Valheim: Review
Release Date: 9 Sep, 2026
Developer: Iron Gate AB
Publisher: Coffee Stain Publishing
Valheim is a survival crafting game with unique mechanics that have you build bases, ships, fight bosses, and explore a massive open world. Visit a Viking-themed 10th world and fight for Odin to take down progressively harder enemies and environmental challenges.
The Good:
Entering Early Access on Steam in 2021, Valheim introduced several survival crafting mechanics that have since become genre-normal additions in almost every similar game that followed. You start with nothing but your fists, and a friendly, if somewhat annoying, crow who will guide you as you set out to figure out where you are, how to survive, and what to do.
Like any crafting-survival game, your first moments in Valheim will mostly be spent gathering sticks and stones, making rudimentary tools, and most likely dying to the most innocuous creatures like a wild boar, or maybe a fallen tree. Gathering resources will unlock new recipes in a fairly organic tech progression arc that I quite enjoy over the typical – spend points on technology A – trees that seem to dominate the genre. I’ve never quite understood why I need to research how to make a campfire in almost every other game.
Valheim does not hold your hand and gives you the full world to explore immediately, limited only by your skill to avoid combat damage and by various environmental factors like frozen mountains, desolate volcanic lands, and vast oceans. The world is huge, and you can explore it at your leisure. True progression, however, is locked behind a series of bosses that you can face whenever you feel ready, and whenever you’ve gathered enough of specific resources to summon them. Each boss is unique and brings in new mechanics. You can take them on straight, you can use the environment to your advantage, or you can spend hours in the world grinding materials to fully equip your character to the max first. The choice is yours.
The best thing that Valheim does is provide a true sandbox for you to explore, build, and even restructure the land around you mostly at your own pace, but with a good pace of increasing challenges the farther you decide to go in the world.
The Bad:
Building. It’s not really bad, but it is the one area that I felt aged the worst over Valheim’s 5 years in Early Access. Though you can create some amazing builds, I found myself constantly fighting controls, trying to get things to line up perfectly, or running back and forth to refill your very limited inventory. Games in the genre since then have added a wide variety of quality-of-life building and crafting elements that I feel Valheim lacks.
Graphically, Valheim hits a very strange middle ground. Its low-rez characters look like you’re playing on your PlayStation 1 until it suddenly overheats and melts the graphics; however, Valheim’s color palette and use of lighting can also make the world around you look incredibly beautiful. This is particularly the case when you set out on the sea for the first time as the sun rises, the light shines off the water, and you can see the green hills in the distance.
The Ugly:
It’s actually difficult to pick something that might be considered the ugly part of Valheim. But a couple of elements could be improved and are often frustrating, especially when playing solo.
Mob spawns and chases in Valheim can be incredibly frustrating. Mobs can often spawn immediately on top of you, or even your base, taking you out in moments if you’re not paying attention. They can also spawn in droves far larger than you could likely withstand given your progression. (In my most recent playthrough, the first base raid consisted of almost 20 Greydwarfs that proceeded to murder me 5 times consecutively, and there was no way to fight back given you spawn with a tiny health pool of 25.)
You’ll also occasionally find areas in the procedural map where multiple high-level mobs have spawned on top of each other. You might find a bear, a couple of trolls, and even a Greydwarf nest all within a few feet of each other, and due to their highly alert nature, they can easily latch on to you, resulting in many frustrating corpse runs where you are killed over and over again. Equipment is difficult and grindy to make, so you typically have no choice but to keep trying.
Some mobs will also chase and harass you forever, forcing you to simply let them murder you so that you can get back to enjoying the game.
You can adjust these elements through customization, but in a vanilla playthrough they often reduce the enjoyment factor.
The Summary:
Though it has minor shortcomings and a few signs of age from its long development process, Valheim remains one of the greatest games in its genre. Few, if any, other games in the survival-crafting genre offer as much of an open sandbox as Valheim.
You can rush through bosses and progression; you can spend hours grinding materials and cutting down trees, or you can casually set aside hours building a massive base with its many building parts, and you can do so on your own, with friends, or by finding a brand new community to join. In Valheim, the world is literally yours to shape as you will, and no other game yet has quite matched its flexibility. After 5 years in Early Access, it’s hard not to see millions of players enjoying their worlds for years and years more.
