Kingdom Two Crowns

 Rating: 9/10 😺😺😺😺😺😺😺😺😺

Ages: 7+ (mostly because younger kids might get frustrated by dying too much, this requires more strategy than you think)

One of my sons came to visit for the holidays and insisted I had to play Kingdom Two Crowns. Yeah, I got addicted really fast. It's a simple game to figure out but isn't an easy one to win.

You basically run back and forth trying to collect money so you can upgrade your walls and buildings, expand your city, hire hobos to work for you, and outfit those hobos with tools so they can be archers, farmers, builders, knights, and other fighters who help defend your little kingdom city against the Greed, weird purple face monsters that come out usually during the night and try to steal your crown. If they manage to knock your crown off and carry it away, you die and get reincarnated as a new monarch in the ruins of your previous kingdom. It's not as bad as it sounds. Most of your buildings are still there. Your hobos are still there, but they have no tools so they are unemployed peasants now until you give them new tools.

There are cool bonuses and things to unlock, like new horses and animals to ride back and forth. Some have super powers and are more useful than others, but all are fun.

I won't admit how many times I died in my current game. I'm still not finished. I'm not sure there is a finish. There are multiple islands to travel between, all with different bonuses to unlock and more Greed to fight and destroy.

This is a great game, but not a quick one to pick up and put back down. Plan on getting sucked into playing "just one more day/project/night/battle" until next thing you know it's after midnight and you really really need to pee but the controller seems glued to your hands.

It's got a fun retro vibe to the graphics which is sometimes annoying because it makes it hard to see what you're really looking at. I have a few minor quibbles and complaints about gameplay, mostly that there is no way to cancel a "build" if you accidentally put money into something you didn't want to do yet. But overall, it's a fun game. Easy enough for younger kids to figure out, but layered enough that it requires some real strategy and planning to succeed at.

There are several flavors of kingdom to try, each with some unique gameplay. So far, I've tried Shogun and Norselands and enjoy both of them. I still have the basic European kingdom and Deadlands to play. I'm looking forward to it!

For an inexpensive game, it promises endless hours of playtime.

DragonQuest Builders

 Rating: 10/10 😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻

All Ages

(No image because sometimes the internet is stupid)

DragonQuest Builders is what happens when you mash up DragonQuest/DragonWarrior and Minecraft. It results in a very fun game with loads of freedom to play it your way.

Just to be very very clear, this is the FIRST dragonquest builder game, NOT the second. I played the demo for DragonQuest Builders 2 and detested every minute of it. They took out everything I loved about the first game and gave me more of the things I didn't like.

DragonQuest Builders is a 3D cube world similar to Minecraft. You can smash things, dig up dirt and other cubes, explore everything you can reach, fight monsters, and build things. For me, the problem with Minecraft was that the world was too open. There were no goals or storylines, just piles and piles of raw materials. I like having some kind of checklist or guide to my gameplay. But I also like the wiggle room to do it my way, not just be railroaded down a plotline. DragonQuest Builders delivers on this.

You start with basically nothing except a mission to find the ruins of a town and try to survive. There are ghosts that roam at night and yes, they will murder you very quickly early in the game. Unless you can find a closed room to shut yourself into and a bed to sleep on. Because sleeping is the best way to avoid ghostly attacks. So you build yourself a dirt hut, roofs are not necessary in this game, and start searching for clues. The missions you get are pretty open-ended - mostly "go find X" - with no time limits. You do eventually have to do them to progress to new areas and new materials, but you could spend weeks just slaughtering monsters and collecting resources if you want. And other than following the blueprints you are given to get the prize from doing it their way, you can build the buildings any way you want. The room 'recipes' are just a list of things that have to be in the room for it to count as that type of space. Some rooms/buildings will give you bonuses so they are worth exploring.

There are boss monsters in the stories that are really annoying. I spent hours building my town just the way I wanted it, then the boss comes along and just trashes everything. So I smashed everything and started over. Just like in the Six-Million-Dollar Man show, "we can build it again, bigger and better." Or something like that.

