Exploding Kittens Original Edition

Amazon Product Name: Exploding Kittens (Original Edition)

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Manufacturer: Exploding Kittens, LLC

Our Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Review by: Robby

If you like things that in your opinion qualify as weird or silly, you’re in luck! Really, with a title like “Exploding Kittens” I doubt any of my fellow weirdos would pass this game up. Exploding Kittens is a card game where the goal is to not draw an Exploding Kitten from a deck, for if Lady Luck presents you with one, you explode, die and lose.

But never fear, because Exploding Kittens are actually pretty rare (there is always one more player than kittens) and the rest of the deck is made up of cards that are designed to help you avoid getting blown up. Defuse cards let you banish the Kitten somewhere else in the deck. Attack cards let you skip drawing and force the next player to take two turns, in the hopes that they won’t use their own Attack card or a Skip card to bypass drawing two cards, of course.

Those are only a few varieties of useful cards. Each of the cards also have funny artwork, which on most cards is accompanied by a silly caption which describes in a-more-direct-than-hilarious way (which only makes even more hilarious) the goofy scene depicted in the artwork. I sometimes absolutely CRACK UP when I read the childish caption and look at the immature artwork.

Back to the gameplay. Your turn is simple. You play as many cards as you want from your hand, pray to your deity of choice that you don’t draw an Exploding Kitten, and then are required to draw. If you don’t have any Defuse cards, then you’re toast if an Exploding Kitten appears. If you survive drawing your card, you pass the turn. My family absolutely loves this game. It’s pretty fun thanks to the simple yet sometimes ridiculous gameplay, hilarious aesthetics and IMPENDING DOOM of the Exploding Kittens. If you like silly things and have acquaintances who like silly things as well, I think you should certainly give this card game a try. Pick it up on Amazon here.

September 12, 2024 0

Sneaky Cards

Amazon Product Name: Sneaky Cards Card Game

Manufacturer: Gamewright

Our Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review by: Robby

What I like about Sneaky Cards is you get to leave cards all over the world. You get to sneak cards to people with pranks, gifts, and activities. Every time we sneak a card in, I say we “trick” the card in.

The most hilarious cards are: Lay in a public space until someone checks on you. Find someone wearing the last item on the list. Finally, give someone extra tips along with this card.

I gave it 4 stars because sometimes it’s hard to find people to give the cards to.

What I don’t like about it: sometimes it’s hard to find people to take the cards and play with you. But keep at it… when you find people who are up for the game, it’s worth the effort!

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

January 20, 2020 0

Forager for PC

Game by: HopFrog and Humble Bundle

Game for: All Ages

Our Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review by: Kelly

Forager is a fun new PC game from indie publisher HopFrog. I played an early build of Forager when it was still free for download from HopFrog’s website, right after it was made a couple of years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed it then as great little casual crafting game, but boy has it grown up for its full release on Steam.

Forager game trailer: Film credit HumbleBundle.com

Forager is a resource collecting, building and crafting game set in a semi-randomized world made up of small islands.

It has a top down viewpoint and all the resources, items, characters, buildings and enemies are beautifully animated 2D sprites with a pleasing and relaxing color palette.

Forager starts your character out on the central island with a basic pickaxe and backpack, as well as some trees, rocks and bushes to start harvesting for resources. Resources constantly re-spawn on all open areas of ground in the game. Additional islands are purchased for gold coins that you either collect in the world or make with technology and buildings.

Forager Humble Beginnings: Image Credit ourfamilygamereviews.com

As you unlock islands in Forager, you gain access to dungeons, puzzles and NPC quests. These add variety to the video game and give you something to do beyond collecting resources and building stuff.

There are 5 biomes in the world. They range from the snowy sheep filled Winter Biome in the north, to the demon infested Fire Biome in the south. Each land has its own unique resource spawns, enemies, and a dungeon. The only exception is the starting Grass Biome. Instead of a dungeon it houses the Museum.

Forager has a balanced, tiered equipment system. The system allows upgrades to the tools, equipment and weapons. The simple combat is fun and gets crazy near the end game when you’ve got a fully upgraded sword, equipment, and a mob of droids following you around. One downside is that at times there is so much going on it can be hard to keep track of.

*Forager Endgame: Image Credit ourfamilygamereviews.com*

Struggling to keep up with the activity in the game shows when it comes to resource production. When you have a ton of furnaces, factories, sewing stations and other production structures, the right side of your screen is a constant stream of information. As you stack your production on top of resource collection from mining rods, and your drones auto-killing everything, that active stream gets hard to read.