Scavland Review:
Release Date: 4 Sep, 2026
Developer: NoShadow
Publisher: NoShadow, Unsubscribe
Scavland is a hardcore survival RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world where mutants are rampant and people suffer. You are a pixelated scavenger looking to survive in the vast wasteland and support the remnants of humanity. You explore the world, fight mutants, humans, and wild animals, collect loot, then try to get back to safety to complete missions, sell your findings and upgrade your kit.
The Good:
The setting of Scavland is fantastic. The incredibly detailed pixel graphics pull you into a wide wasteland where enemies could be hiding behind any corner, and usually are. You equip guns and armor and set out to explore the world either on your own, or by following a core quest line, or by taking on requests from the many interactable NPCs found dotted around the remaining settlements.
Scavland is a hardcore survival RPG, so every fight you take could be your last, even against a handful of very aggressive rats, but most notably versus a large variety of enemies, either human or mutant. Humans carry guns and will spot you from afar, take potshots, and try to use cover when available. Mutants come in a variety of forms and will tear you apart, explode deadly poison on you, or electrocute you, among other means of death. The game is a constant tug-of-war between managing your inventory and ammo, exploring farther from safe zones, and finding big piles of loot to fulfill requests or sell on the market.
Combat is tense, and one or two hits on yourself or an enemy is usually the end of the fight, followed by a potential corpse run if you find yourself on the receiving end. Combat is enhanced by strong sound and lighting effects that make the world feel alive and keep you on your toes.
Among the quests that are typically find-and-retrieve, or clearing zones, you can also go out and explore the world to find enemy outposts, large bunkers, and other areas that will reward you with a large amount of loot.
The Bad:
Like many RPGs in this vein, Scavland suffers a bit in UI design and inventory management. You’re going to spend a ton of time in your inventory trying to move stuff around, identifying usable items from weapons, from junk, and what can be consumed. A limited stash, accessible only from a handful of locations and quick to fill up, makes this time-consuming when I mostly just want to get back out and explore and fight.
Though gunplay in Scavland feels above average, melee combat, which is typically the most useful way to fight off many of the smaller creatures in the world, feels secondary and forgotten. It’s difficult to target enemies with strikes, and there are notably few options in terms of weapons or improvements you can add to your melee arsenal over time. Given the neo-apocalyptic setting, melee combat feels like a natural fit among the endless guns and ammunition that are rarely a problem to find and maintain.
The Ugly:
Progression and questing are by far the weakest links in Scavland. There are only three quest types that I’ve come across in my time with the game: go to location A and kill enemy B, go to location A and retrieve item B, and find item A somewhere in the world and return it. Returning a quest item typically results in a reward of currency or items, or both, and a small reputation reward with the quest giver. Reputation gain is incredibly slow, and you’ll need to repeat 1 or 2 of the same quests over and over to grind reputation, which will eventually give you access to higher-level shop items. It’s a chore.
Though Scavland marks itself as an RPG, it lacks most classic RPG progression mechanics and relies completely on minute gear and crafting updates. There are no other systems to play with to improve your character’s stats, gain skills, or specialize in any type of combat. You can customize your weapons to an extent, but I rarely found attachments that changed the style of play beyond adding a scope to my rifle so I could see farther.
The summary:
Scavland is a solid RPG that really hits its setting well. The world is detailed and interesting to explore, with a solid variety of enemies, guns, and tactics to encounter. More compelling quests, progression, and inventory management options down the road would significantly enhance the experience of venturing forth into the wasteland for hours on end.
Timberborn:
Release Date: Mar, 2026
Developer: Mechanistry
Publisher: Mechanistry
Timberborn is a casual city-builder with unique water physics where you take over the leadership of a group of evolved beavers as they try to rebuild a ruined Earth. Build crafting buildings, set up supply chains, manage food and water supplies, all while doing your best to control the flow of water through various seasons.
The Good:
The setting of Timberborn has you take control of dozens of cute beavers, as they chew through wood both literally and figuratively to build a sprawling city with various levels of technology. Your biggest efforts will revolve around control of each map’s water system, which typically consists of several clean water sources, several bad water sources, and seasons that change randomly every 10-15 in-game days between wet, dry, and bad tides.
Timberborn gives you a ton of toys to play with, and a variety of ways to manage seasons. Want to design detailed aqueducts, causeways, and water control systems? Sure. Want to create automated flood gates that switch flows and production with each change? No problem. Want to simply store a vast amount of water in a massive super structure and watch the world burn each season and rebuild? You can successfully pull that off too.
