Recent reviews by Hexaboo

Star Trek: Next Generation, Terminator 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Half-Life 2, Jagged Alliance 2. All known as sequels that outmatched the originals.

All pale in comparison in how much of a move forward Reus 2 is versus Reus 1. The game cleverly builds up, improves, and expands on the first game in every conceivable way. If you liked the old one, Reus 2 should get on your radar and in your library right now!

Suzerain is a fairly good and fun game, but I don't think its current rating on Steam (93%) accurately reflects its quality, for the shallow experience the game delivers past a certain point, so here's a fat thumbs-down.

The basic premise is excellent, the game uses dialogue choices to guide you through your life prior to your election, and beautifully throws you into a quasi-realistic world of the 1950's, to lead a country with a detailed geography, and people with extensive bios, opinions and allegiances. There is so much to explore in addition to the story, and the story itself captivates you with difficult choices interspersed with all the boring appearances, functions, and official dinner parties that you have to live through for that authentic head-of-state experience. The game does not let up, and you will easily spend the next 10 hours aching to see what the next decision brings, what the newspapers write about you, and whether the economy finally gets back on track.

But once you go beyond just the story and the basic world building, you can really feel the game was made by a bunch of first-world libby millennials who don't know better, and clearly had no intention of changing that. The whole 1950's world of the game is an incredibly hammy projection of the modern mainstream in politics and economics, like having a whole party of neoliberals, second biggest in the parliament no less, even though their economic policies were a very marginal academic idea post-WWII, and never got to any power until the 80's. Sure they're everywhere now, but what the game dismisses as 'old, outdated Sollism' was the very successful and burgeoning capitalist mainstream in the first world that made rich boomers rich boomers. The social liberalism of the liberal bourgeois party in the game is also fairly anachronistic: they wouldn't give a crap about any downtrodden or minorities, certainly not in the 1950's.

The policies that make you a dang commie in the game are the typical watered-down and anachronistic 21-century third-way social-democrat ideas like 'let's not privatise schools, pretty please!' or 'let's choose the state-owned enterprise over privatised ones to build stuff just this once, despite obvious government failure, obviously!' The phrase about 'guaranteed minimum income' as this bold socialist thing in the end really reveals the lack of research in creating the universe of the game (it's neither bold, nor socialist, nor period-appropriate).

There was no attempt to break out of the usual moulds, and give the player a good deal of freedom to weave their own credible story, and offer them an exciting slice of almost-real history. That all in addition that there is no player agency in a pure game-mechanics sense. You are the head of what looks like a reactive branch of the government, rather than the executive. I know there are limitations in terms of what you can have in an interactive-novel game like this, but having virtually no influence on the composition of your cabinet, and no active control setting policies in the country really ruin the idea of you being at the top of executive power.

All in all, don't expect any kind of management gameplay in Suzerain (Democracy is a decent, if limited, option for that). It is an interactive novel, and will deliver enough good story for one playthrough. However, the game is way too shallow and repetitive, and doesn't offer enough player decisions and agency amid all the text fluff for any replay value.

Let's not mince around the bush and dispense with all the petting. This is a SWAT 4 clone with fresher graphics, iron sights and a more fidgety UI. All down to the weaponry, squad layout, wedges, stingers and drop-down contextual menu commands. There's hardly anything new. Which is fine, mostly, because after 15 years, the system really deserves a new game.

However, if you're looking for a solid SWAT 4-style single player experience, give it a pass, at least for now. The mission stories are slapped on and hardly there (the mission briefing is tellingly interrupted as soon as the mission finishes loading), there's no intel, no maps, no planning, no background. The game is clearly coming from the rooting-tooting cowboy-shooting corner of the genre, and as of now simply doesn't deliver the same amounts of immersion that SWAT 4 or Raven Shield do, at a tenth of the price.

Refunded. Let's see where this goes in a year.

P.S. Oh and there's a healing button. Classy.

This game is a part of a gloal conspiracy by the Big Puzzle to drive up the price of loose Lego pieces, because every true waregamer loves the solid crunch of his breaking foot bones as he steps on one of those! Thanks in Unity of Command are made of fudge; aremour: fudge, gune: fudge, Gefreiter Eier: fudge. You step on it and you get disgusting sticky fudge feet, and thent have to like higher a prostitute to lick it off because no piece of sopa is coming noqwhere near me , because there's bugs in it, and the Man's listening in, in cahooters with the Big Puzzle. And UoC12 stands for 'Usurp Our Country, Too', they've made our tanks fudge, and now they're coming for therest!

