I've played this game for about 100 hours off Steam before its release here. I like it!

Cataclysm: The Last Generation is a fork of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead with a greater focus on hardcore survival gameplay, and a few more bits and bobs. Food is much scarcer, combat is much more dangerous, and also you can chuck zombies off of rooftops.

If you're not familiar with Cataclysm itself--Cataclysm is a sandbox traditional roguelike set in modern day New England that is essentially an apocalyptic kitchen sink. It started with riots, scarcity and social unrest, and ended with the dead rising from their graves. If that wasn't bad enough, the animals are changing, the bugs are growing to massive proportions, aliens are kidnapping people and experimenting on them, weird fungus is growing everywhere, and a bunch of giant flowers are taking over the forests.

You, meanwhile, are a rideshare driver. Or a gym coach at an elementary school. Or a taekwando instructor. Or a helicopter pilot. Or an aging retiree. Or a mutated freak. Or, anyone really. And now, like it or not, all of this mess is your problem . Good luck!

What I like about this fork of Cataclysm over the others is the difficulty. The food scarcity pushes the player to take more risks than are even remotely necessary in DDA, and keeps the early game fresh. If you're looking to play Cataclysm and want to focus more on just barely scraping by, this is the fork for you!

I really like Together in Battle. The tactical combat is fun, layered, and feels fresh. The setting and story are really interesting, detailed and enjoyable. The emergent storytelling elements are really well implemented and give the game a lot of charm. I really think Together in Battle is a hidden gem, and more people should definitely play it! If you like Fire Emblem, or Disgaea, or want to play a game that’s similar to Battle Brothers but isn’t soul crushingly cruel, I think Together in Battle is a great way to spend your time.

This game is extremely well written and funny. It takes only 2-3 hours to play through.

There's a few technical issues where some of the footage will skip for half a second during play, typos in the subtitles and the like, and it's very linear aside from choosing your ending, but none of that really matters. This game should be treated like a movie, and you're just buying a DVD.

The cast are all professional and prolific actors and do a great job. It's clear that if this game had any budget it was spent on buying their time. If you're a fan of internet comedy at all, this game is for you. It might be for you even if you're not.

I just finished Subterrain: Mines of Titan. Overall I think it was a big improvement over the first game. The turn based nature of the game made respecting the time limit much less hectic, and at least on normal mode the time limit is very generous. I think the danger level maxes out at like 15 or 20 and I finished the game at danger 7. The storytelling is I think okay. There are a LOT of NPCs and they each have a little one-note story to them. It's not bad by any means but you never feel like you get to spend a lot of time with any particular NPC. The progression system is really fun, and you never feel like you're waiting for the next level up because you gain stats and proficiencies independent of level ups at a pretty steady and frequent rate.

For a crafting game, there's not a lot of variety in things you can craft really :/ My build was pretty set from the point I hit level 5, and almost all of the armor and weapon upgrades were straight upgrades from the previous tier. There was no choice between light, medium, or heavy armor or anything of the sort. The most granular it got was that some gear resisted status effects. But those resistances are basically moot for combat and really only matter for "puzzles" where you have to wade through fire and acid to get a unique accessory.

Speaking of which, unique accessories were underwhelming. I got the accessory I used for the whole game within three hours of playing that healed me every time I attacked. Other accessories had active abilities that might have been useful early game, but were essentially useless late game. And you get them in the mid-late game so they're basically cool-looking trash. These definitely needed some balancing or some way to upgrade them, or just a second accessory slot for an active accessory so they didn't compete with good passive accessories.

I think the inventory and resource management is pretty tedious, but that kind of thing is fun to me. Unfortunately the camp management aspect of the game was pretty lackluster. I left everything at default settings and never had a single problem with resources. Maybe this is something that only matters on hard mode, but it was honestly irrelevant. Similarly, the wave defense aspect of the game was also fairly irrelevant. The turrets you build can handily defeat the waves without your help, and it was actually kind of tedious to have to pick up my traps and ♥♥♥♥ to collect the loot after the turrets did all the work for me. Again, it just feels too "set and forget" and feels like it's just there to remind you of the various in-game timers, but it's easily solved with turrets and barricades and can then be ignored.

Overall I had a lot of fun with the game but at least on normal difficulty it was not a challenge. I liked the sim and survival aspects of the game, but the game gives you almost too many tools to deal with those problems and they end up being a minor annoyance at best. The equipment in the game is pretty lackluster and there's no real diversity in arms or armor once you choose your build. Consumable weapons like grenades are essentially useless late game as well, dealing at best single digit damage to enemies with hundreds to thousands of hit points. Similarly, though I used the "spells" in the game a lot, they were useless against the final boss and enemies because they cost too much "mana" and their damage had no scaling factor. So the flat damage did like 20ish damage per spell, which was essentially a waste of a turn compared to just shooting them with a gun.

I will say that the in-game sprite work and animations were top notch. There was a high-quality sprite for every weapon and armor piece, unique animations for every weapon type, active ability, and enemy, and unique animations for using consumables as well. The polish on the game's visuals is really apparent and it's a highlight of the experience. Even the resource gathering nodes all had multiple sprites and animations based on how depleted the node was, and there were dozens of different harvestables in the game.

So all of this to say, the game was good but it definitely had a lot of problems as well. Aside from what I've already mentioned, melee combat is just a mistake in this game. You can shoot just as well at enemies that are in your face, and unlike with a melee weapon you can attack enemies up to 12 tiles away with a gun. It's just a no-brainer for avoiding damage to use ranged abilities and makes melee combat feel like a joke or an optional challenge. This kind of thing is emblematic of the whole game. There are ways to play it that are essentially wrong. Using spells is wrong. Using consumables is wrong. Using active accessories is wrong. Using melee is wrong. Rebalancing the abilities in the game to have scaling effects would do a world a good for many skills, accessories and items. Increasing the reward for using melee weapons would at least give you a reason to use them. And because if you're not playing the game wrong, it's ultimately not very challenging, engaging in sub-optimal features that have significant costs just feels bad.

I still had fun, and it was a good time, but the game is still really flawed and you really have to look past those flaws to enjoy the experience.

This game is one of the most charming soulslikes I've ever played.

I really enjoyed my time with this game. It's a very low stakes murder and loot-em-up, and I think a lot of thoughtfulness was put into a lot of its elements. The collectibles actually do something useful (if you get them all). The environmental design is excellent, in contrast to a lot of the other entries in the franchise where it's all brown desert or white desert. The spells are an extremely fun and much preferred alternative to grenades. It's really stellar.

If you can bring yourself to avert your eyes from the extremely cringe opening cutscene, I think Wonderlands is worth sinking a good chunk of time into. If you can get it on sale :P