The biggest drawback and worst part of this game are the boss fights. They don't feel like they are connected to the rest of the game play. They aren't even like the boss fights in the original games that this is based on. They are too finicky with the controls and timing and coordination. I handed off the controller to my son and had him fight the bosses.

Overall, this game is loads of fun. I adored the open-ended nature of most of the checklist items. It was fun to see how I could experiment to build the towns. I had one with eight stories above ground, most of them floating on a single staircase. When the monsters got inside my obsidian wall, I just knocked out the stairs so they couldn't trash the rest of my town, and slaughtered them.

The game also includes a free-play level that lets you pretty much play the Minecraft version of the game - no checklists, no goals, just sandbox free play.

The art is adorable, mostly. Even the ugly poison slug monsters are cute. Most combat is simple enough I was fine with it, although I still detest the wyverns. Stupid sneaky guys cost me more than one life.

LEGO Jurassic World

 Rating: 8/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

All Ages

LEGO Jurassic World was a lot more fun than I expected. It's a mashup of three of the dinosaur movies, done with Legos, of course. I really only watched the first movie, so I'm not a huge fan of the franchise. I've also been burned with a lot of the more recent Lego games - buggy, not fun to play, confusing, overwhelming visually, and just not a good experience for me. I'd also heard that you didn't get to play as a dinosaur in this game so I was going to give it a pass.

Until I found it on sale.

Cheap.

So I took a chance on it. And I'm glad I did.

You DO get to play as a dinosaur. As a whole lot of different ones in fact. They're a bit clunky to control, especially the bigger ones, but still - you get to be a LEGO DINOSAUR AND TRASH EVERYTHING!!! Because that's really the point of Lego games - destroy everything you possibly can.

The overworld on this one takes a little getting used to but I really like the way they have it laid out. You are on different islands that unlock as you finish story levels. There are loads of puzzles and challenges to tackle in the overworld, most of them can be cheesed as a raptor, as my daughter figured out. It was so frustrating for me to do all the legwork to get one of the puzzles solved only to get to the final jump point and she'd already cleaned out the gold brick.

Overall, this was a fun game. Not too difficult but not too easy, either, with plenty of Lego smashing to go around. Some of the story levels were painful to play through. I hated the stuff falling through the truck scene where you had to dodge it while hanging on a rope. At least Lego gives you infinite lives even if they steal all your gold coins when you die. But when you have to play through a level two or three times so you can collect everything (sometimes more but we won't talk about those levels or my need to 100% Lego games), bits like this one just get painful to the point where I paid one of my sons to do that part of the level for me. Multiple times. After once or twice, I had to start raising the price. 

This is my way to get around parts of video games that require too much coordination or skills. I bribe my kids to do it for me. Since they are all adults now with years of video game experience, they can usually beat the boss or challenge with no trouble. Me? I struggle with games that require me to be coordinated or jump or process lots of visual input. I still enjoy the stories so I keep struggling. And no, practice isn't going to improve my skills much at this point. It's a losing race with bad eyesight and arthritis. Getting old isn't for wimps.

Back to the game.

I wouldn't pay full price ($30-60 depending on if you like cartridges or not), but I'm glad I picked it up on sale. I definitely got my money's worth of fun out of running around as a raptor destroying things and terrorizing the tourists.

Donut County

 Rating: 9/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

Ages: probably 8+ mostly for story content

Donut County is a weird game. It's about a trash panda king and his empire of raccoons. And donut holes that eat things. And phone apps. And a whole town of mostly talking animals and possibly potato (?) brothers. It's a strange surrealistic game that is also a load of fun. We laughed so hard playing this.

Most of the game is animation of the townspeople talking to each other while they sit 999 meters below where their town used to be because DK, the raccoon who owns the donut shop, is using a new delivery app to deliver donuts to people, only they don't get donuts. They get donut HOLES that are actually holes that eat everything and get bigger as they devour rocks, chairs, tables, pool floaties, chickens, and anything else in the area.

