Medieval Crafter: Blacksmith is a blacksmith simulator set in a nondescript medieval fantasy world. The player controls a dwarven smith in first person and is tasked with crafting weapons and armor that serve one of two purposes: to trade with the townsfolk for money or items, or to equip adventurers at his service so they may successfully return from dungeon delving or arena fighting with bountiful spoils.

Tirelessly working at the forge with all your tools is the core aspect of the game and such is made abundantly clear right from the beginning. It knows what it is and does not shy from forgoing anything but a barebones tutorial story just to get you acquainted with the mechanics. You are then let loose in your quest to craft progressively stronger equipment.

Yet even this simplistic gameplay loop seems to have been too ambitious of a goal. For reasons explored further below, to be a blacksmith in this game is a mind-numbing and unrewarding experience in great part due to it being an unfinished product, contrary to what leaving Steam's Early Access stage might imply.

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The main menu greets you with the inside of a blacksmith's workshop, giving you a glimpse into what you will soon be familiar with in the game. A building's interior, the player model, equipment, tools. It's a fine window to have as the first thing the player sees.


The armor sets all look simple and clean, the type that you might find in any regular old medieval setting. The weapons, bar a few exceptions among the lower-tier ones, look very exotic and downright fantastical for the most part, like they're straight out of a cartoony MMORPG. This clash of aesthetics does not mix well, and the first few times I noticed this jarring mismatch in the equipment my fighters were wearing, I actually had to check whether I had given them the correct armor. I did, but it was still hard to believe the weapon and the armor were of the same quality tier. This lack of aesthetic cohesion leaves a sour taste after all the work put into crafting the gear, only to see this disappointing end result.


The texture work is mediocre, with some particular NPCs looking downright unfinished as their half-open mouths and fluoride stares leave me holding my wallet a little bit tighter when making my way to the forge, tiptoeing my way to avoid the JPG puddles lest I be absorbed into the file. And there are some glitched textures such as on one of the hammer heads, which is kind of hard to miss when it's in front of your face.


The animations are also nothing to write home about. One exception is the walking animations; they leave me with no choice but to believe someone spilled oil all over the floor seeing how easily everyone slides across the cobblestone.

But for all these flaws, I must say the visual design is quite decent. With proper texture work and some better looking NPCs, the town square might actually look slightly deserving of being the center of the kingdom as it's supposed to be, especially with the enormous statue in the middle. The village where you sleep, with its occasional broken fences and bountiful green, might have been a good spot to take a breather and relax in. The ancient forest where you enchant equipment might have looked as magical as it's supposed to be, instead of just another patch in the woods.

Unfortunately, the visuals are clearly an afterthought, though thanks to the solid design behind the locations, there's a foundation here that could easily be improved upon.

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Despite there not being much audio overall, what little there is ended up being much more polished than the visuals or the writing. There's a few ambient tracks that are adequately immersive in a medieval fantasy way, helping you feel the tone of the setting. The main activity of the game, smithing, is accompanied with satisfactory sound effects for most of your actions, be it striking, quenching, fanning the flames, etc. And regarding voicing, while the dwarven smith the player controls is the only voiced character, he is brought to life quite well, his voicelines triggering according to what he's doing or who he's talking to. I actually chuckled a bit when I was removing equipment from my elf adventurer and suddenly heard a gruff voice saying, "Never trust an elf."

The only audio-related annoyance I can point to is the loud CLANG sound effect that plays every time you change locations. Not changing the entire zone, no, just simply going from the inside of the smithy to the outside, for example. It quickly becomes excessive.

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As a simulator video game, not much is expected from the literary department, as that's not a selling point in these types of games anyway. And accordingly, there is no story at all outside of the tutorial. The Royal Blacksmith is retiring and the King summons you to learn from him and take over his smithy. That's it, that's how the game starts, no beating around the bush. This retiring dwarven smith then takes you as his apprentice and shows you the ropes. After he's done his job, you never hear from him again, nor from the king or anyone else for that matter. The story is effectively over, and you are free to do as you please. You are then presented with a questlog giving you generic progression objectives that guide you along until you complete all content available in the game.

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On to the meat of the matter. True to its name, this game has you craft medieval equipment in your smithy, primarily using your mouse to interact with the tools at your disposal. This involves acquiring raw metal either from the mines, vendors or as rewards from adventuring, melting it into the appropriate shape, and assembling it together with other materials.

Being a simulator type game, I never expected significant depth to its mechanics. And yet even with these low expectations, the minigames involved managed to surprise me with how horribly simplistic they are. Only forging and sharpening offer any semblance of a challenge. Forging requires you to hit specific spots on the metal to shape it correctly, while sharpening requires a properly angled, even application across the blade lest you lower the rarity. The remainder of the mechanics in your smithy just involve a lot of mindless drag and drop, incessantly and unabashedly.


This would be less of an issue if there were some way to speed up the process, and while technically there are nodes in your tiny skill tree that speed up forge heating and mining, I found the difference to be rudimentary. The overwhelming majority of the crafting process remains a slog. On top of that, the enchantment table is unnecessarily divorced from the rest of the workshop. Making me walk all the way there for that final part of the crafting process each and every time feels like the game was intentionally going out of its way to annoy me with filler segments. At a certain point I just stopped enchanting my gear; the difference it made in the final product just wasn't worth the trek.

All of this process has a purpose: the equipment. The great final product. Where does this product go? Well, it depends on your goal. If you want to make money, which is needed to hire adventurers, buy materials and several other things, you need to sell it. And there is only one main source of money: customers. There are customers that request specific items with specific stats, and there are others that just buy whatever you put on your racks to sell. The former, with its elevated requirements, should naturally reward you more handsomely, right? Well, this is not the case.

