Crying Suns (PC, 2019)

Some times I like to theorize a bit around the development process of a game I am playing. Did they have a good story and borrowed some good gameplay? Or did they enjoy the gameplay so much from another game they wanted to create a story for it?

It doesn't matter when the end result is as entertaining as Crying Suns, but it is clear that they were heavily inspired by another great game - Faster Than Light (FTL) - when creating this one.

I spent around 50+ hours dying in Faster Than Light back when it came out, probably the most fun I've had failing in any game in a long time. FTL is notorious for its difficulty, and even though it could be downright mean, the gameplay was so well designed the thought of "just another try" was never far away in your mind.

While this isn't a review on FTL, it's worth mentioning this since Crying Suns takes a lot of what makes it fun from that game. What it adds that gives it its own identity is a different kind of combat system and a story (the story in FTL was a bare bone reason to move your ship ahead). 

The story in Crying Suns has other good inspirations, the first that came to mind when playing it was the Empire- and Foundation-series by Isaac Asimov. The game starts out with you being reincarnated as Ellys Idaho, space admiral in the Imperial Fleet. Apparently the original Ellys Idaho died somewhere, and you are woken up as the spare (if you've followed the AppleTV+ series Foundation you get the idea). You meet your new BFF Kaliban who is an OMNI, a certain type of robot that you will soon learn helps humans around the galaxy with absolutely everything. It also seems Kaliban is the only working OMNI left in the galaxy, leaving the humans completely helpless and dying.

You set off together with a crew of characters that you will quite come to like through your run. Your task is to find out what has gone wrong and, if possible, fix it. You do this by traversing space in a huge battle ship and directing your armada in combat with a lot of different enemies. Everywhere you go you have a chance of encountering something; most often something that wants to kill you, but also people in need of help and objects to explore. Just like in FTL I find that the Universe is a harsh place, you're often tricked and trapped by people who pretend to be nice, and you're almost better off becoming the same asshat everyone else seems to be.

You will find yourself really struggling for resources quickly, especially the fuel that allows you to travel around, and turn every dime (or scrap as its called in this game) to make it just another jump, to hopefully better pastures. But the better pastures never come. Around every corner lurks evil and danger. 

It's a good thing evil and danger is so much fun to fight then. As mentioned Crying Suns employs a completely different battle style from FTL, in which you control space ships in real-time on a grid. The combat area can be affected by all sorts of additional hazards like turrets or meteor strikes, and the enemy ship of course has battle ships and weapons of its own.

There is a lot to tinker with and keep track off here, there are many different ship types, skills and weapons to keep you alive and the enemy dead. Fortunately you can always choose to pause combat to issue commands and overall the combat is well designed and very fun - I never grew tired of it. 

I did find that on normal mode I had to scrounge a bit too much for resources, which took away from the fun of exploring the story. In FTL this wasn't an issue since there wasn't any story worth exploring, just the challenge of getting to the end. But the story in Crying Suns is genuinely engaging. While there are encounters that are clearly randomly generated, I only came across duplicates two or three times on a full run, which is impressive. At the end of each zone you continue the story, and you also have a chance of encountering story parts within the zones.

Crying Suns succeeds with a lot of things; it has a story worthy of its own sci-fi series (if this gets printed I am interested!), while nothing spectacular and in certain areas cliché and predictable, it still explores a lot of themes that I personally find fun and interesting. It has a well designed and thought through gameplay, both when travelling through the zones and when battling through any of the very many battles you will encounter.

Visually every character is represented by a fairly rudimentary pixel creation, and space is littered with planets, space stations and battle ships that you visit in a framed style. It suits the game and works well for the gameplay and almost gives the game the feeling of a visual novel.

The world building and character exploration is just deep enough to fit the story and I would've loved to know more or be able to dig deeper. But that would've been another game. It's always a balance between game and story and overall I find Crying Suns has made smart choices. As mentioned however I could see this being further explored in a series of books that I wouldn't mind reading.

If I had to nitpick over anything its that you can't choose to engage in combat yourself, which left me  frustrated a handful of times. When I was tricked out of scrap by a space station I was flying past, I wanted to destroy it. But I just had to accept it and move on. Maybe Ellys Idaho has a stronger moral code than I do, luckily for the people on that space station. When I came across some pirates that chose to bribe me to let them be, I had to accept it (some times you can take the bribe and attack, but I came across an option where I couldn't). This is barely even an issue however.

I played about a third of the game on normal before I decided to enjoy it on easy. Easy is almost too easy, but at least it allowed me to not stress and to have the resources to go out on a limb here and there which in the end I think was a more enjoyable experience. It took me just over 14 hours to complete my first run, and after that you have replay value in trying to beat the game with different battle ships and trying to find out more parts of the main story (or get a different ending, there seemed to be three).

If you enjoy rogue-likes, space battles, sci-fi or just loved FTL I can really recommend checking this game out.

Eye of the Beholder (PC, 1991)

 As gamers we're constantly crushed between the onslaught of new games being released, but also all the games that came before we were old enough to play them or at least enjoy them. I am always trying to balance my gaming of new and old games, to make sure I don't miss out on old classic like Thief, Deus Ex and Heroes of Might and Magic 3. But my quest to sift through the Good Old Games I often come across the ones that didn't age so well. And also the ones that try the old formula but don't quite hit the mark. 

Eye of the Beholder, a game that came out on MS-DOS (remember that thing?) back in 1991 falls somewhere in between. For a dungeon crawler it actually holds up really well and improves on a lot of features and gameplay to similar games like Might & Magic that came out in the mid 80's. But dungeon crawlers of this era still rely on the players immense patience and fortitude to get through, having some cruel design choices. Let's go explore.

You control a group of adventurers, based on basic D&D rules (with all the problems that entails, I'll get back to that). You've been tasked to investigate the sewers beneath a city to find out what is going on down there. As soon as you enter your only way out is blocked and your only option is to work your way further in and further down.

The controls, at least on my version, were with the number pad. This actually worked well since it allowed me to choose between turning and strafing, which would really come in handy when fighting certain enemies. It was also something that on occasion would get me lost, when I accidentally hit turn instead of strafe and suddenly found myself facing the wrong direction. Fortunately the game provides you with a compass, which is quite crucial to keep track off. Some parts of the dungeon will deliberately try to throw you off by turning you around, and some times the only way to spot it before you get lost if by keeping an eye on the compass.