Your freedom to create is on full display in Timberborn, and no approach is completely off the table. With a variety of maps, customizations, and a very active modding community, you can find various challenges or really casual approaches to just build an interesting town.
The water physics, though not ultra-realistic, are fun to play with and figure out unique ways to control the map’s water, and avoid the dreaded bad tides that have endless poisonous water emerge that sickens your beavers and destroys your crops instantly.
The Bad:
There are two factions out with Timberborn’s full 1.0 release. Each offers some unique capabilities, but for the most part there isn’t much differentiation between the two. You’ll largely take the same steps, though with slightly different buildings to meet the same requirements for water, food, and energy. It would have been nice to see more key differences in each faction’s supply chain, or some unique factor for each one that needs to be handled very differently than the other. A good example is a modded faction that, unlike the base game factions, actually suffers if the beavers get wet and need to be kept warm, forcing you to change your playstyle dramatically.
The Ugly:
Timberborn suffers from two issues common in the genre. You’ll spend the vast majority of your time speeding up time and watching the simulation play out while you wait for resources, or wait for a particular construction to finish. Outside of the most difficult maps, which are usually the custom ones, and the highest difficulty levels, you’ll typically come to a point where your group of beavers becomes self-sufficient and can survive most events the game throws at you. The end-game becomes less about survival and more about building large projects and watching the simulation for its own sake. Although it can be satisfying watching your population grow, or a massive project finally get completed, the survival aspect of the game tends to go away completely unless the player makes a critical error.
Summary:
Timberborn is a satisfying city builder with a unique mix of setting and use of physics. A strong modding community for the game highlights a number of intriguing ways the game could go with new factions, mechanics, and survival mechanics that could potentially give the end-game a big boost, and do provide a number of reasons to replay if you’re willing to download mods. Though I got a little lost in the simulation at times, the map variety and the ways you can exploit them still provide hours upon hours of fun inside the game.
Space Craft – Early Access Review
Release Date: 11 June, 2026
Developer: Shiro Games
Publisher: Shiro Games
Space Craft, not “Star Craft,” as I frequently Freudian-slip into, is a multiplayer space exploration, mining, base-building, survival, factory-building mash-up of genres that tries to do a ton of things all at once and, luckily, gets many of them right.
The Good:
Space Craft’s world, or galaxy in this case, is massive. Each galaxy consists of over a dozen large regions, each containing dozens of systems and hundreds of planets. Though most planets are lifeless rocks, each has slightly unique characteristics such as particular mining nodes, hidden bases, space wrecks, and in some cases large mining nodes that allow you to construct bases.
Though the planet surfaces are relatively dull, you never know when you’ll encounter a unique ingredient, some new type of environmental hazard, or the perfect spot to invest in building a base. I’m 30+ hours in, and still finding new environments and materials in the galaxy. I’ve encountered ice planets too cold to get out of your ship on, dusty rocks dense in materials, ocean planets that you can literally dive deep into, and even asteroid belts that require specialized shields to enter.
Each place you encounter in the galaxy looks pretty good. Planets have atmospheres dotted with real clouds. Structures are sleek and highly detailed. Space stations have a reasonable amount of variety in their exteriors but share a significant number of interior details; however, those details all look good. Surprisingly, most of the NPCs in the game are also voiced, though I couldn’t quite tell if these were AI-generated or not.
Once you make it through the starting zone, you’ll be able to craft goods, establish a base, and modify your ship. Base building, or really factory building in Space Craft, is pretty straightforward and works. Unlock a building in one of the many research trees, gather or manufacture the appropriate ingredients, and simply plant the building down on your claimed area. Automation is managed through drones, which you also get to craft. Each more advanced item in Space Craft requires more materials, or more advanced parts that you also need to craft with more and more advanced materials, parts, etc., on and on. The parts supply chain and how everything works together are quite fun, and watching several drones buzzing around your base nonstop is extremely satisfying.
Ship building works similarly. You can construct new parts for your ship, then head to your local shipyard (or build your own) and simply add the parts to the ship. You can build ship bulkheads, internal components such as batteries, and external components such as mining tools and scanners. You can also fully modify the shape of your bulkheads and add paint and decals. No player ship is quite alike after the first few hours. I’ll note you can also find ship parts scattered around the galaxy, or you can grind away and unlock new items and slowly work your way up to them. More on that in the next section.