Despite having stricter criteria, the customers wanting special orders do not, in fact, pay more handsomely than the ones that just buy things off the shelf. The only upside is that they also offer a small amount of materials as rewards, which is honestly virtually worthless unless they're offering particularly rare materials, and those offers only start appearing much, much later. So for the vast majority of the game, you are actively encouraged to refuse customer orders and just pump out whatever is more expensive to sell and profit quickly. There is no difference between the speed at which items of different price tags are sold. You'd think cheaper equipment would fly off the shelves and more expensive parts would have fewer potential buyers, but this was not my experience. Once again, the game shows itself more simplistic in practice than in theory.


Okay, on to adventurers then. Your hirelings that actually fight in the dungeons and the arena, your minions. You hire them at an increasingly higher price and they each have their own classes and personal traits, the former affecting their base stats and the latter their chance of success in specific dungeons. Yet, in practice, these aspects are mostly reduced to flavor text. Their equipment will make up for over 80% of their final stats, making classes and traits practically worthless.


This simplicity is reflected in how little thought is needed to clear the dungeons, which range from Tier 1 to Tier 5 in order of difficulty, similarly to equipment rarity in order of quality. An adventurer's stats all contribute to a final number which makes up his Hero Power. Each dungeon has a Required Hero Power value, and as long as you hit that minimum, be it with a single adventurer or through a party of up to 3, you clear the dungeon, no questions asked, nothing else involved. No need to care about classes, traits, specific stats (of which there are several) or anything else. Just off the top of my head, even something as rudimentary as needing an 800 fire damage weapon for clearing an ice dungeon would make the adventuring infinitely more engaging than it currently is. As it stands, just make higher tier equipment and you're done.

Not to mention that the Tier 5 (and final) dungeon is beatable with Tier 3 equipment. So not only is the main goal of the game tediously straightforward, there is also no point to crafting Tier 4 and 5 equipment at all, which comprises 40% of the gear in this blacksmithing game. Allow me to reiterate: The endgame gear has no endgame content to be used on. Coincidentally, when browsing items to forge, items of Tier 3 to 5 all have the same rarity color, yellow, and rarity classification, "Legendary", despite there being a vast stat difference between them. This leads me to believe Tiers 4 and 5 were very hastily and recently added to the game with little thought as to how they would add to the experience.

Well, there must be some challenge in the Arena, right? There is, but it's also shoddily implemented. The arena tournament comes in 4 versions of increasing difficulty, each with an appropriate minimum Hero Power required. Problem is, the combatants always scale to your adventurer's Hero Power, no matter the stage selected. So if you picked a 2000 power stage and signed up an 8000 power adventurer, suddenly you're equally matched with your opponents. And since the outcome of the fight is determined by a flat percentage reflecting the discrepancy in Hero Power between your adventurer and your opponent, no matter how much you improve, how good your equipment is, how strong your adventurer is, the enemy will always scale up to your power and make each arena fight outcome a 50-50 coin flip.

I won by exploiting the system and signing up my adventurer without equipment, then equipping him after the opponent had already scaled, but the design choice is still beyond absurd. Or was it even a design choice? Why would you have different arena tiers if the enemy always scales? Might this scaling be an error in the system? Who knows.


Okay, so no challenge in the mechanical aspects of the crafting procedure, no challenge in the end goals of the game itself... surely, there must be something engaging about this title? Oh look, there's a day and night cycle. You have to go to bed after a certain hour, as there won't be shopkeepers or customers around to trade with anymore. Maybe management may be the real game here. Buying materials and selling products, a good shopkeeper may have to balance a tight budget to meet strict deadlines, right?

Well, no. There is no kind of overarching time limit so you are free to endlessly mine metals and just wait for shops to restock. The only kind of deadline to put pressure on you is from customers with specific requests, and those are incredibly generous anyway, not to mention completely optional. So there's a day-night cycle and you have to go to bed for... no reason. I guess +1 roleplay points. Another aspect of the game that could have been far more fleshed out than it is.

Oh and there's a random chair inside the castle that seems to be interactable but is not, surrounded by an invisible wall that staves off curiosity. And it's not hidden either, just sitting there in a huge open room with purple flames. This, along with all other examples provided above, lead me to believe this game was released from Early Access far, far too prematurely.

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Completing the two major goals you set out to achieve, clearing both the dungeons and the arena with your adventurers wielding the fruits of your labour, feels incredibly unfulfilling, and neither the crafting procedure nor the smithy's management feel challenging in the slightest. In a game focused around progression, the only paltry approximation of it is in the numbers and the weapons' appearance. The final dungeon is just like the first dungeon with a higher power requirement, while the final arena stage is functionally the same as the first stage. After you're done with the couple hour tutorial in the beginning, you have every tool unlocked, so there is no difference between the gameplay loop during hour 3 and hour 12. Honestly if you completed the tutorial, you've essentially completed the game, because there is nothing new, different or challenging to look forward to.

It's not all bad, seeing as I scavenged some enjoyment out of the shop and adventuring management aspect, optimizing my profits and progression in as little time as possible in lieu of a hard deadline. That and the vague notion that this was a short game probably pulled me through the experience. And while the journey to finish the questlog was brief, it deserved to be far shorter with how little meaningful content there actually is.

To be honest, I really wanted to like this game. Seeing how you are allowed to have up to 7 adventurers and dungeons could only take 3 participants at most, I was kinda hoping to later unlock some new adventure type that incorporated a larger party, maybe like raids or dragon hunts or town defenses or something, maybe those would be the real challenge and have some new mechanics I can't just stat-check or would force me to consider class synergy of some kind in order to overcome.
But no. Tier 5 Dungeon^tm is the best we got. I like this game's premise decently enough, but it was just not executed well at all.


A lot of its shortcomings would have made much more sense if this were an Early Access title, but it is not. I truly am at a loss as to who might be the target audience for this. The crafting process is both too involved to let the shopkeeping aspect take the spotlight, possibly allowing this to be more of a management simulator, and too shallow to be the satisfying crafting simulator it presents itself as. It feels as if the developers did not know which direction to go with, resulting in a half-hearted mix that is neither realistic and immersive as a simulator is supposed to be, nor is it fun and engaging as a game is supposed to be. The gameplay is not stimulating, progression is shallow and unrewarding, and the world looks like a half-baked amalgamation of free 3D assets. Maybe players completely enamored with blacksmithing will enjoy this more than I did. Even then, surely other titles are more deserving of quenching that thirst.