You fight by clicking your weapons/spells. Your front characters can hit (and be hit) in melee range, so it is wise to put your ranged characters in the back row. You only have two spots in the front row however, and this is the first occasion you can smeg yourself over during the character creation screen.

Oh D&D rules. I have complained about them before. And I will probably complain about them many times more. Maybe I should just learn to steer clear of games who implement this system too rigidly? Then again, Eye of the Beholder is actually an example of a game where this system doesn't work too badly. You really have to know which classes are worth rolling in the beginning however, I implore you to throw your pride out the window and look up a walkthrough for at least a bit of guidance on this. If you, for instance, think you want a group of only mages, you are in for a hell ride from the beginning.

Some group compilations are simply the way to go, and when you roll your character stats it's also important to remember that you can't just wing it. Old-school D&D is very harsh and doesn't play kindly to experimenting or deviating. 

Once you've made your best group however, I found Eye of the Beholder didn't suffer so much from one of the worst D&D curses, the combat targeting. Anyone who has played old D&D knows that combat is mostly spent missing whatever you're trying to hit. I don't understand why anyone thought this would be any fun, because it really isn't. In Eye of the Beholder there will still be a lot of missing, but not to the point where it gets frustrating.

Monsters are fortunately not infinite nor random, a certain amount spawn on each level and once you've worked your way through them you are free to explore. Overall I found the difficulty well balanced, and as long as you have a cleric in your group you can heal up between fights. Some enemies have cruel features however which make them a pain to deal with. Spiders have a high chance of poisoning you (unless you were smart enough to roll a dwarf with high constitution!) and I had no way to remove it. You can just watch your characters slowly die when this happens (there is also no way to resurrect characters to my knowledge). If you're lucky you've found some Cure Poison potions at this point. You only other option is to reload the game. You can save whenever so I just made it a habit to save after every combat or every 15 minutes or so.

I called EotB a dungeon crawler, but it really is more of a maze crawler. The game doesn't provide you with any map or mapping system, instead you need to rely on good old pen and paper, or if you're lucky you've got the Clue Book. It is provided with the GoG version of the game. I love the Clue Book, it is absolutely amazing. And absolutely necessary if you don't want to go insane down in those sewers. They twist and turn and like I mentioned even actively try to confuse you. The Clue Book provides maps, with detailed information on the whereabout of enemies and items and I don't care if it's considered cheating - as a working mom I simply don't have the time nor the mind power to work these things out on my own.

I can see the fun in trying to do it the old pen and paper way, it plays a bit like an escape room with added monsters. The dungeon is full of buttons to press, levers to pull, messages on walls and secret walls to walk through. Everything just takes so much time. I wish I had that time, I really do. These game designs reflect a zeitgeist that is gone, those times when that one game was the only new one you had, for months. Eye of the Beholder represents one of the better products of its time in this aspect.

After having struggled through four levels, the first two without guide and the subsequent two with one, I decided that my nerves couldn't handle more. And if I am going to play the game entirely by guide I might as well watch a let's play, right? Maybe I do mind cheating after all.

Eye of the Beholder deserves better than me. It is not a bad game, or at least it wasn't, but time has outrun it. There is not much to complain about, it's got atmosphere and fun gameplay. But also endless running down corridors feeling lost and the stress of being chased by a spider knowing its bite will be the death of you. 

So four levels down I decided it was the enough for me. Looking in the Clue Book I knew that was about a third of the game, but also that much worse (and fun) was waiting for me further down. I will regret not finishing Eye of the Beholder, or maybe I regret not being able to play it back when it was released. I am sure it would've been a great experience.

EXIT: The Game Kids - Jungle of Riddles - Review

The EXIT: The Game series are board games centered around the currently very popular "Escape Room" genre. I haven't tried Escaping any rooms anywhere (unless The Room counts) so when my brother presented me with one of the EXIT games I was intrigued to see how they worked. As this is not a review of the adult version of the series I will just shortly say that the premise is that the players work together to try to solve the puzzles in the game. The design is often clever and some time even fiendish - I don't want to spoil anything by giving too many examples, so just suffice to say you will probably be surprised when you play your first EXIT game.

EXIT: The Game for Kids is just what the name implies, an attempt at translating the experience for the younger audience. 

Now it is worth mentioning that the adult game is playable with younger kids, I had my 6 yo and 10 yo taking part when I tried it and they absolutely loved it. And while most of the puzzles are too hard for them to solve (they're almost too hard for an adult of average intelligence to solve), the team effort and experience is not lost on them. The fact that my kids enjoyed the adult version so much was a big reason I wanted to check out the kids version. The adult version is an intense, one-time (per game) experience but the Kids version promises replayability.

EXIT Kids is similar to the adult version in that the players must co-operate in solving puzzles. The solutions are fed into a code wheel that will allow the players to move on to the next task or in this case, finish the game. In EXIT Kids the game isn't linear, as one solution isn't necessary to try to solve another puzzle. All puzzles are available to be solved from the get go.

The players get six different puzzle cards to try to solve, in the Jungle of Riddles the theme is animals. The replayability comes from the puzzles coming in six different variants, so each new game you shuffle the cards and get a new set of challenges. I found that the variety of puzzles was quite inventive and clever, and ranged from very easy to requiring some time to think for my kids (as mentioned, 6 and 10 yo). You can't play this game too many times in a row, as you will remember the solutions, but if you play it every now and then the replayability is definitely there. A big plus to the game is that once you've explained what the goal of each puzzle is, the game is simple enough to set up that kids can actually play it without an adult participating. 

Always bring HP Sauce to my board gaming.

The game is recommended from age 5+ and I find that appropriate. Both in the sense that the game components are somewhat thin and fragile and will easily break in a rough 3 yo hands. But also in the level of challenge. My 6 yo found some of the puzzles a bit tricky, but my 10 yo was probably right at the upper age that would still find this game fun to play, the puzzles were easy for him to solve. This means that EXIT Kids feels like it has an upper age limit, and as an adult you'd do best to just watch your kids have fun.

The game only takes about 15 minutes to complete and I guess it speak to the games strengths that my kids immediately wanted to play it another time. I agree with the game recommendation of 1-4 players. There are "only" six different puzzles to solve - it's hard to have 4 kids co-operating around the same material, and it is hard to have kids sit around and wait while other kids solve puzzles. You can have them solve different puzzles simultaneously but there is only one code-wheel to share.