The Bad:
The grind. You’ll either love it or hate it as a player. Space Craft was clearly designed with the idea that players would want to work together, at least to some extent, to accomplish things and unlock everything in the game. Though you can solo the content and eventually unlock everything on your own, some technologies and rewards are locked behind progressing experience with your Corpo.
Your Corpo in Space Craft is essentially your guild. You can be in a guild of one, or hundreds, and in order to progress your experience here, you take on contracts that require you to deliver large quantities of goods back to “The Company”. These contracts are so large, however, that going on your own to fulfill these may take you literal weeks in real life to accomplish. This essentially locks out some players from becoming fully independent, establishing several bases, and gaining access to all the core resources in the quantities required. The downside is you can still do quite a bit on your own, but this may or may not be satisfying to all players, when you know you could potentially unlock more, but the tasks seem too daunting.
Completing the aforementioned contracts typically means establishing a base, or three, grinding resources, and then slowly manufacturing those resources into more and more complex items, in the thousands. Though you can automate much of this at your base, its structures build things 3 to 5 times slower than you could do yourself, and are really designed to be left running and checked every several hours. This usually means you try to craft many of the items yourself, which is largely menu-driven and locks you into watching each item be meticulously crafted, with no way to walk away from the machine and do other tasks while you craft.
These factors make for some long periods of staring at the screen, being inactive, walking away while your player completes some crafting, or logging off the game so that you can return the next day to accomplish your goals. If you are playing in a group, this is greatly reduced; however, you can coordinate and deliver goods back and forth between each other’s bases in specialized storage boxes. For solo players like me though, expect much waiting and quiet sessions of mining resources around the map.
The Ugly:
With the game structured around online multiplayer and in early access, the typical tropes of online play are the worst aspects of Space Craft. And no, it’s not the players. It’s the game stability and gameplay smoothness that make the biggest impact on your experience in Space Craft.
With the game requiring a server, that means you can only play when the server is up. It being in early access means the servers can be down more frequently for maintenance and bug fixes, or simply crash and kick you out. I’ve unfortunately experienced this several times in my play.
Though there aren’t really any loading screens in Space Craft, outside of each time you enter a new sector, which is relatively infrequent, there can be significant latency issues, texture snap-ins, and frame drops throughout gameplay. This is particularly noticeable when first entering a planet or transitioning from your ship to ground play, and it can be extremely jarring.
Outside of performance issues, the only other area of Space Craft I have not really enjoyed has been the various “restricted areas” around the galaxy. These are essentially the dungeons of Space Craft. They typically include a short puzzle to unlock doors, or a maze amongst storage containers. They all feel mostly the same, and this is further reinforced by their appearing identical from the outside and having very similar interior features. Though they can sometimes be quite rewarding from a resource perspective, after you’ve completed a couple, you’ll wish they were more varied, longer, and more regularly found.
The Summary:
Space Craft: Is it good? Yes, it is actually quite good. Despite some grindy items, some elements that require you to stare at a menu for hours, a handful of clunky multiplayer components, and some significant grinding, Space Craft is in fact an excellent space mining adventure. Though it doesn’t do anything totally new, or necessarily better than the competition, the scale, the complexity of crafting, the (mostly) open-galaxy exploration, the factory building, and particularly the ship crafting, when combined, work really well together and really scratch the itch for players who enjoy exploring, incrementally progressing, and being regularly surprised with new things to learn or explore. There is always something new to build, some other planet to explore, or some goal to reach that should keep most fans of this genre highly entertained. I look forward to them continuing to build on the early access build and adding content like space battles, new environments, new buildings, and especially new ways for solo players to succeed.
Outworld Station
Release Date: 5 May, 2026
Developer: Trickjump Games Ltd.
Publisher: Trickjump Games Ltd.
Outworld Station is a chill, space factory builder where you explore and exploit a variety of planetoids, build massive factories in their orbit and take on aggressive aliens and environments. With both solo and multiplayer options, you can play your way.
The Good:
Outworld Station at its core is an automation game, and for the most part carries itself well. The learning curve to get started is shallow, as you can relatively quickly build out your first sprawling space station within a couple of hours of gameplay. Where Outworld stands out is in the requirements to branch out, visit new planets, and set up various franchises across the solar system, creating complex supply chains across multiple planets and asteroids.