Overall this is quite the Low Quality game, one which truly makes me feel like indie game developers might be relying on AI a bit too much.

Visuals - 4/10
Audio - 6/10
Story - N/A
Gameplay - 3/10

Overall - 3/10

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, created by Polish studio Fumi Games, strips away the neon and grit of modern shooters in favor of a 1930s noir filter. It plays out as a single-player narrative experience where cartoon physics are applied to first-person gunplay, using a high-contrast black-and-white palette and big-band music to build atmosphere. Behind the novelty of its hand-drawn sprites lies a traditional first-person shooter loop: fast movement, secret hunting, and an arsenal used to dismantle corruption in Mouseville.

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Gameplay

Protagonist Jack Pepper, P.I., goes through a range of locations, from dark alleyways to a zeppelin owned by a corrupt politician. His cases play out in an old-school first-person shooter style, built around fast movement, dashing from cover to cover, and close-range gun and melee combat.

The game world is structured into areas, with Jack’s office acting as a central hub where he returns between levels. From there, he manages cases through a Crime Wall system, where collected clues are stored and organized. As more clues are gathered, new leads unlock and guide progression to the next objective. Between missions, Jack can prepare by stocking up on ammo, weapons, and other supplies. The Crime Wall ultimately feels like little more than a dressed-up way of unlocking the next level, without serving a meaningful gameplay purpose. It lacks any real deduction or interaction, especially when compared to adventure games like Sherlock Holmes or Broken Sword, where collecting and connecting clues is central to progression.
I found the overworld to be very unnecessary. It adds little to the experience and feels out of place in a boomer shooter. The car controls are also clumsy, and the system would have been better served by simply selecting destinations from a menu rather than driving between locations.

Combat is straightforward, with Jack able to jump and dash until his stamina runs out, alongside a fairly large arsenal of weapons. As the game progresses, encounters become more hectic, with a wider mix of enemy types forcing faster movement and more aggressive use of his tools.
One of the key movement tools is Jack’s tail, which allows him to glide and gain upward momentum near fans. It can also be used to swing from hooks in a manner similar to Indiana Jones. Additional upgrades expand his mobility further, including double-jump boots, a suction-based wallrun upgrade, and Monkey Arms that allow him to vault up to otherwise unreachable areas.

There is also a minigame called Baseball Cards, found in a bar near Jack’s office. It’s a turn-based card game built around baseball rules. Winning matches grants tokens, with 20 required to obtain the minigame’s only real reward: a zapper weapon from a nearby slot machine.

Unfortunately, the mode feels more like a distraction added simply because the devs wanted a card minigame rather than because it meaningfully adds to the experience. While the mechanics are functional enough, matches quickly become repetitive and the rewards do little to justify the time or currency invested into them. Considering the weapon is weaker than the default gun and relies on limited, expensive ammunition, the payoff hardly justifies the amount of time spent playing Baseball Cards.

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Equipment

Lockpicks can open certain doors and safes through a minigame. In its basic form, Jack must manipulate a flexible lockpick to reach each pin without blocking his own path. More difficult variants restrict available moves and also introduce spikes that will immediately end the attempt if touched. Failure seals the target lock permanently.
In my opinion, it’s a complete waste of time and interrupts the flow of the game. One minute you are hectically running and dashing around an arena killing enemies, and then you need to lockpick doors, which kills the pacing, especially in chase scenes where every second should count. It would make more sense for Jack just to kick the door in or blow it up.
Jack also has access to a wide variety of firearms. He starts with a Micer (a pistol resembling a Mauser) and acquires additional weapons over time which can be upgraded. Unfortunately, some weapons feel underpowered, and visual effects can sometimes obscure hit feedback, making it hard to tell whether shots are landing and encouraging more blind firing than precision. I ended up relying mostly on the Micer, James Gun, and Portable Freezer, as they were effective enough to handle most encounters.

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Sound and Visuals

When first booting up the game, you’re presented with various noir-inspired options for film grain and diffusion. The sound degradation settings are a nice touch, ranging from a clean, modern mix to filters like Vinyl and Cellulose Disc that add a warm, crackling texture. More extreme options, such as the Cylinder settings, introduce a heavily distorted, lo-fi quality that makes the soundtrack feel like a century-old recording. The soundtrack fits the noir setting well, with slower, moody tracks during exploration and more energetic, jazz-inspired pieces during combat. The voice acting is consistent, with characters matching their visual design—smaller shrews have high-pitched voices, while larger rats sound deeper and more gravelly. Jack Pepper is voiced by Troy Baker (Joel Miller from The Last of Us), whose performance fits the character well. Unfortunately, the dialogue often feels juvenile and overly self-aware, which clashes with the noir tone. A more serious story would have benefited the game, using its cartoon aesthetic as a deliberate contrast to a darker detective narrative.

Speaking of the aesthetic, the environments are rendered in 3D, while key items and interactable objects are presented in a more cartoonish, hand-drawn style. This contrast works well, with stylized elements standing out clearly against the more grounded surroundings. The game’s black-and-white presentation reinforces its noir optics, and the environments themselves are varied, ranging from dark alleyways and police stations to airships, film sets, swamps, and secret laboratories.

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Enemies

Combat encounters are visually engaging because enemy variety is tied closely to the game’s faction design rather than relying solely on mechanical differences. Cultists, mobsters, and crooked cops all have distinct visual styles that help encounters feel grounded within the world itself. Even when enemy archetypes overlap mechanically, the different faction aesthetics help fights maintain a strong sense of identity and make combat easier to read during chaotic moments.

However, while the game introduces melee attackers, shielded enemies, ranged units, and flying threats, many encounters eventually begin to feel repetitive over time. Several enemy types share similar behaviors despite belonging to different factions, which limits how much combat evolves throughout the campaign. Overall, the faction design succeeds in making the world feel cohesive and visually memorable, even if the underlying enemy variety is not always deep enough to keep every encounter feeling fresh. The occasional bosses do little to spice things up, as each rely on one gimmick and as soon as you figure it out, the fight becomes repetitive and trivial. Still, I have to say that they have nice introductions and arenas.