Overall EXIT Kids has the benefit of being simple enough in execution that it is almost like a toy, and something my kids enjoyed bringing out and play around with even on their own (similar to the Mouse Trap game, if you remember that, or a book of Where's Waldo?) The drawback is that the design doesn't really allow for adult participation, besides cheering from the sidelines. This is truly a game made only for kids.

Sagrada - Board Game Review

I'll admit, I am a fool for a good looking board game. Whenever I need to scratch the itch and go hunting for a new board game, I definitely go firstly by aesthetics. I've never quite let it guide my actions as with Sagrada though - the second I saw it I knew I needed it, regardless of gameplay.

Just look at it. And it is about crafting beautiful stained glass windows with colorful dice, I mean it can not get prettier than this. It had me hooked from the go. Is it any fun to play though?

Sagrada brands itself as a game about dice drafting and window crafting, and it sums it up well. If you've played a draft game before - like AQUA, Ticket to Ride or Cascadia - you've got the general idea. Players need to draft resources from a common pool to combine them and whoever scores the most points in the end wins. I've mentioned before that I enjoy the non-antagonistic nature of draft and tile placing games. While you compete for the same resources, the game isn't so much about ruining other people's play, but to optimize your own with what there is. Or at least, that is how you can choose to play it, and probably will have to if you like me are stuck mostly playing board games with little children.

In Sagrada the resources are colourful dice and the craft is your church window. At the start each player chooses a window to craft, and they come in different difficulties. Other than dice, you'll also have extra point challenges and tools to look out for. The extra point challenges are additional ways to place your dice for optimal points, and the tools allow you to fix things you've messed up (or are trying to avoid to mess up). Each player takes turn rolling a certain amount of dice (depending on number of players), and then take turns drafting from that pool. The luck factor is the same as in any draft game, you always hope what you need will turn up and that no one else will grab if before you.

The placement of the die follows some stringent rules - some dice can only be placed according to their value and some according to their colour. Add to this that you can't place two dice of the same colour/value next to each other. 

There is a lot to keep track off in other words and it is so easy to miss a placement. It's a bummer if you do, because it is not easy to try to fix it when you discover it a bit down the road. Once you've started placing other dice around it, they all become wrong. Sudoku comes to mind here, if you've played that you know the feeling. All players should help each other out in making sure the dice placement is correct, to avoid this problem.

Another issue is that dice like to roll. Despite their edgy design, they are literally made to roll around and that becomes apparent as soon as you've started gathering a few pieces onto your window. When you need to squeeze in a die between a few other it is way too easy to accidentally push them aside, flipping their sides and messing up your beautiful order. Best case scenario you need to carefully reassemble and hope your co-players don't accuse you of cheating. Worst case scenario you don't remember exactly how they were placed and you're screwed. This happens easily and is something to really keep in mind when playing the game. A knock with your elbow on the table can actually ruin a run of game if you're unlucky enough. I have this issue more or less with any game that requires tiles to be placed on the board in fragile constellations (mostly because little children's arms yank around like a marionette doll's), but Sagrada is especially sensitive to this problem.

But enough about the nitpicky, Sagrada is fun. It is fun to look at and it is fun to play. As with many draft games similar to this you can adapt the difficulty simply by adding or removing goal components. When I play with my 6 yo the goal is simply to try to complete our windows, and she loves it (the 10 wasn't appealed by pretty colours and isn't a fan of the game).  If you're playing someone with higher ambitions there are several layers of point collecting to add, and if you're really trying to get to the higher echelons you've got a real brain twister in your hands.

Sagrada of course also has a solo mode, which plays similarly as the regular and can be a fun way to kill some time in the evening. I am going to make the comparison to a round of sudoku again, but just way prettier. By now Sagrada also has a few expansion packs, that add more of the fun I am assuming. I haven't had a chance to check them out and currently I am perfectly happy with the core game as it is anyway.

All in all Sagrada ticks a lot of boxes for me - easy to grasp and set up, easily customizable for different difficulties and amazing from a tactile and aesthetic point of view - and the only way I can see you not having fun with this is if you, like my 10 yo, think colourful dice are stupid.

Night in the Woods (PC, 2017)

 "You're Mae. Your grandpa is dead. You're all alone at a station, somewhere in Possum Springs. Someone is blocking the door to the only way out. You need to give him something so he will move away."

Can a game be about that time when you've just become an adult, life feels like it's yours for the taking but also like you have no idea how to do it? Night in the Woods seems to think so.

The introductory quote is from my 10 yo and describes the very beginning of the game. Night in the Woods was a game I hoped we could play together, having the idea that it would be a nice little mystery-solving puzzler. But it's not really that and it's clear that me and my 10 yo experienced the game quite differently. But we both enjoyed it.

We follow the cat Mae as she moves back home to her backwater hometown of Possum Springs, one of those places that barely remembers its glory days of when things actually happened around there. Some of Mae's best friends still live there, working jobs that they hate, trying to make the escape that Mae has already made and returned from. A lot of the game is about their dynamic as a group of friends, the feeling of not knowing where you belong and navigating what it means to be an adult.

While Mae walks and jumps around her hometown, we converse with her parents, her old neighbours, people who knew her when she was a child and before she moved. We also find there is a kid missing and Mae starts to think that there is something weird going on - will people believe her or will they think she is just trying to get attention? We help our friends with their every day problems and try to rekindle the spark of being a teenager without a care in the world.

The smooth, popping graphics is one of the things that drew me to the game in the first place. It's fun to see the characters wag as they talk and the eyes rolling around in their heads as they're looking around. The game controls definitely feel optimized for a gamepad, on PC with regular WASD and spacebar for movement and C for interacting. The game keeps it really simple though and you will never struggle to do the right thing.

Personally I found that Night in the Woods had a good balance between mini-games and story. Mini-games is all you could call it really, you will find yourself in situations where you get to try to press the right thing at the right time. Maybe you're helping your friend move a sofa, maybe you are trying to steal a battery out of a car, maybe you're trying to stab your best friend in a play-knife-fight. Each mini-game is fun and didn't outstay its welcome. They didn't feel like they were necessary for the game either, but they were a nice way to break up the pace and make it not all about talking. To my kid it was too much talking.

But I was actually quite shocked at how much this game hit home with me. I am sure not everyone will identify with Mae's short story in Possum Springs, but to me it was like looking in a mirror. I have been in pretty much that situation, albeit for other reasons. Moving in to a small, back-water town. Hanging out with people who have lived there their whole life, none of us kids anymore, none of us quite yet getting the idea behind being an adult. We had these conversations, we had these thoughts and feelings. That juxtaposed sensation of being on top of the world and completely lost at the same time. Feeling like you're in your own little corner of life and no one understands you. Now, 20 years on from that part of my life, hanging out with Mae and her friends turned out to be a nostalgia hit for me I had not anticipated.

