HIGH Engrossing building/optimization. Crispy isometric graphics.

LOW Writing is uninspired. Save system is cumbersome, UI cruft abounds.

WTF Carrying a dozen tennis balls and 50 heatsinks in my inventory like a freak.

Is there anything lower and lazier for game reviewer to write than “It’s like X plus Y?” Has any stock phrase done as much damage to the reputation of game analysis? Yet I find myself reaching for this shoddy, motheaten platitude, both in trying to situate readers on Little Rocket Lab‘s ludological wavelength, and in justifying my own inability to click with this well-made title which could be (and probably has been) described by at least one reviewer as “Stardew Valley plus Factorio.”

That’s an appetizing cross-pollination, for sure. Factorio is an endless optimization mandala, with hooks that bite deep into the compulsion-prone folds of the old noodle, but its suite of pleasures is cerebral, not emotional. It’s brilliant, but private and unapproachable — like a famous theoretical mathematician at a faculty mixer. Stardew, meanwhile, is eminently approachable, brightly upholstered with cute characters, bucolic atmosphere, and a lush evocative soundtrack — but mechanically speaking, Stardew is not the plumpest pumpkin in the patch.

If asked to imagine what a Factorio/Stardew fusion would look like, what it would play like, Little Rocket Lab would match it nearly exactly. This is the story of Morgan, a young engineer who returns to her hometown of St. Ambroise, finds it in poor shape (well, in as poor shape as an idyllic small town in a cozy-coded videogame can be), and sets about reviving it through the healing power of industry. She also wants to finish building the rocket her engineer mother began long ago.

Story is front and center in Little Rocket Lab. The plot is laid over, threaded under, and wrapped around the factory-building gameplay, like so many looping conveyor belts ferrying Meaning and Significance hither and yon. This is not the thing to play for those who want to be left to their own devices. Everything in Little Rocket Lab gets built because it’s needed, either by the exigencies of the main quest or the ancillary needs of the townsfolk of St. Ambroise, all of whom have a name and one lightly endearing character trait, as mandated by the Games Writing Accords of 1823.

Vibe-wise, everything here is indisputably wholesome – which is to say it’s all cute, good-natured, sweet, flat, and boring. I do not, generally, like the wholesome gaming thing. At its absolute worst (looking at you, Plucky Squire) wholesome games can feel simplistic to the point of patronizing — but to be fair, Little Rocket Lab gets nowhere near that particular nadir. The idea of a factory building experience with more of a plot is a great concept worth exploring. But the plot is just too simplistic and unadventurous here, and it actively inhibited my long-term enjoyment. The Factory can not be had without the Fiction.

That said, the factory can be satisfying. For anybody who has played a certain game or any that followed in its wake, it’s all building business as usual here – and that’s fine. For those new to the genre, Little Rocket Lab does a great job of introducing the basics and, without lampshading every little nuance, points the way to its Greater Complexities so that advanced players can roll up their sleeves a bit further than they absolutely need to to progress in the main quest.

In other words, for as much as I personally found it an inhibitor on my enthusiasm for Little Rocket Lab, the narrative emphasis is what gives the game its own particular flavor. This is not a factory meant to grow endlessly, unfolding out fractally forever until it has more lines of conveyance than a human circulatory system. No, Morgan’s factory is tied directly into the town’s revitalization. In contrast with the average factory title in which the player is left alone to manifest their brain onto the environment, in Little Rocket Lab, the factory must learn to live in symbiotic peace with the town of St. Ambroise.

Honestly, maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment here. Generally, I like my mechanics-forward games to be nigh-storyless, and I like my story-driven games to be complimented by a suite of bantamweight systems. The fusing of the extremes – heavy duty complexity with unavoidable, long-form story – can work, but I don’t think it works for me in Little Rocket Lab.

So, I don’t see myself finishing it, but I can see a lot of people loving it. Beyond the bland writing and the burden it places on progress, there are only a couple of other notable flaws.

The UI, while okay, is not as full-featured or intuitive as it should be. More annoyingly, players can only save by going to sleep at the end of each in-game day – not cool. Time ticks away at a Stardew-like clip, which is not 1:1 with real life time or anything, but it does mean that the minimum play session will be about 20 minutes long, and any unforeseen interruptions can mean losing progress – and progress in a factory builder is everything. Frankly this Save-Only-When-You-End-The-Day system is annoying in any life sim, and I think it is a genre legacy mechanic that the devs brought over without scrutiny. They have said they’ll be taking a look at this system in future patches, but as of the time of writing, it’s still an issue.

So, this is not an overwhelming amount of criticism. For players who want the deepiest, crunchiest, most byzantine and flexible factory builder out there without any distractions, Little Rocket Lab will disappoint. But for people who have tried the big names in this genre and found them daunting or chilly, and who are still looking for their entry point into the conveyor-belt and throughput analysis lifestyle, Little Rocket Lab may be the one.