Hardly a game inside this, little more than 'peck to see the next nugget in the story', but if you're game for dipping your wings in the burning-hot sauce of hard-boiled adventure, why not take a beak?

If you feel like you might be interested in this game, keep in mind that you'll get a full board-game experience with it, and will have to read at least some of the manual to figure it out. The in-game tutorial is superficial and skips a lot of things you need to know in virtually every scenario. The good news is that the manual is very readable and great-looking, and the 15–20 minutes you spend with it will be well-worth it, because the game's system is absolutely compelling and extremely enjoyable once you know what you're doing!

There are a few minor interface complaints: I'd really like to have a line-of-sight mode that doesn't require you to click on the hex to see the line of sight the (showing the LOS automatically where the pointer is, without preventing you from controlling your units), seeing the combat prediction window before you actually roll the dice would be nice to assess the expected modifiers, and maybe a way to see the modifiers terrain gives you if you're in it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS. THIS GAME MAY NOT BE FOR YOU.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: this is not a sim or strategy game of any appreciable depth. At all. This is a 'casual game'. Now, I never use this term as an insult; there is a place for casual games, and there is a place for Until the Last Plane. And it's called 'the lunchbreak'.

If you have to spend the next 30 minutes at your computer, and need a dose of slightly insipid clicky mini-games in a WW2 military aeroplane setting (a setting you presumably enjoy) that you can relax with, this is a game for you. Don't expect this to be something you can lose yourself in, this is light entertainment.

Likey:
- Nice pixel graphics. A good chunk of love clearly went into them, and they actually make the game look like something off, say, Sega Megadrive (Desert/Jungle Strike series, perhaps?)
- Content and theming. I liked how different the three nations in the game are: each of the campaigns brings something of its own. The planes that are in the game look good and are reasonably well-researched; I enjoyed the random events and the occasional in-joke ('Oh don't use those Me 262 as bombers!')
- I kind of enjoyed my time with it; today was a bit of a brainless and bad-hair day, so this turned out the good shallow fun I needed.

No likey, no likey at all:
- Repetitiveness. There is mission progression, and new types of missions crop up as you advance in the campaign (so don't think you've seen it all after playing it for half an hour!). However, it just gets tedious to constantly do the same thing as part of a mission, which you can't even abort.
- Lack of player agency. There are many situations where you have to do hardly anything at all to succeed; intercepting enemy planes? Pfft. Bombing a factory? Two easy clicks, even on top difficulty. At the same time, there's stuff you can't do anything about at all. Your 'attacker' gets intercepted during a bombing run? It goes down, 100% of the time. It gets intercepted during normal flight? You are offered a selection of useless manoeuvres that you can randomly click on, because you only generally evade the enemy attack if the AI makes a really silly mistake.

The game would benefit a lot from better AI, more combat options and abilities, different hits getting you different results (now it doesn't matter if you hit a plane's entire fuselage, or a single pixel), more clarity and predictability with the damage system (see above: enemies hitting you result in apparently random damage), more 'game' on the ground – right now it's all 'make sure you click this stuff quickly', and there are hardly any meaningful choices that you can make there past selecting the pilots for the mission. Meaningful choices are what makes games great.

- Language. This game is in a need of an editor. While its English isn't horrifyingly bad, and is largely passable, there are awkward bits, too, starting from the already mentioned 'attackers' for 'bombers'/'CAS planes' to the actual name of the game: [do what?] until the last plane [does what?]. I'm assuming this is supposed to be play on the phrase 'to the last man', so why isn't the name 'To the Last Plane' then?
- Price. At €11.49, the game is somewhat pricey for what it offers (about 12 hours of gameplay to finish everything, and limited replayability value). There are much better deals on new indie games out there, so make sure you really want this game before paying the full price.

ICBM: rapid-fire, excellently-themed RTS, with hardcore multiplayer and great modding community. No campaign, and few base scenarios. The absolute best in its own little niche. For more details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJa-Mc2zwtE

Excellently written little adventure. The ending seems a little forced (if the whole point was to show the entire workings of the world to a high-intelligence Tek, in order to use it for building a better society, why force it to kill itself?
Why can't it stay underground while the revolution is blazing, to avoid the management finding out about it too early? The protagonist shooting itself option feels like a crude trick to make the 'good' ending slightly less obviously 'good'), but an enjoyable experience, also visually and conceptually.