The rapidly changing stats make it difficult to tell when you’ve collected enough resources to complete your quest or Museum collection. The sound effects for collecting all of that stuff can get overwhelming, and even annoying, so I tend to turn the sound down while playing late in the game. I hope the developer will fix this later on by changing how resource collection notifies the player.

Forager game trailer: Film credit HumbleBundle.com

Completing the Museum collections are a great way to guide your technological rise. All of the items required eventually show up in the Marketplace given enough time.

You can earn upgrade orbs for your character to increase your damage, add more health, or immediately level up. Leveling up in Forager is how you advance your technology, as each level grants you a skill point that you can use to unlock new items, tools and resources.

The skill page is laid out in a grid formation. At level one, you only have access to unlocking the four center skills in the eight by eight grid. As you unlock each skill, all of the adjacent, undiscovered skills in the grid become available to unlock.

The randomness of island spawns and this versatile skill layout allow for some limited replayability, allowing you to rush for skills to build your economy in different ways during a playthrough.

I recommend Forager if you are looking for a fun and relaxing crafting and collecting experience. It’s adorable and throughout the game you unlock special art and comics from the creator that tells the story of Forager’s developer and shares part of HopFrog’s heart.

It’s clear Forager was a passion project born out of pure love and a need to share the designer’s creativity with the world. Although the endgame can be a little nuts and overwhelming, Forager is overall a fantastic indie video game title with fun achievements and puzzles to solve.

I’m happy to say I was able to complete all the achievements in one play-through with about twenty hours of game play. Forager is appropriate for younger gamers as well since it has no gore. Every monster and resource just explodes when you deplete its health.

Forager is well worth an inclusion in your gaming collection and you will get hours of enjoyment out of it. Happy foraging!

Want to get Forager for your favorite gamer? Gift them a Steam gift card, available from Amazon here.

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

June 20, 2019 0

Limbo

Game by: Playdead

Game for: Pre-teens and up

Our Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review by: Mom

Limbo is a creepy black-and-grey platformer puzzle style game from Playdead. Although it’s a few years old, it’s still one of my favorite puzzle solving games, and I’ve played through it a couple of times. The thing I love about Limbo visually is its utter simplicity. The game is played through a series of atmospheric scenes that are dimly lit, and in shadow.

While games like Little Nightmares (see my review of this single player horror game here) depend heavily on lighting and color to guide your character along, Limbo takes visual simplicity even further by placing the puzzle solving on a 2D platform and removing all color from the game.

This quick side scroller relies on your ability to solve problems using physics and quick-thinking to survive. In my opinion, the minimalist design adds to the intrigue as you’re forced to get creative within the confines of the two-dimensional world.

If big horror titles and are too much for you, but you like a bit of creepiness in your video games, then Limbo might be the game for you. It’s beautiful atmosphere and simple adventure will keep you pushing through the trouble that lies ahead.

You can find Limbo for the Nintendo Switch on Amazon here.

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

April 25, 2019 4

Little Nightmares

Game by: Tarsier Studios

Game for: Teens and Up

Our Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review by: Mom

Available on: PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One

Little Nightmares is a platformer style puzzle solving game that my partner got me because I enjoyed the Limbo video game so thoroughly (you can see my review of Limbo here).

Unfortunately, when I first had it added to my Steam library, my ancient computer took a nosedive, and although it ran the game there was so much lag that I was having a hard time getting through the rooms and monsters. I played my first six hours of the game with the graphics turned as far down as possible, but still had such a problem with lag that I gave up. A person can only get caught and neck-snapped by chefs so many times.

Yes, I said neck snapped. Or suffocated, maybe. The intensely dark art design in this game sparks the darkest images of your imagination.

After I upgraded to a new Dell laptop, I gave Little Nightmares another try. I’m glad I did. Little Nightmares was a great horror style game for me. It isn’t overtly graphic, the game doesn’t depend on jump-scares to get the “horror” designation, and the slow pace and dark ambiance make the game pleasing to look at while you’re trying not to die.

I will admit, although I love puzzle games, I don’t like getting stumped to the point of frustration. There were a few points in the game where I simply couldn’t figure out what to do next, and rather than hit my head against the keyboard trying to figure it out, I referenced the Prima Games Little Nightmares Walkthrough and Guide.

