HIGH Nuking the dragon with an array of archers before it torched anything.

LOW Wounded swordsmen taking space in my army without ever returning to action.

WTF This is obviously a fantasy world, yet there are no fantasy buildings or units?

The past decade has seen a flood of creative city-builders setting a new standard for the genre. It’s unfair, of course, to expect every indie team to turn out a Frostpunk or The Wandering Village, but the bar has been raised. That means some reasonably competent titles that don’t stand out will be forgotten, and unfortunately, that’s the fate I expect to befall Becastled.

Becastled is a phased-combat city-building game. The player’s forces can only build, recruit units, and gather resources during the day. Every night, “Lunar” enemies attack from a nearby spawn point and follow predictable paths. On each fifth night, a more powerful force attacks. At the edges of the map are a few towers that, when destroyed, provoke a more powerful attack featuring a boss. Destroying all of these towers grants victory.

There’s no campaign to speak of – the closest thing Becastled offers is a series of tutorials – and the meat of the experience is the freeplay mode described above. There’s also a sandbox mode that feels somewhat pointless, as it removes the core resource management aspect of play. A limited map editor is also available. For purposes of this review I tested the sandbox mode, made a few maps, completed the tutorial, and played five full rounds of varying difficulty in freeplay (each of which ran 2-4 hours).

Becastled’s maps are made of irregular polygons of territory, each of which can have a resource and trees, and one curious feature about these resources is that they don’t really deplete. Even on higher difficulties I never had a mineral or food resource run out. Except in the winter season, forests regenerate completely every day. This bounty eliminates the typical progression of city-builders, and among other things, it leads to oddities in city planning like massive stone walls that completely enclose a forest. Another curiosity is that the world of Becastled is clearly one that’s full of magic – the game’s “Lunar” enemies include a golem, a dragon, and a necromancer – but the player can’t create a building or unit that has any obvious magic capability — the closest one can get is an herbalist.

That herbalist building is not initially available, and must be researched on the rudimentary tech tree, which is only about two steps deep on average. Researching new techs is instantaneous and requires only that the player spend resources, primarily wood. This points to a significant resource imbalance in Becastled, as the need for wood is awfully steep since it’s needed to create every early building and also research every tech to get additional resources. Even obtaining the ability to trade other goods for wood requires 2000 units of wood in research, not counting what’s needed to recruit and sustain manpower and gather gold.

The lack of any other resource can be worked around, but if the player spawns in a map with no wood next to the initial position, they might as well restart. Strangely, the bare-bones map editor has no method for adjusting the position or density of forests, so even when creating a specific optimized world, one is utterly dependent on the RNG to get enough wood in the early game to survive.

I also noticed that units sometimes had trouble getting where they needed to go, or that they would make strange movements. This was most notable with the military units — archers would sometimes teleport outside of walls and troops would sometimes get trapped by a cluster of their comrades. Workers would also sometimes get stuck on terrain or be mysteriously unable to reach their work sites, even when nothing had changed from the previous day. Also, walls laid out near lakes would sometimes simply not get built.

During my time with Becastled, I noticed it being patched almost daily, yet each patch seemed to make pathfinding worse. The last time I played, military units would regularly fail to move at all when I clicked on a destination, and numerous workers failed to reach their work sites every day. This leaves me with some doubt that the pathfinding problems will be addressed.