It’s a really good game that I personally didn’t like very much, but I think — and kind of hope — I’m in the minority.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Teenage Astronauts and published by No More Robots. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not yet rated by the ESRB. It’s a “cozy” game, so there is little to nothing objectionable here. The town itself has issues, and there are allusions to death, unhappiness, and other “mature” problems, but it’s all done with a light touch and with an inevitable wholesome spin. The mechanical complexity will be the main barrier to younger players’ enjoyment here.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the dialogue is text-based, but it cannot be resized. All of many factory-building considerations are conveyed visually as well as audibly. The experience is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game supports both keyboard + mouse and controller, and both are fully remappable.

The post Little Rocket Lab Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Superlative physics. Big trucks. Gnarly vistas.

LOW Saber’s UI design continues to be nightmarish.

WTF A restaurant on one of the maps is named “The Smell Out”

In 2021, Saber Interactive made history when they released Snowrunner, the greatest videogame ever made.

Bafflingly, in the years that followed, developers continued to make games despite the fact that the ultimate expression of the art form had been achieved. Saber themselves have engaged in this quixotic act, first in 2024 with the release of Expeditions (a spin-off focused on exploration) and earlier this year, Roadcraft, a construction company simulator that, like Expeditions, has been met with a somewhat mixed reception by the Snowrunner community.

I am not active in this community but, by dint of having dedicated hundreds of hours to Snowrunner, I do consider myself an honorary member, in the same way that people are awarded degrees from universities they never went to for unrelated things they did elsewhere. As such, I came into Roadcraft expecting something half-baked and disappointing — but it is not half-baked, and it is not disappointing. It’s also not Snowrunner 2. What is Roadcraft? A sloppy, weird, frustrating, brilliant, addictive, fresh-feeling title that takes core elements of its illustrious predecessor and builds on them in wild ways.

Like Snowrunner, Roadcraft is a collection of freeform levels, sandbox maps with main and side objectives to complete. As the seemingly sole on-the-ground employee of an emergency response construction company, players are deployed to disaster-stricken regions and tasked with restoring basic infrastructure, thereby laying the groundwork for regular life to begin again. Thus, in comparison to Snowrunner, the gamut of possible tasks has been expanded beyond haulage — there quarries to be drained, town documents to be recovered, map-spanning pipelines to fix, and, of course, roads to be crafted.

It’s a drawn-out process, this making of roads, and requires both four steps and the specialized brawn of four construction vehicles. First, sand has to be poured, done with a dump truck. Then a bulldozer needs be brought in to plane the sand to a fine and even level. Next, a paver pours steaming asphalt onto the sand. Then, finally, a roller can be brought on-site to compress that hot, bituminous slurry into a smooth and tractable asphalt causeway. Road crafted.

Keep in mind that each of these steps (usually) needs to be done by the player, including bringing each vehicle to the worksite, which is often no small task in itself. Building a short stretch of road can take 20 minutes, depending on the terrain, and the roadcrafting in Roadcraft is a perfect synecdoche for virtually every job in the campaign. This is a slow experience, slower than Snowrunner, quite possibly the most ponderous game I’ve ever played. It’s Minecraft at molasses speed, terraforming at a pace that will, frankly, turn off all but the most degenerate of sickos“ which, happily, I am.

All of Roadcraft‘s vehicular and logistical misadventures are conducted on the deep physics engine that Saber has been working with across their four previous titles. These cumbrous trucks have actual weight, their suspensions rock and shift, tires deform over rocks and rubble. Players will learn to fear steep grades or narrow passes or tight turns. Building materials can and will tumble out of flatbeds into roadside mire. Constant attention has to be paid to both the player vehicle, and the environment. It makes things feel real, every small bit of progress earned in some bone-deep and convincing way that most other virtual accomplishments simply cannot equal. The physics system is what made Snowrunner the unbelievable thing it was, and it gives vibrant life to Roadcraft too.

And so, once acclimated to its, shall we say stately rhythm, the epic length of Roadcraft stops being vexing and becomes, instead, the central gyre of its charm and addictiveness. It is decompressed and utterly chill.

The relaxation is heightened by beautiful environs. The maps in Roadcraft are just stunning. It’s not a matter of fidelity, but of scene-setting. The vistas and setpieces players will stumble on as they crawl across these ravaged landscapes have an almost FromSoft level of stagecraft to them, lushly framed and baroquely, obsessively detailed. There are ruined towns half-submerged in water, a graveyard of rusted excavators sunk into a silt-clogged quarry, a cratered steel mill with broken, bare girders flung up into the air like the upturned legs of a dead spiders…

Some mechanical things are unbeautiful, to be sure. Quite a few things, actually. The Saber team has earned their place in gaming Valhalla, but they’re still incapable of making menus that that are not demonic. I’m not even sure how someone designs a UI this wonky — maybe by having a nightmare about a traffic jam in Hell and then, upon waking, committing that vision directly to interface code.

