Alex Mickle
Alex Mickle is a gamer that traces his roots to JRPG’s on the PS1, but ultimately found his way to PC gaming by spending every afternoon after school playing Counterstrike at a local LAN gaming café. He is a father and husband that splits his gaming time into bursts whenever he can find time, or when ever he makes time. Alex enjoys variance and versatility in his gaming experiences and can be found asleep on the couch with a twitch steam on the television at the end of almost every night.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics Review
Hampered by subpar performance and graphics, coupled with a repetitive storyline, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics serves only as a starting point for a genre rife with unpolished entries.
A Knight's Quest Review
A ridiculous romp through a universe that doesn’t take itself too seriously, A Knight’s Quest offers an enjoyable and forgettable ride that’s only slightly marred by bugs, uninteresting combat, and a storyline that makes you laugh every once in a while.
Children of Morta Review
Generation Zero Review
An interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre, full of beautiful vistas and a streamlined interface. Moments of awe are punctuated with run-ins with the buggy and inconsistent AI.
Aftercharge Review
This squad-based tactical shooter is a fun and easy way to spend an hour, but suffers from paltry game modes, map variation, and character identity.
Sleep Tight Review
Sleep Tight is a top-down shooter with strong base building elements that provides go-to casual gameplay for any library.
Robothorium: Sci-fi Dungeon Crawler Early Access Review
Robothorium has an interesting plot and a fabulous soundtrack, but it falls short in fundamental areas, such as leveling, loot, customization of characters, and variation in dungeons.
FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION Review
Final Fantasy XV’s beautiful graphics and exciting fights unfortunately come with a confusing story, irritating characters, long and unnecessary cutscenes, and optimization issues.
BATTALION 1944 Early Access Review
Server-side problems is the biggest drag for BATTALION 1944 right now, yet it's evidence for how hungry players are for this shooter. This is a great Early Access title that feels balanced and has been created with care. So much is done right that the minor things wrong hardly matter.
WARTILE Early Access, Cont'd!
WARTILE is a creation that is meant to bridge the gap between a real time strategy and a tabletop games, with elements of card play mixed in. Figurine characters that you control begin scenarios on dioramas that are intricately designed and is comprised of many hexagonal tiles that characters move throughout. Each scenario has multiple objectives that are as simple as killing every enemy, and as complex as lighting tents on fire to prevent reinforcements, while also preventing an alarm from being sound when killing sleeping soldiers.
Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition Review
Right now, Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition is very much (if not only) a sum of its parts; luckily, Massive Damage made sure that each of those parts is well-executed. Hopefully, the developers continue their momentum and keep adding gameplay elements; with more variation in crew selection, the ability to actually build a ship with components you gather, and an expansion of the world in which the game persists, Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition can be a triumph.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam Review
When you play Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, just keep your head down, follow orders, and remember that you are not special; you are just a cog in the war machine and your only hope for survival is to lean on your wits, more so than to rely on your quick twitch trigger finger. Even then, you better hope your commander has a good head on their shoulders, otherwise you are in for a long day.
Impact Winter Review
Impact Winter may have just a few too many issues now, but the real reason it isn’t a must-buy is that it would be much more fun if you were just a lonely man wandering the wasteland for items to make your church better. Instead, you must keep wondering if the campfire burnt out, and if the nearly-useless compatriots huddled around it are slowly dying now because no one knows how to throw another damned baseball bat into the embers.
Brawlout Early Access Review
With a limited character pool, no story mode, and very few people that own the game due to its current release state, it is hard to stay online and interested for long periods of time. But, there is no doubt that as this game gains traction in the competitive community, and with piles of kids looking to beat the crap out of each other in a colorful way, Brawlout will find success.
Planet Nomads Early Access Review
Given that Planet Nomads is in alpha, some of the issues get a pass, but there are other, more serious optimization problems with this title, and the building mechanic is borderline terrible. Movement felt delayed, graphics looked choppy more often than not when moving, and the game went through a serious bout of crashing until I switched to a windowed-only view.
There’s a lot of room for improvement for this title, but the foundation the devs have built is workable. Keep your eyes on Planet Nomads going forward, but be wary; your expectations might not be met if you jumped into the game now.
Edengrad Early Access Review
Ultimately, server issues and stability have hampered Edengrad’s initial release. Were Edengrad a standalone offline game, it would be an ‘OK’ game. The problem is that Edengrad isn’t, though, and as an online game, server performance is mandatory — arguably the most important feature, even. The crashes, the lost characters, the performance dips, and more make this game unplayable.
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Review
Many issues, like linear progression and limited AI, that I have with Wildlands are issues rooted to the ‘open-world’ genre, and therefore not worth holding against Ubisoft. Wildlands offers a tight finesse for a shooter, and is sure to be enjoyed by gamers; however, it does little to go beyond this.
A House of Many Doors Review
A House of Many Doors is a terrifying trek through the unknown, a disjointed story with startling descriptions of lost memories and slow declines into madness. It is beautiful, haunting, gripping… and boring. It is simply hard to identify with it, and complicated to understand, which prevents it from truly capitalizing on its amazing elements which would otherwise stand alone so well.
Hellenica Review
Fundamentally, Hellenica is good. I actually think it represents the genre pretty effectively, especially because it fits neatly into a spot somewhere between the classic tactical RPG’s that have been around seemingly forever, and the new wave of casual story driven RPG’s that are so popular today.
Heroes of Issachar Early Access Review
I wanted to like this game, mostly because I find myself drawn to tedious city-building games and like to support developers, but this was nothing like what I could have anticipated. It is also strange to me that the game would seemingly go decrease in quality over the last 3 years, which is the only assumption I can make after watching the aforementioned video. Heroes of Issachar is bad enough that it is making me rethink any reviews I have ever done, because I don’t trust my rating system anymore.
Meadow Review
Might and Delight took the artistic style that they were known for and opened it up into a bit more of a diverse landscape, one that offers different seasons based on where you are on the map, and interesting landscape quirks that make exploring fun.
Industry Manager: Future Technologies Review
Industry Manager - Future Technologies wasn’t developed for broad accessibility, it was developed to scratch the itch that simulation gamers have, an itch that is not scratched easily.
Stardew Valley Review
There are titles that come along from time to time that make us question whether the ever-churning machine of AAA titles that push the graphical envelope further and further are necessary.