The 10 yo had fun with the mini-games and the mystery (because there is one, but it's not the main focus of the game), to me Night in the Woods turned out to be a bit more than just a handful hours of fun. It's worth noting that I played the "Weird Autumn Edition" which seems to be the definitive edition, a sort of director's cut which includes content that was cut from a previous version. I am not sure any other version is available any longer.

Reading up on the game before I started writing this I found out that there is a whole nother side to it that I won't be commenting on in this review, as it is completely unrelated to the game itself. 

I really enjoyed my stay in Possum Springs. We finished it at around 8,5 hours, and some of that was spent by my 10 yo not wanting to continue the story and just explore the tiny town. Your mileage might vary, depending on how your journey to adulthood turned out, but only requiring a few hours of your life I think you wouldn't regret checking this game out.

Here is a nice little short animation Youtuber Worldwidewebuser has up on Youtube.

GoldenEye N64 - A Retrospective

I love going to boot sales and flea markets, you never know what you are going to find. My hopes are always on video games (other than sports and The Sims games, they seems to be the only thing I find) and nostalgic stuff from the 90's. I was over the moon when I found a handful of Mighty Max stuff once. Or the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Board Game.

A while back I went to a boot sale and actually found some interesting video games. Wetrix and GoldenEye for the N64. Wetrix I had only heard of (and trying it out it didn't seem particularly interesting) but GoldenEye... we go way back. I already own a copy, that I got as a kid and played to bits with my friends. I only own the cartridge though, and this copy was complete with box, manual, inlays and all. Of course I had to have it. As I was deciding to buy it, the seller - a man about my own age - came up to me and started chatting. It was obvious he was very reluctant to let go of the games, but I tried to ensure him they were going to a loving home.

As I came home I wanted to see if they worked. I have often thought back on all the fun I used to have with this game back in the day. We had all kinds of unofficial playing modes, like "Terminator" where one of us played with +10 health and everyone else was -10. With proximity mines or grenades there could be so much clutter effects you'd get serious slow downs. But thinking back I was still unsure how much it would hold up today. I had actually avoided revisiting it so that my memories of the game wouldn't be spoiled by the reality that it just wasn't very good anymore.

I thought maybe the graphics, the controls, the gameplay overall just weren't up to what I'd enjoy now, or maybe especially what my kids would enjoy coming to it without the rose-tinted goggles. I've revisited other loves of my youth and come out disappointed (the Narnia-series is an example).

But now I had to test my new copy, there was no reason to avoid it any longer. I sat down with my 10 yo and gave it a go. And we had so much fun.

Everything was just like I remembered it. If I had thought my modern self would have trouble with playing a shooter on the console I was dead wrong. The controls are just great. Sure aiming isn't perfect, but in multiplayer that just adds to the fun. The levels are well designed, the music is awesome. The weapons are fun and allow for fights that are more on the serious side or completely bonkers "let's blow ourselves and everything else up too"-type. My kid absolutely loved it. He never wanted to stop playing it. He hasn't wanted to play anything else with me since we tried it - this game has trumped Minecraft, Lego Jurassic World, Mario Kart 8, you name it.

My first console, but not my last.

This game hasn't even aged, it is just as good as it was when it was released and if you're sitting on a copy I really recommend you break it out with some friends. I still consider this one of the very best multiplayer experiences out there.

But I have a confession to make - I have never once played the single player mode of GoldenEye. I vaguely recall trying the first stage, but never even made it through that. With the multiplayer being as fun as it is, and considering how many hours I put into that part of the game I was a bit confused as to why I never got further into the main campaign. It's James Bond after all, one of my favorite franchises.

Revisiting the game made me want to give it another, or more honestly a first, real go. So I started up the first stage, The Dam, put it on easy and ran out to do some spying. Or so I thought. The controls are completely different from multiplayer and I struggled to move anywhere. Whereas you use the joystick to move and the L/R-button to target in multiplayer, in single player you use the joystick to target and the yellow buttons/D-pad to move. My brain could not wrap itself around this control scheme and I constantly aimed into the sky while I got shot in the face. 

No wonder I gave up so early. The control scheme is so bad I had completely scrubbed the experience from my brain. I just can't understand why they would go with two completely different ways of controlling you character, and then use the weird one for the main campaign. In a way I am glad they did though because I am sure we would've never spent all those hours playing multiplayer if it had used that way of controlling the characters. Playing old games, or PC ports of console games, I have had to get used to a lot of odd control schemes and I usually don't mind (having to use IJKL on Moonlighter recently was a new experience).

But this one wasn't just odd, it went contrary to endless hours of hardwiring in my brain and I realized I wouldn't be able to break through that muscle memory any time soon. I guess I am going to have to watch a Let's Play of the campaign instead.

AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans - Board Game Review

What if you play Cascadia, but under water? Well, let me introduce you to AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans. Any draft game will feel similar to other draft games to a certain extent, but AQUA borrows a lot of its identity from Cascadia - which is understandable since Cascadia has some great core ideas. It does mean however that unless you really love this game style specifically, you might not need AQUA if you already own Cascadia. But let's dig down a bit deeper, does AQUA have any original ideas as well?

The game in AQUA is to create underwater habitats/coral reefs to attract certain animals. To do this you draft hexagonal pieces of reef that need to be fitted with other pieces in certain ways to allow for you to place animal tokens. These habitat tokens look just like in Cascadia, even down to your starting zone, except one is on land and the other under water. One major difference here between AQUA and Cascadia is that where Cascadia allows you to put your habitat tokens wherever (you score more points for fitting them certain ways though), you must fit them following certain rules in AQUA. Also unlike Cascadia where you place animal tokens every turn, in AQUA you can only place an animal token once your habitat tokens line up to fill certain requirements.

At first you can attract smaller animals, and once they are placed in certain patterns you can attract larger animals for bigger points. There is a lot of strategizing when you choose between fast, small points or try to build for larger, harder to reach points - just like any good draft game should be. There are also a lot of optional requirements to meet for extra points. Trying to keep the end game in sight while making good choices here and now works well in AQUA. There isn't much antagonizing between players, while you can pick a habitat token you don't really need simply to mess with someone else's well laid plans, it's difficult to completely ruin someone's day like in LUDO. This is a big plus point for me as it's easier to convince my kids to play something where they'll always feel like they have a chance.

