Ratings and Reviews by ChanceOfFire

In World War II: Armored Recon, you play as the commander of a Stuart Tank. Unlike other war genre games in the HG library, this game has you playing as an NCO rather than an officer, placed in charge of your enlisted crew.

At 900k words, this game is built like a tank, although the prose feels a lot more concise (positive!) than the gigantic Tin Star despite the considerable word count. The game is generally well written, conveying the harsh realities of war and the constant battle against scarce resources. You have a limited amount of fuel and ammo in the game, and will need to carefully keep track of your usage if you don't plan on ending up in a sticky situation. Oftentimes, you'd have to scavenge wrecks for resources, or beg/borrow/steal them from others, further conveying the sense of scarcity when fighting the war.

There is something of a turn based battle system here, similar to the one in Tin Star, where you can pick a movement or combat action each turn, and keep doing so until all enemies are down. It's pretty solid and also ties in well with the stat system and resource levels. That said, the Rule of Cool also seems to apply here, as you'll be fighting and (hopefully) blowing up Panzer IV tanks and the fearsome Tiger tank in open combat, tanks which would have otherwise made short work of a Stuart tank in real life.

Most of the game is centered around combat missions, with breaks and possible misadventures when resting in towns. There is one exploratory search section which breaks up the repetition, but otherwise, the story feels very heavy on the combat aspects.

You'll also have some crew members, with a skill and XP system which allows you to build up each one, along with other supporting characters. They have some fairly interesting conversations to offer, although the game still places more emphasis on the combat rather than social elements. Also, before you ask, there's no romance here.

It's a solid game with a strong mix of resource management and combat, backed by strong writing and a tankload of content. If this genre interests you, I think it's worth trying out.

Don't forget, gasoline is precious.

Violent Delight reminds me of Disneyland. Not because it tries to be creepy (although there is that) but because you've got plenty of waiting in line (enough to make a person insane) before you actually get to go on the rides.

Sitting at home, you bid for a creepy video game cartridge and wait for it to arrive. Yes, I meant 'wait' literally. You'll have to wait an absurdly long time (in real time) before the cartridge arrives, although you can also try to hurry the delivery up (to no useful effect).

Once it arrives, you mess with the cartridge and try out different levels. In between, you can mess with the cartridge to unlock more and more scary levels, with some crudely drawn pictures which supposedly get more horrifying, as well as some text making references to going on. By the way, there're also plenty of wait times here once you mess with the cartridge and prepare for your next romp. Of course, as you descend even further down the levels, you might find yourself breaking something, before the whole world goes to oblivion.

There are some geniunely good ideas and scares here, although the crude art struggles to convey the horror aspects. The ending portion where you end up breaking the cartridge as you continue to mess with it, before watching your existence blow up in your face, was pretty good.

That said, the whole wait time thing feels very excessive, to the point of being obnoxious. Yeah, I get it, the game is trying to convey an idea through the wait times, but there really should have been a less obnoxious way to do this. All I did was open up my own projects to do my own writing in between the wait times, which certainly detracted from the gaming and horror experience. I put my IFcomp two hour playthrough timer on hold while tabbing away to do something else, but I just can't walk away without criticizing this aspect of the game. After the ending scares, the first thing that came to my mind was simply 'glad all the waiting's over.'

Anyway, grab a cup of soda and watch some anime while waiting. It might detract from those scares, but there's no reason you should be staring at a load screen till the end of the world.

The Promises of Mars is another difficult one to rate. From a technical standpoint, it is competently designed with great ease-of-use and an interesting choice of colors for the UI. However, the gameplay gets tedious and minus the atmospheric writing, the story and character elements feel very barebones.

The Promises of Mars is a lot like Dead Sea in terms of gameplay. Find item A, bring it to location B, get item C, and the game moves forward. There are some quality of life features here, such as an interactive map you can click on to instantly travel to any accessible location, as well as the game highlighting usable items at each location. Still, a highlighted item may not always solve the problem, and sometimes, you will need to figure out which of the eligible items you should use to get past your next obstacle. There are some puzzles which break up the repetition of the usual itemfinding, but none were too difficult. The orange and black color scheme is also pretty fitting.

Unfortunately, it felt tedious after a while, and the story and writing just wasn't able to hold it up. There is strong atmosphere in the writing, particularly in the earlier chapters as you look at the ruins and think to a life before, but this started to wear off as I approached the final chapter. The plot is pretty much just navigating your way to a reactor, and there is little character writing as the female protagonist robotically clears one section after another in this drawn out IF obstacle course.

Towards the end, I felt like I was playing a fallout game and trying to clear some overcomplicated puzzle in a maze-like vault which had long overstayed its welcome. When you finally get to the ending portion, you are given a choice regarding that reactor you worked so hard to reach, but the ending scenes are brief and leave a lot to the player's imagination.

I wasn't able to obtain a key item at the start of the game, and spent a good bit of time running around randomly and hitting the same location again and again without effect, before restarting the game and somehow being able to obtain the key item on my next attempt. I also encountered a buggy message during the game, although it didn't prevent me from finishing it. Otherwise, I didn't find any other bugs.

It's not a bad game, but I think the plot, writing and gameplay really needed more variety to support a game of this length. It was good at first but started to feel draggy towards the end. This is another game where I was also just struggling to decide between three or four stars. This would have been a 3.5 if IFDB allowed it, but I'll round it up.

Let Me Play feels less like a choice based IF and more like an idea. You watch a play and are presented with choices... except that you can't really pick something. The game takes agency away from the player, picking choices for you instead.

