So, now that I have a Steam account, I can discuss games that are available to the entire Steam community. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy these games. I simply hope these quick reviews either encourage you to try these games for yourself, or convince you to never try them. Once again, fairness is my rule; I have to be honest with the games I’ll be reviewing. This means that if there’s something I don’t like, I’ll point it out, regardless of the game’s current score. Same if there’s something I enjoy. Take my opinion with a grain of salt; it’s just my opinion, and it’s not like I nearly have enough influence to sway large crowds to the way I view these games. If any game deserves a longer review, I will reserve a whole post (or multiple posts) to it.
AdVenture Capitalist
Not much there is to say about this one: It’s an Idle
game, so basically you can leave it running in the background while you’re
doing something else, and that’s pretty much the only reason this game will
rack up more playtime than any other game in your collection.
Novemseptuagintillion? That's... 79illion! |
This trtip to Mars better be worth it. It cost me a freaking trillion, after all. |
There’s a bunch of ways to have the investments rise
faster: Buying tickets, each approximately 1000 times more expensive than the
previous one. You can convert 10 tickets into a Golden Ticket, which will add a
X7 multiplier to one investment. If all of a planet’s investments are boosted
that way, you can pay more tickets to boost the whole planet even further.
Then, if you’ve got money to waste, you can spend some of your real-life cash
to get much-needed boosts through Gold Bars. But of course, that’s only if you
really want to… Like a lot of free-to-play idle games where buying with real
money is only an option, a time comes where the game doesn’t pick up enough
speed unless you do grab some real-life cash.
Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean you have to stop making money. Many companies make MORE money around Christmas anyway. |
As addictive as this game may be, you know it’s an
idle clicker game, so no matter how long you spend playing this game, there
will never be much of an actual payoff. You can hope for one, but the truth is
that you will probably never get any. But it goes with the genre, so you should
be expecting that. It’s really something that you can only see as a little
time-waster, or something to run in the background while you’re doing other
stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you prefer actual games, then you should just skip this one.
Current price: Free-to-play. (Pay-to-win?)
Adventurer Manager
For a town with a castle, it's pretty damn empty. |
At least there's quite a bit of adventuring to do here. |
I should also say that not many things are explained
to the player. You can hire as many adventurers as you want, but you have no
say on their original stats, and you can only choose whether you want a man, a
woman, or if the gender doesn’t matter (I always pick that option, because all
the adventurers in this game are nondescript enough. For the record, my
highest-level character is a bearded dwarf woman, and she kicks all asses). On top of that, many stats are abbreviated, and you might not always know what each stat is, or what they affect in the game.
That's one overbearing enemy there. |
All in all, this game isn’t terrible, but I’m afraid I
am not accustomed enough to all these factors, and I don’t find a lot of
interest in it. Some interfaces could have been polished or ameliorated. The
RPG elements are alright, and so is the Management Sim aspect, but the two
combined might not be to everyone’s tastes.
Current price: 4.99$ USD
Airscape: The Fall of Gravity
Pits? They are the least of your troubles. Let's just say we won't run out of laser-roasted squid on our plates anytime soon. |
Take the elastic gravity of Mario Galaxy and apply it
to a 2D platformer where the screen rotates with the character. Add to this
water sections, a lot of parts requiring timing and precision, and you get a
devilish little game that will be a joy to play – as long as you don’t get fed
up with the difficulty, anyway – and a pleasure to watch. This game looks
great. The octopi are well-defined, the opponents look very alien. The
soundtrack is pretty cool, too; the current level theme gets drowned out a bit
when the character goes underwater, which is a neat idea.
It's all an elaborate death trap. The robots are not enough? Here's lasers! Not enough? Here's missiles! Not enough? Suspended mines! |
To reach these floating islands, you have to pass under the lasers below, avoid a lot of robots... Just wait, later levels also have fireballs! |
It’s a good game, even though I’m pretty sure I will
never be able to beat it. It’s a cool idea that is well-executed – all you need
is the motivation to carry through after all the lives lost. I would say that
the scree always spins to follow the change of gravity of the octopi, and that
could be dizzying for the player – or sickening, perhaps. There’s a lot of
material to keep a player busy here. Looks great, music’s nice… perhaps a tad
too expensive, if you’re not sure you’ll play it long enough to justify the
price, maybe you should wait for a reduction.
Current price: 9.99$ USD
Auditorium
It's like a more complex form of the light-redirection puzzles in some games. |
Soon enough, we are introduced to colored bubbles and
colored containers, and the music must be colored in those bubbles before it
passes into the containers of the corresponding colors. Most of the puzzle is,
where do I place these, and how big must I make them? Also, what are those new
bubbles? As it turns out, after every set of 5 levels we get a new gameplay
mechanic, which you must then adapt to. Bubbles that make the music spin
around? Sure. Unmovable dots that split the music stream? Eeyup. Bubbles that
speed up the music stream to make it reach its destination faster? Indeed. Double-color
containers? Yep. Portals? Why the Heck not?
And all this time, a world’s music never ends. The
musical tracks add themselves to the mix as you fill the containers. The only
way to get the whole orchestration of the tune is to complete a level. There
are 15 worlds in this game, and it’s an experience more than anything else.
One of the advantages is that since many puzzles have
more than one solution, sometimes you can find a solution that omits one or
another of the bubbles, and yet the end result still works. Unfortunately, for
many of these puzzles, you will need to do some mind gymnastics to figure out
where the flow is going to pass. Let’s see, the flow orbits around in this
bubble, will get into that colored circle, then hit that container, only to go
into a portal and hitting the other side, another color bubble, to a container,
then it’s back in the portal, then that thing will speed it up, and then this
one will send it back and I just went cross-eyed.
By world 7, this is what the playing field looks like. Whoa. |
The game contains over 60 levels, so if you feel like
trying something unique, go ahead and play this game. It doesn’t have any
additional modes, and if you’re really smart you can beat it in 3, maybe 4
hours. It’s a neat game to play between the bigger, more famous titles.
Current Price: 6.99$ USD
Alright, so these were four games I wanted to talk
about but couldn’t dedicate an entire post for. I’ll be making more Steam Pack
articles later on. Next week, I will finally release that long review of Mario
and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. Be sure to tune in!
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