Recent reviews by Spootaloo

Fantastic collection, highly recommend it, and also recommend looking up UFO 50 Bingo for anyone looking to get even more fun from the game after they've tried the entire collection!

I try not to draw direct comparisons to other games in my reviews, but it's pretty hard not to do here. KILLBEAT draws some very clear inspiration from BPM: Bullets Per Minute with its rhythmic gameplay, as well as Hades with its isometric side view perspective and movement. It's a neat crossover of the two ideas, albeit a bit lacking in the polish especially compared to the absolute titan that is Hades. I found myself wishing for a bit more length in the gameplay and it doesn't seem to quite have the same satisfying sense of build synergies that so many roguelikes thrive on. That is to say, I won my first run within 2 attempts and an hour of gameplay, both of said two attempts seeing many of the same items. Perhaps there is some meta-progression that unlocks additional items in future runs, but the starting pool seems quite shallow.

Considering the low asking price, if you loved BPM and want to see its core concept extended to other styles, this might be worth checking out.

I do wish I had the option to put in a more neutral option than the binary yes/no recommendation, because I do think this game has an audience of people who will love it. That said, I'm going to go with a Not Recommended here because, as a lover of all things grid-based-puzzle, I ultimately left feeling pretty disappointed.

Let's start with the positives. I love the art-style and the character design, and the general core game concept is rock solid. The movement style is pretty unique and was fun to figure out. While I see some of the other negative reviews criticized the big empty intermission segments, I actually liked these quite a bit. This is the general speedrunner in me talking, but they gave me a chance to get a handle of the game's movement and figure out how to fully utilize the wrapping mechanic to cut down on travel time. Zipping down long corridors, turning lengthy several-hundred-tile-long segments into a series of quick warps that clear the room in a matter of seconds was pretty satisfying.

However, at the end of the day, this is a puzzle game - Arranger needs to be able to stand on the strength of its puzzle design. Credit where it's due: as far as the design concept goes, Arranger has a lot of clever ideas! Every new area introduces something new, like rafts you have to maneuver to favorable positions, mine carts that are bound to tracks; the list goes on. The problem is that nearly every time you get shown how to play with a new toy, it immediately gets thrown into the trash. All you get is a series of very short puzzles that almost feel tailor-made to railroad you into the correct answer to help you discover all of its mechanical nuances one-at-a-time, only for the expected payoff of a puzzle that layers these nuances to never manifest most of the time. And if you're expecting puzzles that put several of these items and mechanics together at once? Forget about it, it's never happening. The best you get is a dream sequence at the very end that briefly puts several of them in succession, taking great care to make sure they never overlap with each other.

At some point, I realized there were optional puzzles leading to temples for bonus story content. I got excited, thinking that *this* was where the more complex, layered puzzles were. I enter the temple and find that the sole puzzle in these temples is a basic 3x3 sliding picture puzzle, the likes of which you've probably seen in dozens of non-puzzle games. When it was all said and done, I could count the number of puzzles I had to stop and think about for a moment on one hand.

Story beats and dialogue can make for a great respite from tough puzzle solving, but with every puzzle segment ending just when it feels like it's getting started, I instead found myself increasingly irritated with the frequent story breaks after every brief puzzle segment, realizing that I was spending just as much if not more time reading text as I was solving puzzles. I started off fairly engaged with the story, but found myself mashing through and skimming the rest of the game's text after about a third of the way through it. I don't dislike the idea of the game's story and what it's trying to tell, but especially with the game's charming art style, I think a lot of it could have been conveyed better with sparser dialogue through a more show-don't-tell approach. The final area's writing in particular was rather blunt and on-the-nose, and I can't help but wonder if there might have been a better approach.

There are also a few minor gripes on quality-of-life features. The lack of an undo button is pretty glaring for a game of this style for one. The game is filled with little easter eggs and minor side-puzzles that grant hidden achievements, but a ton of them are very easy to permanently miss. Once you beat the game, that save file is permanently locked into the game's final puzzle, giving you access to absolutely nothing else. If you want to get some of the secrets you missed, the only option is to restart the game all the way from the start. Arranger really could have used a chapter-select or the option to freely roam a fully-restored and unlocked world after clearing it. I'm not sure why the game needed to have a point-of-no-return.

Anyway, while I ultimately am giving the game the dreaded Not Recommended thumbs down, as I don't think I can earnestly recommend it to my friends who are more enthusiastic about puzzle games, I do think I can recommend it to people who find some of the more well-known challenging puzzle games frustrating as a way to dip their toes into grid-based puzzle solving. It's got a charming art style and a lot of clever ideas. It's just a shame that a lot of them feel like they were never really brought to their full potential.

The world's fun to explore with a lot of clever puzzle design, and generally enough flexibility and openness that you're free to move on from puzzles that are stumping you at the moment. I have some nitpicks about certain moments, such as the fire island which walls you pretty early on until you find a somewhat hidden mechanic unique to the area, but overall I liked this quite a bit. Looking forward to the upcoming update!

The new campaign is pretty much exactly what you'd expect as a collection of community-made maps stitched together as best as possible into a cohesive campaign. The difficulty curve is erratic, the levels (while solid) tend to lack the polish the original Cronus Frontier campaign has, and the overall feeling of the story and campaign flow is not particularly cohesive.

There are also 12 new challenge mode maps. I'm not the biggest fan of challenge mode, but doubling the count of the maps there seems like a good incentive for any CM junkies to grab this.

Tentatively putting a "Yes" recommendation, but ONLY if you're a pretty big fan of the base game and find yourself craving for more.