While those are serious shortcomings, the fundamental problem with Becastled doesn’t really lie in its systems — the key issue is that there’s just no hook here. There’s no unique resource, no unusual mechanics, and no unexpected interplay between units or buildings. There’s not even anything approaching a graphical twist. Becastled is simplistic and straightforward to the point of being generic, and the magic that’s missing from the player’s build menu is also absent from the experience as a whole.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Mana Potion Studios and published by Mana Potion Studios and Pingle Studios. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (driver 581.80), a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed (as described above). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. The violence is totally bloodless, just little guys falling over. If it can hold their interest, this is an all-ages joint.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: During main play there is no dialogue. In tutorials, dialogue is accompanied by text boxes (not true subtitles, example of text below) that cannot be resized. There is narration in the opening movie but no subtitles. During play there are no essential audio cues. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers partially remappable controls. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but it is not clear whether controller mapping can be changed (indeed I couldn’t find a page that even had the mapping on it). In KBM mode panning and rotating the map is primarily on the keyboard while the mouse is primarily for zooming. While hotkeys to perform a few functions on selected buildings are available, most selection and other functions uses clicking and dragging of the mouse. I found the game awkward to play with a controller. The left stick controls cursor movement (sluggishly) and the right stick adjusts the view. Buttons are used to select but once a building is selected the D-pad must be used to enter its menu and assign workers (using the face buttons).

The post Becastled Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Tight city-building controls and lots of customization.

LOW Each experience ends abruptly.

WTF Why am I able to infinitely stack bushes into the sky?

Tranquil Isle is all about building a tiny island village far away from everything, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

The objective of Tranquil Isle, if you can even call it an objective, is to place buildings around an archipelago’s town center and slowly expand the population by building houses, artisan buildings, and other fixtures, while also expanding to other islands. Each building the player can place also has a point total assigned to it, with certain buildings buffing and debuffing others.

As the points add up, Tranquil Isle presents the player with two options for buildings to populate their village with after certain point thresholds, like a choice between one group of an altar and five houses, or another group comprising a farm and some stables. It’s an effort to give players more control over their end score, which tallies up all the points for every building placed across their village, after which the player can move on to a new project.

A player can experience Tranquil Isle in two different styles — the first being a purely numbers-based experience where they attempt to stack as many buildings as close to each other as possible, while combining certain groups of buildings and their buffs to get the highest score possible. The other is to create an aesthetically pleasing paradise to look at.

Mechanically, the first style is a complex puzzle to solve, but placing certain buildings next to each other makes intuitive sense. Forager buildings work better when they’re not in contact with any other nearby buildings. The mills with big windmills get buffed by nearby farms, but are debuffed by other mills within a certain distance. Houses buff the town center, as well as altars and town halls where people who live in these houses certainly congregate.

The best part of this buff and debuff system is that it naturally lends itself to creating towns that look aesthetically pleasing, so it rarely compromises any part of itself. I don’t play builder-adjacent games like The Sims or Frostpunk because I feel like my poor design choices would ruin whatever architectural layouts make a well-run city look the part, but Tranquil Isle takes that out of the equation, and makes me feel like a somewhat capable city planner.

Aesthetically, designing my islands to make them look more lived-in came secondary to placing down buildings — but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t try to dress them up.

While each building has spacial requirements that prevent them from being too close to one another, there’s no limit to the amount of decorations the player can put on every building and empty inch of grass in town. I found the limits of customization in Tranquil Isle when I found out I could infinitely stack decoration objects like rocks and shrubs on top of each other. Naturally, I made infinitely tall stacks of these objects and just laughed to myself that I was permitted me to do that.

Getting to create a beautiful island utopia is most evident in Tranquil Isle’s Sandbox Mode, which lifts the limits of building space requirements and allows players to run free. I could put ten town halls on one island, or make an island that’s full of taverns and theatres, surrounded by houses so the townspeople could access them. There’s a world full of combinations of buildings, decorations, and terrain forms that can make Sandbox mode a joy to explore.

My only issue with Tranquil Isle come from the eventual end to these building experiences. While I can begin lots of new islands to create lots of different potential towns, it always feels like the building process ends too abruptly.

For example, a “medium” sized town will have three different islands to populate and build upon, but once the player runs out of buildings to build, the game forces them to end. Every time I’d place my last building, I was given the option to build a bridge to a new island… that didn’t exist.

