Recent reviews by Hawkeye Couchot

Awesome rougelike with some cool meta-progression elements. Works great on the steam deck and in offline mode, probably played it for 45 hours while travelling. Easy to pick up and play some short games.

Really fun and challenging bullet hell/farming. Highly recommend. Also great music and charming art.

Truly rare to find such an excellent game. Easily in my top five of all time. Not a simple "good versus evil" tale and that makes it so much better. Can"t recommend it highly enough.

Entertaining story, and cool to see some more background of the world of the Witcher. I didn"t really enjoy Gwent in Witcher III, but here I actually did quite a bit. Some of the puzzles in this game can be a bit frustrating at times, but in general it"s fun. It"s a little grindy but not to the point where it was upsetting. Overall, would recommend.

A great addition to the XCOM universe. I like that they tried a lot of new stuff here. I liked the revamped turn order, the characters having a personality, the whole cops kinda vibe, and for what it"s worth, the simplification. I really enjoy how complex XCOM can be, but this was like XCOM light. I"d recommend this to friends trying to get into turn based strategy.

I didn"t necessarily love the lack of permadeath... it made my decisions seem less meaningful. I also found the UI in most parts of the game to be a bit strange and didn"t quite work how I expected (using gamepad). The story and pacing leaves a bit to be desired - the villains are just sort of revealed, with limited motive, backstory, etc. Just felt a bit hollow and rushes you to the end.

And of course, as of writing there were a few bugs. A few crashes, lots of UI bugs, some character movement shinanigans, but what can you do?

Overall, I really enjoyed this game, and I"ll definitely be playing it again. Don"t let that XCOM light thing fool you, this game is a lot of fun. If anyone else had made it they"d be saying it"s incredible, it"s just a testament to how good XCOM games have been that people are even being so nitpicky.

There are some frustrating technical issues, like crashing (save often!) and some weird camera bugs, but those aside, this game is really enjoyable. It"s a pretty timeless school tale, a little campy, and quite fun.

It"s beautiful, and interesting at times, but the repetitive combat, frustrating boss battles and mechanics take it down a notch. Still worth playing, for the five hours that it is, but I"m not sure I"ll revisit it in the future.

Compelling voice acting and an interesting story, paired with nice visuals made this an enjoyable experience.

I just kept waiting and hoping that this game would end. And I use game lightly, because it is extremely linear. The developer literally walls off sections of the world at multiple times (even if you"ve previously been to those sections) to direct you toward a specific room or section. Some of the writing is funny, I even chuckled a few times, but most of it is infuriating, and feels like it"s aimed at an audience of children. One of the main characters that follows you around, a talking teddy bear straight from soviet Russia, has about three lines, but repeats them, constantly for 3 hours. I found myself sprinting, trying to get away from him and his amazingly annoying squeaking feet.
The game is not difficult, it"s very much "oh hey here"s a highlighted item, I"ll grab it and wait until I need an item" with little care for why this item would be here, or how it can help. About half the items you pick up will tell you directly in their description how to use them.
The game"s framerate jumped up and down fairly often, sometimes dipping into the low 20"s which surprised me since I have a nice card with 8GB DDR5 RAM and a beefy PC outside that.
The game had a couple nice moments, like the ending, but for the most part I felt like I was just trying to get my money"s worth of entertainment out of it. Would not recommend.

A good twist on the tried and true Civilization formula. Easy to understand but difficult to master, with each playthrough creating a very different experience through the use of the new Affinity system.