Recent reviews by Techhead7890

Lovingly crafted, great puzzle mechanics, not too frustrating, wonderful characters, humour, and sound design. A thoroughly impressive exploration experience.

It wasn't really for me. It didn't really feel like exploration, the scenes weren't that interactive - sometimes doors slide open, but they otherwise feel rather frozen in time and lifeless. I think it's the lack of ambient sound effects or atmosphere. I also feel like the score really detracts from the experience and doesn't make any sense to me.

Much in the vein of Agent A, with a beautiful art style yet also a disappointing UX from a mobile port (main menu buttons hidden by bad contrast, no hotkeys to travel between islands or bring up the hint map and some zoom issues with the star map). This one is a bit less frustrating thanks to the star map, more variety in the puzzles, and a bit shorter at about 2 hours instead of 4. However, as with Agent A, it isn't really worth the full $25 price but is well worth it on sale and rather enjoyable. Lots of clicky buttons, levers, and switches!

It's unpolished, and janky at bits (such as extraction). It's fun for a bit but once you've done a tank once it's a drag and has barely any replay value, I would wait until it's on sale. Overall it really needs more work before I can recommend it.

(To the devs: less random wires and pipes at the bottom of the tank; the ability to dig faster for collectibles; and the option to purchase wrecks rather than just buying the completed vehicle would be great.)

Edit: even after the extraction odds revamp so you're not just finding "random halftracks" like I said originally -- yeah it's still just not a great user experience. I keep missing that one stupid bit of rust on the lug behind the wheel, so I sometimes wish you could just nail all the parts to the wall so you can clean them all up at once without having to spend museum money on buying blueprints. I mean crafting parts sucks in general. And yes, it's still impossible to work on the random torsion bar at the bottom of the KV-1, even if you turn on X-ray vision like they suggest. Still a thumbs down in 2022.

Incredible atmosphere, art style, and puzzle controls such as difficulty levels. Well worth it at full price.

Edit: that being said, it's not without a few bumps. The window isn't resizeable and there are a few level saving bugs here and there, but overall I still agree with my original review.

It took a little bit of getting used to. You have to build the tracks and set the switches manually, and it gets frantic when there are multiple trains all swanning about. As far as I can tell you can't stop trains either, they just go off until they reach their destination... or crash. And blow up all the tracks around them.

So I was screaming in chaos initially because from level 2 onwards, 1x speed really is necessary, the pause helps a lot, and the sandbox mode is very useful for planning! But the game doesn't really tell you about any of those things. But it is such a beautiful well made game that I did not have it in my heart to refund it. I don't know when I will pick it up next but I am sure I will at least have fun looking at the game even if I am not making much progress with the campaign.

Sadly it wasn't for me, I didn't like the puzzles and the lack of polish. While functionally complete, no bugs encountered and a great art style I just didn't really connect with the protagonist and got frustrated by the puzzles. It seemed somewhat meaningless. I got to the 3rd chapter before giving up.

I thoroughly recommend it. It doesn't have the depth of Hexcells, Hexceed, or the puzzler edition but it makes up for it with such a wide variety of level generation and difficulty options, theme customisation and most importantly window resizeability. As far as I know it's the only one that really just works in a tiny window off to the side of the screen so you can fiddle with it while you watch something else in the background. I probably wouldn't buy this as my first hex-style puzzle product, I'm not sure if it really "communicates" the deeper techniques in the way that the structured levels for Hexcells and the other games do, but it really feels like the levels in Globesweeper have the most consistent replayability experience compared to the others. Well worth the price.

I feel like there is room for improvement. There's very little feedback, it doesn't even highlight pieces when selected which was a little frustrating at first. This makes me think it was designed for a touch interface. It doesn't give any guidance such as tiles it can move to, or mention pins or forks (although arguably that contributes to minimalism and didacticity). Pieces can move illegally, which is funny but a little unusual. It takes a while to transition to new levels which can be a little frustrating for some of the easier stretches. That all out of the way, it did feel like it was improving my chess skill and is a nice and light puzzle. It's 300 levels long which is good value. Worth checking out.

It is a themed piece-swapping loop game. I'm not sure I liked the integration of the electronics into the gameplay mechanics, they are mostly eye candy (largely just variants of the straight piece, some with polarity/direction constraints, but their light level isn't even affected by parallel/serial connection which is disappointing). But the description does disclaim it's not really a circuit simulator. Otherwise it works great and is well made, reminiscent of a flash puzzle game. Get it on sale.