Tag: Simulation

[LEGACY] Thrive

We’ll start off by saying that I was excited about Thrive, as I’ve played Spore. It’s the part of Spore where you crash-land into the sea inside a big meteorite and gobble up all the stuff you need to evolve, adding more on as you go.
This game is that exact part from spore, but more complicated, more complex.

Again, you start off a tiny cell doing a wiggle-swiggle around the sea, but instead of particulates being picked up you’re sucking up glucose, ammonia, and phosphate. Glucose acts as your primary food source and energy source (so if you can’t find that you’re fucked), whereas ammonia and phosphate are your progress devices, the more you collect of those the quicker you fill your evolution metre.
From there you add different parts to your tiny little cell body, some are just cells, but others have more precise functions like Metabolosomes and Chemosythesizing Proteins… nah I’m too dumb for that stuff.

So, what do you do in the game? Thrive. Haha, yeah but what else? Nope, that’s merely it.

I only played it for what I can say is a “little while” on my stream while making my review, and it’s safe to say it’s not the most entertaining game to play, but also for others to watch. So I continued to play it off-stream to no avail. I couldn’t get a whole lot further than what I had initially, but slowly came to the realisation that “I have to play this game for a lot longer and grind it right out to even noticeably progress, don’t I?”
Yes, that was the case. That, for me, is a huge game-killer. When you noticeably have to put many hours just to get the ball rolling in a game, is it really okay? When the game punishes you for taking a step further than what is expected of you? Especially when all there is to the game is swimming around, gobbling up things and becoming bigger.

Pros:

  • The game functions as a game.
  • Takes the cellular floaty and collect things to upgrade yourself (part of Spore(in brackets as idk where it came from first)) and expands on it, pushing it further.
  • Goes in depth with a more science-y approach, adding more accurate names and processes to evolving and upgrading your lifeform.
  • The upgrade, item, and travel menu is clear and easy to read. It could’ve been so user unfriendly considering the amount of information they’re trying to put across.

Cons:

  • Despite being a lot more complex than the original concepts of this style of game, it still feels empty. I think the original premise (that I’d found in Spore, among other games) was better due to the promise of actual evolution. Within Thrive you just get bigger and bigger and more complex, while that in itself if a fun part about it, that’s really just about it. It’s about getting the best out of what stage you’re in, but not progressing any further than that.
  • Even though the game has numerous pointers and plenty of little pop-ups that show you at the start what things do and how the game works… I still can’t help but feel a little lost even into an hour of playing. I know what I’m doing, yet still feel lost.
  • The game overall, while a good concept, is just incredibly boring. Not much to say about it. The only real danger you have is dying because you can’t find any glucose. I have found other organisms in the water that I’ve had to fight, but honestly, you’re more likely to die from “starvation”.
  • Following the above comment. I do know how the game works, different areas have less of different things that you can eat and need to survive. I know that if I go into a stage unprepared, then there will be a higher chance of me dying, sure. But when I go into the next stage up, and I’m wandering around (in the one direction the first time) for the best half of 2 minutes. In those 2 minutes I find absolutely nothing with no clue as to why I’m not finding anything or where it could be, and die. It’s not really compelling me to play the game for any longer.

Overall, this game is for someone who can do the same thing over and over again, with the same kind of background, same motions but with slight variations. It’s a game that will take a lot of time and a lot of patience, and is really only for someone who enthuses about microorganism evolution and progression.
It’s honestly not for me, not really worth my time and genuinely looked a lot more enjoyable in the trailer than what it was playing it or watching it via a stream.

In addition, please note that this game is currently in Early Access and seems to be one of those games that will be an EA (not that EA) game for a while. This is (hopefully) not due to this being a shovelware game, and because, as the devs state, it is a volunteer project. It is also apparently free elsewhere, whereas on Steam it’s paid for.

Price: £3.99, but free elsewhere.
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Honestly, no. But it seems (like Unturned) this is a pay to support the dev type deal. If you’re interested in this game, find where it’s free and help these devs perfect their long-term project.

Zesty Rating
4.5 Out Of 10.



A game premise I was genuinely keen to see if taking one point of another game and honing in on it worked again. This time it fails. Bland, slow and unrewarding, similar to how life is going for us right now. Too much work and effort for so little outcome and nothing to show for it.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Receiver 2

I first went into Receiver 2 thinking that this was a first-person shooter game like any other, I was wrong. I’d read the blurb on how it teaches you vaguely how a vast array of guns work, in the most “This Does Not Qualify As Actual Gun Training” way as possible, but still thinking it was a progressive game.

I was also wrong.

You start off by getting this pistol, which it tells you how to fire and such in a tutorial area that’s in the construction site of a city. You’re facing off against robot turrets that have a line of sight you can see via the light it shines to see you. The light is blue when it can’t see you and promptly changes you yellow and starts firing at you when it can. Simple.
After the tutorial area, you’re then further up in a series of buildings full of machine gun turrets, learning how to use the next gun, killing more machine gun turrets, and finding cassette tapes.