Building your factory is kept relatively straightforward. Collect or manufacture a few basic resources, and you can quickly build, copy, or delete buildings in a few clicks. Outworld uses a unique system that lets you determine the routes for your products and materials by selecting buildings and linking them. With your conveyor belts, or space tubes in this environment, being able to handle anything you throw at them, the pace becomes relaxed and allows you to slowly build up your various bases at your own pace. There are obstacles in the form of combat and environmental events, but these are merely distractions from the core gameplay and won’t really slow you down for long.
You also get to build some massive ships. A ton of them. In fact, the goal of the game is to build a massive ark ship to save humanity. Setting up and managing your supply chain to consistently produce all the different ships for the fleet can be really rewarding. In particular, you need to manage not only resources but also the loading, offloading, and fueling of the vessels.
The Bad:
Though graphically Outworld Station holds its own, many of the buildings share similar looks and colours, occasionally making your larger-scale factories look less interesting than they could. Some options to recolour or apply different templates would greatly help differentiate the areas of your factory.
There are quests in Outworld. Main quests lead you through a standard tutorial before transitioning to having you build more and more parts and ships. Given the ships you build don’t really do anything once completed except float around until you fulfill the quest, then speed off, it can be less than satisfying once you complete your orders. Smaller quests show up from time to time, which typically require you to manually shuffle parts to your hub, or seek out specific enemies and engage in combat (more on that later). In general, the quests aren’t particularly that interesting and tend to just be tedious in nature.
The Ugly:
Combat is a thing, I guess, in Outworld Station. Various enemies are dotted around each map, and to get access to certain resources and research, you’ll eventually need to take on enemy ships, aliens, and other hostile entities in pursuit of the ultimate factory. These encounters are dull, repetitive, and don’t require any more strategy than circle strafing the enemies.
In some instances, combat is just bad. For instance, in one region you’ll encounter a particular creature that sends out an electric pulse that will stun you for a few moments. On rare occasions you may encounter more than one, and if you haven’t upgraded your vessel, you could get stuck in a non-stop stun battle where you are unable to move or take any actions to break the stun. I once got trapped in this sequence for over 20 minutes until the game itself broke and slingshotted me across the map.
The Summary:
Though Outwold Station has a few flaws, its core goal in allowing you to build various massive satellite factories across a star system works well, and watching your factory grow is very satisfying. With some updates to how quests work, and perhaps a rework of combat, this could be a very compelling factory automation game.
Bellwright Review
Release Date: 23 Apr, 2024
Developer: Donkey Crew
Publisher: Donkey Crew, Snail Games USA
Bellwright! It’s a medieval city management game with some light role-playing and narrative elements, where you pick up sticks and stones and build them into a thriving medieval city, with villagers working in unison to support your campaign to reunite the region and free them from the bandit oppressors and the false king!
As always, let’s get into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Good:
Bellwright is a reasonably good-looking game, and you’ll see diverse regions as you explore across the large map. Draw distances are excellent, and most areas are filled with details, which include a limited selection of fauna like rabbits, birds and deer, a good variety of trees, and rocky outcroppings and easily identifiable resources that you can collect.
The game follows a pretty standard survival structure, with you first picking up sticks and stones from the ground to craft basic tools, then teching up and gathering new items like logs, ores, etc. Gathering items all have animations and are generally satisfying to do, and the general grind of gathering items is fairly well paced.
Where the game turns around, and truly opens up is when you recruit your first villager, which happens early on via a quest line. Villagers support your town and can be assigned to gather, craft and build anything that your player can. They are also required to conduct research to advance to new crafting tables and buildings. Villagers are surprisingly smart at their day-to-day tasks and can mostly be left on their own to complete them. There are commands and options available to determine who amongst your people will take on which tasks, and the priorities for both tasks and buildings. It’s very satisfying to recruit villagers and watch them build your village according to your instructions.
Building in Bellwright is also unique. You place blueprints for buildings, then you and your villagers can carry the necessary crafting materials to a loading area, before then constructing each building piece by piece. The level of detail to each building’s building pattern continues to surprise me each time. As you tech up and build more complex buildings, you’ll need more complex materials and building equipment. Support from your villagers is mandatory to build larger buildings, as these can take 100s, if not 1000s, of clicks to complete each component. However, I am always surprised by how quickly my villagers put these together, so long as I work to support the gathering of the necessary materials.
The one grey area of how effective your villagers are, is that it contrasts poorly with the other villages where nobody seems to work, and all the villagers just simply walk around on predetermined paths throughout the day. It would be nice to see these other villagers at work, and some sort of resource systems in play which might determine what’s available to trade.