I wish Tranquil Isle would give players a greater sense of closure when they were clearly finished with the space at hand, or build out some objectives for the player to complete when they were actually done. However, with tons of combinations of buildings, decorations, and island constructions, players can get nearly infinite replayability out of this title’s solid foundation, chill vibes, and potential.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Buy Tranquil Isle – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Tom Daly and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 2.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it contains no violence, graphic imagery or language.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue, and the only bits of text are in pop-ups on the screen. The text can be resized by a “UI Slider” in the game’s settings. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Tranquil Isle Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Great plot, excellent pace, strong ambiance.

LOW Too short and lacks depth in exploring its themes and artwork.

WTF The crawling painting ladies.

Ib (2023) is a remake of the original made with RPG Maker in 2012.

Those who were into indies at that time know that RPG Maker was the preferred tool for amateurs creators, and it’s an incredible tool for that purpose. It’s simple to learn and use, has a wide variety of objects to build a game with, and the results are easy to publish.

However, despite its capabilities, the tool tended to make homogeneous-seeming products due to the lack of graphic and formula options. After all, it wasn’t a suite for professionals, and with the relatively limited content within, it’s not easy to make a unique experience. However, if we looked hard enough, we could find some special gems – things like Yume Nikki, Omori, or… Ib.

Ib is a young girl that visits an art gallery with her parents. No further explanation is given to us at the beginning, nor it is needed. The scene is established, and we start by quickly exploring the gallery, talking with other visitors and observing the artwork.

The exhibition is about an artist called Guertena. We know virtually nothing about him, but judging by the work, we quickly realize he’s an artist with somewhat whimsical tastes. As we explore further, we reach the top floor, which contains a giant painting. At this point, the lights go dim and weird things start to happen, including the disappearance of all visitors.

In classic Alice in Wonderland style, Ib is teleported into a kind of parallel universe – it’s a dark version of the gallery, and the adventure unfolds as we delve deeper and unveil the mysteries of Guertena’s art.

The world takes the form of a spooky labyrinth decorated with paintings and sculptures. However, the game is linear, so we hardly ever get lost – which is a pity! We interact with the art, and some of it activates scary moments and leads us to solve puzzles. At this point it’s a straightforward progression of completing a puzzle to go on to the next one, which will then take us to another one, and so on.

The puzzles aren’t very complicated. Basically, we need to look for things that stand out in the environment and pay attention to the labels on art. It’s easy but not boring – simple, but with a good pace of exploration. In fact, its simplicity keeps us interested and moving forward while learning more about what’s going on.

Another aspect that keeps us moving forward is the plot. Although not original, it was well-matched to Ib‘s concept. I won’t reveal too much because the plot is the most important element of this experience, but I must congratulate the creator of Ib for not reducing the game to being another cliché horror story. In an implicit way, Ib touches on sensitive topics, and through puzzle after puzzle we are confronted with themes that, in one way or another, are related to our protagonist’s journey and the anxieties of being a teenager.

While themes like childhood innocence, loneliness, fear, jealousy, family, and sanity are explored, I think Ib missed an opportunity to go deeper to better convey what was going on in the plot. For a game whose setting is an art gallery, it’s surprising that the paintings and sculptures are often out of step with what’s going on – in a way, it feels that the art isn’t the point, despite being so core to the concept. Plus, I do think an opportunity was missed by not using real works of art as inspiration. Throughout the entire game, I could only identify two or three paintings inspired by, maybe, Van Gogh and Dalí.

One of the main objectives of play in Ib is to collect works of art. There are 150 pieces to collect, and to see all of them it’s probably necessary to play the game more than once. As such, replayability is not a problem, because the story is short (each playthrough is about an hour) and has multiple endings. I’d say that it’s worth seeing each one.