In addition to all I’ve described, Roadcraft is also wild, wooly, and full of ideas. It’s an exploratory and experimental title for Saber, and it feels like some of the systems are in their prototyping phase. See, for instance, the sub-game about drawing routes that NPC trucks then drive. I understand why it’s here, as it means that players have to find, and then make! – routes these smaller trucks, less capable than the player’s fleet, can traverse. However, the AI itself is bad. If the route waypoints are not laid with aching exactitude, the automated drivers can fumble, even if the trail for them to follow is an adequate one, which means players have to jump back into the Stygian abysses of the Roadcraft menus and redraw the route.

With that said, rough edges are to be expected in something that’s not only niche, but experimental. Roadcraft is not a game for everyone, and it’s not even for every Snowrunner fan — but that’s what makes it brilliant for those willing to tune in, and the number of potential fans is probably larger than one might guess. So, despite how eager I am for the return of the Chosen One in Snowrunner 2, I also will be keenly watching where Roadcraft goes. I can’t think of anything in the double-A space that’s more interesting, or has more potential, than this game.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Saber Interactive and published by Focus Entertainment. It is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 33 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. No time was spent in multiplayer (but I think it’s safe to say it would be great).

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E and contains Mild Language. The ESRB summary is as follows: This is a simulation game in which players restore infrastructures in areas after disasters have struck. Players can operate trucks, cranes, and bulldozers to complete various tasks (e.g., clearing debris, rebuilding roads). The word “hell” appears in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the (sparse) dialogue is accompanied by on-screen text, but the subtitles cannot be resized. No action requires audio cues to successfully complete. I played the game with the sound down for most of my 30 hours with it, and didn’t have any issues. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: KB+M controls are fully remappable. There are four different gamepad control presets available, but they are not remappable beyond that. Steering Wheels are partially supported, but not ideal for this game.

The post Roadcraft Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Gorgeous stop-motion aesthetic. Perfect soundtrack.

LOW Shambolic menus and UI.

WTF YouTubers shouldn’t be allowed to do voice acting.

When Judero, the first game by Talha and Jack Co., released last year, there were a handful of brief “hey look at this” stories from the big outlets, and there were some reviews, but by and large this utterly unique, drop dead gorgeous stop motion videogame assembled over what must’ve been painstaking years of labor was largely dropped by the journos, enchained as they are to the SEO Wheel of Pain. In any just world, Judero should have been fawned over, awarded many accolades, and gone on to make the developers a hefty passel of money.

We don’t live in a just world, of course, and Judero scraped together merely a small cult of appreciators. It was large enough, however, to make the Kickstarter for Talha and Jack Co.’s second game, Mashina, a success.

Knowing only that it looked beautiful and having never played a stop-motion videogame before, I jumped on the opportunity to review Mashina when it released. I was surprised to discover that beneath its beautiful handmade exterior, Mashina is a straightforward mining title, descended directly from Motherload, with only minor tweaks to the undeniably addicting-but-simple core established by that browser game all the way back in 2004. Surprised, but not displeased. Mostly.

For those who haven’t played Motherload or its few modern derivations, here’s the basic structure — there’s an overworld players can walk around in, with shopkeepers and quest givers, before jumping into the underground and digging through dirt, rocks, and other subterranean cruft of varying densities, unearthing precious minerals that are stowed away and later cashed in. Said cash can be used to purchase upgrades, which allow more efficient mining, which allows for larger future profits to buy more expensive later upgrades — we see where this is going, and where it’s going is to a pleasant, albeit mostly mindless, way to lose a handful of hours. These kind of mining titles aren’t idlers, but they are kissing cousins to that genre, gently massaging some low and lizardlike nodule in the Gamer Brain.

As I said, Mashina does make some tweaks to this hoary, dirt-encrusted formula. Mashina herself, the player character, doesn’t have a fuel or oxygen gauge, which are common limiters in this type of experience. Really, the only things stopping a player from digging down indefinitely are limited inventory space, and the need to go topside for the drill upgrades necessary to bite through more ornery materials.

Another quirk? Minerals aren’t added to the inventory automatically. Instead, they have to be picked up manually and fit into a Resident Evil 4-style gridventory. There’s actually a skill available that does the sorting without player input but, as someone who is creepily ardent about RE4, a tasteful Tetris-enjoyer, and general grid appreciator, I never invested in it, preferring to do all the sorting by hand, as God intended.

Okay, I have expended all the words I wish to regarding mechanics, because the real draw of Mashina lies in its aesthetics. Almost every graphical element is comprised of real-world objects and crafts. All the characters are hand-fashioned, stop-motion dolls, and their various paraphernalia made from the sort of odds and ends that turn up and live forever in junk drawers. As such, one of the undimming joys of this title is seeing new characters, drills, trinkets, and other props, and what they’re crafted from.

