Recent reviews by Paikia

Despite being a devoted fan of the JRPG genre, I've played very few JRPGs in recent years, not sure why exactly. Maybe I was turned off by some of the changes in the formula over the years, or maybe I just needed a break. Tales Of Berseria was one of those JRPGs I bought shorty after its release, feeling it deserves a fair chance, yet it found itself collecting virtual dust on my Steam library for a long while. Only a week or so before typing these very words, I've found myself hungry for something new to play, and Tales Of Berseria finally received its due chance to impress me.

So far, 17 hours in, I dare say I am indeed impressed. The game looks, sounds and feels great, even with my antiquated graphics adapter (Geforce GTX465), which gets pushed to the maximum and requires me to have an external fan next to the computer, while playing, in order to handle the excessive heat it produces. The graphics are sharp, the animations are smooth and pleasant to the eye, the soundtrack is decent, at the very least, and the voice acting (which is present for the most part) is a real treat.

I'm still learning the mechanics of the battles and skills systems. While they're generally fun and inviting, I'm having trouble getting used to the action/strategy hybrid. Up until now I've been playing almost exclusively JRPGs with pure tactical turn-based battle systems, such as Final Fantasy X, Cosmic Star Heroine or Valkyria Chronicles (which is more tactics-heavy in nature). I suppose I'll either get used to the idea of action based battles and end up loving it, or have the battle system being one of the aspects I like less in Tales Of Berseria. Either way, I am enjoying myself. Other than the battles, the game offers a crafting / gear improvement system and at least some optional side-quests, so there should be enough to do, besides the main storyline.

The best aspects of the game, in my humble opinion, are the story and the characters. There's nothing really groundbreaking about them that I haven't seen before at all, but they definitely got me pulled in, curious enough to keep coming back for more. It's obvious to me that the story and the characters have been given a lot of time and attention from the developers, and it shows.

All in all, I'm really enjoying Tales Of Berseria. It seems like a solid JRPG that every fan of the genre should at least try out.

I've been a devout fan of the Civilization series ever since I was introduced to Civilization 2 a couple of decades ago. While I obviously liked some aspects of each game more than others, the bottom line was always the same - I really loved all the main installments of the series ever since, and the spinoffs (Colonizations & Beyond Earth) a bit less, although my opinions of them were generally on the positive side as well.

Not surprisingly, after playing over 60 hours, I feel pretty much the same way about Civilization 6. Sure, it has some problems. The AI, for one... ...well, I agree, it sucks. Also, beyond the tedious amount of time the game takes to load, even on decent machines (i7 Quad-Core, 16GB RAM and Geforce GTX465 here), it also tends to lag and stutter from time to time (after changing governments, for example). In some cases, the game wouldn't close on its own, forcing me to restart my system just to get rid of it.

The thing is, despite all those problems, I'm still having way too much fun with this game to dismiss it and put it aside. Even with the crappy AI, the lags and the stutters, the game is fun to play. Just like the previous games in the series, Civilization 6 offers the same gameplay mechanics we're used to, with a new, interesting twist, to make the mix familiar and intuitive on one hand, but refreshing and interesting on the other.

One of my favorite additions is the 'Eureka' / 'Inspiration' boosts to scientific and cultural advancements. All sorts of things can stir you in the right direction for finding something out. Founding a city on the coast, for example, gives you a boost for researching 'Sailing'. Killing enough barbarians and clearing one of their outposts gives you boosts for a couple of military related advancements, and so on. This adds another layer to the way you might want to play, as the more such boosts you get, the faster you advance in general, but since you obviously can't get all of them, you might choose to focus on a specific direction, or to change the order of the topics you research accordingly.

Another interesting new concept is the districts within the cities. If in previous civilization games you just spammed buildings all over, now you have to plan ahead. Each district allows building certain types of buildings. A "Holy Site", for example, lets you build religious buildings, an "Encampment" lets you build military buildings and so on. While each city can have more than one district, the space is limited, so you have to choose - not only between districts, but also between districts and tile improvements, as each tile can support either an improvement or a district (or a world wonder, btw). Just like the science/culture boosts, this makes you think and plan carefully.

My bottom line is this - if you liked the previous Civilization games, I bet you'd like this one as well.

The Deed is a short, dark, atmospheric point & click adventure, in which you're tasked with committing a murder.
Obviously, the goal is to do the dirty deed with the least significant consequences to yourself, meaning you're going to try to either frame someone else for the murder, or simply avoid getting blamed for it yourself (leaving it unsolved). While each single playthrough can be very short, the game does offer you different ways to achieve your goal, each with a different result, so the point is to have plenty of playthroughs, kind of like how it goes in Long Live The Queen, for example.

