Recent reviews by SamBC

This is a tentative positive review, for now.

The controller does what you expect it to, with the two touchpads, and what you tell it to (in terms of configuration).

The haptics are actually fairly impressive, and make the mouse-type control with the touchpads feel much more 'real' than a touchpad usually does.

Harder to eat while playing than it is with a keyboard and mouse, though.

I'm finding this a really enjoyable game, with enough changed from EU/EW to make it worth being a new game, but enough the same that familiarity helps you out - within limits.

The one downside to me first of all - performance issues. The game claims to detect appropriate configuration settings for your system. It seems to be rather... optimistic, shall we say. If you're getting performance issues, turn things down. The game wants to use a lot of shiny graphics effects, and they really push a GPU. Turned a couple of things down or off, and it runs nicely for me now.

I've seen a lot of concern about the time limits on missions. I'm not sure what proportion of mission types have turn limits, but it seems like most missions have turn limits of some sort. Most of them are not "complete mission in this time", that's only on some forced evac missions. Most are "achieve main objective in this time". The turn limits don't force you to completely rush, but they prevent you from overwatch camping the whole time - which is probably the point. Even retaliations, the new version of terror missions, feels more highly pressured, because you need to rescue a minimum number of civis for the mission to be successful, and it's not a small number. I find the extra challenge of this stimulating, and I'm not one to play on high difficulties.

Combat works mostly like EU/EW, but with various little changes which are all to the better. Melee attacks - from the Ranger's sword or the Skulljack, for instance - put a new spin on things, and the fact you can take a move as part of the same action makes them much more useful. you can even choose which suitable adjacent tile to make the attaack from, which is handy - beware using the slash or skulljack command from the command bar, it will pick a tile for you, and while it appears to try to do it intelligently, it's often questionable. Reloading no longer ends turn (though does use an action), so if you are in a protracted firefight, thus not moving, you can stay where you are, reload and shoot.

The strategy level feels more pressured too. There's more going on, and soldiers will be injured through multiple missions early on. The new doom tracker, the Avatar Project, feels like an extra pressure as well. It keeps plugging along, and you need to beat it. I haven't beaten it yet, so I'm not sure if I'm keeping pace well enough, but it feels tough. It feels like I can't just farm, I need to actually push forward with the plot at all times. You're always doing something useful, of course, but you are called to do missions more often than you can manage with experienced troops by month 2, in my experience. Still, trying to get rookies through missions then increases your bench strength.

And as always, rookies are handy for one major thing... "rookie, take point!"

Graphics are a considerable improvement over EU/EW, in my opinion. More realist, less action figure/cartoony, with more fidelity generally. That's true even with various things turned down a bit.

I have no hesitation recommending this game, as long as you do actually meet the minimum requirements for system spec.

Excellent example of what it is. What it is is incredibly simple, but it has great timewasting possibilities for its price.

This is a tentative, on balance, I guess I recommend it.

What it does, it does well. True, there aren't many teams yet, and we'll have to pay for them later - but still a lot cheaper than getting them all as miniatures, never mind painting them. The graphics are terribly pretty.

The 'campaign' mode seems to be an extended tutorial, as far as I can tell, which for a BB vet is frustrating - but I'm not sure it has enough pointers to be useful for a novice. As far as I persisted with it, you get a series of matches linked by story, with the rules of the game being introduced a bit at a time - the earlier matches have most things work automatically, for instance, and gradually fewer things work automatically. You also get no SPP, up to the point I gave up at.

I've not tried the MP yet, so can't comment on that.

Playing SP leagues, however, works mostly better than the previous Cyanide BB games. I would say I like it, certainly. The AI seems slightly cleverer than BB:CE, though still does some really silly things (why try and pick up the ball when you literally cannot score a touchdown before the end of the half? Why not just pummel me in the hope of KOs/injuries?).

Oh, and having turn timers in SP. That's kinda annoying.

My biggest gripe, actually, is that after all the fuss of adding the ability to not use skills when you chose to BB1, that feature seems to be absent. If anyone knows how to do it, please tell me.

It's a city builder. You know that. It's from the people who brought you Cities in Motion, so the public transport is more detailed than many city builders, but it's not full-on at the level Cities in Motion gives you.

Unlike some city builders, you can usually tell what's wrong and how to fix it pretty easily. This, along with a lack of stagnation in cash flow, makes it 'easier' than some city builders, but it also means that you aren't frustrated by hitting a ceiling and going "what the heck do I do now?"

Though you will struggle with traffic. It is inevitable.

The graphics are very nice, and very functional, and it's usually pretty easy to work out how to do whatever you want to do (within reason).

Very enjoyable.

For what it is, this is a decent little game. The combat has a surprising amount of nuance for the simplicity of the rules, and the visual effects, while being light enough for older systems, are nicely pretty.

The range of starting options also means that there's a lot of different approaches in the game, different starting conditions that you can control - as well as all the random variation that you can't control.

It's not a civ game, it's not MOO-like (or GalCiv-like, or SotS-like) - it's all about the adventure and tactical combat, with some light 4X-like elements to tie it all together.

And I'm having a lot of fun with it. There are some rough edges, like the lack of an 'exit game' control on the main menu, and no true-fullscreen (only fullscreen window, and that isn'r borderless), but then it's not a game to play for hours and hours on end, but 20-60 minutes here and there.

But I'm also going to have to go back to BE to get as much as I can out of it - some minor content elements are locked until you do something in BE to unlock them.

A massive improvement over the alread-excellent Binding of Isaac, bringing it in line with modern technology expectations (eg controller support) and making the whole game smoother and more varied.

There are some rough edges, but overall a really decent game, and I hope that the rough edges will be smoothed out in patches.

It's not exactly like Civ5, but familiar enough that you might get tripped up by differences, so go carefully.

This game is fun, but given that in-game stuff describes it as a work in progress, it really ought to be labelled as Early Access.

Anyway, it's fairly normal puzzle quest-type gameplay, and it's good. The character progression largely works. If you want to progress with any speed, you will need to sink some money into the game - but then, you have to do that for most games to get them in the first place. If you want to consistently place high in the events, you'll probably need to spend more money, but I guess that's cool if you care about it that much.

Excellent good fun. Less sandboxy than the original, which has good and bad points. However, individual soldiers are more important.