Recent reviews by BeastofChicken

I've played every Civ game, probably 10s of thousands of hours combined. This isn't it.
Half the price of the full game for each DLC content pack tells you all you need to know about their priorities.

Great so far

There aren't a ton of WW1 games out there, most notably because its incredibly difficult to create 'fun' out a slog. But this is the closet/best thing we have to a WW1 RTS/Total War-like game, and Petroglyph has done a great job. I love the persistent trenches, and seems to capture the sense of WW1 very well.

A few complaints, the AI very clearly cheats FOW, Supply and Tech. They will match you in everything even if you speed rush certain tech trees, they'll hit your units with artillery outside balloon LOS as they come onto the map or move between trenches. I understand balancing against a player is difficult, but the cheating is a bit punishing/over-used.

A few wishes, I'd like to see persistent capture points. I should gain some kind of advantage after sweeping a hex for the next battle and gain the ability to build trenches to fit a new front line. It would reward and push players into taking more risks during the battles. Also more camera controls and an option to zoom out more.

True to the board game and well done. The dice roller seems a bit sketchy, but that might just be bias. It does offer some alternative rolling methods if you don't like it. It's especially fun for multiplayer.

Some notes about single player if you only do that. The AI is a bit lackluster, and I think it's mostly due to some hard-coding that's been done. Once you get used to it, it becomes very predictable, and pretty easy to abuse and win even in seemingly impossible scenarios. For instance, the UK will always build 3 planes in India on turn 1, which makes it laughably easy to take UK as Germany by turn 2 by launching 2 successive assaults as they don't replenish their troops, nor do they strike against protected transports right next door. If playing Total Victory, winning as the U.S. is a given, as Japan does a pitiful job protecting itself from early/mid-game U.S. aggression. I believe that the devs do this to play against the meta Germany first strategy that is necessary in multiplayer. Germany is hard-coded to never buy battleships to help dominate the Atlantic. Russia falls? Make sure to just take Japan and then death-stack battleships to keep Germany from invading the UK. Enough turns, and you can one shot Germany itself with bombardment and a tank landing.

All and all a great game, I just wish the AI was a little more adaptive so I can use it to test strategies for multiplayer. Allowing for custom board setups or more custom game modes would be great as well.

What makes Timberborn stand out of course is its water mechanics and dam building. It's fun seeing a dam project you've been working on for ever finally work. It's still in EA and lacks end-game content, but what they have atm is entertaining and well thought out. In the game you juggle food production, water management, long term construction projects and periodic droughts. The two factions in the game mostly play differently in how you manage your population growth, but they have a few unique buildings between them.

The droughts can get kind of old, I'm hoping we see things like floods, weather etc. in the future.

The district system can take some getting used to. It's also the one thing I dislike most about the game, but its a novel approach to a very common problem in colony sims. Individual agents + long pathfinding is just very resource intensive.

Good simple rogue-like that's much deeper than it first appears with interesting builds and weapons. It's a bit of a copy of Magic Survival on mobile (that's also very good), but some of the encounters are more thought out and less random. For instance, if you break out of an early encirclement, the game sends another encirclement shortly after that's tougher to survive.

It obviously doesn't replace Zbrush, but it seems like the only VR sculpting app that is designed around professional use. In addition to the sculpting tools, It has a decent poly modeling toolset and similar volume tools you get in apps like Medium. Overall, really looking forward to integrating this into my pipeline.

Not bad.

It's pretty good.

I played this quite a bit during the open beta.

So you'll see quite a few reviews talking about similarities between this and Rimworld. It is true that this is a simple version of Rimworld in 3D, especially in regards to the story, character management and the world map. Having said that though, construction, mining and the 3D levels in the game that you can build in, are nearly identical to the lesser known game, Gnomoria (a sprite-based isometric Dwarf Fortress clone), and its freeware cousin Ingnomia. I don't say this as a bad thing, more as a note in case you've played those and are looking for something like it but with newer graphics, a better ui and an active developer.

Myself, I've been waiting on a game like this to appear since Gnomoria was abandoned by its developer, and I couldn't be happier with the result so far. It's fairly simple at this stage, but we are in early access after all. I played about 20 hours in the beta, and I think I was able to get through all the content, but it scratches that 3D colony building sim itch so well, I'm definitely going to keep playing, and looking forward to updates.