It’s true that Ib lacks depth when exploring its themes and I did think that a longer campaign might afford it that opportunity. Perhaps this Switch remake will galvanize its popularity and create an opportunity for the developer to create a more expansive and ambitious iteration. However, as it stands I’d still recommend Ib to anyone interested in the concept, or to those looking for a short, but still meaningful game to decompress with.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by kouri and published by PLAYISM. It is currently available on Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on Switch. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Fantasy Violence, Use of Tobacco, and Mild Blood. There are scenes of stabbings, murders, and blood. In addition, there are themes that can be difficult for children to understand, probably leaving them disturbed. keep this one to teens and up.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. The game can be played without audio. The only audio this game makes is the soundtrack and the environment sounds. Although the game is based on puzzles, there are no sound cues needed to solve them. In my view, the game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. This game doesn’t have a controller map diagram but offers a display with control icons in the upper left corner. The controls are very simple. Movement is on the left stick. Interact with the objects in the map is A. Access the menu and inventory is B. Talk to your companions is X. Zoom in is Y.

The post Ib (Switch) Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The old man on the pier.

LOW A rather generic final boss.

WTF The settings menu has a… vegan option?

If limitation breeds innovation, Minit feels like a self-imposed challenge by its developers. Here’s what a game can be with only two colors, two buttons, and a 60-second frame in which players are permitted to do anything. It’s one of the purest arguments for “less is more” that I’ve seen in recent memory.

The main character of Minit — an orb with a beak, because that’s all the detail the visual style affords — finds a sword that curses him to restart his adventure every minute, so players have exactly that much time to make progress before they’re yanked back to the starting point and forced to begin anew. That this gimmick works even remotely well is a herculean feat, as it requires everything in Minit to be whittled down to its simplest, most succinct form.

Environments must be easy enough to read that players don’t waste valuable time figuring out what they’re able to interact with, and how. Characters must communicate important information in as few words as possible. The world must be compact enough that players actually have time to reach any location in it. The controls must be basic, and the moveset needs be uniform. Minit looks and plays like it could have been released on the original Game Boy, and that’s the only circumstance in which a concept like this could work.

However, it’s not a full-on Groundhog Day scenario. Enemies respawn and puzzles reset, but players permanently keep any items that they obtain, and the general state of the world carries over from one attempt to the next — if an NPC is rescued, for example, he stays rescued for the remainder of the campaign.

The structure of the game is relatively routine, with players’ ever-expanding arsenals granting them access to farther reaches of Minit’s world. We get our hands on a stronger sword, and suddenly we can chop through any plants that are blocking important routes. We find a pair of flippers, and now bodies of water don’t halt our progress.

If the 60-second time limit didn’t exist, this would be the shortest and easiest Zelda game ever made — by necessity, the puzzles and fetch quests are all simple enough that they can be completed in a matter of moments. However, the time-loop mechanic turns seemingly mundane tasks into moments of fist-pumping bravado since everything is a speedrun.

The final boss is the only aspect of Minit that betrays its sensibilities — it’s an over-elaborate bullet hell-style fight, and the devs compensate for this by not erasing players’ progress whenever they die or run out of time, essentially providing unlimited continues. It’s not a frustrating battle, but it’s a surprisingly uninspired note to end such a clever little game on.

However, that fight is the only stumble in what will likely be remembered as one of 2018’s more notable indie releases, worthwhile as a charming homage to retro action/adventure titles and as an ambitious exercise in restrained game design — it’s the world’s most agreeable game, chopped up into a hundred bite-sized pieces. I want to complain that it’s over too quickly, but then Minit makes a constant case for brevity being the soul of wit, so I guess I should shut up. Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Jan Willem Nijman, Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio, and Dominik Johann and published by Devolver Digital. It is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PlayStation 4. Approximately two hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Everyone and contains Mild Fantasy Violence. There’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about here.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialog is text-based, and sound cues never play a vital role. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The two commands, “action” and “retry,” can be remapped, though movement controls can’t.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options. Note that the game is presented exclusively in stark black-and-white.

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