The game itself is heavy, literally - all the habitat and animal tokens are in gorgeous, chunky card board that are easy to handle and fun to look at, there is some great value for money here. When I first opened the box I was worried that all the tokens would be thrown around, since the game comes with no bags to hold them. Turns out the game itself provides you with a setup that you build inside the box that allows you to store your tokens just perfectly when you want to put your game away.

I mentioned in my review of Cascadia that even my 5 yo can play it with some minor help, this is even more true for AQUA where the playstyle is very adaptable depending on who you are playing with. In essence the game is just about matching colors and trying to build shapes. Me and my kids usually just play with the face value points, whereas more seasoned players can opt in for all the extra requirements to try to gather more points. Or not - the simplest form of AQUA is a nice, quick little fix of board gaming that works well, and is easy to set up, understand and play.

It seems to be standard nowadays that draft board games come with some sort of solo mode - a fascinating trend in board games, that I hope never goes away - and AQUA has one too of course. It doesn't change much of the setup, you simply play the game as usual but try to beat certain challenges. The rule book (which has a nice, luxurious feel to it) comes with an extensive highscore board to compete against other players, or just yourself like a chaser of points in a Tetris game.

AQUA borrows a lot from Cascadia but has its own identity, though maybe not enough unless you're really into this kind of gameplay. AQUA might even be even more adaptable to different skill levels but in the end the choice probably simply comes down to what you prefer - to play with bears or whale sharks?

Cascadia - Board Game Review

 As someone who loves to play board games, but is surrounded by people who mostly don't, I am always desperate to find anything that will encourage them to want to play with me. So when my 10 yo looks over my shoulders while I am on a board game hunt and says Cascadia "looks like a fun game", the small chance of having found a board game he'd want to play was all the excuse I needed to buy it. He is an extremely picky board game player.

He is really into animals of all kinds, so I can see what caught his interest. In Cascadia you are tasked to build a park, or biome if you prefer, and meet certain requirements to make your animals thrive. In reality you can place your wildlife tokes any way you like as long as you respect the limitations on the habitat token. A bear can only go on a token with a bear on it. But if you want the big-bomba-points you want to place your tokens very carefully and thoughtfully indeed, to meet your animals needs. Bears might only want to live in pairs and hawks don't want to be near any other hawks, for instance. It all translates to having to place your tokens according to certain patterns depending on which animal it is.

The habitat tokens in turn represent different areas of nature - river, forest, mountain and so on. Each token can represent one or more such areas. The more of these areas you connect together, the more points you score at the end, of course, and is yet another variable to factor in as you expand your park.

Cascadia is a drafting game, as such a certain amount of wildlife and habitat tokens are put up on the table for the players to draft in turn. This simple system has been twisted and turned around in loads of games by now, in Cascadia the trick is that habitat tokens and wildlife tokens are put into the pool together and you need to choose one combination. The habitat token might not come with the animal token you need, but that's how it goes and adds to the strategic thinking. The draft pool gets refreshed with each draft meaning there is no "last" person left with the bottom of the barrel, a game design choice I like for this game. 

Certain habitat tokens will reward you a pine cone token if you place an animal on top of them. The pine cones can be traded in for benefits during your drafting, such as altering your options - which often comes in handy when there is yet another fox in the draft pool and you really need that last salmon to finish your run.

And that is pretty much it. The easy set up and concept lends it well for playing it even with younger children. My 5 yo can play this, with some strategic help, since the basic idea is just to put the corresponding animal on the right picture on the habitat tokens. As such it is very easy to get into while there is a lot of strategizing to do if you really want to get the big points. As with most drafting games there is tactic in choosing between whatever you need next or whatever your opponent needs next. 

Overall however I find drafting games like Cascadia to be far less antagonistic than classic games like Monopoly or Ludo. While you can try to outmaneuver your co-players by drafting what they seem to need, it is difficult to completely prevent them from making any sort of progress. For better or worse the game is more about building your biomes individually and see whoever planned it out better, and less about sticking a wrench in someone else's works. This just makes it yet another reason why it works well to play with children, in my book.

Cascadia won Adult Game of the Year 2023 award here in Sweden and I can see why. It's easy get into, it's adaptable to play with people less experienced and you can easily dig deep trenches of strategy if you are so inclined. And who doesn't enjoy building parks? Apparently my 10 yo, as it turns out he doesn't like this game either (I really do though).

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - I Waited 4 Years For This

Or at least close to.

As someone who really enjoyed Suikoden 1 and 2, I was immediately intrigued when I heard a spiritual successor by no one less than the original creator Yoshitaka Murayama was looking for funding on Kickstarter in mid-2020. This was also before I had had a few bad experiences with Kickstarter so I eagerly threw my money at a physical copy and started waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

To their credit, the development team were very informative and transparent about the ups and downs of the developmental process. So much in fact that I stopped reading the steady flow of updates that came to my inbox not long after I had backed the project. I realized that the game would either be a thing or not be a thing (as is the way with Kickstarter) and basically stopped thinking about it for a year. And another year.

I had genuinely given up hope on the whole thing towards the end of last year and sort of just started seeing the updates as another junk mail to delete. 

But then one of the updates caught my attention (fortunately). The subject line asked for my personal information so that my physical copy could be sent to me (and also to pay for shipping, more money into the void I thought). It was easy to submit, but I was nervous and shaky nonetheless. It almost felt unreal to actually be at this stage, finally. After I had submitted my information I set my mind to another year of waiting, or maybe just not receiving anything at all.

But then one day, not long after, when I came home it was there in my postbox waiting for me. My very own copy of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I have waited so long for this game, actually forgotten about it and written it off as a myth not going to materialize that I didn't really know how to handle that physical manifestation in my hands. My mind was empty. I couldn't muster excitement about something I had considered dead and non-existent for so long. I had also missed that poor Murayama-san had passed just before the release of this game and heard of it the day after I had received my copy (coincidentally? Who knows).

So now I think that whatever I end up feeling about the game - whether it was worth the wait or not - it will hold a special place in my heart because of the journey, because of the symbolism. This Kickstarter story ended up on a mixed note. I am glad I got the game, I believe it will at least be entertaining but of course playing it will will also fill me with sadness knowing Murayama didn't get to see the final reception himself.