The Bad:
Quests in Bellwright fall under 3 types: collect or craft a number of materials and deliver them, kill a number of animals or bandits, deliver goods from point a to point b. These quests are generally tiresome and generic. Often, the quests are multi-step and require significant amounts of grinding materials and crafting items to complete. I often found myself ignoring all but the earliest quests to instead work on my village, pre-build common items, and then complete quests en masse.
Questing provides items, gold, loyalty, and valor. Valor allows you to recruit new villagers, but can be gathered by fighting bandits found throughout the world. Loyalty allows you to recruit more highly skilled villagers and is a requirement to progress the tech tree during the mid and late game, as most buildings require a specialist to research or run. Unfortunately, to recruit most of these specialists you also need to liberate each village, which can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor.
The time and frustration mostly stems from the combat, which uses a directional style and has you throwing strikes between blocking in the correct directions. 1-on-1 combat is fine, but as soon as any groups are involved, it can be extremely frustrating as both villagers and enemies blob together, move around in unexpected ways, and are typically hard to target.
The Ugly:
Traversing the large map is clearly the most frustrating component of Bellwright. Though the game does offer fast travel, this can only be used by your player, or in a very limited fashion in a recent update for your armies along rivers. The latter requires late-game materials and research to activate. There are no mounts available and limited options to increase your carry capacity until the late game, which really slows things down.
In addition, although they have made improvements, it’s difficult to raise your militia, and there are limited options for controlling them once raised, with only a handful of commands available and a very simple AI.
These issues compound the above combat issues, meaning I typically choose to engage much larger armies by myself and find ways to cheese to a win rather than try to organize and march an army across the world. I can often soften large groups of enemies by kiting them one by one with arrows.
The Summary:
Do I recommend Bellwright? I do! Even with the combat limitations and some of the roadblocks in teching up. The building and management of your village is very satisfying, and extremely rewarding when you go off on an adventure and return to see significant movement on buildings being completed automatically by your villagers. The villagers are also smart enough to run your village with minimal interaction, making it feel alive. With some additional updates to some other areas of the game, this is a very good game for fans of village simulations.
Wartales Review
Release Date: 12 Apr, 2023
Developer: Shiro Games
Publisher: Shiro Games
Wartales is a mercenary management, tactical combat game with survival and crafting mechanics. Is it good? Let’s get into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Good
Combat in Wartales is lean and clean. Incorporating most of what you’d expect from a typical tactical, turn-based battle system without the somewhat annoying RNG you might see in some games. When you make an attack, you will hit something, and the RNG will mostly affect the amount you hit for, whether any special effects hit, or occasionally whether you accidentally hit a teammate. Even early battles can be challenging, and with the threat of perma-death hanging over each action, careful consideration is needed before each move you make.
The open world and quests are all quite enjoyable. Every quest in Wartales is optional, and you can take them on in any order you like, including the story quests. The story quests are all interesting and include more challenging combat scenarios, but never lock you from progressing your mercenary group. You’re free to take on the story quests, find contracts that reward money, or wander the world taking on combat at your own pace, and making money through crafting or trade. Most scenarios have multiple routes to completion, some of which may include combat. There is no true moral system in the game, though you will be pressed to take sides or make moral decisions. These are usually only rewarded with different items or amounts of gold and don’t have a significant impact on your story.
There is a solid mix of weapons and classes in the game, and each has its use. A mixed group of mercenaries with varying skills and strengths is generally required for success. You can easily recruit new team members in taverns, and occasionally through quests found in the world, though I wish the latter would happen more frequently, or as a result of winning in combat. You can find weapons and armor via battle, trading with traveling merchants, or crafting. Crafting is typically the best route to get new gear and involves a simple mini-game once you have enough resources. There are also mini-games for gathering resources, though these are neither challenging nor varied.
The Bad
Wartales is designed to be challenging; much of that challenge in the mid to late game comes from the enemies you face gaining massive buffs to their health or numbers. The AI tactically isn’t very challenging and can be easily tricked into maneuvering into volatile positions. In later battles, when you lose, it’s usually due to the vast number of troops the AI has, or their bloated health and armor numbers. Numbers that you can’t easily manage at similar levels with your troops.
Even though the open world has many things to do, and several points of interest, there isn’t much incentive to play in any other style than – take a quest – travel to a destination – fight a battle – return to town. You could try to live a life of crime or purchase a DLC to open a tavern, but none of these activities feels particularly balanced against the typical, cyclic endeavor described above.