Also, the soundtrack is a continual delight. There is only one way in which Mashina resembles Grand Theft Auto, and that’s in its implementation of an in-game radio with different stations, each with their own host, music, and vibe. It’s not the most tonally diverse collection of songs, as there are presiding elements of lo-fi, shoegaze, almost-too-precious indie folk across all stations, but not a single tune crosses the line into twee. It’s really, really good stuff — so good, in fact, that while digging games are usually a prime choice for muting and watching something on the ol’ second screen, I always gave Mashina’s soundtrack my full attention.

“Story”-wise (heavy quote marks in effect) the overworld is full of other Bobots who want Mashina to do things for them, and they all have quirky personalities. That sounds groan-worthy, but this is genuinely quirky, original and full-hearted goofiness, not the manufactured preciousness that passes for quirky in a lot of cozy games. The ‘bots here come across less like uwu-coded dopes and more like a gaggle of preoccupied weirdos, each firmly ass-in-saddle on their own personal hobbyhorse, and that’s cool.

If the aesthetic, music, and character were stripped away, truthfully Mashina would be a middling entry in the mining genre. It’s not deep, not especially streamlined, hardly innovative even relative to the circumscribed bounds of its niche genre. It’s also easy. The menus are terrible. The building mechanics are underbaked. The economy collapses within the first few hours. The menus, I repeat, are terrible. Mechanically compared to any other mining game of repute — none of which are that complex or rich — Mashina comes up short.

But — and this is probably the only time I have ever said or felt this — the mechanical guts and all the other stuff that goes with it – don’t really matter.

Mashina’s simplicity fits its mission, as Talha and Jack Co. have chosen the correct genre. Anything more complex or demanding would need heaps more polish and fathoms more depth to be feasible, and a commensurate extension of all its precious intangibles to go along with it. However, Mashina is about a bunch of robo-dweebs relaxing at the end of the world, and it wants to help players relax in their own collapsing reality.

I respect it as art much more than I respect it as a game, and taken as a whole, I love it as an experience. Nice work, Mashina.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Talha and Jack Co. and published by Judatone Games. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 6.5 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. There’s nothing inappropriate in this game whatsoever. There is no violence, the only “enemy” is just a robot with the wrong switch flipped — it goes back to being nice with the click of a button. Some of the humor is too oblique and weird for younger players to understand, but it’s nothing parents should worry about them being exposed to.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the dialogue is accompanied by on-screen text, but the subtitles cannot be resized.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls for both keyboard+mouse and controller.

The post Mashina Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s a Zachlike by Zach. Wonderful theming.

LOW Might be too easy for the hardcore Zachheads

WTF Pachinko+Solitaire (but it rules)

If pressed to name the game designer I admire most, I’d probably say Zach Barth. Not because I enjoy his games the most (although I enjoy them a great deal) but because the Zachtronics oeuvre — beginning with SpaceChem with 2011, and concluding in 2022 with Last Call BBS — is probably the most consistent, artistically coherent body of work in the field.

Big claim, but it’s true. The Zachtronics titles are the result of intense focus — of a team working entirely within their own self-discovered ludological world, cultivating a hitherto-unexplored corner of puzzle design so sui generis that we came up with a new name for them — Zachlikes. Every Zachtronics release (excluding a couple outliers) built off a core concept of open-ended, discovery-based automation and/or programming puzzles, in which players uncover their own unique solutions to each problem at a pace that, too, belongs to each player personally. Every Zachlike borrows pieces and parts from the prior ones, but adds something of its own, pilfered in its turn by the next one.

After Last Call, Zachtronics disbanded — or rather metamorphosed into Coincidence, a company that’s the kind of outfit someone starts when they’ve made enough money to liberate themselves from the capitalist mill-wheel and can do whatever the hell they want. Coincidence released a couple of card games, an educational title to teach arithmetic, and even something called “Zach Attack!,” a scratch card-based logic affair. But sadly, nothing that could be called a Zachlike — until now.

Kaizen: A Factory Story is not just something made by Zach Barth, but is a genuine Zachlike in the classical tradition. Not the most adventurous one, nor the longest, certainly not the hardest, but Barth and his crew are fully and gloriously back on their bullshit here, right down to the requisite solitaire game-within-a-game.

Kaizen takes place in Japan in the late ’80s, when the country was riding an economic boom that resulted, amongst other things, in virtuosic consumer electronics manufacturing. As David Sugimoto, a young business graduate from Indiana who goes to Japan for a sales job but ends up shepherding production factories instead, players create assembly lines for appliances, computers, video game systems, and more — it’s a comforting, nostalgia-laced parade celebrating the most appealing of era of product design before later variants of the corporate psychosis leached all character and quality from consumer goods. (Do we really think anyone is going to look back fondly on the way the PS5 looks, for example?)