I will start the game up soon. I haven't finished mentally preparing myself for it yet.

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut (PC, 2015)

I've played and really enjoyed Fallout 1, 2, Tactics, 3 and New Vegas. It felt then like an obvious step to go full circle and try out Wasteland 2, seeing as the Fallout series was inspired by the very first Wasteland game released in 1988. While that game looked a bit dated for my patience, Wasteland 2 looked like a good alternate version of a Fallout game. It is inevitable that I am going to compare these two games then, seeing as they seem to be (un?)willingly intertwined.

Wasteland 2 was released in 2014 and the Director's Cut that I have played was released the year after with some enhanced gameplay. Unlike Fallout, Wasteland never created a franchise, so it took them 26 years to finally manage to come out with a sequel. Wasteland 2 has some interesting people attached to it, first and foremost the original creator of Wasteland Brian Fargo. Adding to this were people attached to Fallout 1 & 2, like the game designer Jason Anderson and composer Mark Morgan. Then came Chris Avellone and Colin McComb whom had worked on Planescape: Torment among other things and it really looked like Wasteland 2 could only turn out to be the perfect Apocalyptic adventure, a true hero to carry on the Fallout flag.

Just like in Fallout, the game starts out with the player in the remains of America after a devastating nuclear war with the Soviet Union (China in Fallout). People have bonded together in different factions, some are intent on spreading law, some are intent on spreading death. You control a group of newbie ranger recruits who are tasked to find out what or who has killed a fellow ranger. You get tasked a lot of other things, helping out nearby settlements for instance, and you quickly get many reasons to travel across the desert landscape. Just in Fallout, your party is represented by a symbol on the map and you can come across random encounters which you can choose to engage, or not, depending on your skill.

Your characters have stats which influence your capabilities and can further improve their qualities with skills and perks. Skills can range from how to handle different weapons to being able to remove bombs, repair items, speak to animals, or handle people to mention a few. Perks often allow you to improve certain areas of gameplay, like carry capacity, health, resilience or the efficiency of your skills. You always feel like you aren't quite good enough at doing anything. Some (most?) bigger quests require that you have a certain level of skill to be able to complete it satisfactorily. But you also need to use those precious points to be able to hit anything with your weapons (more on that below). Some things are probably, definitely, more useful to put your points into than others but it's complete trial and error to figure out what they are.

So I run out into the literal wasteland and try to get to work at helping people. Turns out I am not overly good at that. Wherever I go new mysteries crop up that I have to solve in order to keep people happy, or, as is often the case around here, alive. I realize that some of my choices are mutually exclusive, meaning that if I fail to finish a task a certain way or at all, it changes my options up ahead. Nothing wrong with that and I think it works well enough although I often realize after the fact that I messed something up and can't fix it again. Quick save and quick load are your friend here. 

I do quickly find that there is a lot of running back and forth though. And I constantly get lost. I am not sure it is to the benefit of the game that I am capable to turn the camera all the way around, because while it helps me see around corners, it often gets me lost in the directions. Fitting to the wasteland, but less fun to play is the constant scrounging for resources. I feel a frustration between the cost of each shot I make against an enemy, compared to how weak most weapons feel. Not to mention all the missing. I ended up trying to teach most of my characters melee weapons to save on ammo, and often times I ended up doing way more damage with melee weapons than with guns simply because shooting cost more AP and missed more often.

A word about the combat system. If you've played Fallout 1 or 2 you know pretty much how it goes. Each character has a set of Action Points, or AP, that they can freely allocate on different actions, like attacking (with different weapons requiring different amount of AP as mentioned), using a skill (like bandaging), hiding, reloading and so on. I think it is a great system and there is nothing wrong with it here either. In fact, Wasteland 2 is helpful enough to give you a great overlay of the combat area, showing you exactly how far you can move if you still want to have enough AP for a shot.

The problem arises in the calculating of success, which is less often than desirable (albeit nowhere near as frustratingly rare as in The Temple of Elemental Evil). And even when your characters finally hit, they usually only put a small dent in the enemy. Most enemies require a lot of whacking, or wasting of precious bullets, before they go down. In the meantime your own characters easily take a lot of damage and wasting of precious bandages to keep alive.

Wasteland 2, to its credit, has a generous fail system, in which your characters don't immediately die when they go down. You have a certain window of opportunity to resuscitate them and save them back to life. On the other hand, once dead the character stays dead and you can't ever get them back. I fortunately didn't end up in this situation, but I got close a few times.

Overall the combat system is a lot more frustrating than it is fun, even though the core system is good. The end result is often just a lot of flailing and bullet spraying, which just isn't a fun way to spend your evening (unless you're playing Quake 2). Add to this other environmental mechanics, like exploding seed pods that infect your characters with hard to treat diseases and debuffs and there is a lot of quick saving and quick loading, as mentioned. Even then a lot of time is spent having to run back to some safer area to restack on bullets and bandages, to which you might not even have enough money anyway. The combat in Wasteland 2 makes me feel frustrated and anxious in a way that leaves a bad taste. After 8 hours I turned it down to easy, and that only helped so much. It's stiff, even for a turn based system.

The game has an odd claustrophobic feeling as well. Every area you enter only has one or two exit points, meaning if what you need is at the other end you have to run all the way there and back to do your business and be about your way. I don't recall this being the case in Fallout, where you could exit a town from any side straight out into the desert hellscape. Here, everything I have encountered so far (~10 hours) is enclosed by mountains or the like.

Fallout took the concept that Wasteland set up and improved on it in many ways. I had hoped that Wasteland 2 could maybe take yet another step and improve on what Fallout (especially Fallout 2) left behind. I realize now that maybe that was a hard act to follow and Wasteland 2 instead ends up feeling like a step back - like everything is just that tiny bit of a chore instead of fun.

If you're yearning for more isometric role-playing apocalypse, and there aren't too many of those out there, you could definitely get worse than Wasteland 2. But I can't help feeling like Sisyphus pushing the rock up that hill, praying it will just this once stay up there rather than roll back over my face (as the fable goes). While I am having fun with Wasteland 2, it does make me miss Fallout 2.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters - TV-series Review

Warning, spoilers ahead. 

If posters on the wall are a sign of fandom, Godzilla is second only to my children in this household. I probably wouldn't call myself a hardcore fan (whatever that is), but I am definitely a big fan of the franchise and I curse the fact that most movies before 2010 are oddly difficult to get hold of here in Sweden in particular. 

