Recently in the game giveaways thread
@IAmNotAlpharius had many random Steam codes he was parting with. 90% of these codes are seemingly the kind of stuff they give away in bundles, that is to say things nobody has ever heard of. I asked him to give me one of the codes at random because I thought it'd be fun to review some random thing I've never heard. Well, he ended up giving me 2 random codes so here are the reviews.
Rym 9000
It's a good thing he gave me two codes, because this one doesn't have a lot to talk about. Rym 9000 is a vertical space shooter and... it has some quirks. The first very apparent thing is that when launching the game it appeared in the top right quadrant of the screen with the rest being nothing but black space.
The bottom right is the Steam overlay that always glitches as it recedes, happened every launch and never left.
You might also think the colors look fucked up, almost like an old VGA game. That, however, is not a glitch. This game gives an epilepsy warning at the beginning and boy is it not kidding. The visuals are so garbled and incomprehensible it is extremely difficult to focus on any kind of small oncoming obstacle. Well, now we can actually talk about the gameplay which is... that of a below average vertical shooter. When your brain can comprehend it you fly upwards as enemies come from every potential direction in set patterns and shoot them. Occasionally power ups that look like crosshairs, which caused me to avoid them for awhile, appear and they upgrade your weapon a level which is mostly just more damage despite later levels changing the appearance. The power ups also seem to be your health in that taking a hit drops you one level and you die when taking damage at base level.
This game seems to be some kind of "audio-visual experience" type game, or whatever pretentious designers would call it. It seems to trying to revolve around it's music which is alright, syncing with the eye-melting visual effects. When you die, you restart the current level with seemingly infinite tries. I played for about 30 minutes and got to level 3 but in the end it wasn't worth going blind for life. The first boss took more attempts than it should have just because of visual noise making bullets hard to see and that is not a good long term playthrough. I don't know if this game was shovelwear, art project, mobile game ported to Steam or all three, but I can say I don't recommend it.
I'd give it a 3/10 for being a 5/10 game that is obnoxious to even play due to the visuals. Imagine looking at this shit for an hour or two straight.
The Amazing American Circus
Alright, now this is more what I was hoping for. The Amazing American Circus is an interesting deck building game set in the old west where you control a troupe master who inherited a failing circus from his late father. In this game you travel through the old west going from city to city to put on shows which take the form of card battles against the audience, and there are a ton of mechanics. Perhaps too many.
In simple terms you have a group of performers which you can bring up to 3 in a show. The performers have a deck of 5 cards each which can be changed and upgraded as the performers level up. Each performer focuses on slightly different playstyles such as the juggler building up stacks of balls to release for big impressions (damage, basically) or the mime who focuses on defense and returning damage to attackers. Cards take a stamina resource to use of which you have 3 of each turn that can be changed with certain cards. Each round you draw 5 of the combined 15 cards and use them to delight the audience and protect against insults and hurled tomatoes. When you reach the end of the deck the cards are reshuffled and all your performers take a sum of damage depending on the city. Performers have a base 10 hp which can be raised through some means temporarily and when they reach 0 one of their 5 cards is permanently removed, if all 5 are removed the performer is removed themselves. Cards also have a finale value which when filled lets you use a super attack.
That is the basic ruleset, but tons of shit gets added soon. You can find and choose a misfit opener (basically a freakshow freak) that gives bonuses on the opening turn, performers can gain 'gifts' and 'hoaxes' after shows which are extra cards in their deck with beneficial and negative effects, they also gain flaws and boons which similarly help or hinder, there are temporary buffs from food and random events and so on. While there are a lot of mechanics they are mostly added complexity for the sake of it and some are really annoying such as random flaws/hoaxes you have to pay to remove.
Speaking of money, it is in short supply. You need it for everything - leveling up, changing stats, buying food for travel, hiring new performers, upgrading you caravan which is another big thing with tons of options. The thing about gaining money is the system for doing so is stupid. When you do a show you choose your risk level which changes the range of the reward. 0 risk could be potential $300-$400 payout while max risk could be $0-800. You can see the problem, pay isn't based on performance but RNG where you could potentially get $0 for winning. The only way to improve this is paying additional money before the show for 3 kinds of advertisements that push the minimum pay up but also take out of your profits - it is stupid to not do this every show, however. Max risk and max advertisements is the only way to potentially get a lot, and even then you could still roll the lowest pay. On top of all this you can only do one show per town unless you travel to like 10 towns in-between first, wasting resources, and even then repeat shows pay about 1/10th of the first time so it is often not even worth it.
Traveling the map from town to town is a series of paths between towns with occasional areas unrevealed that you can pay $75 to free form select and area that's size is based on an upgrade you can purchase. Anything within that area is revealed if there is anything there, you can reveal nothing and waste your money. Areas are largely new towns to put on shows but they can also be side areas with little quests or random events. Random events are kind of bullshit though, they are mostly a choice between two bad options where you pick the lesser of two evils. While traveling the map you also have to make food from ingredients bought in tows that effects 3 bars positively or negatively, each bar giving different buffs or debuffs depending on level.
That is a lot of shit to explain, but I think that mostly covers the mechanics. Now, with all this stuff is the game any good...? Well, yeah, I am actually enjoying it. All the different levels of upgrades really speaks to my autism. The battle system was weird at first but as I got used to it it became enjoyable. It is also very easy to exploit, and while I struggled at the beginning I am now regularly winning matches in the first few turns, thought the drawing aspect can still net you some bad luck in that regard. All the mechanics disguise what is at it's core a very simple game. It does have a very charming and unique art style and theming to help hold back the monotony. I am already kind of interested in restarting and min-max blitzing through now that I know what works well. I've played a combined 4 hours over last night and today which is more then 80% of Steam reviews which is too bad but exactly the kind of experience I was looking for when asking for a random key. It's nice and charming and a solid 6/10, the kind of thing that gets overlooked all the time.
I am not sure how much the game sells for, but if it's ever on sale for $5 or less I would say it's worthwhile for a couple of evenings.