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Conclusion

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is visually strong and has a fitting soundtrack, solid voice acting, and varied set pieces. However, it is a very basic shooter at best, and unfortunately, it isn't good. The game is just not worth playing even if the visual presentation is outstanding. You'd be better off playing any of the other indie boomer shooters out there.

Ground Zero is a retro clone designed by Malformation Games in the style of old Resident Evil games by Capcom. Anyone who’s been wanting a classic, fixed-camera survival horror game with ammo and health management will be interested in this.
While the name of Resident Evil lives on, things just haven’t been the same since the release of the fourth game oh-so-long ago. The franchise has undergone even more drastic changes since then that make the over-the-shoulder camera innovation from RE4 look quaint. No, the days of low-res corridors, slow door-opening cinematics, and corny dialog are never coming back to mainstream, and in their absence a cottage industry has risen up to make money off of your childhood memories. Malformation Games is one of several developers looking to deliver the survival horror goods with their new title, Ground Zero.


In 2030, an asteroid impacts Daejeon, South Korea, spreading radiation and biological contamination across the country. The Transcontinental Union Military (which is totally not a replacement for the UN) decides to send in two specialists—Jang Seo-Yeon from South Korea and Evan Fielding from Canada—with no additional support of any kind, to find out what’s going on and solve the problem. After the opening cinematic, you get treated to the first of several branching paths.


I decided to go with the beach and enjoyed a leisurely stroll along the shore, fighting mutant dogs. From the shore I went through a beached ship. The dialog indicated that the beach path was quicker, but more difficult—a subjective matter.
For those not in the know, the gist of the typical survival horror game works like this: nearly every room is displayed from a handful of fixed camera angles that change depending on where you're standing. Monsters often lurk in said rooms, usually out of sight to make life challenging. Attacking most enemies is as simple as point and shoot. Ammunition and healing are almost always at a premium. Saves are limited to special rooms and, depending on the game, require a special item (i.e., ink ribbons) to save, adding to the resource management.

Ground Zero has its own take on this. Ammo tends to be scarce at first, but to make up for it, you can perform timed, critical shots by holding and releasing the proper button at the right moment; this kills weaker enemies with one round. I get the feeling that the Malformation devs didn't like running out of bullets. This worked out pretty swell for me most of the time since it let me avoid knife fighting or having to bolt past enemies to conserve bullets. It’s obvious the devs intended players to use it, because before I started investing heavily into picking off monsters that way, I was always getting dangerously low on ammo. So, if your sense of timing is off, you might be in for a bad time. Also, sometimes enemies that hit the floor aren't always dead. A quick tap in close range will finish them off with an execution maneuver, complete with a small cinematic.


GZ also introduces dodging and parrying to the mix. Tapping the dodge button lets your character dash out of the way of oncoming attacks at the cost of stamina; once it runs low, the heavy breathing starts and the dashing stops. It's a much nicer alternative to awkwardly running past monster strikes or circling around oncoming projectiles. Characters can block oncoming attacks by holding down the appropriate block button. Parrying requires a timed block coordinated with the enemy’s attack, but the window is fairly generous on normal difficulty. One of the few times I died was in the process of learning how to time my blocks. I also made the unpleasant discovery that not all attacks can be blocked. A successful parry opens up the enemy to a melee riposte, a great way to save on ammo if you don’t mind standing there parrying an enemy until it dies. Counterattacking an enemy to death is also a good way to get a perfect genome DNA sample.


Everything you kill can be scanned for DNA; the better the sample, the more points you get. You can spend these points later at automated shops conveniently located around the wasteland that sell everything your survivalist heart could desire: guns, ammo, supplies, etc. You can also sell anything you don’t need for additional points. The caveat is that riddling monsters full of holes leaves you with degraded samples. Getting a perfect sample requires taking it out in hand-to-hand combat; pity, then, that the survival knife is a truly terrible weapon. Still, it's a nice way of rewarding skillful play and on harder modes every extra point will count. I found myself taking down as many enemies as I could with counterattacks to squeeze as many points as I could from enemies.


Knife aside, the game offers quite a few fun weapons for killing the biological terrors you’ll encounter, far more than your typical RE game. Some are only found depending on the paths you take in the game; at one point I had my choice of going through a hospital, which would have had more medical supplies, or a police station, which promised me more weapons. I was in no danger of running out of healing junk, so I hit the PD and walked away with several shiny new guns and armloads of extra ammo.


Of particular note are hand grenades. I can’t say I’m a fan of them. The nature of the fixed camera means I was never sure of where they’re going half the time. I also didn’t want to hit myself with them, and it takes time I never had enough of to line up the toss. Flashbangs don’t last long enough to be useful, though I did manage to take out a few groups of zombies with some regular grenades. Otherwise, grenades ended up being sold at the shops for more weapons and ammo.

Ground Zero follows the tradition of the save room, complete with a save item. Once the save station is on you can save as much as you want, and the save item is almost always nearby, which almost invalidates the purpose of having a save item in the first place. The entire point of having ink ribbons in RE was to put pressure on the player to decide when to save since there was an upper limit on how many times he could do so, but this made more sense in a hub environment. GZ also autosaves at key points in the game, but the hardest unlockable difficulty removes this feature. Save rooms also contain safes that are all but identical to RE's item boxes that let you store all your extra junk, except they require you to solve a math problem first. On normal puzzle difficulty, none of the puzzles were hard, but, if you have trouble, there are two ways to open safes; a safe-cracking explosive will blast it at the cost of losing whatever bonus items are inside, and a cypher can reveal part of the solution. Since I never had any trouble on normal, safe-crackers and cyphers ended up being vendor trash. Safes are linked through a pocket dimension, so what goes into one is available in all.


