Bomber Crew

A cute game of crew management.

Overview

In Bomber Crew, you send your plane out to do bombing missions in WW2 Western Europe. Most encounters involve trying to destroy a ground target while being harassed by enemy fighters. Most tasks are pretty simple but the meat of the game comes when you need to do too many things at once. 

Various Mechanics

Management

For the most part, your seven crew members do not need to be managed. When everything is going well, very little interaction is required. The stress of the game comes when problems arise. If the electrical system goes out, you need to order someone to repair it, then later order him back to his station. When a lot of things go wrong at the same time, it is overwhelming. Two gunners run out of ammo, the mechanic needs medical attention, an engine catches fire, and you are passing over your bombing target -- what do you do? This stress brilliantly captures the feel of "long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror", although without the boredom.

RPG

Your crew gains levels, you buy equipment, you unlock new stuff, you improve your airplane. The RPG elements could be improved, but they aren't bad for such a simple game.

Permadeath

The game is a little awkward when you lose your plane and crew. Instead of losing the game, you get replacements. These replacements are fairly well leveled, but likely weaker than what you had. This means that death just makes the game harder until you can recover. However, it makes me lose the connection I feel with my crew. Losing your plane is fairly easy to do.

Mechanics That Don't Work Well

This game has some cool mechanics that don't really play well.

Parachutes: In practice, it is rare to be in a situation where you need parachutes and have time to use them. Earlier in the game, medkits are far more useful.

Item Unlocks: This just feels clunky to me. Why not have everything unlocked from the beginning but be cost prohibitive? 

Survival Skills: If you plane goes down behind enemy lines, your crewmen might survive. That's cool and all, but it wasn't an important part of the game. My crew are far more likely to die during a mission. This mechanic should either be magnified or removed.

Crew Advancement: This is a huge missed opportunity. You only have one set of crew, they have unique roles, and death is reasonably frequent. When a crewman dies, you recruit a replacement. When a crewman is wounded, he is ready for the next battle. This isn't bad, but with a few tweaks, it could have been a really fun system of recruitment and training, similar to XCom. You could maintain backup crew that slowly gain levels from training. On easy missions you could swap some of your backup crew to give them more xp. With a full backup crew, losing your primary crew wouldn't hurt, but if you then lost your backup crew that could signal the end of the game. Forcing wounded crew to lose a few missions while they recover would make for interesting strategic choices. The frustrating thing is that all of those system almost exist -- crew gets wounded, there is a screen for recruitment, etc.

Other Annoyances

• Ordering the crew is often awkward. If a wounded guy is next to a turret, clicking in the area might heal the crew, man the turret, or just stand there doing nothing.
• Not enough feedback for who is selected. You are ordering people around but didn't realize you had the pilot selected? The ship starts to plummet.
• Selecting things is difficult. I've lost a few missions because I simply couldn't convince the crewman to pick up a medkit. I still haven't figured this out, even after asking Google.
• Parts of the plane are difficult to access. The inner port engine is hard to click on. The bomber station is hard to click on while doing an emergency dive. 

Should You Buy It

Despite the complaints, I do recommend Bomber Crew. It is cheap, easy to get into, and fun. It has some depth and replayability. I didn't finish the campaign, but someone with more patience, a faster brain, or the willingness to save-cheat would not have any problems.

Dicey Dungeons

 A cute roguelike deckbuilding dice game.

Overview

Dicey Dungeons is another entry in the genre of permadeath exploration card games. However, instead of a deck of cards, Dicey Dungeon uses collectible equipment. Instead of shuffling a deck, Dicey Dungeons rolls dice.

Similarities

Dicey Dungeons would like to claim similarity to the popular Slay the Spire (see my review of Slay the Spire). However, Dicey Dungeons is much less complex. A better comparison would be to Dreamquest. 

Style

The sound and graphics are simplistic and cutesy. It wasn't for me, but not especially distracting. When the sound got repetitive, I turned it off.

The Bad

It forces you to play all of the classes on an easy level before you can ramp up the difficulty. This meant I was bored while playing, but there seemed like the promise of an interesting game later. By the time I hit the "interesting" part, I was ready to shelve the game and didn't give it much of a chance.

Some of the classes require a lot of unnecessary analysis. The Witch has a lot of choices available depending how you wish to arrange your dice. For me this leads to analysis paralysis as I seek to find the optimal solution. It is a common complaint I have with games -- where I wish there was an undo button so I could rollback any predictable choice. So long as I don't reveal anything hidden or trigger a random event, a game should let me easily explore different choices.

Should You Buy It?

I would likely recommend Dreamquest and Slay the Spire before Dicey Dungeons. However, everyone has different tastes and Dicey Dungeons offers something unique.

Factorio

This was one of my most highly anticipated games. I waited for years for it to come out of early access and happily paid full price when it did.

Overview

Factorio is a game of optimization and refactoring. You build machines that build better machines that build even better machines. The bulk of the game is figuring out how to optimize supply chains. There are aliens who attack from time to time, but that feels like a minor element of the overall game play.

For me, the fun of the game was trying to come up with good designs that were scalable. There normally isn't much time pressure, but you have to design in real-time so if you are constantly interrupted by alien attacks. 

Multiplayer is lots of fun, but I love cooperative multiplayer games. In Factorio, having another player around has three advantages. First, it lets two brains solve problems. Some designs are complicated and it's nice to say, "you make the widgets and I'll make the gadgets." Second, there are lots of distractions in Factorio. Aliens attack, systems run out of materials, etc. Often one player will be deep in thought what the other is able to handle maintenance. Third, it's always nice to have another person around to celebrate accomplishments and discover cool things. 

Replayability

After one playthough, I don't feel the need to play any more. I probably will start up a new game to see if it's like a new game, or just drudgery. 

Compare to Other Games

I'm going to make a separate blog entry to compare Factorio, Rimworld, Don't Starve, and Oxygen Not Included.

Factorio is extremely similar to Mindustry, although it's a lot deeper. Mindustry has more "game" where you have challenges to overcome. Factorio is more about the process. 

Should You Buy It?

Factorio is a winner for me, but it's exactly the game I've wanted for a long time. This is not a simple question.