Tag Archives: strategy game

[Game: Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club, 2021]
Mini Metrics:

5 Ways Mini Motorways Improves on the Studio’s Earlier Release Mini Metro

  By ,

 

Introduction:

Both Mini Metro and the studio’s more recent iteration on the formula, Mini Motorways, are a noticeable step up in execution from similar chill takes on the strategy genre such as Islanders and Reus. Unlike those other games, Dinosaur Polo Club’s mini city sims have a deceptively high skill ceiling, bear cohesive and striking visual styles, and include randomized elements in a way that offers a worthwhile challenge and texture rather than a source of frustration.

More than anything, though, what impresses me about Mini Metro and Mini Motorways is their elegance: the restraint of their visuals, including plain flat polygons and muted complementary colors to evoke utilitarian subway maps and route guides; the way their entire soundscapes are reliant on context-dependent sound effects and almost no music, starting things calm and naturally transitioning to a unique and sonorous cacophony later in a round; and the understated deftness of how the complexity of the playfield increases (in part) simply by zooming out the camera at a glacial, almost-imperceptible pace.

But the two games are not created equal. When the developers returned to the drawing board after Mini Metro and altered the design, I feel they took full advantage of that opportunity. Mini Motorways is a great example of what a video game sequel can and should do; despite feeling like an incredibly similar game in terms of both style and substance, it is a noticeable refinement of the template established by Mini Metro in numerous ways, five of which I’ll cover now:

Mini Motorways screenshot with over 3000 trips completed - Mini Metro Comparison, Dinosaur Polo Club

Continue reading

[Game: Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club, 2021]
Mini Metrics:

5 Ways Mini Motorways Improves on the Studio’s Earlier Release Mini Metro

 was last modified: January 22nd, 2025 by Daniel Podgorski

[Game: Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios, 2016]
Inordinate Exsanguination:

On the Design Decisions Bloating Red Hook’s Otherwise Terrific Strategy Game Darkest Dungeon

  By ,

 

Introduction:

Despite all of its thematic darkness and mechanical brutality, Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon can be quite a joy to play. It has a balanced mix of depth and breadth in its D&D-style strategy mechanics, making for a satisfying experience when formulating and executing plans. Its level of aesthetic polish stands out as exceptional, putting it alongside the work of other artistically gifted small development teams like Supergiant Games, Nitrome, and Team Cherry. And its level of difficulty makes for an agreeable challenge that requires players to develop non-trivial strategies for longterm success, as all strategy titles should.

I most assuredly have an overall positive impression of the game, and if this were a simple review of it, I would only feel that I was slightly misrepresenting my opinion if I closed by giving it an unabashed recommendation. It’s a very competent mix among an RPG, a roguelike, and a strategy game, all set against a backdrop of Lovecraftian horror—what’s not to like?

But the game’s literal tens of thousands of positive Steam reviews more than adequately cover its merits, so that’s not what I want to talk about here. Instead, this article will be focused on the abundance of small design decisions, surfacing roughly between the 20-hour mark and 60-hour mark of a playthrough, which serve to weaken the game’s demonstrable strength.

I should clarify right at the outset that none of the things I will be discussing in this article are elements covered by the title’s gameplay options (which include a number of toggles for enabling or disabling some of the game’s more contentious mechanics). Rather, the decisions I will highlight include non-optional mechanics that unduly slow its pace, that mislead the player to push them toward sub-par strategies, and that add challenge in ways that feel sloppy or even unintentional. Alone, any one of them would probably be nitpicking for me to discuss; but together, they sum into a disrespect that the game demonstrates toward the player’s time.

Continue reading

[Game: Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios, 2016]
Inordinate Exsanguination:

On the Design Decisions Bloating Red Hook’s Otherwise Terrific Strategy Game Darkest Dungeon

 was last modified: August 26th, 2020 by Daniel Podgorski

[Game: Slay the Spire, Mega Crit Games, 2019]
Someone Else’s Strategy:

On Mega Crit’s Slay the Spire, and the Occasional Heresy of Outside Help

  By ,

 

Introduction:

The deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire is a well-designed, challenging, engaging game. Each of the game’s characters has a unique set of cards from which options are randomized and dealt to the player during each run, usually as a choice of one from three at a time. Each run begins with a small standard deck, which the player improves, expands, contracts, and (ideally) eventually uses to conquer 50-54 floors of the spire. On succeeding, the player unlocks a slightly harder version of the game for the character that won, up to a maximum of 20 difficulty modifiers (a system called ‘ascension’ in-game).

Deck-building games, like most games with card-based combat, are a subset of the strategy genre. The principal challenge of Slay the Spire—as in its broader strategy siblings—is, as the name of the genre implies, developing and executing an effective strategy. In theory, barring some truly horrendous luck, a person who has robust strategies should be able to beat the game a reasonable proportion of the time, even at high ascension levels. Figuring out which strategies work and which strategies don’t work forms nearly the entire gameplay loop and motivation structure of the game throughout nearly the entire time a player will spend with it.

I feel that these facts must be patently obvious to most players of Slay the Spire, yet I’ve encountered again and again people who give new players some truly objectionable advice which would never come from someone that understood those precepts. The advice in question runs rampant in the forums across the web dedicated to the game, and even feels implied in the words of the developers within the game’s graphics settings when they say that they “recommend Borderless Fullscreen for fast alt-tab.” The relevant advice is to make use of secondary resources—such as watching high-level players in order to “learn the game,” or having a wiki open while playing. I intend to argue here that doing so is tantamount to telling new players to skip the most engaging and valuable content of Slay the Spire.

Continue reading

[Game: Slay the Spire, Mega Crit Games, 2019]
Someone Else’s Strategy:

On Mega Crit’s Slay the Spire, and the Occasional Heresy of Outside Help

 was last modified: August 26th, 2020 by Daniel Podgorski