From here on, the game is samey, samey, samey. You get to the end of the level, you restart in a different area with a different gun. You get to the end of the level again, restart again with another different gun, more robotic turrets, blah, blah blah.
There is nothing more to this game than restarting in the same building with a different gun each time, I got through about 5 guns until I’d had enough. I’ve actually got to in a point in this review where I’m uncertain if I’ve said the same thing over and over because that’s all there is. Nothing actually… happens…

Pros:

  • The game works, not graphical issues or game breaking bugs.
  • The game feels soooo sleek and smooth, everything about the game feels fluid and responsive, and is precisely what I’d love from a first person Hitman game.
  • The setting (while the same one every single time) is 100% spot on. Everything is believable in an abandoned office building, a work in progress. It’s not a forced scene and sets a really great atmosphere.
  • The actual implementation of learning how to use different guns and them all being finicky and different was appealing. Especially when I reset once and didn’t realise that I was using a different gun, as it looked vaguely the same until I had to reload it, and it was missing one chamber.
  • It gives a sense of infinite possibility to how you can approach how to finish the “level”. Walk down any corridor, up any stairs, and shoot the turrets from any angle.

Cons:

  • While the game works sleekly, and smoothly, it does have a few weird controls for a keyboard. More akin to a console controller. Like for sprinting, you need to ferociously tap the “W” key to start sprinting, and you need to keep it up to keep sprinting. Each action for the gun, firing, reloading, emptying the chamber, opening the chamber, have all separate keys on the keyboard, which makes for a “I need to look at my fingers” moment nearly every time. Not only that, but having to forget all of that for the next gun you use on the next level.
  • The setting is the same at every level, and not in a Groundhog Day way. You get to the top of the level each time and then suddenly appear back downstairs again with a different gun. The story I uncovered within does nothing to really explain why I’m here, but I know who I am. Despite being a well polished and believable building, seeing it for the 5th time was enough to know I would rather not see it again.
  • While I loved the intricacy of using different guns, the learning of it felt clunky and somewhat forced. It lacked the situational learning that you have in most other FPS games where when the player picks up new guns it slowly lets them learn everything. In this, you’re just handed the gun and multiple controls that you’re given to remember and gives you no repetitive learning time. But at the same time, the whole game is learning time, and you don’t feel as if it’s an actual game.
  • As much as I love the whole “telling the story through the tapes and notes” feature, it becomes semi-irrelevant if you can just miss them. This was something I thought about Amnesia as well until I realised that despite seeming like an open game, it wasn’t. This game, however, is very much open, and it’s easy to miss some notes and tapes. I didn’t feel as though I were getting the full story or experience. They’d do better with the Superliminal approach of areas you have to walk through which have the story in them.

Price: £15.49
Time To Complete: 7.5 hours
Achievements: 34
Cards: 5
Worth The Money: Not At All

Overall, there is not a game for me, to the point where I wouldn’t really consider it a game. It’s a simulation (as it’s advertised) but not as much of a game as it feels it is. It’s super polished and is really intuitive to play, and honestly feels like something I’d enjoy playing if the environment/world I was in was enjoyable. It has that high levels of “I am more in control of this character than other games allow me to be” but gave me nothing to do with it. Honestly, it’s not something I can recommend to most of my friends, as they would all get bored with it much quicker than I did.
For a gun nerd who doesn’t give a shit about a story or being entertained by changing aspects of the game, this is for you.

Zesty Rating
3.5 Out Of 10
It’s got the glitz, and it’s got the glamour, but it’s got as much weight as an inflatable hammer. An empty simulation game which gives you the story in miss-able drips and drabs, and really drags when all you do is train, again and again. I apparently felt like rhyming because the itchy trigger finger sends my frustration climbing.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.

NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”.
0

[LEGACY] 9 Balls

9 Balls is indeed a billiards game, what happens when it is 8 balls instead?

This is the question I asked when I opened the title screen and instead of “play”, “options” and “exit” I was met with “8 balls” and “9 balls”.
Now this isn’t relevant, obviously, but it was a lingering question. Why call it 9 balls when you have an 8 balls game too?

This is a shadow of a billiards game, it is essentially the “typing on an Xbox/PlayStation console without one of those little keyboard add-ons” version of billiards. Everything is so slow, clunky, and unintuitive.
Instead of the cue being able to swing around freely as you’d position yourself around the billiard table, you have to pull, pull, pull, pull the cue round to where you want it to face. It’s clunky, and it’s sticky, and quite frankly, virtually unplayable.

On the other hand, the ball physics are to die for *sarcasm*. Whether you feel a bit more stricken when you attempt to line up the balls for a break, and see the pathetic click and hardly moving balls despite the strength-o-meter being at the highest possible level, or later when you attempt to take a long shot on a perfectly positioned ball, the meter is unable to provide the strength necessary to pocket the ball.
The ball physics suck. I can’t even tell if it’s the “friction” on the table that’s causing this or a shitty mistake in the mechanics of the maths behind the ball movement.