From about the time I finished the police department, ammo conservation was a complete nonissue. Once one weapon got low, I could switch off to another and keep going. My timed-crit skills were impeccable, and I had enough ammo between all of my weapons that I could clear every room of monsters. I also had more than enough genome points to buy out every store of its ammo. In short, I think normal difficulty was easy in disguise.

In lieu of Resident Evil’s colored herbs, Ground Zero uses a set of colored serums and an injection system. Green is for health, red for stamina, and blue for antibody (poison cure). The syringe holds up to three doses of a serum, but they all get used up in one shot. Serums can be mixed together to extend their effects, but the real strength lies in putting three of the same kind together for a permanent upgrade to your stats. Three health serums give a permanent boost to health and damage resistance, three antibodies make it harder to get infected, and so on. The game makes this system clear when it first introduces the serums and the main idea here is that you’ll want to hoard your precious healing items while avoiding damage at all cost to inject yourself at the last minute. However, I noticed that I'd capped most of my stats by a bit over the halfway mark and I could take quite a beating before I needed to heal myself again. I ended the game with a safe full of extra serums, but I'm sure on a harder difficulty this would become a life-or-death situation. The syringe doesn't take up any inventory space and is another example of the developers obviously disliking an element of classic RE, namely, how healing items hog your pockets. GZ still has traditional medical kits and the serums themselves take up item slots, but it's very nice to be able to have a full heal on standby without needing to lug around extra junk. It's also important to note that inventory space can be expanded, provided you can find the upgrades.

Ground Zero doesn’t bother trying to separate itself from its roots. In fact, it seems to try to check every single box it can before the game is over. I had my choice of the hospital or a police department, and RE did both of those. Later on, a segment of the game takes place on a moving train while being attacked by what’s probably the tail of a giant, mutant scorpion (like in Resident Evil Zero), and there’s one area where I got jumped by reanimated raptors and had to square off against a T-Rex, so they managed to get Dino Crisis into the mix. GZ is derivative in a big way, but you’re not playing this because it’s a shiny new take on the genre; you want it because you long for the classic survival horror that Capcom left behind.

I found GZ’s story engaging, and there are at least two different endings. The branching paths mean you’ll get some replay out of the main mission. Unlike most traditional RE games, GZ plays in a chapter-by-chapter, mini-hub progression rather than one or two large hubs that last the entire game. I’m rather grateful that Malformation didn’t try to mimic the typical Capcom campiness of the era. Seo is a likable character; Evan is alright, though he does try to take the role of “cowboy” too much in lieu of an American counterpart. There's one more character who shows up later who’s a bit obnoxious by design, and while you can kill her, I’m pretty sure that leads to the bad ending, and she’s fairly low-key. There’s no political grandstanding or woke nonsense that I can see. Once you’re done with the game, then comes the unlockable goodies: clothes, cheats, and new visual modes. Also, you get a new mini-game called Apocalypse Crisis, a time attack gauntlet through various maps that lets you rack up more genome points; pity, then, that I ended the game with a huge stack of them.

One thing missing from GZ is the need to search every nook and cranny for items. Almost everything is out in the open, and once passed by, it will show up on your map, so, even if you didn't actually see that box of ammo when you went through the locker room, which makes it hard to miss extra loot. I did find one or two things tucked in a background prop, but that felt like more of a secret for those who want to scour every room.

There are still things that could be better. Malformation already released a patch to deal with performance issues. The shotgun decides it doesn’t want to do damage anymore even if you have a perfect point-blank shot on the target. I personally found grenades to be a waste of time. Upgrading my knife made it even worse. The map only lets you look at your current level, and this is more annoying than you’d think because there’s a lot of Z-level backtracking in some areas. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for a vehicle section, namely piloting a motorboat through a flooded city. The vehicle controls left a lot to be desired: pressing right usually made me go left, pressing left usually made me go left, but I could never really be sure when the game would change it up and I'd have to let go and gently tap the stick a few times hoping to get a new bead on which way the mystical spirit of the boat wanted to lead me. To make it all more challenging there are angry tentacles waiting in the water to thrash the boat if you get too close and toxic clouds to race through. Don't get through them in time? You die.

Remember what I said about subjective difficulty? I died exactly five times, ran out of ammo once, and never injected myself with anything less than three doses of a serum, so I was always upgrading my stats until I maxed them. I was only ever infected one time, which required a mad dash back to the save room to use a biohazard kit I’d found along the way instead of one of my precious antibody doses. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult either. My guess is that easy is game journo mode, normal is easy, and hard might be what would have passed for normal back in the 90s. I ended my game with a huge surplus of ammo, weapons, and supplies. Additional difficulty modes are unlocked upon completion of the game, so somewhere in there I’m sure I can find a happy place that makes me hate life. Anyone familiar with this style of game might want to start on hard instead. In addition to unlockables, there are also collectibles for those who want to go all-in: 12 zodiac coins are hidden somewhere in ruined South Korea. I managed to find 5 of them. No idea if you get anything nice for the trouble.

Ground Zero is an excellent successor to the classic Resident Evil style, offers a few nice quality-of-life changes of its own to the formula, and is well worth your time and money.

Mirage 7 is a dark fairytale third-person adventure game blending fantasy and sci-fi elements, developed by Italian studio Drakkar Studios. Nadira, a young girl, journeys through a desert with her pet lizard, Jiji, in search of a lost oasis, hoping to find a way to save her sister.

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Gameplay

Nadira's adventure proceeds through the traditional point-and-click adventure formula: she must find items and use them in combination with each other and the environment to solve puzzles. Her pet lizard companion offers assistance through the "Lizard Eyes" ability, which reveals hidden items in a short range. The ability turns the screen dark blue and items are highlighted in a bright orange. You can use Lizard Eyes whenever you want by pressing left bumper on a controller or the middle mouse button.
Items can be combined through the inventory screen. For example, refilling the canteen, one of Nadira's most important items, is simple: just select waterleaves (the plants used to restore its healing charges) in your inventory and combine them with the canteen. Combat is quite simplistic: Nadira has a dagger to do a basic attack with a click of the left mouse button. She can also dodge with shift, or attack with her slingshot using both mouse buttons, which is also needed to solve puzzles.