And while far from every Godzilla movie is great or maybe even good, I wasn't truly disappointed by a Godzilla movie until the Gareth Edwards movie Godzilla that was released in 2014. That was the first time I watched a movie where I felt the creators had fundamentally misunderstood the reason fans like me return to watch Godzilla stomp, and get stomped.

I've enjoyed some fringe-picks before - the 1998 Roland Emmerich movie Godzilla was very entertaining and who can hate the cute baby Godzilla from Son of Godzilla (1967)? And every Godzilla movie has to find a balance between what you're there to see - big ass monsters punching, kicking and headbutting each other - with the filler stuff - humans and their reactions to big ass monsters punching, kicking and headbutting each other. No one cares about the people really, we accept them because we want to see the monsters and respect that budgets didn't allow for 90 minutes of that, back in the day.

But Godzilla 2014 completely missed the mark. The creators somehow thought that maybe we cared more about the people than the monsters, if only it was dramatic enough. Maybe they thought if we also cared about the people we'd enjoy the full 90 minutes and not the just the 10 minutes of kaiju fighting. This, in essence, is not a bad notion and Godzilla Minus One is a much better executed version of this idea (I have other thoughts on Godzilla Minus One, but that is another review for another day). But Godzilla 2014 tries so hard to make the humans interesting, they completely forget to make the kaiju interesting. And how could you even fail something like that, it's Godzilla!

And that brings me to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know there are a few TV adaptations of the Godzilla world out there, and I've watched an episode here or there but nothing ever caught my interest. For some reason it didn't feel like the core idea of the Godzilla movies would translate well to the episodic nature of a TV-series. The structure of a Godzilla movie is generally very predictable, and trying to spread that out over however many episodes just means you will have some episodes that are 100% without Godzilla (or other kaiju) in it and ergo: boring.

So needless to say, my expectations for Monarch weren't particularly high and I'll be honest, the one thing that made me even watch the stuff was the fact that Kurt Russell was in it. I was hoping that maybe Kurt could make the Godzilla-less episodes at least bearable. 

The show takes place over two different time periods, and since nowadays it's apparently uncool to inform viewers on where and when they are, I more than once was confused as to which order things happened. Since the time in-between is quite far (60 years or so) you'd think it'd be obvious, but the jumps are also made some times within each time period to further confuse things. In the present time-line, we follow half-siblings Cate and Kentaro who are looking for their missing father. He seems to have something to do with an organization called Monarch who seems to have something to do with Godzilla. In the other time-line we follow Cate and Kentaro's grandparents as they set up was is to become Monarch. A common denominator here is Lee Shaw, played in the modern time-line by Kurt Russel and in the old time-line by Kurt Russel's extremely lookalike son, Wyatt Russell. Other characters correctly point out that this should make Lee Shaw close to 100 years old in present day, which he obviously doesn't seem to be anywhere close to - but it's mostly just shrugged off.

Let me try not to make the same mistake Monarch does here, by doing everything except get to the point.  This show will blue ball you for 10 hours of your life if you let it. Monarch is a showcase of how to beat around the bush and I've rarely felt my time more wasted than watching this show. It is about as filled with meaningful substance as an empty mug. I recall having similar feelings when watching the Resident Evil TV-series and yet again it amazes me to see show creators take all this brilliant lore and instead show us the same old teen-angst drama that no one on earth truly cares about.

The three main characters, Cate, Kentaro and their friend Mae, are so annoyingly bland and predictable I am at a lack for any good words to describe how frustrating it was to have to watch them do anything in this show. They were so pointless in fact, I had to google their names even after having just watched their shenanigans for hours. Their whole hunt for their father seems like it could've been cut out completely and it would've already been a much better show. Their time-line isn't entirely hopeless however or I would've probably honestly just skipped their scenes all together. Kurt Russel is always fun to watch, and some of the "evil" members of Monarch are at least not irritating.

The best parts of the show are the old-timey ones, where we see Keiko, Bill (the grandparents) and Lee Shaw hunt for kaijus and form the beginnings of what becomes Monarch. I could've easily done with just those parts and been much happier. Though I suspect I only truly enjoy these parts of the show because they are not as bad as the other ones, not because their particularly good in their own right.

After a few episodes me and my SO started feeling that watching this was more and more of a chore. With two episodes left to go I felt like I just couldn't put up with it any longer. I had to tell him he had to go on without me and leave me behind. I had absolutely zero interest in seeing what else was going to happen in this world, because I already knew it would amount to nothing.

So what about Godzilla? Yeah, he shows up. You get to see his eye or tail in a flashback here and there and he jumps out of a sand dune and rushes off in one episode. There are even some other kaijus that do basically nothing. Overall the ratio boring human relations vs cool kaiju stuff is about 1000/1. Don't bother showing up for this one.

S.O.S Dino - Board Game

Children are famously not the best at losing, and since my children are the ones I've got to play board games with, I've come to explore a lot more co-operative board games lately. 

I barely even knew co-operative board games were a genre until a few years ago when I stumbled across the first one, having been brought up on proper home wreckers like Monopoly and Ludo. I definitely don't recommend playing them with your kids. Or anyone else for that matter.

In S.O.S Dino, you're tasked with your fellow players to save a bunch of dinosaurs, and preferably also their eggs, from Dino Apocalypse. You start in the middle and need to work your way to the edges, and as you play the board will become more and more covered with obstacles, especially Lava Tiles, that prevent you from reaching your goal. The tactic is in placing your tiles smartly, because each round you get to draw a tile from a bag and have some control in where it goes. Lava Tiles, and they make out the vast majority of the tiles, will tell you which Dinos you can move and which Lava flow to extend, but the direction is yours to control.

The box art is cute too.

If you're unlucky however you get a meteor strike or make a volcano erupt, creating further lava flows. The board quickly becomes overrun, and it's easy to paint yourself in a corner if you don't pay attention. It's quite devastating to see a dinosaur burn in a puddle of lava, and any hopes that this game wouldn't make your kids sad fly out the window. Fortunately the game only seems stressful on the outside, after having played it a few times it seems quite easy to succeed and we usually get all the dinos and eggs to safety. The challenge is definitely in level with children around the age of 4-12.

The board is made up of plenty of little pieces that need to be arranged and assembled before you start playing. But don't worry, this is no Mouse Trap where you spend more time putting things together than actually playing (or having fun). In fact, getting things in the right place is part of the fun for my kids because you sort of build up a little dino world. 