Still, towards the end, you might get a choice which allows you to regain some of that player agency, and pick again. Basically, this game is a pretty unusual commentary on player agency.

You could play through once to amuse yourself, but I was pretty much done at the end. The art and sound is pretty nice. The timed text is a pain, however, and the game doesn't give you any skip or back buttons. (But given the lack of player agency, what did you expect, eh?) Just do your playthough, see the idea the game is putting forward, and call it a day.

You play as an employee in a waste management job, in some sci-fi setting which involves spaceships and different planets. Unfortunately, it was pretty tough to get immersed in this one for reasons which have nothing to do with text.

You pick a partner to travel with you. There are two people you can choose from, with wildly different personalities and backstories, and the choice of each partner brings you down a totally different route in the game. The writing was fairly solid, although I didn't feel particularly attached to either character. If you want to see most of the content, you'll want to play at least twice, one with each character.

As far as VNs go, you get a good bit of choices, mainly around choosing what sort of garbage artifact you want to pick up and bring back (that's your job), as well as some dialogue options around your partner. According to the walkthrough, picking different garbage options may affect the outcome of the story, although this wasn't very well-advertised in the game, and I was largely picking space junk at random on a blind playthrough.

A more glaring issue was the art. This is a VN... so I guess it's fair to talk about this. The game uses photographic images for backgrounds, and a lot of them are easily recognizable as pictures from modern day earth. Some pictures even have people going about. The picture of the spaceship interior appears to be that of a modern aircraft cockpit (with the control stick and flight screens). It was hard to imagine myself visiting planets in a spaceship when the game was showing something which looked like the busy mall near my house. Additionally, the character art and character cards also looked really out of place against the photographic backgrounds, even if it was in itself pretty solid for a free VN.

I get that it's hard to get good art, and I also strongly appreciate the effort which went into collecting all these art assets to make a VN-entry. Still, I do think my immersion in the game really suffered heavily for it.

It can provide a good bit of entertainment if you're willing to give it a shot. There's lots of content here. Still, try to suspend your disbelief when you see all those people in the background.

Ok, so you're struggling with your homework. You ask the AI to do it for you. It spits out an essay. You get an A+. Win.

I'm sure AI-reliance plays out differently for different people, but our protagonist here is quick to thank AI profusely for its assistance, before going on to depend on it for emotional counselling and support. The story goes on and branches, where the protagonist can decide to start doing their homework with their organic brain again, or remain reliant on AI. (it does not end well)

There is an undo button. That said, using it a bit too much caused a code error to appear.

This take on AI-reliance just felt... mehh. There's plenty to talk about for this topic, but after playing through this game, I was like... does that actually happen? Don't get me wrong, being over-reliant on AI comes with a host of problems, some of which would be interesting to explore, but I'm not sure if this game really nailed those down.

You could give it a read, I suppose. That said, in Real Life, don't expect an A+ just for tossing your entire assignment at an AI and blindly handing the output to your professor. The tech isn't that good yet. When it is, that's when we're going to have to panic.

A simple but endearing game. You play as a member of a flock... I mean murder of crows, and you spend the day doing simple crow stuff.

It's probably the crow-equivalent of a slice of life game, where you do all manner of unremarkable but fun things without much of an overarching plot or goal. Crows are pretty cute animals here, going on adventures, picking up shiny things and playing with non-feathered creatures like dogs and humans. The premise could make for some light hearted fun.

Still, this game is rough. I ran into some bugs, like a dead end and an error message telling me that some code broke down. There were a few typos, and spacings between paragraphs weren't always consistent.

It's a short game and can be a pretty rough experience. Still, it might be worth it for some light-hearted reading.

Our story begins with some slow moving timed text. Thankfully, this doesn't carry over completely to the rest of the game. Still, you'd probably want to make a save once you get past it, if you're planning to play more than once. The game does recommend making a save sometime after the introduction... for a different reason.

From what I can tell, there is no undo option, although there is a save system.

Anyway, you're off to a shady place to meet with someone (didn't say human) whom you're supposed to well... do some business with. Nevertheless, you do have the option to talk with him, learn more about him and find out if he is really the creature of darkness he seems to be. (Still, some parts on vegetarianism and compassion in feeding did feel a little awkward.)

The writing is mostly solid, although the game's length didn't quite allow for a deep exploration of the characters and the story. There is a simple stat system, but it didn't work on my mobile browser for some reason, and I had to switch to another phone to see the little stat popups. There is also a good bit of conversational branching, so multiple playthroughs might be necessary to see more of the content. Having played through about three times, I managed to unlock two different endings, although I didn't feel like going back for yet another round.

Overall, it's a fairly solid short read. I would give 3.5 stars, but I'll round that off to 4 stars for this review. (Don't get me wrong, the timed text is still a pain.)

A troll game! Awesome.

I was deciding whether to give 5 stars or -1 stars for this game. That said, I've seen better trolling efforts on reddit, so I'll go with -1 stars.

Come to think of it, I spent more time writing this review than playing the game, and this is coming from the guy who reviewed a ton of Neo-twiny jam games this year. An extra star for that.

Also, this game doesn't seem to be affected by the geoblock rule in the UK. (Like me) A bonus star for that.

Ok, that adds up to one star out of five. Thank you, folks. Have a nice day.

I downloaded this game, read through the readme and tried to run it. There was an interesting bit of starting text and a character creation system.

Nevertheless, I was unable to proceed beyond the introduction. I typed a command and the game threw up an error, something about being unable to connect to the server. I am leaving this game unrated as I am unable to provide a proper assessment of the game in its current state.