The only time that the ball physics don’t suck is when I got bored with the game and started pelting all the balls full force and eventually managed to send the 8-ball flying off the table. I had a good giggle at the fact it could do that, and, and I was a little happier for a split second, then it happened. The next turn started, and the 8-ball didn’t reset, or come back at all. It was just gone. Keep on playing after that and the next turn around, *poof,* all the balls disappear from the table and the game is rendered unplayable.

If your game is going to have ball physics where things are hitting off each other at high speeds, things will fly into the air. Please, for fuck’s sake, put a damn invisible dome around the table to prevent balls from getting out.

Pros:

  • It looks like a billiards game, doesn’t look too cheap. (like all the graphics being made in Paint.)
  • No graphical or music issues or glitches.
  • Unexpected extra game mode (+1 point)
  • Doesn’t crash on load or during game.
  • Good cue sight (seeing where you’re firing the ball), some billiards games don’t give you that at all.

Cons:

  • You literally have to drag the cue across the table again and again and again to just get it to where you want to aim.
  • No option to turn off the cue sight, some people may want to play without the visual aide.
  • Balls have too much friction, or the maths just wrong?
  • Balls fly off into the sunset and never come back, thus breaking the game.

Price: £0.79
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: No, despite being as cheap as it is. Just no.

Zesty Rating
1 Out Of 10
Boring, clunky, sticky and barely fun game of billiards. Not worth the spare change in your pocket, buy yourself a Freddo. The only redeeming thing about this game is that it looks the part, and it doesn’t randomly crash on you for no reason. 

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] 12 Hours

Upon entering 12 Hours, you’re hit straight with that shitty indie feel and not to mention the long loading times. The screen shows some basic text with controls, but some of these controls seem confusing at first because they ask you to use the LMB to turn on and off your torch, but also to use it to attack… What? Nevermind, I’m sure it will explain itself eventually or make sense in-game.

You then start off in a corridor, no story as you are within a nightmare of the developer’s making. All that you can see will be the wooden floor, the dirty off-white walls, and the wooden doors. A very plain setting and not very spooky or endangering at all.
Each door you go through will land you in one of the random rooms that this game possesses, where all the items have the exact same spawn location. Random rooms, but all the contents of the rooms are not randomised, weird.
The red “blood” writing on the wall is extremely far from intimidating. Some writing is even supposed to be funny, but that completely devalues the scare of others! Whispering emanating from these walls, but it’s not subtle whatsoever, and for me, takes away some scare as the sound was clearly just placed on the wall.

The monster(s) you encounter (as far as I’m aware) is a homeless old man with a machete/butcher knife and a demon dog/human hybrid that I swear I’ve seen in some game before. These enemies will sometimes spawn right in front of you and, typically, not even facing you. They will spawn, more than likely, before you can reach/find a weapon, leaving you defenceless. The monster(s) can run faster than you and there’s no way to close the door to prevent them from attacking you (despite it giving you the option to interact with it) and there is no hiding mechanic. You just die.

On my last playthrough I was lucky enough to come across a baseball bat, which I found to my displeasure that as soon as I picked it up the torch went out. Baseball bats are two-handed weapons, and it wouldn’t make sense that I could hold a torch too, so that was fine, but now I have to fight the monsters in the pitch black with a baseball bat, big deal. Or at least it wouldn’t be if the game had not already put (from what I can tell) a headlamp on the floor. It told me to press G to turn it on, and it didn’t. It had a sign like a switchover sign with the button T, so I tried that. Nothing.

Obviously, the headlamp was put here with the combat in mind, so you could still see your enemies as you were fighting them. You technically still can, but you can only see their life bar. Oh, and the crawling monster had me dead before I could even get a second hit. *Shakes some salt.*

Pros:
— The game works. No audio or auditory glitches and no game crashes.
— Battery charge to battery finding ratio is sensible enough.
— Combat is actually combat and not just a horror hide and seek.
— Buttons (for everything except LMB issue) are set sensibly to global standard.

Cons:
— Monsters spawn right in front of you, sometimes not even facing you.
— If you don’t find a bat before the monster finds you, you’re fucked, as you can’t defend yourself otherwise.
— The torch is terrible, and the headlamp doesn’t work.
— There is no hide mechanic, and the monster(s) all run faster than you. No way to revive or recover.
— Randomly Generated Map sometimes makes the most stupid of corridors, some you can’t even fit into.

All images are just random rooms that I’ve walked into. None are linked by anything whatsoever. They’re purely rooms with different things in them.

Price: £2.89
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: No. Do not buy it.

Honestly, don’t buy this game. If this game is bundled with another game, but you have the option of adding something else instead of this one, do it.
If you already have this game for some reason, play it. Play it and then let people know to avoid this as if it were quarantined.
This is one of the many games that makes people avoid early access and indie tags, and gives the general idea to AAA players that “indie” means “trash”.

Zesty Rating
1 Out Of 10.
The main suspect when it comes to giving Early Access and Indie a bad name. RNG Maps make for tight crawlspaces, no weapon to start despite the risk of being attacked, cheap, boring and dull. A must not play.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Abst Clicker Farm

Saying this right here first before I write anything, as I know that the amount I write can prevent people from seeing how I feel about this game.

