Recent reviews by [PMC] Portable Merc Collector

Mind Over Magic is a colony sim game in the same vein as Oxygen Not Included, but instead of scifi clones and duplicants, you're managing wizards and magic!

Every wanted to build Hogwarts from Harry Potter? Now you can! In this game you're tasked with managing your staff and students as well as building your own custom school from the ground up, literally.

Normally every other "colony sim" game has you expanding outwards, but this is rather unique in that it's more focused on expanding "upwards". Mind Over Magic places various bonuses for rooms based on clever design and structure placement. With certain rooms needing certain quirks such as one wall higher then the other, or a structure needing to stand entirely on it's own with no rooms next to it.

These quirks can be a bit frustrating at times, but the game alleviates this in multiple ways. From giving the player plenty of tools to make unconventional architecture work, to to refunding every resource spent to build what you demolish. It's acually quite a robust system for just coming up with the wackiest wizard school you can think of.

Certain rooms also gain decor bonuses when objects are placed in them! However instead of being more akin to something like ONI where it's just a small stat boost. In MoM these furniture pieces actually enable you to design specific rooms that buff the objects within them. Want faster research? Make a Mage's Study! Want better healing? Build a hospital! Generally the shape or size of the room does not matter, as long as you can fulfill it's requirements, go crazy!

Outside of the structure building aspect, your little AI wizards and students are also quite robust too. There's an RPG element to them where you're meant to train and level them up as they work for you. As they gain levels you unlock new abilities and boosts to their stats and profession.

Wands are a great example of this, everyone starts with a Tier 1 wand, but you can use a Wand Shaper to create better wands which enable you to gain further levels and better stats! Worried about your previous staff becoming useless? No problems there either! In the underground there will be a Wand Transfigurator that will allow you to switch wands and "upgrade" older staff! Provided it's the same type of course.

With more of an emphasis on combat then possibly other colony sims, MoM's approach to combat is similar to an RPG much like the aforementioned leveling system. Characters fight in turn based battles with abilities and skills from their wands and levels. When "killed", a character doesn't instantly die, but rather gets knocked unconscious by being "At Death's Door" similar to Darkest Dungeon. You CAN save them if you're quick enough, however being at death's door will give them a permanent negative quality called a Scar. Due to this it's usually better to either relegate mages who have a scar or multiples to only being workers, or if they're too much hassle, just letting them retire. You're not forced to though!

This combat system rewards smart tactical decision making and risk vs. reward decision making. If a fight looks too tough, you can skip it entirely until your staff are more powerful. Want to take that fight, but want to try to avoid any of your mages falling injured? You can give them the option to flee from battle, but this does take a turn, so be careful when using it as they will still be vulnerable until their next move. Smart battle decisions can leave you winning big rewards while telling your staff to flee and keeping them from getting scars and negative side effects.

Also this game is quite polished from what I've played so far! In my 28 hours I've played I have yet to run into any bugs or glitches that mess with my game.

Overall Mind Over Magic is a great colony sim and a unique one at that! Having played when it was in Early Access then stopped for awhile, I'm back in at the time of writing this review. If you like strategy and RPG mechanics, this will be a colony sim you'll definitely get some enjoyment from! However if you wish having more automation in your battles, and an overall more punishing experience, you may find this one too easy.

Pick this one up if you're a strategy nerd like me and you like wizards, it's fun!

TLDR: If you enjoy RPG elements with your colony sim games, you'll love this. If you want a game where everything is automated and you want a more cutthroat, punishing experience, you probably won't like this one as the game's punishments are accumulative rather then overwhelming.

I do like this game, but it has some very glaring flaws, and if you cannot enjoy a game through some rather annoying mechanics, then you may do well to avoid this one.

