Recent reviews by Onion_Bubs

I spent 180 hours getting all the Steam achievements. Everything after that is just me playing again because it's fun. Not that it wasn't fun for the first 180 hours - if it wasn't, I would've stopped playing much sooner.

Your first character, the Pawnbarian, is a great introduction to the mechanics of the game, and then the other 5 characters each bring their own twist. Similarly, the Goblin Caves dungeon is a good place to start, and then the other two bring different effects into play that make you reconsider the strategy you used to beat the goblin boss.

But if you find yourself beating all the bosses with all the characters without breaking a sweat, that's where the game's difficulty "chains" come in. Essentially, your difficulty is on a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 being what you start with. While half the difficulty increments just make you fight more enemies and raise the likelihood of fighting more of the annoying ones, the other half introduce special handicaps you have to work around. The game is very replayable thanks to this.

No complaints whatsoever about the graphics and sound. Nice and clean without overstimulating me. The boss' themes are all bangers.

I don't recall experiencing any major bugs, but I know others have, and I have seen how j4 responds: quickly and helpfully. He isn't one of those guys who releases a game into the wild and then disappears without a trace. You're experiencing issues? He'll help you. Heck, he's even given advice on game strategy a few times!

I'm aware that no new features are in the pipeline right now and I don't think this game needs anything else, but one thing I think would be nice to add one day is mod support. People have come up with ideas for pieces, upgrades, characters, enemies, dungeons, and even cosmetic tweaks. I have no doubt that the ability to turn such ideas into reality would be appreciated by quite a few people. But the lack of mod support doesn't detract from this game. It's still an incredible game I will quite happily play over and over and over again.

If you've got half an hour to kill, you can't really go wrong with booting up Mini Metro and either playing one of the levels to try and beat your high score or playing the daily challenge to see how you fare against players from all around the world.

What I especially like about this game is the challenge run system where you can select an achievement for a level and, if you violate the conditions of that achievement (eg, putting tunnels on a second line when you're only allowed them on one line), the game stops and gives you the chance to resolve the issue instead of just carrying on and preventing you from getting the achievement. I wish more games did this.

To date, I have purchased just over 15 games on Steam. Some of them have been complete wastenados of my money - one in particular I shelled out a lot for and only got a couple of hours of semi-enjoyment out of it. Startopia is the exact opposite of that game - I paid very little for it and, so far, I've gotten more hours of fun out of it than any other game I've purchased on here.

You're managing a space station which is being visited by nine different alien types, each with their own preferences and skills. You have to build facilities to ensure these aliens are healthy, well-rested, well-fed, entertained and other things like that, make sure any aliens who cause trouble get rehabilitated, keep the station clean, and make sure you have enough energy to keep it all running. You're aided by this artificially intelligent being called VAL who often peppers his advice with a degree of snark and you get occasional visits from a trader named Arona who I swear is a cross between a Vogon and Moneybags from Spyro 2.

Speaking of Vogons, if you pay attention to VAL's messages and the descriptions of each individual alien, you might notice qutie a few sci-fi references in this game, particularly Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ones.

The graphics aren't brilliant and a lot of the animations do look kinda like the aliens are miming their actions rather than actually performing them, but they're good enough for what this game needs. The music isn't particularly great either but it does help to provide a great atmosphere. You're given a few tutorial missions to help you get to grips with the mechanics and then there's ten proper missions for you to do, each one focusing on a particular aspect of gameplay, like healing sick aliens, putting criminals in the slammer and cultivating resources on the bio deck. And then there's sandbox mode, where you can set things up how you like. Personally, I like just using it to see what I can actually do.

Not that this game is perfect though. The combat system feels kinda loose. Like, I know that by clicking on the enemy I'm telling some of my guys to attack, but how many? And placing and managing muster points is just awkward. There is also this bug where if a gem slug sits at a table in a cocktail bar or gets in one of them slug baths, it will never ever leave the table or bath and it will die. I don't think this is too bad because, by the time you're building those things, you should already have plenty of energy in reserve in case of bad things happening. Plus, you could always handwaive it as the slugs dying in their own excesses or something. Finally, after completing all ten missions, unless you're willing to use sandbox mode to make your own, the replay value of the game diminishes.

Really, though, those are the only bad things I can think about with this game, and I'd say it's easily worth at least double the price it's being sold for. I'd be willing to pay triple.