This is a short game taking only an hour or two to play through, but I only paid a few dollars for it. It was well worth it. The mechanics were a little touchy, especially getting the hole to slow down and go where you wanted it to go, but that was a minor quibble with an otherwise very fun game.

It's quirky and weird and highly entertaining.

LEGO The Incredibles

Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸 

Ages: all ages, although younger children and impatient adults might get frustrated by some of the fiddly mechanics

I'm a fan of Lego games, have been for years, but a lot of the more recent ones left me feeling meh about the whole Lego game thing. Too many of them were buggy and felt like re-treads of previous game mechanics. A lot of the game just didn't make sense and the stories were just straight re-tellings of the movies they were based on. The fun little easter eggs and character goofiness was missing.

I loved the Lego Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean games. I enjoyed most of the earlier superhero ones and the Harry Potter ones, but the Hobbit was not fun. It included an unwinnable race and a lot of flaky programming. The Lego Movie game was too weird. The more recent superhero ones felt just off.

I bought Lego Jurassic Park (review coming soon!) on a whim when it was on sale cheap. And had a ball playing it. My daughter (18yo) decided to play with me for a while, but only if she could just play as a raptor. The whole time. This game was NOT play-tested for a raptor in EVERY situation. We crashed it multiple times. And laughed hysterically at the silliness of it.

Lego The Incredibles does not have dinosaurs, unfortunately. But it has superheroes with lots of superpowers. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. The good is that you can fly, shoot lasers out your eyes, swim underwater, throw fish bombs, slam the ground really hard, and a bunch of other things. The bad is that the powers are only labeled by an icon so it's hard to figure out what the powers are if it's not obvious. There is a way to find text titles for the powers but I was at over 80% of the game finished before my daughter found it. They are a bit overwhelming, too, trying to find the one character that has that one rare power that you  need in that one spot. The other bad is also a good, if you're an anarchist in these game like me, it's really easy to cheese a lot of the jumping puzzles with a flying superhero. Or a helicopter, which I found and stole in the first half hour of gameplay.

The game crashed a lot, too. I'm not sure why. We were just playing it. Maybe because the game felt like it was mostly programmed to be a one-person game with the second player added as an afterthought, although there were places where it was almost impossible to play as just one player. It was weirdly uneven in this regard.

By far, my biggest gripe about the game is the way the story levels are integrated. In the older games, the cut scenes usually came just at the beginning and end of the level with a short one maybe in the middle at the checkpoints. This one had the story/animated sequences so integrated into the play areas that it was really hard to figure out if I was actually playing or watching a movie. And some of them were SOOOOO LOOOOOONG. Seriously, I took a lot of bathroom breaks in the middle of playing levels because of this.

The story levels also took place in the overworld half the time, which was even more confusing than the long cut scenes. Sometimes you could go off and explore and do what you want and other times you were limited to the story characters and settings which were the same but not. Yep, so confusing to play.

A lot of the extra overworld prizes, like the gold bricks and building bricks, didn't become available until after you did the crime wave for that area. Which would not be that big of a problem, but the crime waves were tied to story levels so you don't get half these goodies until after the game is mostly finished. What's the point in giving me a special brick that has great superpowers that would have been very helpful early in the game after I've already done all the things it might have helped me do?

Money also has little meaning in this game except as a way to keep score. You only purchase a few things and they don't cost much. I remember scrounging coins like crazy in the earlier games so I could buy that one character I unlocked that I wanted to play SO MUCH, but this game? Meh, most of them you just get once you find them. No money necessary.

My other major complaint is the extremely long load times especially the ones where the screen goes black for almost a minute. I kept wondering if the game had crashed while loading the next scene.

Overall, it's been a fun game. The overworld is amazingly large. There are plenty of places to explore, hidden treasures to find, simple puzzles to solve but a lot fewer than previous Lego games, plus loads of fun characters including a lot from other Pixar movies. Would I have played full price for this? Probably not. But it was worth the ten bucks I dropped to get it.

I'm still missing the silliness from the previous Lego games, though.