Recent reviews by cannonInspector

Short, but fun game you might expect to see on Newgrounds 10 years ago, but don't hold that against it. You get 3-5 hours of gameplay if you're a nolifer tryhard, probably 4-8 if not.

This game is full of SOVL.

While an interesting concept, Survival Machine creeps onto the scene at a laboriously slow pace with AI-generated audio, a mediocre gameplay loop, buggy quest mechanics, terrible multiplayer ping, hit-scan bows, completely boring combat, an annoying 'upgrade-everything' disposition and incessantly repetitive quest reminders.

And AI-generated dev responses holy moly.

As my friend said: "This one needs to cook."

A step backwards. Mechanicus is no longer a tactical shooter, it is now a roll-the-dice shooter like XCOM and the latest reminder that I shouldn't dare to get excited for a new game before its release.

The devs have removed most if not all of the character customization and made the combat more "fast-paced" and less intuitive. Enemy groups are endless droves. The necron campaign is particularly egregious with this when it sends an enemy squad of 5 with a 30% dodge chance and far more HP and damage than any of your units, and then piles on tremendous amounts of units with 15% dodge chances and multiple attacks per turn in the next mission of the PROLOGUE. Meanwhile your units are consistent through missions and you have no healing, unless you took the one Necron Lord who can heal. 99% of the Admech units have a lingering DOT effect or will prioritize executing your units who're trying to reanimate if the DOT isn't on them already. Enemy units have upwards of 8 HP with dodge chance while your scrungly little Necron Warrior has 6 hp and no dodge to speak of. He shoots once, for 3 damage at most. Said enemy meanwhile does somewhere between 2 and 5 damage, might have multiple attacks and whatever hell else.

Cover doesn't matter at all, and units outside of your named hero characters die for a set period instead of being replaceable and costing Blackstone resources. The game's balance is all over the place and it's not just due to dodge chances or bad encounter design.

I'm not going into this expecting this to be the exact same game as the last one with new characters, but it's not the same game in any way. HIlariously it does have some of the same characters and some of the same themes and composer, etc. but the gameplay is completely divorced from the first. The soundscape is dramatically reduced and the amount of mental investment is gone. This is basically ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Chaos Gate with Necrons and Admech. They replaced a great musical score with extremely loud background sounds that dominate everything. The clinking and clattering of my RLS Necrons and the enemy Sicarians was more annoying than anything else, they literally wont stop ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moving.

I considered refunding this but realized it took me six ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours to get outside of the Necrons prologue on the default difficulty. Before the end of the first act, there's no choices at all, so there wasn't any way I could have 'gone back' to see if there was something I could change or do before committing to these challenging battles.

Also some of the cutscenes are still unfinished art renders and some of the dialogue seems to double back upon itself. A mission will end with one cutscene, and then the dialogue will retread it, but not in the same way, making it clunky and confusing. It is as if the story was written by one person and the cutscenes by another. All of the characters in the dialogues seem to float up and down for some reason, and it's just.. slightly distracting. As is Videx's new voice actor; He used to be a semi-reserved cardinal or pontifex with lots of dogma. Now he's just a litany-shouting psycho and it's very boring.

Interesting game with many feature. I can afford!

It's literally Kingdoms and Castles with a roman coat of paint. I don't know if I'm happy or disappointed they didn't make it a DLC. I'm going to go with 'neutral'. I am yet again asking for Steam to allow me to leave Neutral reviews.

Feels like an early access game despite not being one. Gameplay is boring and the addition of a wave shooter and base management doesn't improve the formula at all. The wave shooter is decidedly the worst part of the game, but that's putting it very mildly.

You'll notice everyone who's reviewing this game has about 20 hours played. Because that's all the gameplay that this has. Misery is another Lethal-like with a STALKER coat of paint and some base-building. While sometimes fun and consuming, Misery's gameplay is painfully unpolished and the mechanics are often quite buggy.

One of the highlights for the game is the lack of a map, which is a feature. Using whistles and VOIP to communicate with your friends is part of the experience. The atmosphere is absolutely something that was done right and manages to be eponymous. Switching between rural slav countryside and more urban soviet-y block housing, and the underground areas provides a somewhat interesting form of progression, however the difficulty curve in this is non-existent: You are either immediately screwed or the area is a complete piss-take with nothing hostile.

However, what was not particularly well thought out is the gameplay cycle. Players are expected to enter a semi-randomly generated sandbox area which has random loot and story vignettes. While interesting the first few times, the re-use of a number of vignettes can make the world feel very small and the game's scope very limited. Enemy variation is very limited outside of the underground area and the enemy lethality is either minimal or exceedingly high, as mentioned before.

Basebuilding is "fine", but the game's electricity and power systems are decidedly very buggy, with cables and batteries occasionally "forgetting" what they're connected to between map reloads and requiring complete rewires of your carefully or not-so-carefully positioned system. Check your battery voltage regularly.

Gasoline generators operate on the bizarre logic of instantly transforming all gasoline inserted into them into power, regardless of whether or not there is currently any capacity for it. This is extremely un-intuitive, as filling a 'full' generator with gas leads to a significant loss. The dwarf hampster wheel generator additionally doesn't play nice with any of the other power systems, acting as if 'clogging' the wires with a different kind of power.

Anyway, for $10? Maybe, but this Dream Game needs quite a bit more work.

A fun and addicting shop-running simulator with surprisingly intricate mechanics. While very fun, there are still a number of bugs that need to be reported and hammered out, and the variety of shoppers could be improved. As a demo? It's fantastic, but the game needs a bit more work before it's set for release.

I think of problems and the dev solves them, simple as.