Cosmic Raze

Utterly unplayable, enemies have too high HP and you can't deploy anything fast enough. RNG seems deliberately rigged, enemies on Difficulty 1 kamikaze after a missile and you're just stuck waiting for a cooldown, which then causes a domino effect. Upgrades take forever, scroll wheel and button mapping is ridiculous. the only saving grace is the pixel graphics. Devs honestly make games like this an complain they dont make as much money as other devs. 1/10. consider a career in McDonald's.

Interesting combination of tower defense and space invader style shoot-em-up. Basically you're stacking towers and moving layers independently, though it get chaotic enough later that you probably can't think anything other than putting as many towers as you can after a while.

I have fun playing this one, it gets intense and it looks very nice to me. I love the pixel style of the graphics. When I first played, the game felt a little small, like I had almost done all of the fun progress already, but I see a lot of promising updates added to the game that I'll be excited to reach.

The game was quite a bit more chaotic and micro-manage-y than I was expecting. In the later waves I felt like I was just plopping stuff down as fast as I could in whatever free spaces I had and hoping for the best. I guess that, with more play time, target recognition would be faster and strategy would be more apparent, but I can't get over that initial impression of how little in control I felt. I doubt I'll be investing any more time in learning the nuances of the various synergies. I can't say it's bad. I can say that it's not for me.

Basically 'Plants vs. Zombies' but with a very limited number of turrets you can place, & an annoying 'shift' mechanic where you have to nudge the rows up & down to try & cover for the aforementioned lack of turrets.

Another fun game from the developer. It's more strategic (instead of actiony) than the last two (Gunlocked, Boons and Burdens), but like those games it nails of my favorite aspects of roguelike/lite games: the emphasis on getting more more powerful within each run through a series of upgrades with interesting synergies. But it's tuned so that most of the time you won't climb up power curve so quickly as to make the rest of the run trivial. So far (I think the game version is 0.7 now), the game is in pretty good shape. Here are a few assorted observations: *The music is good. It's repetitive but not boring. Like in the way that electronic music tends to repeat sections while adding and subtracting elements, changing keys, and stuff like that. *The art is nice. I'm sure the chunky pixels won't be to everyone's taste, but I like the style a lot. *That said, sometimes it's tough to tell some of your own units apart, even when they have fairly different functions. E.g., there will be units that look pretty similar (in terms of color or shape) but do very different things. I guess there might be a consistency/theme-scheme for the different unit classes/types that I just haven't internalized yet, so it's possible that's a me problem. *The writing is charmingly passive aggressive (especially various shop descriptions). There are a few typos here and there ([i]Narhal[/i] in the Narwhal description, a wave that [i]tarvels[/i] in that sniper unit that's one of the green circles) *I [b]strongly[/b] recommend playing with a mouse instead of a controller. As of now, though, mouse controls can't be rebound, so you can't activate your power with a button (e.g., by pressing space), which is kinda weird. *Sometimes, enemies will disable your units for a few seconds. Other times, trying to keep track of my unit's cooldowns, energy levels, and the sheer quantity of enemy units will disable my brain for a few seconds. That's fun. It doesn't always immediatly lead to a game over, either! So, all that said, you probably already know if you might like a game like this. If you think you might, I recommend giving it a shot. I would note that I enjoyed it a lot more the second and third times I played. I'm not sure how much of that is from getting the game better vs. switching to mouse conrtols vs. the game getting a couple of patches in the meantime. That's maybe not ideal from a "selling games" business standpoint where you want to grab people from the jump, but I do appreciate the depth and intellignce.