Do not buy this.
At any cost.
Do not.
If you’re an unlucky sod who has this in their steam library already due to buying 150 game bundles from dodgy Russian game-code websites, then do us a favour. This game only has 4 reviews, write one. Even if it is only “This game is very bad.”, just be honest. In aide of mindless fools who would buy a game just because it’s on sale, turn them away with the sight of red. (Negative rating).

This game is a shill, a shell, and a bombshell all at once.
Now, it’s not outrageously bad as the game actually functions and does not crash in the middle of playing like so many AAA games, that’s a plus, so we are now up to at least a 1/10.
Then there is the matrix-like binary code type theme, which I’m fond of. I’ve always liked the green text on the black background aesthetic.
The generation of money is also interesting, it is your standard “currency is click=dollars”.
To level up, you purchase bits bytes and kilobytes to auto-collect your money. So now we are at least at a 2/10. (If we were giving out pity points, that is).

As soon as you enter the damn game you are hit with a wall of shattered expectations, no ear-blasting music, no cheesy copyright free music, no music that breaches copyright laws, nothing.
None of the buttons make noises, nothing makes a noise. It’s just you, the button and the noise of your mouse endlessly clicking as you try to figure out why life has doomed you to this fate.
Not of this game, but why you even thought this game would even be worth playing in the first place.
Silence of the void, asking you the crushing question of why you even bothered to buy/download/play this game in the first place.

The fun stuff is, is that this game is so easy to replicate.
It’s so un-unique.
You get maybe 10 “enhancers” to your click bonus, and you’re just left to fend for yourself with your underpowered clicking and the severe lack of money to purchase your next 10 megabytes.
Yes, the binary and computer theme is cool! So what?
A mindless clicking game was made with visually intriguing aspects, not visually appealing ones, and boom, done. Perfect.
You’ve got yourself what the developers consider a “game” worth “money”.

Do all these images look the same? If the answer is “Yes”, or any variation of agreeing, then ask yourself this: “Did you expect anything less?”

Pros:

  • It functions as a game, no crashes, major bugs with visuals or audio.
  • Computer Theme/ Binary Theme/ Matrix Theme

Cons:

  • No Music
  • No Sounds
  • No Effort
  • No Imagination
  • Nothing Unique
  • No payoff for all the time you’ve wasted clicking at binary.

This game is nothing.

Oh, and the achievements are borked.

Price: £0.79
Time To Complete: There is no completion. I have 6.9 hours in the game for the “lols”, but it probably only took 1 – 2 hours to max everything out.
Achievements: 5
Cards: N/A
Worth The Money: It’s not worth wiping your arse with.

If you recognise this image, then you already know what I’m implying.
Play it instead if you want a clicker.

This game is a shell of a clicker game, so much so that I don’t even consider it a game, as there’s no payoff. There’s no effort, no life, and no reason to play it. So, therefore, there is no reason to buy it or to endorse the “maker” of this “game”.

Zest Rating
0 Out Of 10. I’m drinking bleach for a pallet cleanser after that.
The endless void which is the expanse of my life can’t hope to be just as dull, empty and meaningless as this game. It’s devoid of passion, creativity, and meaning. Honestly, describing myself as well, but at least I have really nice eyes, the game can’t boast the same.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Ratropolis

Ratropolis takes the cake from Castle On The Coast from me for “best game I’ve received from Keymailer yet.” in the grounds that I am playing this game off-stream and really am enjoying it. Castle On The Coast is still by far a better game, but due to me getting motion sickness and Ratropolis being the extremely simple game that it is, makes for a super addicting, challenging but fundamentally easy game to come back to.

Ratropolis is a card battling game, where you use the random draw of the cards to build and upgrade your settlement, all while tower-defencing at either side of your settlement, fending off zombie rats.

You start off the game by choosing which leader you wish to play as (at the start, only being able to pick from a few due to you needing to win games to unlock them), each leader having different advantages to playing them and different powers which you can use to give yourself a boost mid-game.
From here you can also choose where your settlement is located, there are a few areas such as the forest, the coast, and desert, each having their advantages and disadvantages.

From here you’re presented with your “town hall” and a few cards to start you off with, a few army cards, a few cheese cards (when played right give you money), labour cards and house cards.
You gain money in the game via using cards that grant you money or from the tax that’s collected every 5 seconds in-game. You also have a limited number of mice (citizens) at your disposal, which you can increase and decrease with a good strategy.
Every 15 seconds you can reshuffle your deck and draw new cards, the natural amount being 4–5 cards, reusing ones that have multiple uses and using up ones that are one use only. The game gives you the option to reshuffle a lot earlier than this but at the cost of your money, which the cost increases for every wave that passes.

The game is “over” once 30 waves of enemies have been defeated, from here you can choose to exit the game and claim your rewards to keep playing, despite there being no additional rewards. Things get excruciatingly tougher from there, no news is good news and everything that happens is bad. The game really tries to kill you if you decide to continue, to the point where I only survived an additional 5 waves after winning.