Iron Harvest is.. a very interesting, unique game, and honestly? The devs made something very interesting with what they had, but some mechanics just really needed tweaking before they left. Based off of the Scythe board game in which WW1 era humanity used gigantic dieselpunk mechs in place of vehicles like tanks and artillery, Iron Harvest focuses on fictional nations based off of real world counterparts in WW1 era Europe. You start with Polania, Rusviet and Saxony, later DLCs included expansions to these factions and even new air units with Ursonia (America) added later on.

The game has a surprisingly extremely robust campaign with a lot of missions, and one thing I really like about it, you can use these campaign missions to unlock skins and reward progress, all completely singleplayer! Even playing co-op with a friend if you wish. The singleplayer offerings are surprisingly very big and where most of the effort is put in. If anything, get the game for that, as the multiplayer is dead at the moment, skirmish with AI does exist, but it's not the same. Not bad, just not the same.

The main draw of the game's mechanics is it's inherently designed with a similar system to Company of Heroes in mind. Infantry are your main swiss army knife, but they can't do everything. Vehicles are your hammer and shield, you won't get tons and tons of them, but what you do call in is very powerful and tanky for when you need it to be. Cover is made with various things in the environment as well as structures made by player engineer units, and helps your infantry to last much longer in a fight.

Now, the negatives.. Sometimes the difficulty spikes in certain missions, and it spikes BAD. Some missions like the first Rusviet Revolution mission when it comes to defending the mansion can be extremely hard unless you know what you're doing. On top of that, the attack on Tesla's factory has units constantly spawning from the gates, in theory you're supposed to attack the gates until their health is reduced, but the units just never stop spawning. I ended up suiciding small armies into the gates until I eventually destroyed them through attrition.

Also, mechs seem a bit unbalanced still when it comes to effectiveness vs. infantry. Cover doesn't seem to make a large enough difference when it comes to infantry vs. mechs. Infantry vs. infantry is a noticeable difference, but the value of infantry tends to fall off late game once the mechs start getting spammed. Mechs can't capture points however, so there is an inherent use only infantry will have, but anything late game just slaughters them. This WAS fixed a bit later on down the line, when anti-mech infantry were buffed and mech damage to infantry was toned down a bit. Generally you want to try to avoiding mechs with infantry if you can, but it's no longer suicide like it was before.

Another annoying bit with mechs vs. infantry is mech attacks on infantry tend to "stagger" infantry, making them dive out of the way. While this fun bit of realism works in making battles more cinematic, it also makes infantry a lot more annoying to fight mechs with because, when staggered, they don't shoot back. If multiple mechs are fighting your infantry, or hero, they'll rarely be able to do anything because they'll essentially be stunlocked. Best to bring in as much support as you can in bigger fights.

Outside of that, and sometimes clunky controls like positioning mechs the way you want them, how fast infantry retreat from battle, and some pathfinding here and there, it's a solid game. Not a great or amazing one, but a "good" game.

TLDR: Pick it up on sale only if you're interested. If you're looking for something with lots of polish (pun intended) or tight, smooth gameplay, this won't be for you. Buuut if you're interested and like WW1 era humanity duking it out with big clunky mechs and don't mind jank, you'll have fun with the singleplayer options.

A genuinely fun RTS game that may have launched with too little content for some people, but the devs are as of this review working on a skirmish style game mode to alleviate that. This review will talk about the base game as well as the DLCs!

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The base game is really fun and relies often times more on good positioning and timely ability usage then how fast you can click things. It merges both aspects of the Starship Troopers movies and books as well, although it mostly takes from the movie universe.

The gameplay is very solid with a great variety of units. You have your basic Mobile Infantry riflemen, then engineers, grenadiers, rocket teams, snipers and more. Later down the line you unlock much more heavy ordinance including the Marauders from the third movie!

Most of your strategic decision making is going to be figuring out where to place your troops for attacking or holding the line against the arachnids. More often then not if you position your units well, you take minimal if any losses, and your soldiers will quickly rank up and unlock their veteran abilities. It's very well balanced in that it awards you if you place your units well, and they mow down hundreds upon hundreds of bugs with minimal losses. If you don't, you are punished by either having to retreat, or try to hold and weather the storm through the losses that will be inflicted upon you.