The puzzles are on the easy side but still quite nicely presented. For example, you come across two lit braziers with a nearby plaque that describes soldiers who were outnumbered and under attack; they used the darkness to their advantage to save themselves. Dousing the braziers plunges the area into darkness and solves the puzzle.

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Sound and Visuals

The voice acting is generally adequate, though a handful of bit characters with minimal screen time sound amateurish, slurred, or mumbled. On the plus side, Nadira's voice actress is pleasant to listen to, and the mysterious vizier she meets along the way has quite the enigmatic voice.
The soundtrack is good, with a distinct Arabic theme, prominently featuring the oud, a traditional Middle Eastern lute which enhances the game's sense of place.

The graphics are good, with detailed, stylized character models. The environments are high-quality, bringing the desert to life through visible heat effects and footprints left in the sand where Nadira and Jiji have been.

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Difficulties

The game offers standard difficulty options, with no unique variations. I played the game in Normal Mode, and the enemies were engaging enough that I needed to heal myself multiple times. However, if you are just looking for a fun puzzle adventure, I suggest Story Mode, while you might prefer Challenge Mode to push yourself. The main thing that changes with difficulty is HP. I did a comparison, and Story Mode has enemies dying very quickly, while Challenge Mode turns them into bullet sponges. Nadira, on the other hand, will die after fewer hits in Challenge, compared to Normal and Easy, where she can take a lot more damage before she dies. Puzzles stay the same regardless of difficulty.

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Conclusion

Mirage 7 is a short yet fun puzzle adventure that mixes fantasy and sci-fi elements quite nicely. The straightforward gameplay was simple and enjoyable. Combat feels somewhat clunky without a lock-on feature, but that was the only negative I felt was worth complaining about. Overall, I recommend it.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind the hyphen on "X-COM". The new games by Firaxis spell the name without it, while the classic games have a hyphen in between "X" and "COM". This is important for references to be understandable. No monitors were harmed in making this review.

In 1994, MicroProse released UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM: UFO Defense), a game that took the nascent gaming world by storm and essentially defined the genre now known as “squad tactics.” While many modern games—such as Battle Brothers, Wartales, and Silent Storm—draw inspiration from X-COM, the franchise also spawned a direct line of remakes, reboots, and spiritual successors. The most famous of these is XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis, 2012), while other contenders include Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019), the UFO: After series (2003-2007), and Goldhawk’s Xenonauts (2014). I played the original Xenonauts back in the day and found the base game to be a bit underwhelming. The vanilla experience felt short of greatness and mods played a crucial role in elevating Xenonauts beyond mediocrity. Naturally my expectations for Xenonauts 2 were moderate. Before examining how it stacks up against other successors, it’s worth outlining the philosophy and design decisions behind each of these games’ lineages.

The Firaxis Games (henceforth referred to as “XCOM 1” and "XCOM 2") revamped the original formula in several important ways. Gone is the time units system. In its place, Firaxis introduced the controversial “two actions” system, forever “blessing” the world with soldiers running past their enemies and the almighty “overwatch” button. The flat stat progression is replaced by a class system and individual roaming enemies are replaced by the pod system, whose legacy remains divisive to this day. Many X-COM purists accuse Firaxis of being unfaithful to what made the original game great. On the other hand, Firaxis doesn’t fun police the players. Blaster launchers, psionics and flying snipers make a glorious comeback, giving the games their own brand of exploding, space magic fun.

The “after” series (UFO: Aftermath, UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight) nowadays is more of a niche curiosity. Being real time with simultaneous actions, it didn't really influence other successors. Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) did find a niche audience and attempted basically the same thing as Xenonauts, but its experimental philosophy with free aim, diplomacy and evolving aliens stands in stark contrast with the latter’s staunch, balance-driven conservatism. Indeed, Xenonauts 2's take on X-COM boils down to deepening the mechanics, treading similar ground while making sure that whenever power fantasy and FUN clashes with challenge and “balance”, the Balance Gods get their due.

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Geoscape

The strategic layer of Xenonauts 2 happens in the Geoscape, which will immediately be familiar to veterans of previous games. The game rejects the modern trend of single base campaigns, opting instead to force the player into at least building a second base to cover whatever continents were left out of the detection range. The air game not only makes a comeback, it is THE most sophisticated interception system in any X-COM successor to date. Air battles can be auto resolved or played manually. The combination of weapons, interceptors and enemies allow for plenty of variance in Earth’s struggle for air superiority against its would-be conquerors. It is quite satisfying to defeat a stronger enemy squad through clever flanking and superior dogfighting. It’s also worth mentioning that new aircraft don’t just bring more speed and armor; they also bring new tricks that can be used in battle to outmaneuver enemy ships.


New to the sequel is the “operations” system, which introduces a new resource for the player to manage. Operation Points (OP) represent the clandestine war between Xenonauts and Aliens for influence over various human groups, like scientists, manufacturers and intelligence agencies. Once these assets are secured, the player receives bonuses like faster research, reduced panic or just more OP. Conversely, the visitors will try to infiltrate these groups, raising panic and making life harder for the player. Once all relevant groups in a continent are secured, a larger continent bonus is applied, similar to securing all regions in a continent in XCOM 1. Aside from applying a stacking passive bonus, OP can be used for requisitioning immediate benefits in the form of materials or cold hard cash. The decision making regarding OPs boils down to balancing short term benefits with expanding your network for long-term returns.


The economic aspect of Xenonauts 2 is also one of its stronger suits. Players are tasked with managing money, materials and operations points in order to stay ahead of the curve. The goal of a campaign can be summarized as “don’t fall behind” and to that end the game presents you with an overwhelming number of considerations. Do you build another lab or go for another plane? Do you burn your OP for cash or do you save for a new supporter? How many soldiers on reserve are enough? Can you afford a permanent upgrade or do you need the resources for something more pressing? Is it time to increase radar coverage and can you defend your new assets? In every other X-COM successor you reach a point where the economy becomes a non-issue, usually around the midgame, but in Xenonauts 2 scarcity will haunt you for the entire campaign.