The Zachtronics games don’t get enough credit for their atmospherics. Story and setting are peripheral, but realized with great taste and an eye for the historical (or fantastical) milieu being evoked. ’80s Japan is a low-hanging fruit in terms of aesthetic, but Kaizen pleases from top to bottom in this regard. The sonic landscape is a boppable city pop homage, the color palette and clean linework lifted straight from Nagai Hiroshi, and in the puzzles themselves, non-copyright-infringing homages to landmark electronics and appliances are rendered with an almost touching accuracy, down to the particular density of computer polymers, or the brushed metal of a camcorder square chassis. Even the degree to which the little red Power LEDs are recessed into the frames seems wholly convincing and accurate. This is the least abstracted, the most tangible, Zachlike puzzle pieces have ever been.

Each puzzle is a work assignment — assemble a rice cooker, a computer, or a bidet. Starting with separate, sometimes unfinished components, players have to utilize different apparatuses to modify and manipulate these pieces into a finished product. Mechanical arms push, flip, and grab components; electric saws remove material; welders and riveters fuse disparate elements together. All of these mechanisms are assigned behaviors on a timeline at the bottom of the worktable.

The challenge comes from the physicality of all of these pieces. An arm can’t be in the way of another arm, the saws will cut whatever passes through them indiscriminately, etc. As the Zachlike-likers know, much of the frisson comes from solving these micro-problems to reach a viable solution. After that, any solution can be tweaked to optimize for the three different metrics — time, cost, and size — and every solution is ranked on and compared to other players’ solutions with the signature Zachtronics histograms.

This is the proven, beloved Zachlike format, and it works just as well in Kaizen as before. All this being said, there is something every so slightly insubstantial about this particular entry.

It might be the first Zachlite, much easier and shorter than installments in the established Zachtronics canon. The Zachlikes are always joyful pain to me, as there is not a single neuron in brain with any sort of engineering bent, and I usually crawl through these games at a sub-testudinal pace — but I blazed through Kaizen. Sometimes I solved a puzzle in less than five minutes. Once, I noticed that another player had come up with more or less the exact same solution that I did — something that has never happened to me with prior Zachlikes. The difficulty does ramp up, but even later on there’s this nebulous feeling of limitation — almost as if the devs were holding back.

I feel safe saying it’s intentional — in other words, not a symptom of fatigue or disinterest on the dev’s part, but rather a purposefully lighter take on the core Zachlike themes. It’s an approach I understand, even if I personally don’t endorse it. I may not be good at Opus Magnum or Infinifactory, but their bracing, permissive difficulty is part of what I love about them, and the relative lack of challenge in Kaizen gives it less mechanical character than its older siblings, and, I would guess, less staying power in the long run. If those prior games are vast, rich, brain-pain buffets, Kaizen is a light, spritzy cerebrum sorbet.

Does that mean that I would recommend Kaizen to the Zach-curious out there? Yes and no. It’s a delightful experience, but I think newcomers would actually be better served doing what I did and jumping in at the deep end with one of Kaizen’s classic predecessors. Kaizen is best, I think, for the already-converted. It’s not on the same level as the older titles, but it’s a delightful dose of most of what made them special. A summer treat for the sickos.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Coincidence and published by Astra Logical. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed (I got hung up on the excellent Pachi-Sol solitaire minigame for while). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. There’s nothing troubling, dark, unpleasant, or violent in this game whatsoever. The vast majority of time is spent looking at a table of components and mechanisms, and the closest the game comes to toilet humor is in having players assemble a bidet.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Dialogue for the dozen or so cutscenes are accompanied by subtitles, but the subtitles cannot be resized.

Remappable Controls: The game is keyboard and/or mouse only. The controls are not remappable. Everything can be done with the mouse alone, but there are intuitive hotkeys (CTRL+Z for undo, etc.) for faster solution editing.

The post Kaizen: A Factory Story Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Classic compulsive Monster Train cardplay, crunchier than ever.

LOW Higher learning curve than the first. Some unclear interactions.

WTF Which one of you sickos put all these waifus in the train???

Though lots of strong roguelite deckbuilders have followed in the wake of Slay the Spire, Monster Train is the only one to have staked out a space equal to Mega Crit’s genre-establishing release. It managed to do this by being, emphatically, its own thing, accomplished by taking a mere handful of mechanical waypoints from Spire and then building out an entirely original vision on top of that framework. This is, in some narrower, less foundational way, the process by which we saw FPS titles like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood carve out separate, full identities away from the “DOOM clone” designation.

Monster Train was fresh, it felt new within a new genre. People cottoned to it, unsurprisingly, so it’s no surprise that it got a sequel. But, it is unusual because Monster Train 2 is the first sequel to a major roguelite deckbuilder we’ve seen. In fact, the larger roguelite space is light on sequels overall. It’s a genre in which the exemplars generally live forever (or near enough to it in gaming terms) growing not so much older as denser, either through official content infusions or the ministrations of dedicated communities.