The gameplay itself is very simple. During the first couple of acts, your job would be to talk to people, trying to lead the conversations in the direction you want, while picking up two items out of the junk scattered around the house. One item should serve as a murder weapon, while the other's function is to be a false, planted evidence, meant to lead the police to suspect the victim you'd like to frame.

After doing the deed itself, you'll be interviewed by a police detective, having to answer questions perhaps explain your behavior. Again, just like during the previous phase, the idea is to lead the detective to the conclusion you're interested in. As soon as you're done, you're given the outcome of the game. Being consistent and logical, it's pretty easy to get to the result you want, but despite that fact, I've found the game to be entertaining enough, especially considering its low price.

Don't expect anything special regarding graphics or music, as the entire focus of the game is the plot. Also, I did experience the occasional crash, losing my progress, but since each playthrough is so short anyway, there's wasn't too much progress to lose to begin with.

All in all, this is a cute little mystery game, definitely worthy of its price tag, in my opinion.

Just like its predecessor, Hero of the Kingdom 2 is a casual point & click adventure, in which you follow a shallow, somewhat childish medieval story of kings, princesses, pirates and treasures. As the cliché goes, your sister gets kidnapped by the evil pirate 'Black Rose', and you set out on a journey to rescue her. The nice thing is - clichés aren't necessarily bad things, and even a story like that serves its purpose very well in a game like this.

I usually like my games to challenge me, make me think or otherwise improve myself in order to rise up to dealing with anything the game's AI has in store for me. However, sometimes I feel like I could use the exact opposite type of game, in which all I have to do is go with the flow without having to give it too much effort. Hero of the Kingdom 2 is exactly this kind of game. I found myself clicking through the plot, gathering all sorts of stuff in order to either sell them or use them to craft other, more complex items.

There's nothing special about the graphics or the music, which is exactly what I was expecting from a game like this. Just like the story, all it takes is the very basics to preserve the suspension of disbelief required of this light-weight, casual fantasy. Such games kind of feel to me like having a pizza and a bottle of coca-cola for dinner - there's nothing there you really need, except the pleasure and satisfaction you get from it, and that's exactly why I enjoy playing games like HOTK2 from time to time. You can't live on games like that, just like you can't live on pizza and coca-cola, but once in a while, it's the perfect solution.

Recommended for anyone with the occasional mood for a casual game.

At first glance, Cosmic Star Heroine might look like just another clone in an endless series of attempts to revive the 8/16bit era JRPGs. As someone who's old enough to have actually played many of the originals not long after they were released, I believe I can offer some valuable insights, regarding whether or not Cosmic Star Heroine is anything like the games its creators named as their sources of inspiration, namely Phantasy Star and Chrono Trigger. While I've never played Chrono Trigger before, I have played both Phantasy Star 1 and Phantasy Star 4 multiple times, and I'd dare say I know those games very well.

So, is Cosmic Star Heroine anything like those games? Well, my short version of the answer is "Yes, it is somewhat like them". But what exactly do I mean by that?

I mean that Cosmic Star Heroine, like many other such games, takes the main formula behind the old JRPGs and tries to make it work. Except unlike other such games, Cosmic Star Heroine does most of the things right. Specifically, it engages the player with an interesting and dynamic story, and doesn't rely just on the "magic formula" to do the work. Also, unlike other games, the story will pull you into the interesting part right from the beginning, so you don't end up yawning between scenes. Then again, this might also be seen as a drawback, as you don't get the freedom to explore and interact with the world on your own, as you could, for example, on either of the Phantasy Star games. So while being interesting and fast paced, the main story branch is also linear and fixed.

The battle system seems solid. While I might not even be halfway through the game, I get the feeling like the battles are complex enough to be interesting on one hand, but familiar, intuitive and make me feel right at home on the other. Characters seem to come and go, similar to what happens in Phantasy Star 4. This adds some depth both to the story and to the tactical aspect of the battles, since you end up having to learn each character's strengths and weakneses, so you can use their abilities to your advantage.

You can choose one of four difficulty levels, and you can change it freely along the game. I've been playing mostly on "Heroine", the third on the list, which is supposed to be a bit challenging (although not the hardest). Most of the battles are pretty easy for me, but twice already I had to lower the difficulty to "Agent", which is considered easy (yet not the easiest) so I could get past a couple of fights I considered very difficult. I believe those spikes in difficulty are quite extreme, and it's possible they'll be addressed by the devs during future patches, but since changing the difficulty level is as easy as pressing a button, it's not a real problem, and might even be an advantage for players looking for the extra challenge.