Each cheese costs 40 gold, but gives you 30 gold for every cheese in your hand when it’s played. There are 3 cards in hand, so the player gets 90 gold. But when only one cheese card is present, if the card is played, the player makes a loss of 10 gold.

This game is honestly a treasure, I’ve actually not found a lot wrong with this game, and I’ve clocked at least 16 hours into this game by the time I actually get this review done, and possibly by the time that the review comes out I could be at between 20 and 25 hours. Each game is roughly about an hour if you make it to around the 30 wave mark, so maybe I’ll have unlocked everything by then.

Pros:

  • The game works, there are no graphical or audio errors.
  • This game masterfully combines card battling and tower defence in real time in a way that forces you to be strategic but also fast thinking, the enemies come in waves all the time, and you can refresh your hand often with more money, making this game fast-paced and challengingly stressful.
  • The art-style is cute and cartoony, lending itself to the people centred in the game, the mice. When the rats come on screen, the cute art-style lends itself to making the rats oddly more grotesque.
  • Each leader has a completely different playstyle as they all have different buffs and super abilities. Not only this, but they also tend to have their own range of cards that appear too, making it feel like you’re running a different kind of settlement with each different leader.
  • The game produces different waves of different enemies after every 5 levels or so, throwing bosses, mini-bosses and different species of enemy at you. This adds a lot of variety and gives a feeling of progression.
  • Once you’d beaten wave 30 it’s not over! You can continue afterwards on the same game and the game will outright try to slaughter you, or you can exit to the menu and start another settlement with the same character to unlock more cards and in the same area to increase the overall difficulty.
  • So that you don’t have to click everything or scroll/drag around the settlement, the game has easy shortcuts to do things in game. Pressing [Tab] moves you to the latest event, like the merchant appearing or your cheese is ready. Pressing [Space] will reshuffle your cards and [R] will use your ability.

Cons:

  • The tutorial leaves a lot to be desired. I feel as if it taught me all the basics, but when it came to the rewards from the reward chest, I saw “Increase Leader Level” as one of the options and felt like the game had completely skipped out on explaining what that was. Also, a few other small things as well, like the bounty system (for the war leader) and the souls system (for the spirit leader) that were never explained or told where to look or what to do with it.
  • The game is a tad unbalanced, from waves coming too quickly sometimes due to the enemy number increasing every wave, so by the time you’re done with one wave the next is already attacking the other side. Some leader’s abilities are a lot more useable than others, the newest leader that was added not too long ago probably needing a tweak. The overall game is focused heavily on the RNG of everything, especially the cards, which will sometimes blow an entire game out of the water.
  • The interface of the game isn’t the best. I personally would like a tab I could pull up mid-game that show all my stats (maybe not pausing the game but slowing the time down to the same as when placing the cards), or possibly an easier function for moving your military mice around. What this game excels at in ease of play, it loses in the finickiness of everything else.
  • The settlement is initially set up like so; Town Hall-esque building, lots of space either side and then your walls. Once those walls fall you’re done for, you have to then sit and watch the enemy tear through every building between the wall and your town hall before smacking the town hall a few times, and it’s game over. I feel like the last stance should be at the town hall, give it some more HP, some walls, allow me to place troops at it or move troops to it. (Maybe I’m salty because I know that I easily had enough troops to finish off the remaining enemies, but they wouldn’t attack because they didn’t have a wall to defend, and I was on wave 30 and could’ve won, but I think it’s definitely a thing that should be considered.)

Price: £13.99
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 46
Cards: 6
Worth The Money: To the people who really like this kind of game, yes, definitely. On the current sale at time of review publication (£9.79), it’s certainly something to be picked up by anyone.

Overall, this game has stolen my heart and my free time. Over the course of writing this review, I’ve gone and played it multiple times when I should’ve been writing more. Looking back and forth between the achievements and my game to see what I’m missing and what I still need to complete the glossary. It’s still being updated to this very day, which is why I think it’s done so well. If you’re interested in this tower defence, card-battling deck-builder, settlement building simulation game, I’d absolutely say it’s worth a look.

Zesty Rating
8.5 Out Of 10.
A lovely little card-battling, deck building, settlement management tower defence indie game with a lot to offer to those who seek the challenge of not only keeping a colony alive, but keeping on top of tax, and amassing a formidable army. With new and interesting features attached to every different leader, and different ways to die in each different biome, this game is honestly a breath of fresh air.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

20,000 Miles Under the Sea

20,000 Miles Under the Sea is, thankfully, a game that I’m pretty sure has always been free.
To even call this a game is honestly an insult to even the top-tier trash games, such as ABST Clicker Farm and Abscond (Not the actual Abscond Game, but the “developer’s” audacity to release it as their game).

If you’re like me, and you have irritating, but very true thoughts pop into your head now and again, then you’ll know that there’s a certain point in life where the question: “How high can you count?” goes from being a matter of knowledge to a matter of will.

That is this “game”.