The Ugly
The game is a grind. It will take you hours, upon hours, of several ever-lengthening battles to even dream of having any of your mercenary group reach later levels. My longest single campaign lasted over 25 hours, and I had only reached level 7 of 15.
Similarly, those ever-lengthening battles can also be a grind. As you expand your mercenary group to include more and more members, each battle can take multiple hours to complete. Since there is no checkpoint system, these longer battles require painstaking preparation and thought before each move and each commitment lest you make a mistake and lose the battle, forcing you to restart from the beginning.
Summary
Even with the grind, I still highly recommend Wartales for players who enjoy tactical battles and large open-world exploration. Though the game can chug to a halt mid-way through, I find the early hours to be extremely rewarding with each play-through.
Microtopia Review
Release Date: 18 Feb, 2025
Developer: Cordyceps Collective
Publisher: Goblinz Publishing, Gamirror Games
Microtopia, get small, tiny, and take control of an army of nanobot ants and build their colony. Part factory automation, part city builder, and part science lab. Microtopia is a genre in its own right. What did I think about the game? Let’s get into the good, the bad, and the ugly! You can check out my play-through here!
The Good
Visually, Microtopia is a joy to view. Though nothing is shockingly pretty, the level of detail provided for each ant, each factory, and their various animations enhances the look and feel of the game. The unique filter applied to all of it, like that of a microscope’s lens, lends a surreal feel to looking into another world from far above.
Through a relatively short tutorial, the scope of the game is slowly revealed to you, and man, is there scope. An incredibly large and complex tech tree unveils itself to you shortly into the game and provides stepping stones to additional complexity as well as various levels of automation.
Each ant outside of your starting four has a particular lifespan or battery life, and will soon expire once nurtured by your queen. At first, this brings great disappointment as you witness hundreds of tiny ants simply turn black and crumble until you slowly realize the complex tools available to repurpose your many ants into new ants, materials, or even, eventually, a queen.
Figuring out and maximizing the life span of each ant is not only a requirement to survive and grow, but also offers significant challenge and reward as you uncover new factories, gates, and paths, and create complex systems. Though driven through trial and error, succeeding in a task in Microtopia is incredibly rewarding as you see the automation cut loose, or fully optimize the lifespan of a tiny little ant.
The Bad
Great complexity brings great disappointment. Though success is incredibly rewarding, failing to set up a complex path system or create efficiencies in a factory can be truly annoying. The game provides little feedback or data to help you isolate issues, explain certain tools and systems, or let you know when you are maximizing your efficiency.
I’d often find myself moving things around over and over again to no avail. Though the game does not punish you for moving buildings or trails around, I’d frequently return to recently rebuilt areas to find massive piles of dead ants, lineups, or even no ants at all, and then need to spend significant time troubleshooting and waiting for things to restart. (More on that in the Ugly section!)
There’s a significant lack of data in this factory automation game! Similar games often provide you with a variety of charts, graphs, and so on to help better judge areas of efficiency. Microtopia only offers a single bar to indicate how quickly your queen is spawning larvae, and an occasional report during a specific segment of the game to indicate your overall population. Given this game is driven by how many of what type of ant you have, it would be incredibly valuable to pull up those numbers at any time and make sure you have the right balance of what you need so that you can best address shortages in your automation schemes.
The Ugly
There is always an ugly side, though, inherently, Microtopia’s ugliness mostly resides in its UI and controls. There is a general lack of menus, tooltips, and pop-ups to help you more thoroughly understand the mechanics of the game. Though tutorials for most basic mechanics are available, the game’s complex nature would benefit from more in-depth tooling.
The UI can sometimes be difficult to navigate or understand. It’s all built quite simply, but it often lacks enough information, or the information only becomes available once a building or mechanic has begun. Want to know how long an Iron Ant lives compared to a regular ant? You’ll have to build the various factories and parts, and build an iron ant to find out. Why can’t this information be available on the tech tree?
The controls in Microtopia are simple, probably too simple. Ants can be selected individually or in bulk, but have no pathing. You have to create the path they follow each time an ant needs to move somewhere else. Eliminating paths below ants keeps them stationary until directed to a new path. In many cases, that may mean selecting dozens of ants individually and directing each of them one at a time. If you group them, you can’t control them as a group, as pathing only works in straight lines, and if even one ant’s path in the group is blocked, you won’t be able to execute the command. Since the ants are so small and difficult to select, it’s easy to leave ants stranded until they die.