In other words, whether or not Shiny Shoe realized it, they were blazing new trails for the roguelite deckbuilder genre and setting precedent for what to expect from the sequel to a foundational text.

As a sequel, Monster Train 2 is classical in its approach, focused on refinement and amplification. Many elements are carried over more or less unchanged, and there was a moment when I nearly became disappointed — almost underwhelmed — with it. But the more I played, the more I could appreciate the judicious improvements, creative expansions, and, most importantly, the enormous generosity of content. When it came fully into focus after a few hours, Monster Train 2 impressed the hell out of me.

Remember, much is the same. Monster Train 2 takes place on a four-tiered train. The lower three levels are where cards — monsters, spells, and a few new things — can be played, while the uppermost fourth level houses the Pyre Heart, the train’s energy source. Each round enemies will enter from the lowest level, and any existing enemies in the train move up one level. Any goons that get to the Heart will attack it until they’re killed, but if they reduce the Heart’s HP to zero, it’s game over.

(Please, I beg, do not make me explain the story of Monster Train 1 or 2. I know there are people out there who care about this series’ goofball lore about a war between the spangled, melodramatic cartoon characters of this particular heaven and hell, but I’m definitely not one of them. There’s a train, there are monsters in it, and really, isn’t that enough?)

It certainly starts in a familiar way but the most important refinement here is the fancy new Deployment Phase.

Before the first turn, players are given all unit cards marked with a blue banner, and can place as many of them as they have energy for. Then the first standard turn occurs. This may seem insignificant to someone who hasn’t played Monster Train 1, but it’s a seismic shift. It cleans up one of the most ambiguous mechanics in the original — draw priority — making it much more legible, and much more strategic. Arranging the Deployment Phase units is a delicious tactical aperitif before hefty main course of locomotive card battling.

Monster Train 2 also delivers five brand new clans to play with. In Monster Train 1, the clans were unlocked in order of complexity. That’s true here too, but the introductory clans start with more complicated, oblique elements than were on offer with the first title’s Hellhorned and Awoken. All five clans have unique keywords, and two of them have a bespoke, overarching mechanic separate from the words on the cards.

In other words, things start out dense, and get denser as the player goes along. This is not a criticism, but I think Monster Train 2 is targeted at people who have played the first one a decent amount. Despite the bright, googly art style, this is a mechanically crunchy game afroth with calculations and considerations that are easier to grok with some Monster Train-ing under the belt already.

The upside to this is that the weirder, twistier, more offbeat strategies of these clans are wonderful puzzles for all the Train mavens out there. I’m partial to the Underlegion, an army of myconids with a unique “Troop” keyword that allows for massive stacks of little fungoid footmen to overwhelm opponents. The Pyreborn, a race of classic red dragons, lean into one of my favorite traditional draconic characteristics — greed for gold. Their spells and units play with the economy in unique ways.

Other existing elements have been tastefully embroidered. There isn’t just a single, standard Pyre Heart, for example — more than ten different Hearts can be unlocked through play, each with different stats and traits. There are equipment and room cards now too. Equipment works just like you’d think, and the most complicated new clan, the Lazarus League, plays with these cards in some wild ways. Rooms provide a powerful effect on one entire train floor, and there are also some new units with baked-in abilities, activated manually, with attendant cooldowns between uses.

All of this adds up to a sequel built directly and unabashedly on top of the original, but in such a way as to feel fresh, compelling, and surprising all over again. Every hour I spent with it, some new idea, mechanic, mode or flourish unfurled itself. I don’t have space to go into the alternate game modes, covenant ranks, or other surprises (and wouldn’t if I could) but take my word for it — this title is absolutely stuffed with things to play with.

Monster Train 2 is more Monster Train — but it’s more in the most considered, intelligent possible way. Highly recommended.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Shiny Shoe and published by Big Fan Games. It is available on PC, PS5, Switch and XBX/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 27 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was completed (at the basic level, with many covenant levels and unlocks left to get). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E 10+ and contains Alcohol References, Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood and Mild Language. The core gameplay features a lot of monsters fighting each other, but it’s mostly bloodless. The monsters themselves are, for the most part, pretty tame in their designs — although a few of the later clans’ creatures can be gory and/or creepy in ways that might be upsetting to younger players. In terms of bad language, sometimes the game says “Hell yeah,” but that seems to be about it.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present, including a preset deuteranopia mode as well as the option to customize the colorblind settings.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has subtitles for the (very few) voiced sequences. Most of the dialogue in the game is text only. The subtitles cannot be resized, but the UI can be set to a “Large” configuration.