The one thing I didn’t love was that the game wasn’t long enough, so I was glad that I had all the extra downloadable content to work through after Little Nightmares found its end. Adding The Depths, The Hideaway, and The Residence to my Steam library nearly doubled my playtime and kept me enthralled in the story of this delightfully creepy game.

Tarsier Studios took their storytelling a fresh direction by making the entire game without dialogue, relying on lighting, music and sound effects to move you through the plot. It’s clear that your character wants to escape the horrible child-farm she lives in, and it’s not difficult to piece together why, one scene at a time.

In fact, this immersive story style makes the game linger in the back of your mind long after you walk away from the screen, which is an emotional effect that I love coming from a cinematic video game.

As I mentioned before, my biggest complaint about the game is that I would have liked the core game to be longer. It took me about six hours to play through, and I’m not the most savvy gamer.

If you decide to try Little Nightmares yourself, make sure to grab the Secrets of the Maw Expansion Pass. Once you get involved in this story, you’re going to want it to last as long as possible.

I played Little Nightmares on my laptop through the Steam store. But you can find this game on just about all the current consoles here.

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

April 25, 2019 1

Stormcast Eternals Neave Blacktalon

Amazon Product Name (APN): Stormcast Eternals Neave Blacktalon Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Manufacturer: Games Workshop

Review by: Kelly

Our Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neave Blacktalon the Knight-Zephyros is an amazing Hero character for your Stormcast Eternal armies in games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar by Games Workshop.

Neave Blacktalon plays as a single model, and her abilities make her perfectly suited for hunting key enemy heroes. She’s a capable filler hero if you have enough points left over in a list. Her sculpt is looks nice with her dual axes, choice of two head sculpts, and bearskin cape.

I enjoyed putting this model together and painting it in the cannon Hammers of Sigmar paint scheme, which are the colors I have most of my Stormcast Eternals collection painted in.

Neave Blacktalon does one extra damage per attack if targeting an enemy hero with Lightning-fast Strikes. She also gets one extra attack with her Whirlwind Axes if she charges with the Nemesis ability. She can even run and shoot in the same turn with Tireless Hunters.

By far her best ability, Windrider, allows Neave Blacktalon to follow in the wake of any other Stormcast Eternal unit that uses Ride the Winds Aetheric, such as Vanguard-Palladors and the Lord-Aquilar. This gives her sudden bursts of speed across the battlefield.

When in combat, Neave Blacktalon gets two shooting attacks at a nine inch range with her Boltstorm Pistol. She hits and wounds on a three plus with one damage each.

She then gets a whopping seven attacks, hitting and wounding on a three plus with minus one rend and one damage each with her Whirlwind Axes.

If she is charging a hero, Neave Blacktalon gets EIGHT attacks doing TWO damage each. With the dice on my side, Neave has obliterated chaos wizards, a skaven warlord and even the mighty Slambo in a single round of combat. I even used her Windrider ability once in a game to follow my Lord-Aquilar all the way up the board, behind enemy lines, where the dynamic duo proceeded to annihilate every enemy supporting hero and a Skullcannon before the enemy general killed her.

Neave Blacktalon is a fantastic model with a beautiful sculpt and does well hunting enemy heroes on the battlefield. Neave deserves a place in your Stormcast Eternals armies collection for your games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar by Games Workshop. You can find her on Amazon right here.

Want more? Check out some of our other lists and reviews below.

April 25, 2019 0

Stormcast Eternals Sequitors

Amazon Product Name (APN): Games Workshop Warhammer Age Sigmar Stormcast Eternals Sequitors

Manufacturer: Games Workshop

Review by: Kelly

Our Rating: 5 of 5 stars

In 2018, with Games Workshop’s release of the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soul Wars starter set came a new chamber for the Stormcast Eternals, the Sacrosanct Chamber. This sect of the Stormcast Eternals focuses on magical weaponry, enhancements and beefy spellcasting.

Sequitors are the first choice for your battleline units in games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Sequitors are the Liberator’s final form. Better in every way and currently undercosted in the 2018 Generals Handbook, they are a must have inclusion in your Stormcast Eternals, and specifically Sancrosanct Chamber lists.

The Sequitors Stormsmite Mauls and Stormsmite Greatmaces are solid weapons. Both hit and wound on a three plus. Sequitors shine when you take as many Stormsmite Greatmaces as you can, one in every three models, plus the Sequitor-Prime unit leader can take one as well.