Speaking of scarcity, Xenonauts 2 brought its own middle-of-the-road approach to the classic strategy of becoming the world's premier arms dealer. It's shocking for me to think there are people so invested in fun policing single player games that they proclaim manufacturing plasma weapons and selling them for a hefty profit was an "exploit" in the original game, instead of a logical conclusion to the premises of the game itself. Firaxis "solved" this by making upgrades squad wide by default, so individual rifles are simply not represented in their games. In this game the profit margin of equipment lowers with each piece sold. Hence, arms dealing is profitable, but not an endless well of infinite money. Idle engineers will also generate money for you, but the opportunity cost of doing so makes hiring engineers for idling them a poor usage of your limited resources.

Another innovation on the strategy layer is the delegation system, or “why is nobody else doing something about these aliens?” Squad tactics is a repetitive genre by design and every campaign inevitably reaches the point of fatigue. You actually can have too much of a good thing and even if the tactical layer is good (and we’ll get to that in a bit), players can only remain invested in so many missions. The in-game justification for the system is that world governments are very interested in recovering downed UFOs, so they pay you for the privilege. You can say no and recover yourself, but that costs you OP. This can be disabled when starting a new game, but I found that the 2 missions per UFO system is helpful in avoiding turning the campaign into a slog. I find it superior to, say, an auto resolve system.

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Tactical layer

The missions themselves play out very similarly to the classic games, with a system of time units (TUs) governing the action economy. All attacks cost a percentage of total TUs, so the stat won’t provide you with more attacks per turn, but it will allow your soldier to move considerably more before attacking. This prevents TUs from becoming the ultimate stat, as with AP based systems like Jagged Alliance 3 and Fallout Tactics, where the AP stat trumps all others. Action refunds and attack reset mechanics, which are commonplace in XCOM 2, are also absent, meaning character progression is more linear and less likely to offend the Gods of Balance.

Weapons in the game are tiered by tech and split into a few static types: shotgun, rifle, machinegun, sniper and pistol. Each weapon type has its strengths and weaknesses, with rifles being the jack-of-all-trades weapon. Apart from giving distinct roles to different weapons, the game also makes usage of a suppression mechanic, very similar to Jagged Alliance, with flashbangs being a key tool in the player’s arsenal to avoid reaction fire. Cover destruction is also an important mechanic, with demolition charges and grenades competing for your precious TUs and inventory space. At first glance the multitude of weapon types gives the impression that there are more tools available to the player, but experience firing the different weapons says X-COM's rifle/heavy plasma are like a swiss army knife, while Xenonauts 2 weapons are the individual blades, meaning you need a shotgun for close quarters and a sniper for long instead of having one weapon that could do both with different fire modes.

There's sufficient mission variety to keep the player engaged. The classic UFO recovery, terror and abduction missions make a comeback, alongside the new data recovery mission, VIP rescue/capture and several key plot related missions. Interestingly enough, despite the community's hostility towards the Firaxis games, Xenonauts 2 takes a cue from XCOM 2 and introduces timed missions. I'm aware mission timers are controversial, with mods that extend them being extremely popular in the Steam Workshop for XCOM 2. However, I do believe throwing a wrench on overwatch camping and introducing urgency to certain missions is a good call and I don't blame Goldhawk for making it. Regarding the plot, the campaign is structured around five acts, each ending after a certain time (visible on the Geoscape) or the completion of an important plot related mission. There are no voice overs, everything is told via mediocre quality text centered around a Redditor science guy and a cute base-mom. The writing is mostly there to remind you this is a mechanics-first type of game and storyfags should look elsewhere.

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Great atmosphere, good graphics, mediocre sound effects

Another strong aspect of Xenonauts 2 is its atmosphere. The creepy music and semi-realistic art style are very reminiscent of the classic X-COM games and provide veteran players with a sizeable dose of nostalgia. The feeling of dread every time you end a turn is back, and the presence of armed civilians helps establish that “something bad is lurking over there” quite nicely. A lot of indie games will put you off solely based on their questionable art direction, but Xenonauts 2 looks quite enticing—like an interactive season of G.I. Joe, not too far removed from what’s presented in the iconic 1994 introduction cinematic of X-COM.

The sound effects, on the other hand, are… there. It may be a conscious choice to avoid exaggerated death cries and over-the-top “pew pew” audio, but the result is ultimately forgettable. Don’t expect punchy, instantly recognizable sounds like the AK-47 from Counter-Strike 1.6, which is burned into the memory of a generation of LAN house kids. Aliens getting shot sound like a mildly annoyed pet snake, and firefights sound more like kids playing with BB guns than desperate battles for mankind’s survival. While X-COM uses sound to transmit the “otherworldliness” of the alien threat, and XCOM leans into a larger-than-life cinematic tone, Xenonauts 2 just sounds like not much is happening. Instead of a sensory voyage to a sci-fi battlefield, the sound design feels like an inoffensive elevator ride in an office building. It’s clearly the weakest aspect of the game, and the first place modders will want to start.

Another big missed mark is the final mission. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say the visuals are just a repeat of the same environments we’ve seen before. Given the stakes and the location where it supposedly takes place, I expected unique visuals to help tell the conclusion of the story, but if I were to show screenshots of the final mission and tell you it’s an alien base or ship, you would be none the wiser. The overall tragedy of the game repeats itself here: the developers seemed more concerned with ensuring nobody would say it was too easy—or worse, figure out a cheese strategy to trivialize the combat encounter. Instead of treating the closing chapter as a canvas for beautiful art, they saw it as yet another spreadsheet to be filled and balanced.

