I'm a bit of a farming game fanatic so I was excited to see a game that has a less stereotypically "cozy" concept (it still looks very cozy but all of the promo material on the store page prominently features large machinery and mechs)

I really like what I've seen so far - on the surface the UI is nice and clear, the environment is just gorgeous (esp when it's raining), and interacting with things (the mech, grabbing and throwing resources) feels great.

Mechanically there's a lot to love here too - using the mech to harvest resources is satisfying, the tutorial really gets you involved without realizing that you're learning (SO MANY games fuck this up). Best of all, equipment upgrades let you interact with more interesting terrain instead of being simple "you can cut down BIG trees now" style upgrades (although there are some of those too)

I can't really speak for how long the gameplay loop can sustain itself but I think this is going to be one of my new favorite farming games. I never really took to Slime Rancher but I think the vibes of this are a lot closer to that than most farming games.

On paper the core challenge of this is very similar to a lot of city builders but the individual elements and vibes of the game are very different from any city builder I've played - really, you're creating a neighborhood by placing individual buildings while trying to hit certain target values for things like beauty, resident satisfaction, but these are done by clicking trash that they throw on the street each day, customizing the recipes at shops they visit, stuff like that (meaning it feels more like a chill puzzle game than a cold, clinical management sim). A lot of micro-level care for these little streets. This is also a definite purchase from me

the snob in me really wanted to hate this but the truth is that it's got that flash game spirit where you fuck around and destroy shit in a big-ass sandbox while trying to survive the consequences of your actions and i kinda vibe w it. the store page for this shit is horrendous but i mean, the core audience for this are the people for whom the core appeal of the GTA series is the ability to go on rampages, so it should hardly come as a surprise. as long as they dont price this at a million dollars or whatever i'd be curious enough to pick it up i think

Hades but interesting

I know everything gets compared to Hades now but imagine a version of the game where you have a timer, but it never has enough time for you to clear the room. Instead each attempt at the room (3 by default) creates a copy of yourself that can kill enemies, allowing you to clear the room by effectively being in 3+ places at once

Even in the demo it does some interesting stuff with this concept, enemies you have to kill simultaneously and things like that. For me this is something I'll be picking up when it goes on sale at some point in the future

I think this is about where a survivors game can top out on this list. It fulfills its promise of having creative effects - rolling enemies up into a big katamari, shooting grapes at them, running them over with fleets of garbage trucks - but it still struggles with visual clarity a bit. Thankfully it's not one of the survivors games where you're prone to getting one-shot by an enemy you never saw, but it's basically impossible to tell which attacks of yours are actually pulling their weight or not. There's actual effort put into this game (more than can be said for the majority of this genre)

Buggy in its current state (and desperately needs an audio options menu) but if you wanted something that's exactly half STALKER and half Tarkov, this is what you're looking for. Need to spend more time with this demo before I can really say whether or not I'd buy this, but I enjoyed the little bit I actually played

Very, very rudimentary at this point in time and combat feels very clunky, but I think this is fascinating because the sandbox elements can be weirdly detailed in places. As soon as you go to craft a tool you will see that there are a fuckload of tools (likely just different qualities of the same handful, but still) but I'm a little freak and I love the idea that you can't just get full value out of a rock by hitting it with a pickaxe, but instead you have to use a hammer to break the rock chunks into smaller pieces. There's a lot of MMO style skill usage (let's hear it for hotbars!!) and levelling which means I'll probably check this bad boy out after it gets closer to its full release. I really think I'm going to remain allergic to its combat but if the world ends up being interesting it might be a fun thing to futz around in for survival reasons

played this a while back

curious little thing. i played the "prologue" that's currently available on steam and it could be decently fun but it's extremely easy in its current state, the game basically plays itself unless you're completely unable to dodge enemies. with some tweaking i think you'd have something really interesting here because the farming/fishing/mining mechanics requires you to position in a way that keeps you from doing the classic Survivors game "strafe in a circle forever" strat.

could maybe use a more visible cursor for people playing on KBM and a couple weapons can make things look really messy in ways that can actively sabotage you, specifically the water jet weapon (covers a lot of the screen at high ranks) and the mole turret weapon (looks like an enemy)

Did not expect them to get as weird with the settings and stuff after playing the first one, although given the ending of that game I probably should've - still more of the same for the most part, hard to say too much about this with such a limited playtime

played this a while back

The idea of building a really strong gun and then passing it onto your drone (who will follow the same upgrade path on your next run) is neat, but there are so many of these games coming out right now that I just don't see any reason to play this one over any of the others.

not as bad as its placement here would suggest but I'm really struggling to get into this when compared to their other game, industry idle. i think this format works really well for factories and large-scale automation but trying to picture this network as a society doesn't really grab me in the same way because it never feels "alive"