One of the main mechanics that sets this game apart from others is the Line of Sight mechanic given to your soldiers. What this means is soldiers cannot shoot through each other well. A collumn of soldiers means only the troops infront will be able to shoot forward, and the ones in back shoot back with everyone in the middle being stuck. This means you must work with line tactics similar to 17 and 1800s style warfare, and use your infantry in various formations and utilize heightened terrain to your advantage. It changes typical RTS play up quite a lot!

At first glance the game may seem to have weak units that rely upon the spamming of abilities to be effective, but this actually isn't the case in my experience! Playing at normal difficulty, abilities often function as an "Oh ****!" mechanic to save you from a would-be horrible situation. Grenades offer good crowd control and can help infantry stand up to things like Tigers while shotgun suppression does huge damage to bugs up close and often keeps them from attacking outright. That's just on the Rifle Infantry alone!

Now, for your enemy, the arachnids.. when this came out, oh boy, they provided a really tough challenge but the crown prince of difficulty for them.. was the scorpions. The scorpions on release, were VERY deadly, and not fun at all to fight. Take a sniper, right? But give them AOE attacks, and the ability to cut 30-40% of a single squad's health down in one shot. Alright well, if there's only one, that doesn't sound too bad right? ..well the bugs loved to spam them. You can imagine how badly this would frustrate lots of people.

Luckily though the devs listened! Nowadays the arachnids are in a really good spot balance wise. Nothing feels OP or unfair, and nothing feels "too hard" or "uncounterable". You won't have moments where you feel like you got absolutely destroyed and there was nothing you can do, unless you rushed, or got caught off guard without a plan. The bugs have a heavy emphasis on melee combat much like the movies, but in game, they have numerous ranged attackers too to keep you on your toes and make sure you watch the front line regularly.

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Now.. the DLC! The first DLC is, in my opinion, not horrible, but also not too good. It has a lot of limited missions where you're forced to only use a small number of units with no bases or methods to produce more. Compared to the first campaign which was 80-85% that, it's a bit jarring. However, you may find that to be an alright trade off for what you get in return!

Mercenary units introduced in the first DLC are, honestly? Quite interesting, they open up new strategies and new ways to play that wasn't possible in the first campaign. One of the downsides is their voice lines do get repetitive though. "Sure thing! We're flexible."

I'm currently playing through the 2nd DLC right now, and so far? I'm having a blast compared to the first. The new units introduced on both bug and human factions are great and smooth to play against, abilities are fun to use and have great variety, and the new unit types feel right at home with the rest of the troops!

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If you're a Starship Troopers fan and a strategy game player, this is a great game on both points. It mixes various aspects from the books and movies and manages to strike a fine balance between both as well as keeping things in line with the feel of both! The gameplay is fun and unique compared to other strategy or RTS games which often revolve around managing things as quickly or efficiently as possible. This is a very "defense" oriented strategy game, and in my opinion? A great breath of fresh air.

If you don't play many strategy games but feel unsure about this because it looks interesting to you. Give it a look! Being more defense oriented it really relies on how well you use what you have, rather then how fast you can use it, hell sometimes rushing is actively discouraged. Running in and trying to take a hive early before you whittled down the defenders can get your entire force slaughtered if you aren't careful.

It's a good game!

TLDR: If you like Starship Troopers and RTS games: This one's good, the mechanics set it apart from other more spammy games and this one's much more defense oriented.

December 10th patch really was NOT a good direction to take this game, copying it from a mod rather then building it off of feedback from all sides was a mistake imo.

They basically just removed a lot of the new variety and tactics that the original variants of the ToS2 roles added, like executioner. Now a large portion of the roles are just ToS1 with a slightly different flavor.

