For such a smart design, it’s got an appallingly bad implementation.

It all comes down to one burning question I have while I’m waiting for stuff to happen in Cosmonautica: why aren’t I just playing Space Colony?

Battle it out in virtually any engagement on the Western/Eastern/Mediterranean Front using detailed American, German, Russian and British armies.

So after that third attempt (my fifth attempt overall), I threw in the towel. Not because I don’t want to know what happens. I sort of do. It’s an intriguing story and for all its frivolity, the plot has at least a couple of exciting reveals. The simplistic characters are appealing enough and their forced conflicts are no worse than something you’d see in the average TV show. But I learned my lesson after six seasons of Lost. Sunken cost fallacy is a terrible reason to watch a TV show or play a game. I’ve learned that it’s okay to bail on a story once the storyteller has betrayed your trust. I’ve learned that uninstalling The Next World is the choice to make instead of playing it a sixth time.

The tutorial is great, the matchmaking system works nicely, and the game even knows enough only to send you an email reminder about your turn when you are not logged in. It’s like Playdek thought of everything...It’s not so much about whether the game is any good. It’s whether it’s any good for you. It’s more than just good for me.

Carmageddon: Max Damage is unique, hilarious, a little long in the tooth, and a comedy Charles B. Griffith would be proud to have inspired.

Rearranging ingredients is a viable way to make a different meal. And the Last Roman campaign is an edifying alternative to all that tasty Warhammer junk food.

for a throwaway tower defense game, Alien Shooter TD does what it needs to do: pass the time by slathering a map in alien gore.

It’s mostly a numbers-heavy realtime party-based dungeon crawl combat extravaganza. Sci fi, to boot. You’d think the developers at Quadro Delta would come up with a more thematic title to distinguish it from their previous game, Pixel Piracy. That one wasn’t sci-fi. It was your garden variety Caribbean pirates, but in pixels.

A remarkable essay about history and game design. Also a damn fine game.

It’s delivering a quick sharp jolt of gore, profanity, and arcade-induced dexterity. It will last maybe two minutes if you’re good. Three or even four if you’re really good or lucky. At which point it doesn’t even ask you if you want to restart. It knows you do. So it just does.

The gameplay appeal of Caladrius Blaze is its variety and progression within each match.

One of the smartest things about Age of Rivals is how strikes a balance among separate but interrelated systems for armies, economies, art, religion, espionage. I especially like how it handles military strategies. Armies are important, but they’re not dominant. Your opponent can go all-out aggressive on your ass, but you can still win a cultural victory. Try that in a 4X.

Ponder the lushly informative and sexily Sumerian visuals as you bake bread and make beer for a cooing fertility goddess who peers in from above like someone’s mom asking who’s winning. It’s going to be close.

Rapture: World Conquest demonstrates what every other game with a globe-shaped map has demonstrated for as long as they’ve been around. Namely, that a globe is never a good idea for a strategy game. Never. Information is a critical component in a strategy game, especially a real-time strategy game. But a globe hides exactly half the information at all times. That’s a misguided attempt at immersion at best, a dick move at worst.

Not quite beer n' pretzels. More like suds n' crumbs. With its hand out for more of your money.

Thaumistry is exactly what you want if you’re an Infocom fanboy like me. It has that thoughtful, funny writing Infocom spoiled us with, dozens of just-hard-enough puzzles, a cast of characters with enough personality to be interesting, an over-the-top set-piece climax, and all the refinements you expect from a modern adventure game. You can’t break it and make it unwinnable. You can’t die, with one obvious exception, blatantly telegraphed several turns before it happens. But this isn’t posturing, hipstery “art house” interactive fiction — it’s a hardcore, puzzles-first design. The heart of a 1980s text adventure throbs beneath all the 21st-century niceties.

This is what pinball should be, but unlike most pinball tables that have to fit the subject matter to the gonzo mechanical gravity-powered contrivances of pinball, Adventure Land is already there. Who cares about Star Wars or Skyrim or Spider-Man when you have tables like this!

When it comes to free-to-play games from Russia about fishing, you could do a lot worse.

When the puzzle elements fall away and you’ve established a rapport with the hardware, and perhaps even an affection for its idiosyncrasies, you’re sitting in Dan O’Bannon’s chair. Now you’re Pinback. Now that galloping finger jab — right-left-right-left — actually does something.

If I had to pick one thing Space Tyrant does best, it would be pacing. Because this is how a game has to move in order to cook a Marie Callender chicken pot pie in 20 minutes.

Unlike Sentinels of the Multiverse, I’d still rather play this on the tabletop. Handelabra seems so preoccupied with whether or not they could make a One Deck Dungeon videogame (they can!), but they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Remember how good the DLC was in the first State of Decay? Lifeline and Breakdown? If so, definitely steer clear of this waste of $10.

That’s this boardgame port in a nutshell: an incomplete effort stripped of personality and then a door slammed shut before you can admire your work.

This is state-of-the-art for action RPGs in Soldak’s fantasy worlds.

The premise is cyberpunk, the parameters are thoughtful, and the payoff is worth the bother.

Shadow Empire has tons of personality, playing with science fiction, apocalypses, resource management, RPGs, and card games. But everything in Secret Government feels like a dry imitation of a dry Paradox game. Shadow Empire also reveals things as you play. You learn clever systems that interact with each other in interesting ways. But playing Secret Government never goes beyond the feeling of tweaking values in a spreadsheet without any innovative interactions or even meaningful systems. Numbers, all the way down, lined up in rows and columns with all the expected interactions, in a game that lets you do a lot of little things that don’t matter much in the hopes that eventually something’s going to happen that might matter a little. All the while, make sure you keep Ramiro Vazquez’ secrecy topped off.

What could have been a worthy and equally quirky follow-up to Reus and Renowned Explorers is instead a confused combination of soccer management, tax forms, and bad documentation lightly dusted with a flurry of religious words.