This “game” is just a test of mental endurance to see how long you can last, staring at a screen, while you lethargically descend into the depths of the ocean.
There is not much to look at, you can’t look around or explore really. The only option you have in the game is “Auto-swim”, where you just descend, and “Not Auto-Swim” where you just descend, but you can sluggishly swim forward.
Shoals of fish randomly spawn in and out with glitchy animations and bad implementation overall, phasing through solid rock and coral. Even Mario 64 had fish that you could interact with.

Of course, you can’t have an underwater game without having a horror element! So, only in the description of this game on Steam will you see that:

This is a simple idle horror game, and all that is required of you is to observe the life of the underwater world and wait.

Continued with:

But please remember that you are not alone – a terrible creature inhabits this abyss. If you’re too scared to meet this monster, you can tap out any time you like…

Ooo spooky, so where is this terrible sea creature?
It doesn’t exist.
All it is, is a terribly done jumpscare, which is easily avoided in one of two ways. Keep auto-swim on, as if you’re in auto-swim mode it doesn’t touch you for some reason (either that or the RNG was super unlucky), or moving away from the obvious red dots.

What also doesn’t exist is this bullshit.

This image shows the developer of the game claiming that the first person to reach the bottom of the game will receive $20,000.

Yeah, I don’t think you’re fooling anyone with this.

This image shows the developer admitting that there is no cash prize of $20,000, and that money will only be handed out if people buy the music.

Yeah, you weren’t fooling anyone.

As far as I could tell, using all the resources that I could, the soundtrack was not bought once.
Checking Steam sale records and various other 3rd party sites that track information like this, I found absolutely nothing.
This was a clear attempt to get people to play it, so they could get better feedback for the game (which never happened) and get some pennies back.
As discussed in the Abscond review/investigative piece that I wrote, it costs around $100 for developers to publish a game on Steam. It makes sense that the devs would make a desperate grab at their financial loss of a release.

Aside from this, what else do we have in the game?

  • Horrendous crashes that persist after the developer has updated/patched the game twice to “fix” these errors. Happening so often that I experienced at least 5 crashes within the 24 minutes I was able to hold out.
  • No option to mess with the sound. If there is, I cannot find it. Pressing the escape key, in hope that it would bring up a menu, took me out of the game and “marked my name” where I stopped. I had to start all over again. Thanks, this is undoubtedly what I wanted.
  • No clear indication, in the game, of how to play or that you have to avoid the red dots, or how to avoid them. Nothing telling you what or how to do things at all.
  • The “game” is so mind-numbing that the developer themselves instruct you: “you can minimize the game and continue to go down, doing other things.” if it’s too “tiring”. Just leave the game on, minimise it and do something more fun is their advice. Thanks, again. Brilliant game.
  • To add to the last point, the game is so badly optimised. Not to mention the crashes again, which are probably partially caused by this issue, but this “game” eats up all of your resources because of the bad optimisation. GPU? Gone. RAM? Gone. Shaders people! Fix your fucking shaders!

And to top it all off, is the most annoying part of the game. The name markers.
So, you accidentally exited out the game, or you’ve had enough, and you exit the game. That’s a name marker added with your name on it, but it’s not just you who can see it. Everyone can.

And you can’t turn it off.

You must sink, 20k feet, staring at the blur of mashed up names as so many people either crashed or gave up within the first 5 minutes. It’s then evenly spacing out a bit more until you reach the 30-minute mark, and another massive mash of names again where people have taken a gigantic sigh and turned the game off.

This, but thousands more names overlapping each other, covering the entire screen.

The “beautiful, underwater scenery” in this game, you want to see it? Too bad, you’ve got to stare at this clusterfuck of names.
Thank goodness, the game doesn’t “start” until you get past this absolute mess, although, I doubt you’ll be paying attention to find that out.

Price: N/A
Time To Complete: Apparently around an hour.
Achievements: 28
Cards: N/A
Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free, to be honest.

It’s not worth a fun rating.

0 Out Of 10

While it is not the country of origin that defines the type of game a developer produces, you will find that a lot of “Shovelware” comes from Russia. People who are well versed in Steam and cheap games will know this already.
I can only see so far, and my scope is limited to so many, different variables:
— Time of purchase
— Impulsivity
— Jumping on bundles/sales
— Complete disregard for my own enjoyment, just to sate an urge to buy something that looks bad.

Yeah, I’m bullshitting, but it’s a half-truth. There have been Brazilian games and Portuguese and English games I’ve played that all fit these categories. Cheap games, made to barely hold themselves together, to sit on Steam and slowly farm pennies until the $100 is paid back before Steam finds the game and deletes it. But not as many as I have Russian.
This is predominantly because of where I bought these games initially, and where I get them from now.

DailyIndieGame is one of the big reasons as to why I have a lot of these (apart from the few times I went to Russian sites and paid £10 for 250 games) games are in my Steam library. The promise is, from the site, to highlight creator’s games. Giving them out in bundles for small prices. It’s honestly a decent way to do things, but after a while I had to take a step back and check what I was actually buying because… ehhhhhhh. I maybe just paid £0.66 for The Wasteland Trucker, but… Yuck, I paid THAT, for THIS??