The soundtrack is really nice, and so are the graphics (pixels). There's nothing really ground breaking about those aspects of the game, but they're more than enough to help make everything believable. I admit I was a bit disappointed, as I was expecting at least some better looking cut-scenes and maybe some voice acting (maybe like the stuff from Vay or Lunar), but the game does seem to work well enough without any of those.

All in all, Cosmic Star Heroine seems like a really good game, and one of the few from the recent years, in my humble opinion, to actually do justice to the old JRPGs.

I really like the concept of this game - some sort of a career simulator in a futuristic world, with elements of economy and networking. This is what I thought I was getting into when I bought this game and started playing. However, I ended up getting very bored very quickly.

To my disappointment, the game ended up being all about talking to people, getting them to trust and like you, so they ask you to do all sorts of missions for them, usually going back and forth between places or getting information about people they know. In my book, this type of game would be defined as "a gossip simulator". No matter where you are, the main gameplay mechanic is choosing an AI to talk to, so you can impress it in order to complete one of many boring types of missions. /yawn

You can also get a job, except the mechanism seems confusing, to say the least. Instead of getting to your work place and have some activity the game would present you as your supposed job, you have to "get owed" hours first, which means waiting... and waiting... and waiting... I suppose it was designed like that to let you do other things while having a job, but it just doesn't make sense to me. None of it.

I suggest avoiding this game, as it hardly offers any fun, if at all. If you're really curious about it, wait for it to go on sale, and even then, I'd suggest not expecting much.

This is a game I find very difficult to review, simply because I'm just not sure how to describe and explain how come I like it so much. The general concept in Stardew Valley is to build and maintain the farm you inherited from your grandfather, while maintaining your relationships with the town folks. It's sort of a hybrid between a farming simulator and a dating simulator, and I dare say that it's the first game of either of those genres I find enjoyable (excluding Agarest, which also includes a dating component).

The graphics aren't anything special, and neither is the soundtrack, but the gameplay mechanics seem to be solid enough to carry the game without much help from the audio-visual department. Basically, you plant, maintain and harvest crops, and buy and take care of farm animals. Any time you feel tired of that, you can go fishing, socializing in town or go fight and find treasures in a local mine. You can add buildings and features to your farm (once you have enough money and resources) so you can expand it and make it a money-making machine. Add to that crafting and gathering, and you get quite a lot of options of how to go about your farming carear.

While there is the ocasional bug or problem, the game is stable and runs smoothly 99% of the time, no special problems noted. All in all, if you like this type of simulation games, try Stardew Valley, as it seems to do everything right.

I consider Transport Fever to be an unpolished gem. On one hand, I really enjoy playing it, as it does the important things very well. On the other hand, though, it has plenty of problems. The result, for me, felt kind of like taking a shower on a cold day with a faulty water heater, so the temperature of the water keeps flactuating between too cold and too hot. Having played for over 250 hours (at the time of writing this review), it's evident I chose to keep playing despite the problems.

The good side of the game, in my opinion, consists of the main gameplay mechanics. Much like in previous games of this genre, including Transport Fever's own predecessor, Train Fever, the purpose is to build and manage your own network of transportation routes. You build roads, railway tracks, sea ports and airports, plan routes, buy vehicles and manage your fleet and infrastructure. While I have some serious reservations about some aspects of the economy (some of which I'll list and describe later on), the system does feel balanced well, in general, and is definitely complex and interesting enough to carry the whole game on its shoulders. Also, the models of the vehicles look really well, and from what I understand from others, are also realistic.

As for the negatives - while the game is fun to play, sometimes to the degree of being addictive, some issues take much of the fun out of the experience. The most significant of those issues, in my opinion, are the user interface and the performance issues. The game barely uses more than one CPU core, which practically means really low FPS values even on the best of hardware, especially when playing on advanced stages of the game. This issue has been addressed and improved on one of the recent patches to the game, but the game still stutters and lags like crazy - enough to sometimes cause me to quit in frustration, even though I'm playing on a relatively fast computer (Intel i7 2.9Ghz, Quad-Core with 16GB RAM).