Remappable Controls: The game offers fully remappable controls for Mouse and Keyboard, but not for gamepad. The gamepad controls function much like they do in other deckbuilders — the A button confirms, B button goes back, the X button ends the turn. The left stick moves between cards in the hand and units on the field when necessary. The only unusual element of the gamepad controls relative to other deckbuilders is that the right analog stick allows for moving between the different floors of the train.

The post Monster Train 2 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Intermittently brilliant physics puzzling. Beautiful music.

LOW Frustrating interface. Timed levels. The camera.

WTF The Undo “feature” is a war crime

Full disclosure — I am shamefully, abysmally bad at World of Goo 2.

I love physics games, I love building games, and I love puzzle games, but I labored over ever single level in Goo 2, and never connected with it. This innocuous little cutie raked my ass viciously across the coals for more than 10 hours. It turned my brain into flan, made me feel like my hands were flippers. I looked at my monitor like a stranger. My cat watched me in profound disdain as I hemorrhaged all honor and dignity. I am not a Goo Gamer.

Please bear that in mind as I kvetch at length about this game I don’t like very much.

World of Goo 2 is, of course, the long longed-for sequel to the 2008 classic, a true first wave indie success, but one that, unlike some of its peers, never became on ongoing franchise and did not spawn any real imitators. World of Goo didn’t establish a genre, and didn’t create a puzzle genus unto itself. There are plenty of titles out there with Goo DNA, but there has never been anything exactly like it – until World of Goo 2.

In each level, the goal is to usher a number of goo balls into a pipe. That pipe is always in some out-of-the way place, ensconced behind walls, or concealed behind chicanes lined with spikes or spinning gears that’ll pulverize the player’s fragile, viscous wards. Goo balls can stick to each other with strands of goo to form lattice-like structures, and the idea is that they must be built up in such a way that enough unused goo balls can crawl up the structure and reach the pipe. World of Goo 2 is an experience somewhere between a physics sandbox and a physics puzzle, with a soupçon of frustration-core elements from games like Getting Over It or Jump King.

Can a game be clever, but not smart? Some World of Goo 2 levels have an easy brilliance, where the solution is (sometimes literally) dangling right overhead, but only reachable through some particular, convoluted path, an accordion-stack of micro-puzzles folded lasagnalike onto itself. The solution/thought process is made up of several steps — how do I get over this gap, to reach those balloon goo balls, to float up to that outcropping, so I can wake up those absorbent goo balls, so I can drain that goo lake, so it can go into this goo cannon and flow down this hill and wake up another group of goo balls, so I can finally build a lattice and usher enough slime into the pipe?

These levels provide a pungent satisfaction that, befitting World of Goo 2’s chimerical genre-straddling, doesn’t feel exactly like the pleasure of solving a pure puzzle or building a bridge in a sandbox game, nor passing a section of the junk mountain in Getting Over It. If the design could maintain itself in this narrow and relatively unexplored ludological zone, I think I would be in love with it unreservedly, even if I could never be good at it. Unfortunately, the reality of World of Goo 2 is messier than that. The interface is a series of small annoyances that ramify into a big problem.

Players’ direct interaction with World of Goo 2 mostly boils down to clicking and moving goo balls. Not a problem in theory, but in practice, unpleasant friction gets kicked up at every turn.

Exhibit A: Goo balls not part of a structure crawl over it constantly — it is so easy to accidentally click on the wrong goo ball during a time-sensitive moment, when the difference between a wobbling tower staying upright or collapsing on itself and necessitating an undo comes down to two or three crucial seconds.

Which brings me to Exhibit B: the Undo.

World of Goo 2’s undo system may be the single most frustrating, backwards, misguided, cackhanded implementation of something that has long been solved I’ve ever seen. In lieu of the time-tested undo button, little fireflies float around and have to be clicked on to undo plays. These fireflies are minute, and they zip around like a flitting insect, almost as if they’re purposefully evading the click.

There is no excuse I can accept for making a key element of any puzzle-adjacent experience so unnecessarily obnoxious. I don’t care if it’s lore-friendly, I don’t care if it’s cute, I don’t care if it’s funny — this choice alone accounted for at least 40% of my frustration with World of Goo 2. Even in 2008, it would be questionable at the most absolute generous interpretation. In 2025, it’s a joy-devouring mega-gaffe.

There are smaller issues too. Not every level is a winner. There is a degree of openness to solutions, but not as much as it might seem. The camera is zoomed in way too close, and can’t be adjusted to a satisfactory distance — a bantamweight problem, especially on the more convoluted levels where a path through challenges has to be plotted out in advance. There are levels with very strict time limits, and I hated these (Thankfully there is the option to skip any level at any time).

In so many ways, World of Goo 2 is an honorable enterprise. The art is great. The theming is enjoyable, if not as deep as it sometimes seems like it thinks it is. There’s a melancholy goofiness to the World of Goo world that I like, and I love anything with its aesthetic roots in the glory days of the Flash- and browser-based gaming frontiers of the aughts. The music is absolutely beautiful. This is a mechanics-forward game, so I’ve routed most of ink to the highs and lows therein, but know that the audio-visual side of World of Goo 2 is an unqualified success.