Another culprit (of no bad means) is Steamdb’s Free Game activator. Any time a game goes up for free, whether just newly released for free or discounted to free, it will activate it on your account. It’s responsible for the fact I have over 11k items in my library now and if you load up my steam games list IT WILL CRASH YOUR CLIENT/BROWSER.

It’s safe to say, you can expect a lot more Shovelware reviews. We’ve got my whole library to look forward to reviewing. 

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Alchemy Garden

I am completely in love with this game, and the game is still in Alpha. How is this possible? Oh yeah, a combination of things I’ve always loved, a concept that’s always worked and the fact that the dev/devs are seriously putting in a lot of effort into the game. This game certainly enters my top 10 of games that I’ve received from Keymailer, and it’s not every halfway finished yet due to it being in Alpha stage of all things, not even Beta!

Alchemy garden is a game where you, a budding alchemist, move into a shack outside of town and do it up enough to where not only can you live in it but sell from it too. Like Potion Craft, you go through the day picking your plants and herbs, create potions to your heart’s whim and proceed to sell them to the random members of the public that wander in.
Unlike Potion Craft, however, doing everything by hand, picking every flower and mushroom, and running around the entire outside area. It’s so… tranquil. Not only this, but you can also head into town and interact with the townspeople, not that they have much to say yet. There are two shops within the town, one is a seed vendor who sells 3 different types of seeds with varying rarities every day, and a carpenter who sells tools and furniture.

This game is currently in Alpha stage as I mentioned before, so there are a few things I could pick up on that would make the game better, but nothing too game-breaking.
The recipe book that you note all the potions you made in is not very user-friendly, putting the potions that you make in the book in the order that you found them. This makes looking for the recipe for potions really tedious, as you have to flip through every other potion before/after it to find it again for a customer.
Another thing is that when I was placing furniture outside (I’m not sure if it’s after I slept, or after I saved, quit and played the game a day later) on returning to where the furniture should’ve been, it’d vanished!

There’s another few things with objects like flowers spawning on top of each other, the inside of the cave taking half of your stamina to traverse because you have to jump all the time, and the general finickiness of putting ingredients in the cauldron… but aside from that, this game has the makings of something great, and I genuinely can’t wait until the full release.

Price: £7.99 (Update 10.99 now)
Time To Complete: N/A. However, with the limited potions right now, it took me around 2 hours to get all the plants to create every potion craftable.
Achievements: N/A (Yet) (update 44)
Cards: N/A (Yet)
Worth The Money: For most games in Alpha, I’d usually tell you to steer clear of any that cost money, as you’re “paying to test the game”. In Alchemy Garden’s case, I see this as an investment into what the game can become. So definitely, yes.

I can’t write much more about Alchemy Garden, because there’s not that much more to the game. It still has taken 5 hours out of my life and will continue to do so when I feel I need a little of that cutesy, free will, potion maker and sell ’em game.
With that 5 hours, I did the same thing over and over again, reminiscent of my very much enjoyed 400+ hours of Stardew Valley, and not one time was I bored.
If you’re a person who likes the potion making and selling aspect of Potion Craft, the free will and no clear direction of Minecraft and the endless, enjoyable farming routines of Stardew, then £7.99 shouldn’t be too much for you.
Even so, this game goes on sale more often than I stream. So if you’re still not too sure, you can always pick it up for a steal at some point.

Zesty Rating
4 Out Of 5. That first little pip of pomegranate that’s so full of flavour. And because it tastes so good, you know the rest of its insides will taste the same.
A richly colourful and cute game. Harness nature and pick up countless flowers and herbs to make a vast array of potions. Despite being in Alpha, it shows great promise for a full and addicting shopkeeping game which allows you to go at your own pace.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.

NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”.
0

[LEGACY] Amazon Rush

Amazon Rush is an endless runner game, created at the peak of runner-game-hype, along with games like Subway Surfer and the like. Judging by the game itself, it’s honestly hard to tell whether it was an honest attempt at recreating the magic, or a blatant attempt at grabbing from the pockets of people who wanted to try something new.

This review will be more of an argument with what the developers describe the game as, so I will be listing the pros and cons first.

Pros:

  • A decent game in itself when it decides to work.
  • The game is competent enough to have AN objective.
  • The game provides a singular challenge for a singular cosmetic.
  • The game is not so lazy that it doesn’t have power ups.
  • Nice start screen and game over screen.

Cons:

  • The main character is bland and forgettable. There is nothing unique or interesting about it.
  • The RNG for which blocks spawn is absolutely atrocious. Blocks can spawn inside each other and make the game freeze because it doesn’t know what’s happening, or they can spawn too far unreachable for you to make it with power ups.
  • The moving background is only one picture long, so it’s the same image looping over and over again. A second image would’ve been good enough to just give it a bit more sustenance.
  • Not unique in any way.
  • Jumping mechanics have you float and then suddenly drop, making it almost impossible to predict where you’re going to land.
  • Dull with no rewarding aspects.