The crew from the classic Descent games returns for a modern incarnation of the 6-degrees-of-freedom games we all know and love. There are three primary game modes available:

Much like the old-school shooters it draws influence from, the biggest draw in this game is easily the single player campaign. The Cronus Frontier campaign is no-nonsense, fast-paced action. While a little bit shorter compared to the classics of old, the overall level design and difficulty balance is much more polished. With five selectable difficulty levels, both directionally-challenged newbies and challenge-seeking veterans should be able to find some enjoyment here. The upgrade system offers a nice bit of flexibility to your playstyle and nicely rewards those with a keen eye for secrets. My only criticisms are that I found most of the boss fights to be somewhat underwhelming, and that some players might find the lack of mission variety to grow a bit repetitive by the end.

Challenge Mode pits you into an arena with endlessly spawning bots, with two seperate sub-modes: Countdown (Get as many kills as possible in a 5-minute time limit) and Infinite (Survive as long as possible, getting as many kills as you can before being taken down). The item and enemy spawns are randomized on every playthrough to ensure that no two plays are the exact same. While this does keep the mode from getting stale, it is a bit of a double-edged sword for anyone looking to place high on the in-game leaderboards. Ranking up in that regard can often feel somewhat dependent upon randomly rolling a favorable intersection of high-value targets and strong powerup pickups. If you're not too worried about chasing leaderboards, though (or even if you are!), there's still quite a lot of fun to be had here once you've finished up the campaign.

Multiplayer is, much like the single player campaign, all about straightforward, no-nonsense action. Rules are simple - blow up the other guys, but don't get blown up yourself. First, the bad news - the multiplayer experience is currently considerably restrictive and laden with flaws. Long wait times, finnicky ranking system, squirelly lag compensation, lack of a server browser, and very limited number of servers all mean that getting a balanced match without frustrating hit-registration problems is unfortunately not something you can expect to get consistently. There's also a distinct lack of multiplayer co-op options available for the campaign and challenge modes.

The good news, though, is that the developers have stated that they are aware of these issues, and are looking to make improvements here one of their next focuses once the console versions are completed. Here's hoping we see improvements in the future.



Overload is absolutely worth picking up if you're a fan of shooters, especially 6dof shooters like the classic Descent - but only if you're looking for a solid single player experience. If you're looking for a good multiplayer experience, I'd probably recommend holding out for a bit until after the console versions release.

Crypt of the NecroDancer's premier DLC pack offers a lot - balance tweaks, new characters, new items, new enemies, new bosses, a new zone, and (of course) new music. While it doesn't quite reach the same degree of polish, attention to detail, and balance found in the original game, AMPLIFIED is still a worthwhile pick-up if you're wanting a little something extra to help further scratch that Necrodancing itch.

I've played this game once or twice but forgot to leave a review.

It's pretty cool I guess.

Compared to its namesake, Solitaire, Fairie Solitaire is a game that is simple to a fault. Cards are setup in a formation on the board and the player has to chain them together in continuous sequential chains (8 > 9 > 10 > 9 > 10 > J > Q, etc). That's all there is to it. Really. Suit and colors don't matter and may as well not be there at all.

What you see on the first level is pretty much what you get for the entire game, and it makes the game just about as mind-numbingly easy and repetitive as you would expect. Even the "challenge" maps don't really offer a notable increase in difficulty. Other gameplay mechanics that are introduced a little ways into the adventure mode, such as thorns and ice walls, are actually the exact same as the usual mechanics - the only difference between these mechanics and conventionally blocked stacks of cards is a graphical effect. The upgrade system is mostly inconsequential, granting little bits of extra info or allowing room for error. The Aura Ring is the only upgrade that comes close to being significant in the long run, adding a way to occasionally force a card off of a stack. Unfortunately, its high cost means it won't be available until the mid-to-late game.

That's pretty much all there is to the gameplay, so what about all the dressings? Unfortunately, there isn't much to speak of here either. The soundtrack gets repetitive pretty quickly. The storyline is pretty generic and leaves off on an annoying cliffhanger for a sequel that doesn't exist (and considering the fact that this game came out 6 years ago by now, probably never will exist). Completing adventure mode didn't take me even half as long as the alleged 14 hours mentioned in the description (which, to be honest, is probably for the best). The 40 unique locations are nothing more than different forgettable graphical backdrops.

The pet system feels tacked on and unneccesary. Finding and evolving them is just a matter of grinding the game out until you're lucky enough to randomly find the eggs and evolution resources. Preparing a given pet for evolution is a pure time sink, done in the background automatically while you play the game normally. The only thing evolution grants you is a small image of your fully grown pet alongside a descriptive sentence or two. There's absolutely no incentive to grind for pet evolution aside from this and a couple steam achievements. Incidentally, if you are going for said achievements, you can probably expect to sink ~50 hours into the game after completing a <10 hour story mode, if I had to guess.

Just about the only thing positive I have to say about the game is that the artwork for the world map and the cutscenes looked fairly nice.

If you want a casual card game and traditional Solitaire is too challenging for you, then maybe this is worth considering. As for me, I think I'll stick with the one bundled with Windows to scratch that itch.

I picked up Circuits because of the cheap price and the somewhat intriguing game concept. While most music games are based primarily around rhythmic timing, Circuits is more based on pitch and tone recognition. This makes for a pretty unique experience. Given that it's a music-based game, having a solid soundtrack is important - thankfully, Circuits delivers on that front with a well-made relaxing atmospheric soundtrack. My biggest critique is the relatively short length.

If you consider yourself completely tone-deaf, I'd have a hard time recommending this. But if you're looking for a relaxing, musical way to pass by a couple hours, then it's hard to come up with a better recommendation than Circuits.