I don’t reach for the ‘m’ word – masterpiece – very often, but describing this top-down turnless tactics game without recourse to it would be perverse. Those fifty-one months of Early Access tinkering have paid off big time. If it wasn’t for the potentially divisive theme, the lack of saving, and some minor realism failings, I’d say KillHouse had produced that rare thing, a critic-proof game.
I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Read on to discover why PCG awarded an obscure £15 truck sim 85% back in 2012.
Simulatia and Grognardia can be awfully dour places. In realistic military and vehicular fare, frivolous details tend to be rare. While the lack of the whimsical and the extraneous arguably isn’t surprising given the development demands elsewhere, I love encountering stuff like Door Kickers 2’s gratuitous gas hobs and aerofly RC’s mischievous molehills in my digital playthings.
When a game’s Steam review graph looks like this (image link), reviews of said game can feel a tad superfluous. While I’d be more than happy to spend the next few evenings playing the endlessly entertaining Door Kickers 2 with my critical head on*, if the majority of Cornerites have already decided how they feel about this Early-Accessible-no-longer sequel, I may come at it from a different angle or assign the Friday slot to a game that isn’t blessed with quite so many satisfied customers.
In addition to a choreographable Coral Sea clash between taskforces linchpinned by the Lexington and Yorktown, and Shokaku and Zuikaku, the due-out-early-next-week Task Force Admiral demo includes an Easter egg the size of a Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp. Courtesy of a “crude experiment” called Fleet Defense, trialists will get to experience a small Japanese strike from the cockpit of a controllable Grumman F4F fighter.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
The captivating City Transport Simulator: Tram has reminded me of the inherent advantages tram sims have over train sims. When I fire it up, I know my fingers, eyeballs, and little grey cells are in line for a low-impact workout. I know there’s zero chance I’ll end up yawning at monotonous scenery, or willing a ‘distance to next station’ number to tick down faster.
Every Friday, Tally-Ho Corner’s cleverest clogs come together to solve a ‘foxer’ handcrafted by my sadistic chum and colleague, Roman. A complete ‘defoxing’ sometimes takes several days and usually involves the little grey cells of many readers.