“Enjoy the Unique World of adventure and challenges”.
This game is not unique, the only thing that’s even close to being unique is how bad it is, but since the greenlight is non-existent it’s “unique-ness at failing to be a decent running game” is almost snuffed out.
The main character is forgettable. The background is so plain, bland and lazy that you swear you’ve seen it somewhere before. The power ups are indeed somewhat unique, but they’re always just out-of-reach so that if you go for them, there is no way to survive.
The “Aboriginal” costume is actually the most unique thing about this, not for the promise of costumes as other games have done it better, but just for its design, which was obviously the “challenges”, the dev was talking about.

“…with lots of thrill and fun.”
Fuck off.
Thrill and fun are different and are achieved in different ways. This game is in no way thrilling, and it also is in no way fun. The difference between this, is that this game has the potential to be fun and captivating like most runners want to be as runner games are all about replayability. If the only thing you have to offer as a reward is 75,000 coins away and there’s nothing in between and nothing after that, players just don’t latch on.

“This running game is beautifully designed…”
There’s no problem with this statement apart from the statement itself. The background design is tolerable, the character design is better than expected along with the costume, and the info screens are a nice touch with the bloody… arrows? Spears? I can’t tell what they are, but they do fit the Amazon theme.
However, just all-out claiming that this is beautifully designed is a lot of bullshit, and we can all see that.

“…awesome sound effects.”
Yeah, sure. You picked the right ones. All sound effects were appropriate. Congratulations.

Price: £0.79 (believe it or not, its base price used to be £2)
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 124
Cards: No
Worth The Money: No. The game is broken, it can literally crash your Steam Client.

Do not buy this game.
If you wish to buy this game, buy it when it’s on sale. 50% or above sale, and even at that it’s still not worth what you’re paying for it. At this point, it’s more beneficial for you if you buy it off a dodgy website, get hacked, have to freeze your account then claim it back again just to get the game.

Zesty Rating
1 Out Of 10. You’re being the victim of that weird trick people can do where they eat a banana, but then put the skin back the way it was to make you think there’s still a banana there. There’s not.
Describes itself as unique and beautiful, maybe that’s what it’s mother’s told it. Awful Runner game, no reward aspects, only endless running and no gain. RNG breaks the game and Steam Client. Don’t buy this one.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Agross

Agross is a simple survival management game. It is truly basic.
The person you control is not even humanoid, it’s essentially a player counter from Sorry! In a way, it makes the game a different experience as you are being told these people are human despite not seeing them that way. For me, I feel that it makes me act differently in the game as I would if they appeared human.

For instance, all the people who worked for me had their health at 20 as I didn’t feed them for 4 days and made them work flat out until they were almost dead. Whereas in games like Sims or Settlers, I’m a little more… morally sound.
The carrots looked like carrots, the chickens were chickens, so they were treated as such. The people being nothing more than pawns made me the ruthless overlord of the carrots.

There are a few things I would change, which most would only be me being nitpicky. The only thing I actually think is viable from that list and what other people have mentioned too (where both reviews have the exact wording and seem to have been copied) is changing the market from 12 hours to 8 hours. You know, because most of us like to shove some toast in our mouth before we head out, we can imagine these farmers just stuffing a carrot in their walking off to market.

Pros:

  • The game works soundly, with no graphical errors or musical bugs.
  • The aesthetics are simple but pleasing. The simplicity brings out the “simple life on the farm” feeling but adds a sort of sole barren-ness which you have to deal with.
  • Decent music.
  • A solid game concept which has been done before, but tackles it in its own way and does a good job of that.
  • A challenging juggle between “Do I feed my workers, myself, or force everyone to work hard, so we can sell our produce tomorrow?”

Cons:

  • The lack of humanoid humans brought out the sadist in me, while not even really a complaint, the style lends itself to the minimalism, the other items in the game look more like what they’re supposed to represent.
  • No upgrade system, for anything at all to make things a little easier over time. Like upgraded tools or cheaper labour.
  • Only one music track looping over and over again, the music was decent, but 1 track looping is kind of bland.
  • The hour usage per action could use a bit of tweaking, while I do believe that you could spend 12 hours going to, in and coming back from a market, your character had breakfast before that. The farmers around here drive their tractors with toast in their mouths and their breakfast hot drink in a flask.
The little red cylinder is your farmer or worker.

Price: £0.79
Time To Complete: No Ending
Achievements: None
Cards: None
Worth The Money: Yeah, it’s okay for a £1 game. Definitely good when one sale.

Overall, it is a perfectly sound game, the game is good. For £0.79 it’s honestly not all that bad if you’re into these kinds of management games and can handle the tough starting challenge it presents you. All the mechanics are there for a management survival game. The only thing I would suggest is slight changes to the times and maybe an upgrading system.

Zesty Rating
4 Out Of 10. Has the minimalistic blandness of an avocado, but plenty of people like avocados. I prefer guacamole.
A simplistic, farming-survival game. Tend to the chickens, plant some carrots, and don’t forget to feed yourself. Become the ruthless overlord of the carrots, and starve your workers. Barely recommended, but a good grab nonetheless. 

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

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