warheads, missiles and carries, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what are the consequences. Using a high-resolution population density map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict.
Nuclear conflict scenarios
You can design realistic large-scale scenarios between major powers with thousands of warheads. Scenarios can be created manually where you can assign each warhead individually or with the assistance of an AI for faster targeting. It is also possible to simulate whole conflicts with a few clicks on the map interactively. You can download scenarios created by other people and upload your scenarios to the mods.io server.
Realistic effects of nuclear weapons
The simulation includes a high-resolution population density grid. The effects of blast, heat, fires and radiation are calculated and visualized for each population cell to estimate fatalities (similar to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP). The destruction of military targets is simulated using a model considering the CEP of the weapon, target hardness and cratering.
You can place yourself, your family and friends into the simulation to estimate the expected injuries and survival probability. The amount of burnt fuel and produced soot are also calculated to estimate the effects of nuclear winter using a simplified model.
Design and placement of objects
Using an intuitive UI you can design warheads, place them on missiles and into silos, on aircraft, TELs and submarines.
You can then place the forces onto the map simply clicking on it or importing real-world locations from KMZ files.
If you know how much uranium and plutonium is needed for one warhead, you can estimate how many can be build from today’s stockpiles if a country wants to.
Modding and interfaces
The simulation supports some basic modding of unit textures, loading screens and background music. It is also possible to share unit blueprints and scenarios with others.
If you have simulated a conflict in another tool you can import the list of detonations as a simple CSV file to calculate the humanitarian effects. On the other hand, you can also export the list of detonations together with the burnt soot into other tools like detailed climate simulations.
Stronghold 2: Steam Edition
– Real player with 39.3 hrs in game
…o mannnnnn , this one brings back memories ! When there was no stress , no problems , coming from school and chill with this :( Perfectly Splendid' :D
– Real player with 37.1 hrs in game
Stronghold Legends: Steam Edition
Stronghold Legends is kind of the the odd child of the entire Stronghold franchise, being the only title featuring fantasy elements.
Arbitrarily, it is also the title which divided people the most in regard whether to like it or not in the past.
Personally, I believe it to be one of the most innovative Stronghold games due to the very fact that a lot of different new mechanics and also tactics were introduced with the likes of giants or dragons as well as magic. Granted, it didn’t look great back then and even remastered it still doesn’t, but gameplay wise it has more than enough depth to make up for it, even although that depth is more shallow than with other Stronghold games due to the fact that the devs tried to open the target audience a little with those fantasy elements.
– Real player with 689.3 hrs in game
So if Steam logged all the time I had playing this game on the Disc, I would legit have over a couple thousand hours. This game was my childhood, and a few years ago I convinced my friends to play the multiplayer with me. Once we were finally all into it and knew the mechanics, they closed the multiplayer servers not two months later. Devestated, I still played through all the single player modes, but I did so long for the multiplayer back. But, Steam delivered, and upgraded the game to the Steam edition, reviving the community for the game and allowing us to play multiplayer again (While adding a few new cool features! Workshop is so nice). While my friends and I (Sadly) don’t play this game as much currently, as League of Legends has consumed our lives, whenever we get bored, or when I’m feeling in a particularly mediaval mood, this is always the first game I turn to, as every time I play it I am filled with that sense of nastolgia, and am able to relax to the nice sounds of my catapults tearing down my enemy’s walls.
– Real player with 143.6 hrs in game
The Stronghold Collection
– Real player with 39.3 hrs in game
…o mannnnnn , this one brings back memories ! When there was no stress , no problems , coming from school and chill with this :( Perfectly Splendid' :D
– Real player with 37.1 hrs in game
An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs
I am a ‘dog person’ so this game looked intriguing. I had it on my wish list and picked it up, on sale. Having spent many hours in airports run by dogs, I have very mixed feelings. It is a silly, somewhat mindless game with the biggest challenge being to find specific characters, objects and gates in each of 6 airports. Woven into this is a love story about a long distance relationship between you and Krista (the last two humans left on the planet). Your busy lives intersect at airports and it is sweet to watch the relationship unfold through many brief encounters. Although each airport has very different geography, there is a lot of repetition (the same shops, the same vendors, and much of the same dialog).
– Real player with 19.0 hrs in game
Hilariously it was my girlfriend who got me this game, we are long distance, and neither of us actually knew much about the game. I just kinda wishlisted it long ago cause haha cute dogs and alien airports, and she got it cause just frick it we get gifts for each other so sue us (please dont, legal action scares me). Well, 13 hours later and I am all misty eyed over what was supposed to be a silly little game. Even now typin this out I am gettin all teary eyed. Not gonna get too into detail cause I ain’t wanna spoil stuff but heck, this game is gonna last in my brain head for a long while. 10/10, Recommend it forever
– Real player with 14.4 hrs in game