For example, a unit of ten models can have four Stormsmite Greatmaces! To top that off, a hit roll of six with a Stormsmite Greatmace does D3 hits instead of one. This allows for some crazy extra attacks with good dice RNG (random number generation).

Sequitors can also take Tempest Blades instead of Stormsmite Mauls, granting them an three attacks instead of two, but they wound on a four plus instead of a three plus.

Sequitors have two wounds and get to reroll saves of one for any units carrying a Stormshield (sorry Greatmaces, but that’s the tradeoff), on top of their base save of a four plus. They also get an ability called Aetheric Channeling which allows you choose to channel aetheric power into their weapons or shields at the start of the combat phase.

If you choose to channel aetheric power into your shields, you get to re-roll ALL of your failed saves, not just the ones. If you choose weapons instead, you get to re-roll all failed hits. This ability stacks with the Evocator’s Empower Spell, which if successful allows the Sequitors to re-roll failed wound rolls. A minimum unit of Evocators is a must have inclusion in lists running Sequitors.

While I personally feel that Sequitors are a little overpowered as an automatic inclusion in games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, they are not impossible to deal with. They can be hammered down, or at least weakened with shooting attacks. This gives them better balance against armies with lots of shooting, such as the Kharadron Overlords.

Sequitors are available in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soul Wars Starter Set, in a standard kit box, and in an easy to build box.

You’re ready to add the Stormcast Eternals Sequitors to your army, right? You can find them on Amazon by clicking here.

Want more? Check out some of our other lists and reviews below.

April 25, 2019

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition

Manufacturer: Beamdog

Our Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review by: Kelly

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for PC is the penultimate version of this classic Dungeons and Dragons RPG adventure. Baldur’s Gate is a top-down isometric view RPG adventure where you roll a single character or an entire party of adventurers to experience the story of your unusual parentage and the mysterious circumstances the Sword Coast of Faerun currently finds itself in.

The world of Faerun is a vastly fleshed out world in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons and many characters from the books and pen and paper RPGs like the wizard Elminster and the drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden appear in Baldur’s Gate.

Baldur’s Gate is built on the 2nd Edition rules for Dungeons and Dragons and still remains one of my favorite RPG systems from when I was a kid. The game can be paused at any time by pressing Spacebar allowing you to micro manage your party’s actions during combat. And there are some intense encounters where you really need to.

Expect to fight all of the classic monsters from Dungeons and Dragons such as Kobolds, Gnolls, Trolls, Giants, Doppelgangers, Beholders, carrion crawlers, liches and many more. The updated spell effects and sounds really make your spell casters shine as almost all of the spell effects were updated with more depth and animations. And all of the classic D&D spells are available for your wizards, druids and clerics. Some of my favorites are Magic Missile, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Bless, and Monster Summoning and all look fantastic in Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition.

In 2016, Beamdog Inc had acquired permissions to re-release the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series as Enhanced Editions and boy did they deliver. Beamdog faithfully updated the entire game’s graphics, sounds on an updated version of the original Infinity Engine. They even added new NPC’s to find and add to your party and some new side quests.

Beamdog has preserved the look, feel, mechanics, and spirit of the game and I have bought almost all of the Enhanced Edition Games they have released on Steam.

My Love Affair With Baldur’s Gate started with the original release of the game in 1998. Baldur’s Gate was originally developed by Bioware and published by Interplay Entertainment. I put in hundreds of hours in the base game and its expansion Tales of the Sword coast during high school and later in college.

Since that time I’ve done at least 10 full playthroughs with different main characters, including an evil character run that was just as memorable as any of my others.

If you are a fan of pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, and you want to play one of the best RPGs ever made on PC, then Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is the place to start.

I highly recommend you check it out for yourself along with the other games from that series. Beamdog currently has released Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II. They are all amazing and Beamdog has even released a brand new expansion for Baldur’s Gate called Siege of Dragonspear that has never been seen before. That’s right, they made a full game expansion for a title that is now over 20 years old.

That is the kind of dedication to an intellectual property that I wish more developers had these days and it shines through every bit of work they did on enhancing Baldur’s Gate.

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

April 16, 2019 0

Why I Uninstalled Fallout 76

An Honest Review from a Long Time Fallout Fangirl

Developers: Bethesda Software

Our Rating: 1 of 5 Stars

Review by: Kelly

Editor’s note: This is a very long review. Put your phone on silent, close Facebook, get some popcorn, and settle in. We’re going to be here a while.