Similarly, controlling path snapping can be temperamental, and there don’t seem to be any commands to help facilitate things like 90-degree turns or splits. Paths tend to stick together unintentionally, get blocked by buildings and other objects, or even by UI elements, such as the exclamation marks that pop up when a building is out of resources. This can cause significant frustration. Enhancements for creating clean paths and areas are also locked behind tech and specific resources, which can be frustrating at times.
Summary
Microtopia offers significant potential for players who enjoy complex city-building and factory-automation games. Its unique look and setting set it apart from many others in the genre. Though getting things set up exactly as you like and maximizing efficiencies can be challenging and sometimes frustrating, when everything works, and you make the right decisions, the game is incredibly rewarding.
Whiskerwood Review
Whiskerwood is a casual city-building simulation with elements of automation. The game challenges players to support a growing force of mouse workers with evolving needs and requirements that demand constant balancing, new technologies, and expansive building requirements to put at ease.
How is the game? Let's get into the good, the bad, and the ugly after 50 hours of play!
The good
Graphically, Whiskerwood is a lot of fun to look at. The colour palette, the detail, and the constant animations and motion of your city as it expands and becomes more complex are always enjoyable to watch. I do wish, however, that your Whiskers had more variety in appearance and unique outfits based on their jobs to help differentiate them further. Currently, they all wear the same clothing and have only subtle differences, such as a slightly darker colour or a different size.
Building in Whiskerwood is fluid and allows for all sorts of unique builds. Buildings use a variety of materials like logs, planks, or stone, and you can build out over the water or even vertically on top of other buildings, at the cost of additional materials. Each build conforms and updates based on your decisions. This creates really unique cities every time you play, as you negotiate varying islands that may have steep mountains, vast flat areas, or be tiny and provide limited space to work.
Your greatest challenge in Whiskerwood is appeasing your cat monarchs by trading with them for large sums of products and resources that you take from your island city. These payments come up every few days in-game and increase regularly as you expand and start producing more complex items. This game otherwise falls on the more casual side for players who enjoy building supply chains and designing sprawling cities, as the survival aspect of this simulation largely depends on making increasingly large payments. This only becomes a real challenge if you expand too fast, as your whisker's needs grow as you grow, become more complex and difficult to fulfill.
The Bad
That's where the bad starts. For players looking for a challenging city, survival city builder Whiskerwood, in its default state, isn't that. It's a generally easy romp that offers plenty of flexibility to experiment without failing. The greatest likelihood of failure comes mostly from the RNG for the islands and the various resources you need to begin research. Start on the wrong island, and whoops, no tin anywhere nearby, and you've accidentally hardlocked your progress in-game.
Your cat overlords will send you basic supplies, at a cost, on a regular basis, but with no true trading system in the game, necessary resources are often off the table if you don't carefully examine each island to ensure you have everything you need nearby to go through the research tree.
Given this RNG to begin, selecting a map and starting location is very difficult as the game locks your perspective, doesn't provide you any ability to filter, or an option to quickly regenerate the map without backing out to the menu. On the larger maps, this means carefully scraping through each set of islands, visually identifying resources that may be available on nearby islands before making your selection. It's a tedious process.
The Ugly
Though the simulation runs well most of the time, late-game performance issues to begin to crop up as your city expands across multiple islands and hundreds of whiskers. The auto-save causes significant stuttering and occurs frequently, even when the game is paused.
Speaking of pausing, this game has 3 available run speeds and a pause, but you'll likely only ever use 2: pause and speed x3. It rarely becomes useful to run the game on normal speed, as things simply don't happen very quickly. This is particularly the case for research, as it may take 2 or 3, or more in-game days to finish one research, and you can only do one research at a time, even if you have multiple research facilities and the necessary resources to complete them. This makes certain periods of the game drag on as you wait for the day to end.
Summary
Whiskerwood, despite some flaws and balance issues, is still a great addition to the colony-city-building genre. Its colourful graphics, detailed buildings and environments, crisp animations, and building mechanics make it a very enjoyable experience for players who like the city-planning element and enjoy watching their supply chain successfully complete. For players seeking a steep survival curve, you'll want to increase the difficulty from the default settings, and maybe choose more difficult starting islands to test yourself against the generally easy to master survival mechanics.
Leave a Reply