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Technology, balance and standardization

So far I covered mostly the positive aspects of Xenonauts 2, so it’s time to dive into the game’s biggest flaw: its unhealthy obsession with fixing the “unbalanced” elements of both X-COM and XCOM. What do veteran players remember most fondly from X-COM? Mind controlling aliens and making them shoot each other? Blowing up entire rooms with blaster launchers? Flying snipers raining death from above? Well, REJOICE, brothers and sisters, for these heinous offenses against the Gods of Balance are completely gone from Xenonauts 2. I’m under the impression that every time the developers added something fun and cool to the tech tree, their chief concern was, “will this BREAK MY PRECIOUS GAME!?”

Sure, you can have jetpacks, but no hovering in mid-air and no shooting while flying! Sure, you can destroy objects in-game, but UFO walls are made out of Contrivium™ and you can’t make your own doors. You have to go through the dev-approved killzone, that’s the rules buster. Invisibility? Hell no! But you can have this armor that makes it harder for enemies to hit you. The game even tells you that you should equip said armor on your snipers because GOD FORBID you don’t play EXACTLY the way the developers intended. There’s a power armor that allows your guys to walk through walls, but don’t even think about going full Kool-Aid man on the aliens! That's unbalanced fun and we don't do that here.


In every single strategy game you start out with a very small set of tools and unlock more as you play the game, be it from technology, perks, plot or another source the game sees fit. Xenonauts 2, however, displays a stubborn refusal to provide players with actually new toys to mess around with. With perks being absent and transformative technologies being extremely limited, the player is left for the most part just improving stats and equipping better stat sticks. The ballistic rifle you have on day 1 and the fusion rifle from endgame perform exactly the same. As a rule, new technologies don’t change the way you approach the challenges presented by the game, they just make you better at doing the same thing.


The way the tech tree works also contributes to the feeling that the game is overly concerned with you not breaking it. Earlier I mentioned the goal of the campaign is to not fall behind, but it should also be pointed out you can’t possibly get ahead in this game. Since you need to find new UFOs, alien species and whatnot, it’s actually impossible to acquire new weapons ahead of schedule. So if we look at the act division of the campaign, it’s possible to tell in abstract what weapon technology the player will have at each stage, because he can’t possibly research better stuff. Yes, it is true that X-COM did roughly the same thing, but I can’t shake the feeling that the leash is much tighter in Xenonauts 2.

To the game's credit, enemies are visually distinct and look interesting enough. Unfortunately, they don't introduce new challenges that must be worked around with new tools. New enemies are just bigger stat sticks that are dealt with the same as the old, which interacts poorly with the inherently repetitive nature of the genre. Lizard, robot and frog face enemies are all fought in the same manner, albeit featuring different health bars and weaponry. The Reaper (aka Chryssalid) is the only enemy that stands out as being a big wall of stats in melee range as opposed to being ranged. Sadly, enemy design is an aspect in which XCOM 2 does a far better job than what we see here.

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RNGesus doesn’t love you

Another glaring issue of the game is the unchecked randomization of pretty much everything. In more recent years we had games like King Arthur: Knight’s Tale (NeocoreGames, 2022) experimenting with systems that heavily rein in RNG and ensure player decision making is front and center of combat resolution instead of dice rolling and coin flipping. Xenonauts 2, however, is not one such game. In fact this is probably the most “lolrandom” X-COM successor/clone out there. The accuracy formula is heavily biased in favor of a miss, so much so that a single plastic chair between you and the alien might as well be a WW1 trench. As you play Xenonauts 2 you will get in the habit of walking soldiers towards the nearest obstacle before shooting, as this action removes that obstacle as a potential point of failure for your shot. And once we're past the hit or miss check, damage rolls go from 50 to 150% of the weapon's base damage, so when you consider that machineguns can attack up to 10 times in a single action, rifles can burst for 3 and every shotgun shot consists of 3 "mini shots", the end result is that there is zero consistency in what comes out of an attack action. Your soldier might obliterate an alien, miss everything, hit for pitiful damage, suppress him (or not) and anything and everything in between. And because of the excessively wide damage spread it is very difficult to notice the actual effect of the small percentage increases provided by autopsies and "advanced" weaponry.

The RNG issue is compounded once you learn the skill ceiling for your soldiers is really, really low. While it is true that experienced soldiers in Xenonauts 2 can carry considerably more gear, sprint for longer distances and defend themselves better against psionics, the actual attacking part is severely hamstrung. It's quite frustrating to see Colonels with dozens of missions under their belt still struggling to hit a mildly obstructed shot. Worse still, grenade throwing can still fail spectacularly, making you question, "if these guys are the best Earth has to offer, how bad can life under the Eternals be?" While a 100+ accuracy soldier in X-COM gives Vassili Zaitsev a run for his money, a 100 accuracy Xenonaut can hit aimed shots against exposed targets and that's about it. Anything more complicated than that and you should start praying to RNGesus. Rifle burst fire, for instance, is a complete joke and the penalties for using it are so severe, Colonels will consistently miss a full burst in point blank range of a 7-foot tall lizard man. I've had similar experiences with a few conversion mods for Jagged Alliance 2 that nerf accuracy across the board for some unfathomable reason. Because professional soldiers not hitting the broad side of a barn is "realistic", somehow. And stat based specializations? They are quickly gone as all soldiers become equally adept at everything, minor deviations notwithstanding.

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Is it High Quality?

I say in conclusion that while the game is competently made and quite fun, it’s unfortunate that this is yet another case of modern game development having an obsession with controlling the “meta”, being allergic to strategies arising organically in the community and players DARING to break their precious baby. Perhaps in another 30 years Xenonauts 3 will be more willing to compromise balance in favor of letting players have more fun, but in 2026 the question potential buyers should be asking is, “what did I enjoy the most about X-COM?” If your enjoyment comes mostly from solving tactical puzzles and dealing with a robust management layer then by all means: buy this game right now. This is a worthy addition to your library of squad tactics games and very high quality in the sense that it is well made, looks good and functions as designed. But if the power fantasy aspect of the originals is what really kept bringing you back then this game will feel like that time when the new guy supported your team with a rocket launcher. Xenonauts 2 is to X-COM what soymeat burgers are to a juicy steak.