It's almost the same game with slightly different roles now after this. Just get the original if the devs decide to keep on this road, it's not worth it.

Your enjoyment of the game largely depends on who you play with, then again this can be said for most multiplayer only games.

That said, this is a pretty fun little game in which you try to play mind games with the other people at your table. Each player gets a hand and you must decide when to lie, or when to call other players liars. If you're right and they call you a liar, they shoot themselves, if you're wrong when you call liar, you shoot yourself. Simple!

I've always wanted an excuse to bring a revolver into a bar!

I would've loved to actually PLAY this game.

AMD Ryzen 5 7600 6-Core Processor
12 core PC

Game crashes and bluescreens my PC on the first mission every single time I try.

Don't buy this until they RELIABLY fix the problems with AMD hardware. It's not worth the money.

If you thought the base game was too easy, this is for you. If you didn't, and hoped it would be more like the base game, avoid it.

I'll be honest, I'm disappointed with this one, I went into it thinking that the new map would be a lot of fun to play in and there'd be plenty of new stuff that'd be a blast to use, and fight. Instead.. it felt more like a gauntlet with one of the most annoying types of missions possible.

The base game had plenty of defense oriented missions, and missions that allowed you to build up an army, and really have fun with watching your massive pile of troopers fight a massive pile of bugs. This game, most of the missions are basically just: "Here's a small group of units, fight thru the whole map with em and pretty much all of your reinforcements are one-time." It's not fun for an entire campaign, to me at least. If this was one mission or two, out of the DLC, I wouldn't complain as much.

Then.. there's the balance. The balance isn't pre-nerf scorpion levels of bad, but, they expect you to be a lot more active in this one, and it's too different from the base game imo. This one, most of the levels are gauntlets. You'll come across map hazards in small, close-quarters esq rooms that can quickly kill your troops, and on top of that the hordes of bugs they throw at you are double to triple the size of your group.

Then, there's the new bug types. Stingers are not fun, they're like the spitters from the base game, which isn't bad, but they're a LOT more spammy. Not only that, but the hives they have now not only SPAWNS them, but they act like sniper towers, able to CONSTANTLY damage your troops if they get anywhere near close. In maps where reinforcing is either very limited or nonexistent, well, you can already see how that would get frustrating. Then, to top it all off, the classic bugs like Tigers are still here! So, that's fun..

Not everything is bad, the mercenaries were an interesting idea, being able to switch up your weapon types was really neat. It also saved you a lot of time and allowed you to be able to adapt to situations on the fly without requiring new squads, or you to let old squads die for new ones. But most of the time this doesn't really come into play because of the mission design, most battles aren't big enough for you to really DO that. You stick with what works, and you don't switch off of that, because if you do, you end up taking too many losses and failing.

There's also quite a few time based objectives as well that require you to beat certain missions in a certain time or fail. Those weren't too bad, but coupled with the small groups, and gigantic number of bugs, it was a slog.

This DLC could've been really good if it had played more like the original Kwalasha campaign, but the mission design just doesn't really let you play around. The units given to the player is interesting, the new bugs are interesting with a fewww frustrating bits, but the level design kills it for me.

The first game was an RTS with large armies and well placed unit and group management. This played more like a RTT game with heavy focus on small groups.

I followed this game for a few years after hearing of it being "pokemon with gun lmao" and then it finally released!

It's unironically fun, it has an ark-esq building system, with the creature catching style of PLA and stamina/durability of BOTW. Like, the game is surprisingly good, really good if you're into survival games. Not only that, but you can just assign your little creatures to your base, and they craft, generate resources, farm, etc, so you don't have to! I've never seen another game mix all these things together and do it well.

That being said there's quite a bit of jank at the moment. It's common for a pal to bug and walk in a circle attempting to pick up the same item over and over. This is easily fixable though if you pick it up yourself, but it gets annoying after awile. Also the map has quite a few "broken" areas hidden here adn there. Places where the textures are glitched or you can clip into strange places. But usually you have to actively look for these spots on the map and actively mess with it over and over to clip.

