So it's a little game, but with a big heart. There is some serious love of Norse mythology - prepare for an armload of nidvellirs, ratatosks and mjolnirs. To relive that feeling in the pit of your stomach when either you and the end-of-level boss will be killed by the next stroke. Ultimately, there's nothing in Jotun that would have even been hailed as original if you'd seen it in Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion, but fun is timeless.
The biggest down side - if you can call it that - to Natural Disasters is just how obvious it all is. Helicopters and shelters, weather stations for early warning, loss of life, rebuilding efforts, and so on. The whole idea of demolishing huge areas of your city with various crises. It's all been done before, and while it most certainly belongs in a game like Cities Skylines, I wasn't really surprised with the novelty of any of it. Does that mean it isn't fun? Heck no! Of course it is. Either playing with random disasters as part of the challenge, or manually bringing about the End of Days on your city like a vengeful god are brilliant ways to spend your time. Because, deep down, I suppose there's something in all of us that loves to just watch the world burn.
Props to the small team for really doing a whole lot with a little graphically. The rain never seems to let up, and the neon glow of the noodle stands shimmer on the trash-strewn alleys, and the smoky canyons between the seemingly-endless skyscrapers adds a feeling of vastness to the city. Really though, when you get down to it, Cloudpunk seems more like a straightforward interactive novel than it does a really fleshed-out game. It takes the first part of the 'go anywhere, do anything' sandbox model and does it very well. It just doesn't really deliver on the 'do anything' part all that well.
Port Royale 4 is ambitious and delivers in most regards, leading to a well rounded and beautifully choreographed world. The green tropical islands seem to breathe with life and purpose, a purpose that you influence through a variety of means, whether through trade, nationalism or just blatant piracy.
And while it's easy to recommend you pick up and enjoy The Falconeer, its real magic lies in waiting. As hopefully it's the start of a new series, where we eventually see The Falconeer Black Flag, or whatever Tomas decides to call it. And that is really where it starts to fill my flight chaps with excitement juice.
As it is, Mountains of Madness is fun as a casual diversion for Lovecraft lovers and Cthulhuphiles, and is nostalgia-adjacent for those of us who grew up around Guybrush Threepwood.
Overall, Blackguards is a fun, tactical time waster with a throwaway fantasy RPG plot that does nothing new.
At the end of the day, there are a few good ideas in what is obviously supposed to be a multiplayer-focused RTS, but there's just a lack of anything really imaginative, anything we've not seen before.
There is a solid wargame here, as you'd expect from the Panzer guys at Slitherine. Warhammer fans will be able to lose themselves down the rabbit hole of unit loadouts and Armageddon pattern variants, tinkering with constructing the perfect battalion, and there's even a map editor bundled with the game (which I found to be a little more complex than it needed to be). At the moment, I can't help but feel that a full-price ticket is a little ambitious for a game that looks for the most part like it could be handled by a web browser, but once the price comes down a little it's a worthy gateway drug to the world of really crunchy wargames.
Perhaps the point is to highlight the futility of foreign conflicts that fuel endless generations of inter-religious strife. And if they do introduce a 'baby/village idiot' difficulty level in a later patch, I might revisit. Otherwise, the only crusade I'm going to sign up for will be the one against fixed save points in PC FPSes.
It's not cynical to say that Planetary Annihilation was built from the ground up as an e-sports option. As such, it's not really designed for mellow, thoughtful play at home so much as overly frenetic, WMD-laden violence before an army of screaming South Koreans. It has certainly learned the lessons of past MP giants, but whether it is really going to conquer that demanding arena or sputter like a damp squib is hard to predict. As a game in its own right though, a lot of what you're doing is standard RTS stuff, only simultaneously on a series of spherical maps, which adds dramatically to the challenge.
I have sort of enjoyed my time with Blackguards 2, although writing a review where all you really want to do is scream "IT'S THE SAME AS BLACKGUARDS!" has been a challenge. It really is a testament to the fine voice actors and tightly crafted combat above everything else, that even after two extremely similar games I'm still not staggeringly bored of it all. Slightly bored, perhaps, but not staggeringly.
The storyline of the campaign mode is sort of fun and playing a season with all of the ups and downs that brings is also fun, but for me I think most of the joy comes from the nostalgia, I'm afraid.
They're good at telling stories, these Frictional guys. They're good at building tension, and at using audio cues to stimulate fear. But in the end, I was put off by the inconvenient monsters. When fear is replaced by impatience, something is lost. This is something that Alien Isolation had very occasionally, and that completely ruined the 1999 PC game Aliens vs. Predator. When the monsters become a nuisance, and you're more worried about them for holding up your progress into the main plot than really terrifying you, it's hard to stay really scared.
At the end of the day, this reminded me a great deal of Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island series of recent years. It's a modern take on a classic genre, heavily capitalising on a famous name and rich in character and humour, but ultimately built on a straightforward foundation short on real innovation or beauty. Still, it's been a while since we've seen a lot of these adventures, and this is the first chapter of five. The main characters are endearing enough that after a couple of chapters they might be able to carry the games more or less on their own merits, but less in the way of un-skippable animations (some of which you'll need to sit through a lot) and mid-game ambling would go a long way toward warming me up when the subsequent chapters arrive.
Then, once I realized that I'd been a numskull, I installed the DLC and tried again, playing with the new tourism and leisure districts, and building taxi ranks and bus lanes, and… well, once again I had a great time and felt that the DLC was a little light on content.
If all of this added bullying isn't to your taste, you can just get the new districts and the new character, for instance, so it's not an 'all-or-nothing' affair, and it's this level of customisation that I feel saves Crimson Court from being perhaps just one vampiric bite too far.
In the short term, if you're willing to think of the prefab fantasy setting as comfortingly familiar, Spellforce 3 is a pretty fun. The voice acting is terrific, and the plot easy to understand without requiring weeks of learning why THESE giant wolves are different to other games' giant wolves. Whether this familiarity is a brave counterpoint to the endless setting creep of gaming is really a matter of personal taste. And if you're looking for a fantasy RPG/RTS hybrid, this is a promising contender. However, by trying to do two things at once, it fails to be really remarkable at either.
I found Nantucket to be high on style but thin on substance, but its modest price point saves it from my more barbed harpoons. It has some pleasantly nostalgic reminiscences of Sid Meier's Pirates and a management system that borrows some of the more surface-level mechanics of Paradox games - both of which are good things. Plus, it really is the only thing that does exactly what it does. The originality of the concept is worth something even when it's not necessarily backed up with mechanical innovation.
I know it seems like a paradox to say that on the one hand, it's a well-oiled, impeccably balanced sci-fi empire building game with all the elements that make a great wargame; and on the other hand it feels a smidgen like they phoned it in, but there you are. That's precisely how it feels.