The Incredible Baron

This game is very tedious. Almost no one bought it to find out, so I'm telling you here.

I love it. Discovered it from FlatRedBall and bought it to support the devs but man its genuinely a lot of fun. It reminds me a lot of Plants vs Zombies in terms of the vibe and casual accessibility (while still having some depth) but what I really love is that you can replay harder versions of earlier missions for upgrades and to research the enemy. These Silver/Gold variant of the missiosn can be genuinely hard or even legitmately impossible without the upgrades from later missions.

It creates this really fun gameplay loop for me where I wanna do the later missions to get upgrades to complete earlier missions harder variants. I love that the game doesn't stop you from attempting a harder variant of an earlier mission even if it really is impossible with your loadout. It adds that sense of discovery like 'omg can I actually do it?' and makes it feel so satisifying when I do it.

It also just runs well

This is another game where I have very mixed feelings in reviewing it. I mean overall the game is good and its addicting, however I will say you shouldn't 100% it. I as well as most people get stuck on 3-8 gold, the level is stupidly brutal in difficulty and is a rather extreme difficulty spike.

But its a rather simple game with simple mechanics that sometimes you have to think to fully do well in it.

You send creatures to encounter other creatures. Sometimes bombs, or range attack, or collision mellee. But it's one railway track and AI and player send creatures or spells down same track from opposite ends. Too boring. Only skill is how fast can you click when cool down ends.

В меру сложная стратегия с приятной графикой и лёгким звуковым сопровождением, отлично подходит на 30-40 минут в день

GLANCE RECOMMENDATION: 80% YES / 20% NO

GOOD

• great aesthetic and creature design
  
• simple lane pushing combat that evolves as you need to bring multiple colored creatures
  
• research incentive keeps you coming back to levels as you like if you want to grind out new units early
  
• story is as robust as it needs to be: I just needed a simple reason to be on an island collecting research and I got it
  
• excellent podcast game, although I wish there were sliders for the sounds rather than on/off
  
• amount of content is spot on with the even the full price point
  

NEUTRAL

[*]difficulty is good overall, but you can get stuck if you try to do silver and gold on each stage before moving on. It seems to want you to complete the game on bronze, then silver, then gold and not each stage on each difficulty before going to the next area.

SUMMARY

Pokemon-esque educational game with a flair for the dramatic. Baron Buffon Hildegard might not be the hero the age of exlporation needed, but he was absolutely the hero that it deserved. A fun -- and at times challenging -- game that should be attractive to players from age six and beyond.

Great indie game. Glad to be able to play it on my laptop now instead of only on my tablet.

Core gameplay involves you strategically picking units to take into each level, and strategically deploying them to defeat the enemy's base, in a tug of war style scenario. There is a lot of depth on picking which units you want to use for each scenario (based on the opponent's makeup) and how to best use each unit. As you beat scenarios you will research new units that you'll be able to use, encouraging a fun feedback loop of maximizing beating each level with trying to research as many units as you can (there are a lot).

The units are well designed and balanced, the story is clever and entertaining, the challenges are strategically hard in a rewarding way, and there is lot's of replayability to try and unlock everything.