Aside from that though, honestly the game's great fun if you're into survival games! The survival systems aren't too punishing, you can adjust the difficulty to your liking however you'd like during world generation. If you're on the fence and not sure about it, look into it, it's a pretty good game!

If you don't mind some jank, that is. Whether or not this will improve in the future, we will see, but so far the devs seem intent on updating!

I will say right off the bat, this is not a difficult game. This is not hard or meant to be too challenging. If you are looking for something with more difficulty, the older LEGO games will be for you.

However, that being said.. this is the largest LEGO Star Wars game to date! The sheer amount of characters, missions and content to interact with, do and collect is staggering. Compared to previous games which had individual selections with their own missions, condensing each trilogy down to a series of 6-8 missions for each movie. This game has every single Star Wars movie/trilogy so far, and even characters from things like TV series' or extra content if you go for the character DLC. (Yes, even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Disney sequels.)

There are over 200 characters to collect in the base game, many missions to do, and places to explore. Every planet in the game is a large free-roam map with multiple places to go, things to explore and people to talk to. They even have player and class upgrades and various boosts to buy with things you find! That being said, if you aren't too keen on doing side missions and the story content is what you're after, this game probably has the shortest story segments of any previous LEGO Star Wars game. Previously each trilogy had many individual missions based off of each movie, here, each "era"/movie of Star Wars has only 5 individual missions for each. All with varying lengths in what you are actually supposed to do. For example, The Phantom Menace, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge of the Sith all together are only 15 missions long.

If you are looking for a LEGO game with lengthy story content similar to the Complete Saga, and want to spend a good long while on lengthy missions enjoying the variety, this game may not be for you. The missions aren't exactly long compared to The Complete Saga, but they aren't so short they're breezed through in a few minutes either, there's just less of them.

However, if you want a LOT of stuff to do in a LEGO game, and the story bits don't concern you much, like Freeplay, then you will likely really love this. There are so many characters, new classes, different abilities, and new "perks" with different types of characters that.. it's honestly staggering. Not only that but the open world areas have so many hidden areas, collectibles and easter eggs that it's honestly great to roam around in! Hell, they even made characters never before seen playable as playable characters in this, such as pod racers like Sebulba, characters have multiple outfits like Jar Jar's senator outfit, and everyone has all updated appearances compared to the older models used in Classic LEGO! Not to mention the voice acting.

TLDR: If your here for the story and mission/level design, you may want to skip this one as it has less individual missions and less mission length then the past LEGO Star Wars games. But if you want a game with a massive sandbox to play as whomever you want from a massive cast of characters, you'll like this! The sheer amount of characters they've shoved into this game is.. staggering.

Surprisingly quite a fun game!

It's a city builder tower defense game with survival mechanics in the vein of RimWorld, They Are Billions and a slight bit of Stronghold mixed in.

You are thrown into a procedurally generated world and start a camp with which you build up your own city from there. At first you have a small amount of workers and balance their roles using the structures. However as more time progresses things become smoother and the challenge gradually ramps up as does your village's capabilities.

However one thing to note is that the tutorials, while sufficient, are sparse and few and far between. Ironically enough the worst thing about the game (for me at least) is how little things are explained at the start. Don't get me wrong, it's part of the challenge to learn! But there's not even a tutorial that tells you the buttons on the lower left corner of your screen are how you designate resource zones. Which, without those, your resource buildings just do not function.

I feel like that's a bit of an oversight with tutorials, as, it is a biiiit obvious, but those buttons just do not stand out, and I stumbled across them by complete accident.

However, that being said, the game is great if you are a fan of survival oriented city builder/management games with TD elements! I'd recommend picking it up if you're looking for something slow going with a nice challenge inbetween and don't mind learning as you go.