World of Goo 2 as whole, I guess, could be classified as a broken success. I struggled with it, both because of my own ineptitude, but more crucially because of its quite serious design flaws. It doesn’t deserve to be hated, or ignored, but I don’t want to play it anymore. I’m goo-d, thanks.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corporation. It is available on Android, iOS, PC, PS5, and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed (because I am horrible at it). There are no multiplayer modes in the PC version, but the Switch port does have multiplayer options.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Mild Suggestive Themes and Mild Violence. The official description reads: This is a physics-based puzzle game in which players use balls of goo to create wobbly structures towards a pipe. A story mode allows players to follow a detective investigating a missing persons case. One sequence depicts a character dying after getting shot. The game contains some suggestive material: a red-light district sign reading “XXX”; a character shaking their buttocks; a man feeling a character’s thigh; innuendo such as “He’s a…gentleman of the night” and “two hot bullets in a revolver…romantically permeated”).

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has subtitles for the spoken dialogue sequences. The subtitles cannot be resized. Almost all key information is conveyed visually as well as audibly, but certain levels have timed elements that are easier to monitor with sound than by sight-checking them.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Keyboard+mouse and touch screen are supported. In fact, the entire game can be played with just the mouse, which is used for picking up and plopping down the goo balls, panning around the screen, and (very sadly), undoing actions. WASD can also be used for screen panning, but the mouse is still necessary, and still the central control implement.

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When I played Slay the Spire and Into the Breach for the first time, I knew each one would exert major influence, and that many devs to come would offer their own spin on the mechanics canonized in these titles. What I didn’t expect, however, was that developers would take these two very different games and fuse them together. However, the Tactical Roguelite Deckbuilder is here to stay.

Starless Abyss is the first title from Amsterdam-based Konafa Games. It’s an interesting, maximalist, messy take on this young sub-genre, larded with systems and ideas and quirks, all held together by a viscous peritoneum of star-encrusted Lovecraftian cosmic pulp.

The Starless story, so far, has not grabbed me, but for context — players assume the role of a starship pilot who’s been shunted into another dimension, in the hopes that they can save the galaxy from encroaching monstrous cosmic entities. They do this by proceeding through a series of encounters (events, shops, and combat) in the hopes of beating back the Outer Gods and their rogues gallery of degenerate invertebrates.

Combat is the main course here, and while the easy shorthand would be to say “Into the Breach with a deck,” that doesn’t quite encompass the unique flavor imparted by the many concepts and mechanics laid on top, tucked underneath, and squeezed into all the little gaps of that framework. To jump to a more terrestrial metaphor, what we have here in Starless Abyss is some good ol’ fashioned Lasagna Game Design, with many layers to consider during each encounter.

The setup will be familiar to those who know the genre — enemies position themselves and telegraph an attack, then the player takes their turn before the attacks land. Players control a squad of three spaceships which can all move once, but all other actions are dictated by cards drawn from a single shared deck and played from a shared hand. Any ship can use as many cards as desired, as long as the player has energy to use them.

Each ship has multiple stats – health, shield, movement points, a heat gauge, artifact slots for specialized buffs, and sometimes innate special properties, once the player buys or finds better ships than the basic beater. A ship called the Brawler, for instance, gets a bonus to all damage, but reduces the maximum range of all attacks to two hexes.

The field of battle, a hex grid, presents additional considerations, like debris fields that cost extra movement to enter, but provide a damage reduction to any ship within them. When a corporeal (as opposed to a phantasmal) enemy is killed, it leaves a massive smear of starbeast offal where it dies, blocking line of sight.

There’s also a strong board game influence here. Throughout the run, players acquire “D.I.C.E.,” which are dice used during non-combat events. Unlike Spire, where the outcome of an event is simply a matter of clicking on the choice desired, Starless Abyss choices can fail — playing a high enough D.I.C.E. (D.I.E.?) will guarantee success, but lower-value D.I.C.E. will only yield a 50% chance of gaining the desired result.

I’m still wrapping my head around the way Starless Abyss’s multiple systems mesh, but I can detect sweet, nourishing tactical density here. Mechanics aside, this project has obviously been made with love. The visuals are just great, with blocky, saturated, chunky pixels barrel-aged in a very fine bowling alley carpet color palette featuring blossoms of purple, eructations of neon green, and powder-white nebulae foliating against violet-black expanses speckled with stars and tentacles.

There’s too much in Starless Abyss for me to render a verdict at this early stage, but I can safely say that anyone who vibes with this sub-genre should be paying attention to this thing. It’s an Abyss worth gazing into.

Buy Starless Abyss – PC

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