Category: Game reviews

As always I would like to take a moment to thank the great people over at Curve Games for hooking me up with a review copy of this game. It is always appreciated.

Now let me start by saying this,I’m not sure a game has ever made me this mad and kept me coming back without being made by FromSoftware in a very long time. And I mean this as a compliment in every way possible.

You will start as a lone traveler setting down on a planet that you will need to set up shop on. The tutorial will set you up with a solid foundation on how to get started with building your first few robots and how to get them chopping down trees, replanting them and how to build tools and such. It will also show you how to get people and research going.

This however as they say is only the tip of the iceberg. My first run I thought I was doing well,but it never occured to me I could have my robots break down the logs into poles and such for me and then store them. So I did a lot of that myself while also making tools for my robots as they broke. This is a very viable option. But it is time consuming,as far as I can tell you can’t truly lose this game so much as you can back yourself into a corner that makes the game harder than it needs to be.

So after fiddling with very easy to use and intuitive not programer that essentially boils down to show the robots what you want them to do and change a few commands to how often and when you want them to do it. I finally had everything going smoothly on my second attempt. At least that is what I thought. I had trees being chopped, tools being made and stored and as they broke my bots were coming for new tools,I thought. Then I noticed it all fell to pieces. When I wasn’t looking all it took was 1 robot to run out of materials,in this case sticks. Tools stopped being made trees stopped coming down sticks ran out and it just went from there.

That is when I learned in this beautiful little game things don’t all move at the same speed. Trees come down faster than they can be planted for example,so you need multiple bots working on some things and fewer working on others. The graphics are cute,and I loved watching my little person and bots especially stomp things into existence. Outside of a few minor camera issues where things would be annoyingly stuck behind trees I had no complaints. If you love games like Factorio but need your fix on console, this is your game. It is definitely a 9/10 and gets my full recommendation. This is one of those games I will be playing for a long time to come. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

As we all know, I truly love working with NIS America. They tossed me a review copy of Disgaea 6 for the Nintendo Switch when it came out and they were awesome enough to give me one for the PS5 as well. A huge shout out and thank you to them for that.

I will tell you this right out the gate, having played both versions of the game the complete version is truly complete. Right from the start, it is possible to go and get a ton of DLC characters from the older titles. I won’t spoil the who, but the list is pretty solid and had some of my favorites. That being said, while one of the more fun things to do in the Disgaea series to do is more or less breaking the game with insane character levels and damage output this specific version is by far the easiest.

If you don’t want to walk through the game with ease I suggest going into the settings and turning off using the bonus tickets the game gives you. Within a few fights, my character levels were in the hundreds, and even cranking up the enemy levels to the highest never really did much for the challenge. There is a challenge dungeon to unlock and an extra difficulty setting where the big challenge begins, and you will be leveling your characters up into the literal millions.

With all that aside Disgaea 6 is the usual Disgaea. You will start out as Zed, an angry little zombie trying to destroy the God of Destruction. You will eventually find out exactly why he is going through Super Reincarnaction to do this but to be honest you will probably figure it out before then anyway. The story is solid enough and is good for a laugh, in fact, I rather enjoyed it.

The graphics and sound are also great, I don’t ask much from a tactical RPG besides looking nice and this one certainly accomplishes that and all the special attacks and spells are up to par as well. Nothing here is pushing the performance abilities of the PS5, but I wouldn’t really want it to. The voice acting is also well done.

All in all, I have to recommend this one to any fan of tactical RPGs or the series. Easily an 8/10. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

As always I want to thank the fine folks at RoomcGames and Versus Evil for tossing me a review copy of this one. It is always appreciated and definitely doesn’t go unnoticed.

Hand of Merlin plays like a lot of other RPGs. You create a party of three heroes then move around a map to individual places ( think Slay the Spire) and make decisions. Maybe it’s to help some poor folks find a wagon wheel or save them from bandits. Solving these will many times get you money, or fame. Fame is used to level up all of your characters at once.

Battles themselves play out in a tactics style and won’t win any awards for creativity. If you are a fan of them there is nothing new here to enjoy. The usual hit points and armor are present with hit points not coming back between battles outside of certain ways of healing and armor completely replenishing.

I don’t say this is a bad thing, the battle system is a lot of fun and I greatly enjoyed it. I just don’t want anyone to go into this thinking the wheel has been reinvented so to speak.

The story itself is quite basic but it serves its purpose. Inspired by Arthurian legends, Merlin is attempting to save the world from a terrible event. That is where the rouge-lite experience comes into play. Each time you fail, and by the way, losing the Holy Grail also results in a game over. I discovered that when I sold it. Anyway, if you fail Merlin will simply take off to a new part of the multiverse where you will start all over again. You pretty much lose all of the progress you made except for any heroes you unlocked or spells you unlocked.

Oddly, I don’t really have anything bad to say about this game. It is essentially average in every way I can think of. The sound, the graphics, the gameplay. It is all good. Just that, good. It isn’t in any way special or unremarkable. It is a solid 7/10 and great for any fan of rogue-lites.

  Eiyuden Chronicle Rising is a weird game for me. It’s cheap ($15) and is a spin off of a game that isn’t out yet. It introduces you to the world and some of the characters that will be in next year’s Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.

  It actually does a very good job of this, C.J. is a lovable scavenger and her relationship with Garoo who is a kangaroo is great. More than once I laughed at how upset or annoyed he would seem to get at her love of stamp collecting.

  Yes I did say stamp collecting. A large part of this game is simply helping rebuild New Nevaeh. While you do this the towns people will reward you with money, experience new tools and stamps. These stamps fill a card that basically show your progress in the game and can be used to get items at the trader, later on some of these items are absolutely amazing so it is worth collecting them, sort of.

I say sort of because the game isn’t really all that hard or long. You only ever get three characters,you can swap between them easily simply by hitting A Y or B depending on who you want to attack with and doing so allows you to use link attacks to cause more damage or solve puzzles. I never found a reason to spend time grinding for levels or materials, simply doing all the missions will set you up nicely.

  The town itself however is nice, rebuilding it is simplistic,just gather the materials people ask for and give it to them. They will build the building in a preset location and give you a stamp.

Honestly for $15 the game is nice but a little repetitive. It is a nice introduction however to a world I can’t wait to give deeper into. It is also on GamePass and definitely worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

  As always with these reviews I would like to take a second to say thank you to the nice people over at Klabater and LAB132 for tossing is a copy of this one to review, it is always appreciated.

As many of you know I am a huge fan of Kerbal Space Program,so any chance I get to play with rockets or space stations I will. There are no rockets in this game and no need to worry about orbiting things. This time however all you have to worry about is building the best space station you can with a very intuitive system. simply pick the type of object or connection you want to add and it builds.

Another screen allows you to connect what you just build to the stations systems. This screen will also show you exactly how efficient your space station is.

None of this is to say the game is easy,it is very far from easy. There are decisions to be made depending on your goals or even the campaign you are playing. Can you really afford to build that extra research lab instead of more power? There is a pretty fine line between being efficient enough to do things just quick enough to make it worth it and everything you have built becoming a huge slog.

There isn’t a ton to this game compared to others out there in the surface. When you dig deep and see how things can go from great to catastrophic in a few minutes, or from being a simple trade station simulator to having to terraform a planet it becomes very hard not to recommend this game when you see the price point of $20.(US) the game looks amazing with fabulous views and the sounds are pretty much exactly what one would hope for. A solid 8/10 experience that any fan of space, building, or tycoon fans will enjoy. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.