The Dino Figures that come with the game are really nice looking and could've easily been used as any toy outside of the game as well. They're brightly coloured and distinguished from each other - the colouration is part of the game mechanics since each tile prevents a certain dino from moving.

It only takes about 20 minutes to play and doesn't outstay its welcome, it keeps a good pace throughout and is easy to learn. It has a good balance between luck and tactics that fit the age it is aimed for and good production quality. S.O.S Dino isn't amazing, but it's a fun game to keep in your roster for board games to play with your kids. If you find it somewhere I recommend giving it a try.

The Signal From Tölva (PC, 2017)

 Not every game has to be a five course meal. Or a Nobel prize winner, you know, if games could win those. I am perfectly fine with the bite-sized games and only rarely seek out 100+ hour ones like The Witcher 3. With the limited game time I have, I am happy playing a ~5 hour game, as long as it knows what it is doing. Games like The Room, Five Nights at Freddy's or Gone Home (and heck, every game on consoles before 1995). Often these games sacrifice breadth and instead focus on a certain aspect - the puzzling, the scare or the story for the beforementioned examples. It's even more important then that these aspects are fun or interesting. Because if you don't have that, you don't really have much of anything.

And I've come across a few of those games, that just end up feeling fairly empty. Since they only take a handful of hours to play through I often stick it out if I feel like I can sense the end on the horizon. For some reason these games fail to stick the landing, and they're either so obscure in their story telling or void of content that after a handful of hours of checking it out, you struggle to find any reason to continue. There is simply nothing to motivate you forward. Games like Rymdresa, Year Walk, Superbrothers: Of Sword and Sworcery and Lifeless Planet all fit this category. 

And unfortunately, The Signal From Tölva will be another game I add to this list.

Released by Big Robot in 2017, it starts out promising; you close in on a planet - Tölva - and need to check out a signal (roll credits). Instead of going in yourself, you've got an endless amount of robots to do it for you. Whenever one of your robots gets out of service (i.e destroyed), you simply spawn as a new one in one of the spawn-zones you will find on the planet surface.

It's a beautiful day

I liked the premise of this one, it is was got me interested in the first place and got me to try it out even though screenshots of the game weren't really selling it for me.

On the planet surface your objective is to scramble around and look out different points of interest. Some of these you will scan, which will reward you some vague information about what is going on. These tidbits of text are obscure and never cleared anything up for me. Otherwise there is really not much to see on Tölva. Bandit robots and other enemy robots are also scattered on the surface and they will always (as far as I have played) attack you on sight. There are no other flora or fauna to interact with on Tölva and it's also never entirely clear what it is you're looking for. 

You will be given quests to liberate certain areas, which allows you to spawn in new areas and access your "outfitter". In the outfitter you can buy and equip new weapons and pieces of armor that allow you to traverse certain types of hazards. All of this just sort of happens and it doesn't feel earned. When playing a typical metroidvania, you first get to feel the frustration and curiosity of not being able to access something, before you finally get the tool to do so.  Here I get the ability to traverse a hazard before I even realized that it was going to be a problem, meaning it doesn't feel like a reward or accomplishment to be able to move to a new area. 

Contact of the first kind.

Combat works fine, you get a selection of equipping three different guns, a shield and an AoE effect to play around with. The guns range from the usual types - pistols, rifles, shotguns etc. When you try to compare them in the outfitter/store it is not entirely clear what constitutes an upgrade. It should be that a weapon with higher DPS kills stuff faster, but it doesn't translate very clearly in actual combat. I found that my personal favorites were the ones that reloaded quickly.

Not too far into the game you get the ability to enlist other robots to your team. They will fight for you until they die (which is almost immediately) and work better as a distraction or cannon fodder than your new posse. This is a fun addition to an otherwise incredibly lonely game. Unfortunately you can only enlist robots in certain places, and these are not too common. You either choose to get these robots and do a whole lot of running back and forth, or you juts decide to go at it alone.

Looks nice enough.

There is still going to be a lot of running. Running isn't even the right term, your robot can either saunter like some playboy on his Sunday walk, or waggle slightly faster if you hold down your Shift key. Considering the distances of sameness you have to get through, the speed is just not enough. Maybe later in the game you get some sort of rocket boots or jet pack, maybe even a teleport (!) but if so the trek there (pun intended) is just too far.

There is something curious that has piqued my interest though, and I suspect it will haunt my nightmares even long after I have stopped playing this game. Every here and there you come across what looks like abandoned bunkers or barracks. As you walk in there it at first glance seems pretty unassuming. There isn't anything to interact with (like most of the rest of the planet), no secrets to uncover and no information that clears up your confusion about the place. As you go to leave however, you notice that the way you came from suddenly has turned into a dead end. You go down a corridor and end up where you entered. You go around a corner and end up in another dead end. You quickly notice that you are stuck in this place and that each corridor and each turn just leads back to the center of the structure. It is frustrating and confusing, but also haunting and eerie. 

I encountered two buildings like this and managed to get out of the first one by walking through the corridors in a certain order, or so I think. Maybe there is a timer or a trigger somewhere, I honestly don't know. The second structure I went into I simply couldn't get out of, even though I asked the rest of my family for help to try to figure it out. Fortunately I could just abandon my poor robot in there and simply respawn as another outside that hellish place. I swore never to enter one again.

As a gameplay element these structures are both intriguing and annoying. Other than the fascination of not understanding their purpose and them being so curious, they're really just another piece of this world that don't add anything of value. There isn't anything to uncover or learn (except maybe the depths of your frustrations).

Tölva is a curious planet - basically void of any animal life except the occasional flock of birds (?) in the sky. As previously mentioned, other than other robots there is literally nothing to interact with. I guess this is kind of what the Mars Rovers must feel like. Visually it ranges from thought-provoking to dreary. While it's pretty to look at, it's also very repetitive. And frustrating. The planet is covered with derelict ships, probes, robots, bunkers, ships flying overhead... you name it. All these beg to be explored, there is the potential to an interesting story here. But the secret about what is going on is a tightly kept one. So you keep on moving around, destroying enemy robots and scanning things - hoping to uncover something that will make it worth your time.

Roughly six hours into the game it's difficult for me to recommend it. Some half-interesting gameplay elements aren't enough to keep me motivated when the story offers so little. On the other hand maybe there is something to be said for a straight-forward, predictable game that doesn't try to be more than the sum of its parts. At least it won't stress you out.