As for the user interface - well, sometimes it feels like the developers of the game just didn't think things through before making decisions. Some of the problems have already been addressed and fixed on a recent patch, but many still remain:

1) When you upgrade a train station (adding platforms or upgrading tracks to high-speed, for example), all the passenger or cargo items which either wait at the station to be picked up, or on their way to that station - will vanish as if never existed. This problem has much to do with the game's AI as with the user inteface, and perhaps the closest to the definition of "game breaking", as if it happens mid or late game, it can easily lead you to bancrupcy - all by a mere few clicks of the mouse, without any warnings. Another effect of upgrading a station is that trains on the affected route will sometimes change direction for no apparent reason, and end up halting the entire traffic on the network (causing more losses, as maintenance costs keep accumulating as the time goes by, but since the trains can't move, no passengers or cargo get transported, so you don't get paid).

2) The cargo system is awkward and unrealistic. I won't get into it too deeply, as this is not a guide, but I will say that despite being interesting and challenging when done right, transporting cargo in this game takes a lot of trial and error, as the game simply doesn't bother to give you all the information you need. You'll start having fun with it only when you grasp the concepts it's based on (complete chains and demand base).

3) Replacing vehicles (when they get older and need to be replaced) usually means loss of money, as the 'Auto-Replace' feature will in many cases have at least some of the cargo or the passengers on board the vehicle vanish into thin air (without paying you for the transportation), and sending vehicles to their depots manually will usually mean having to pay their maintenance costs for a long while, without being able to use them to transport anyone or anything during that time.

4) Different scales - maybe the only problem on the list which also has something to do with the game-design. As everything is obviously scaled down, there's a significant and obvious difference between the scale of the maps (including the cities) and the scale of the vehicles and stations. This was most likely designed like this for the eye-candy effect of the moving vehicles, but I believe it has a major negative impact on the gameplay - specifically the acceleration rates of trains and airplanes, and the volume of traffic (especially trains).

Although it seems like most of this review is made up of the negatives of the game, I do recommend it, with all its flaws and problems, to anyone who likes this genre. The game is fun to play - as long as you don't let yourself get too frustrated with the problems.

Shoppe Keep, as implied by the name, is a game where you run your own shop. You sell items and gear to adventurers, much like in Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale.

Except if you're expecting anything like Recettear, don't bother with this game. Most of the time I was "playing" it - I ended up spending waiting for customers. I tried thinking of positive points, but all I could come up with was the general concept, which has a lot of potential, and the soundtrack, which is decent. Unlike Recettear, though, there's no story, no content, and there's pretty much nothing to do. You just wait around, scratching your nuggets while waiting for customers.

All in all, this is a cheap, stripped-down replica of Recettear. I'd pay triple the price to play a good shopkeeper game. Too bad that at least to my knowledge, at the time of writing this review, Recettear is still the only one that exists.

TL;DR - Another piece of junk to collect virtual dust on my Steam games list.

Kk, I deleted my old review, since I felt it might have been harsh, so here I go again. The verdict is still the same (not recommended, at least at the moment), but I feel I now understand the game well enough to explain my reasons better.
All in all, this game shows a lot of potential, and is fun to play, even now. The graphics and music are pretty much "meh!", as in pretty bad, but don't matter anyway, and don't really influence my opinion of the game. What does influence it, is the gameplay mechanics.

Basically, this is a stripped-down / casual football manager. It really tries to be and look simple, but here is where I was starting to have problems.

The first problem, and perhaps the major one, is that it doesn't really succeed in being simple, at least when it comes being intuitive and understandable. I've clocked countless hours of gameplay on plenty of versions of both football manager games and action soccer games, such as FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer in the past, so I dare claim to be able to learn such games quick and easy. Not with Football Tactics, though. For a game that presumes to be simple, there sure are quite a lot of reading materials. While some of the skills and moves are easy enough to figure out while playing, others aren't, so don't plan on just jumping in and figuring out as you go.

The second problem regarding the game's presumed simple design, is that in some aspects, it is too simple. Soon enough, many things become tedious and tiresome, as the game becomes repetetive and dull. Some would choose the word 'boring'.

My last issue with the game is its core gameplay component - how it deals with every action within the soccer games. While I can't provide any proof of any of this, as I don't have access to the game code, I feel very strongly that sometimes, in specific situations, the results don't make sense. I took quite a few games as test cases and explained this in much detail in the forums. I got some answers from the developers, but I still feel that while there's no bias to either side (I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't "cheat"), some results don't make sense. As this game is still on "Early Acess" at the time of writing this review, I dare say that at least in my humble opinion, the AI needs work just as much as any other aspect of the game, if not more.

Also, some interactive tutorials would be helpful as well.

TL;DR - A promising game, but I suggest waiting for improvements, especially with the AI.