-Kevin Purdy
sixty four
Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac
I try not to think or write about games in terms of “dollars to enjoyment ratio.” Games often get cheaper over time, everyone enjoys them differently, and they are also art as well as commerce. But friends, come on: $6 per sixty four? If you play it for an hour and just smile a couple of times at its quirks and little cubes, that's less than a latte or a big-city beer.
But you will almost certainly play sixty four for more than an hour, and maybe many more hours if you like games with systems, buildings and resources. You build and place machines to extract resources, use those resources to fund new and better machines, reorganize your machines, and finally create beautiful workflows that are largely automated. Why do you do this? It's a fun and dark mystery.
The game looks wonderful on your sim city 2000/3000-Style style. It can be mentally exhausting, but you really can't miss it; You can even leave the game window open in the background while you convince your boss or remote work software that you're otherwise productive. It's a fever dream that I would recommend to almost everyone, unless they are afraid of repeating the many days lost in games like factory, Satisfyingor even Universal clips. In that case, just do it in the wish list; What could go wrong?
-Kevin Purdy
Tactical Breach Mages
Suspicious developments; windows
Credit: Suspicious Developments
What can you do to breathe life into turn-based tactics, a fairly mature genre?
Tactical Breach Mages adds wizards who see the future, control time, and place hexes, for one thing. On the other hand, it refines network combat, adding window throwing and door sealing to the mix, and giving enemies a much wider range of attacks than area-of-effect variations. Ultimately, it boils all this down into an inventive sci-fi narrative, with an engaging plot, characters who reveal themselves one joke at a time, and an overall sense of wonder at a charmingly strange world of militarized magic.