A bunch of small game reviews: Shogun Showdown, Into the Breach and Fly Corp

Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month.

I’m taking a two day break from Batteries included series: today for this three game review and tomorrow for my August IndieWeb Carnival entry.

All of these I’ve been enjoying a ton on my Steam Deck lately, although Fly Corp is best with a proper mouse so I only play it when connected to a display or projector at my desk or living room.

Shogun Showdown

Shogun Showdown is an interesting turn-based combat deck-building roguelike. I’m all for good deck building games so when I heard about the game (which is currently in Steam early access) last Christmas, I purchased it. I played for a short bit, wasn’t impressed and left it into the shelf. Until last week when it resurfaced with a recommendation by a fellow community member.

I found out why I didn’t like it

So I started playing it again and struggled a ton. It wasn’t fun. I was making a ton of mistakes because of the controls. I’m so used to controlling the menus and hand of cards with the left analogue stick that when it controlled my character instead, I made a ton of mistakes in movement and wasting turns. I almost put the game back to the shelf.

But then one lunch break, I decided to give it a go with the keyboard. And the game opened up to me and I was hooked. Finally, when I wasn’t making constant mistakes with movement, I started making good decisions and getting through the fights.

It’s a really fun game with great different weapons that all bring their unique aspect to the strategies. Each opponent type has a predictable attack pattern that depends on the environment (for example, they attack when they can deal damage to you) which can be learned and used to your advantage.

Take one step right, one step left, do the boogie woogie and slash a few foes

Shogun Showdown is delightfully simple and deviously difficult - a perfect balance for a game that keeps you hooked. There a only a couple of things you can do on your turn: move one tile left or right, turn around, add an attack to the queue or perform all attacks in your queue.

You start each run with two attacks: a swing that hits adjacent tiles on both sides and an arrow that hits the first enemy in its direction. After each combat, you get to upgrade your arsenal: get new tiles, upgrade existing tiles and in the shops, buy new skills and potions.

The game is more of a puzzle game than a combat game. You need to learn how different enemies operate and use that knowledge to dodge attacks and to take enemies down in the most efficient way, if you want to get through each fight.

Into the Breach

I really liked Faster than Light, the previous game from Subset Games who made Into the Breach. It has a lot in similar with Shogun Showdown, despite being a very different game. In Into the Breach, time traveling soldiers try to fight aliens called The Vek in 8x8 grid battle fields.

These fights are not really fights to win most often but to survive long enough for the enemy to give up while protecting your crew and the cities in the area. The HP is presented as power in the power grid and you lose power whenever your city is hit.

And most of the time, humans are on the disadvantaged side of the battle and it takes smart Sun Tzu level war smarts to survive.

Between battles, you gain stars that you can use to fix the powergrid and buy upgrades to your team. If you lose, you get to warp one of your pilots back in time to try again. The lore fits the game play real well.

Similar to Shogun Showdown, one bad move can cause things to escalate fast and cause the mission to fail - even if not immediately. And similarly, each enemy has their own behavior, strengths and weaknesses and learning them has almost Hitman-style repetition benefits.

Fly Corp

Fly Corp, developed by KishMish Games, is completely different from the previous two but one that I’ve been having a blast lately.

In Fly Corp, you’re destroying the environ… sorry, running an aviation business. You start with one country and couple of cities and need to operate flight routes between them. As time goes one, more cities pop up and as you gain money, you need to open new cities before the deadline hits zero to stay in the game.

More cities means more routes and more routes means more things to manage. Once you’re running a full scale business with hundreds of cities in dozens of countries and trying to keep the airports from overflowing from customers, you’re frantically jumping around in the map, trying to remember where cities you’ve never heard of are so you can find them fast enough to build new routes, upgrade plans and avoid disasters.