I suppose it’s easier to explain my feelings about this game if I start with a little story.

I’ve been a huge fallout fan since the original top-down isometric view turn based games of Fallout one and two. Fallout 3 was a huge leap forward in that universe for a lot of us fans. Its storytelling, choices, and combat were all great. The bugs in the game were amusing at best, and as long as you were careful with saves, they were rarely game breaking.

Since that time, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a lot of Bethesda’s titles, not just the Fallout games. Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, Skyrim, and the new Doom and Wolfenstein titles have all been fun and I’ve enjoyed them all to various extents. I’m not just a Fallout fan, I’m a Bethesda fan, and I have been for a long time. Unfortunately, with Fallout 76, I don’t know if I can honestly say that anymore.

Fallout 76 was released on November 14th 2018 and is an online multiplayer version of Fallout 4 on a huge map. The map is set in the hills of Appalachia in West Virginia. Players can scavenge the wasteland and complete quests together or solo.

You experience the story through leftover holo tapes and notes as there are no real NPCs in Fallout 76, save for a couple of robots that you return to for quest lines. There’s some great storytelling in Fallout 76, but it’s hard to find and is often interrupted by random attacks and many, many game breaking bugs. So many bugs, it would be hard to list them all here.

As of the writing of this review, it’s been over three months since Fallout 76 released, and despite Bethesda’s updates, is still a broken mess with rampant cheating, severe server stability issues, broken animations, quests with broken markers, and a boring, somewhat lifeless world.

I wanted to love Fallout 76. I would have settled for being mildly content.

I bought Fallout 76 with my Dad so we could Fallout together. It was something we had both had really wanted for a long time. We jumped online the second the game went live, ready to experience the new world side-by-side.

Shortly after launch, the friends list in the game bugged and auto blocked us from each other, making it so we couldn’t play the game together. The glitch kept us blocked from each other for several weeks before a patch finally fixed the issue. Eventually, we found each other again through a mutual friend that was also playing Fallout 76.

That one bug alone was frustrating for us. We persevered, and when we finally could play together again, we had problems staying on the same server. It sometimes took up to an hour to get on the same server, meet up and start playing. Even then, we would only get an hour or two to play before the server would disconnect or one of our clients would crash.

When we were successful at questing and exploring together, I found the majority of quests I took on to be forgettable and uninspiring.

The grind to maintain your weapons and equipment and gather ammo and materials can be downright depressing at times, and ends up feeling very unrewarding. Bethesda has continued to Nerf this grind, making it longer and longer while not fixing the basic issues many players have with the game.

It seems like whenever Bethesda releases a new patch, the game is broken in new and frustrating ways. But hey, that Atomic Shop seems to have some great new skins every week for sale.

How Bethesda thought their aging creation engine would be able to stand up to massive online play is beyond me. I was really hoping Fallout 4 would have been their last title built in the creation engine, but quality of their product is something that seems to be much less important to Bethesda these days and that is really unfortunate.

The worst part of it all is that I pre-ordered and paid full price for Fallout 76. Two weeks after release, it was half price.

TWO. WEEKS.

Now, retailers are dumping copies as fast and as cheaply as they can. There are many people who believe the game will soon go free to play. I can’t get a refund because I actually played the game and gave it a shot. How am I supposed to feel like a valued customer after this experience? The answer is, I don’t.

I’m going to have a hard time supporting Bethesda in the future. Bethesda gets to keep my money for Fallout 76, but it was such a bad experience all the way around.

If you are looking for a fantastic RPG experience, check out some of my favorites like:

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

Hollow Knight

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Dungeon Siege

System Shock 2

Deux Ex: Human Revolution

There are also several new games on the horizon that have me excited for 2019. Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds being at the top of my list.

Want to see more? Check out some of our other articles and reviews below.

April 4, 2019 0

Ticket To Ride: First Journey

Amazon Product Name (APN): Ticket to Ride: First Journey

Manufacturer: Days of Wonder

Our Rating: 10,000,000 out of 5 stars

Review by: Robby

What I like about Ticket to Ride: First Journey:

It’s all about trains! It’s even more fun than regular Ticket to Ride. I like the bigger cards because they’re easier to hold than regular Ticket to Ride. The cards are all circus cars which makes me smile.

I love winning the golden ticket!

You can find Ticket to Ride: First Journeys on Amazon here.