Been clearing out my Steam backlog lately, mostly things I don't intend on puttin serious time into.
Chantelise, a third-person action-rpg from the Recettear people. Lock on combat, spells you cas by expending gems you pick up from enemies. You can only hold so many gems and different combinations yield different effects. You have to clear sections of dungeons to advance to the next, sometimes there's a boss at the end. If you die, you get sent back to town, but you don't have to depopulate already cleared sections again, so you can just run back to where you died, which despite being generous is still a waste of time. Also has a simple upgrade system where you can buy equipment to boost your defense, attack and HP. It's also apparently set in the same world as Recettear. Your protagonist is followed around by a fairy who does the spellcasting, the items you find and buy as well as the enemies are all from Recettear as well, which is a nice detail. No interest to continue playing.
Receiver, a game that I think was the result of a game jam? Anyway, you go through randomly generated rooms trying to collect 11 tapes which all seem to be about weapon handling. You're randomly assigned a revolver or pistol at the start, which you use to defend against turrets and drones scattered about the level. You die very quickly and ammo is limited. The gimmick of the game is that you're controlling every aspect of the re-loading process using six or so buttons. If it's a revolver you pop out the cylinder, shake out the casings, put in new bullets one by one and pop the cylinder back in. With a pistol, you additionally have to hold on to the empy magazines and pull back the slide (or whatever that's called). It's a neat idea which will possibly be revisited by VR horror games, otherwise pretty unremarkable. No reason to spend more than one hour with this.
Evil Genius, a moustache twirling bond villain sim, where you build your lair, send out minions to the world to steal money for you or gain infamy by doing random missions, with your ultimate goal being world domination. Doing so will eventually alert you to the authorities, who send agents to your lair to spy on you and disrupt your operations. You can lure them into traps or sic your henchmen on them, capture them, interrogate them, kill them (and store their corpses in freezers), etc. I can see the appeal, but I wasn't interested.
Flotilla. Turn-based space combat. Controls immediately turned me off, put in the dumpster.
Defcon. Nuclear war strategy game made to look like the world map you might see in a control room of some superpower. Place radar dishes and missle silos in your area of influence (among them a united Europe, but not a united Germany, ha) and deploy fleets of submarines, cariers and battleships to defend against the enemy navy and raze their coasts. It's neat to track dozens of warheads as they hit major population centres, hopefully more of theirs than yours. The death toll (usually in millions) pops up as they detonate. Neat, but I didn't need to play more than a single mission. Stark, dispassionate nuclear annihilation. Got it. Moving on.
Side note: Suffers from illegible fonts, and badly scaling UI, like all of Introversion's games pre Prison Architect.
Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy. You have 30 seconds (+however many resets you can afford to buy from the goddess of time) to defeat some evil entity from casting a doomsday spell. Turns slow as molassess classic JRPGs on their head by distilling them down to their core, sans menu driven battles. The bridge is out? Do something for a nearby carpenter, reset the timer, race to the castle. Repeat, with increasing amount and/or varied steps to complete before you can reach the stage boss. Cute, somewhat charming. Probably very short, but it didn't grab me.
Eufloria HD. A screensaver purporting to be a strategy game, from what I've seen. I managed to break progression in the tutorial, which didn't instill much confidence in me. You direct seedlings orbiting asteroids from one body to the next, planting trees along the way. The characteristics of the asteroid influence the seedlings' stats that are spawned from the trees you've planted, which you then send on to the next asteroid or planet or whatever until you're colonized the entire map. Mindlessly repeat. If there's strategy, I haven't played enough to see it, neither do I intend to.
Frozen Synapse. Could be an Introversion game from the looks of it, but it is not. Anyway, it's a turn-based tactics game in which you direct every single move of your soldiers on a abstracted top-down map. It essentially looks like the planning portion of the old Raibow Six games, only you never switch into a real-time first person view to enact your plan. You set waypoints, attach actions to them (aim here, shoot on sight, duck, etc.), then hit play to see how things turn out after a brief wait where the enemy decides how to act. There's a lengthy campaign, but the focus was supposed to be on multiplayer (or 1v1, rather), as the devs gave out two keys per copy when it came out. Fun, but very fiddly. Don't have the patience for this right now, might return to it later (though probably won't).
Gratuitous Space Battles. Design ships (or outfit them, rather), construct fleets, hit play. You don't influence combat in any way beyond that. All you can do is speed up time. It is kind of neat to watch the battles play out, but I have no interest in dueling spreadsheets (not in this way, anyway).
Majesty 2. An RTS that I will likely play for a little longer than any of the above. The gimmick with this game is that you have no direct control over any units. Instead, you set rewards for certain tasks and idle heroes decide by themselves wether the reward money you've set is worth their time (but they also run around and kill any monster in sight). You want to clear out a den of wolves? Build a guild (warriors, rangers, rogues or clerics), hire some heroes and set a reward for its destruction. Initially, a reward of 100 gold will be enough, but the heroes you recruit level up, as so do their standards.
Consequently, money is the only resource, which you accrue by creating a simple economy centred around the heroes' needs. A marketplace where they buy potions and trinkets is essential, but you soon expand with tradeposts (which you find in pre-defined locations), Inns for heroes to rest, a blacksmith to upgrade their equipment, etc.
Given that your income is effectively unlimited, the game tries to limit your capabilities in other ways. One is to raise the cost of buildings with every additional copy (but not the upgrades or recruitment costs). The other is to replace destroyed monster spawners with indestructible sewer entrances that regularly spills out rats (and eventually ratmen) and, upon the death of a hero, an indestructible cemetary where you can revive your fallen, but which also produces skeletons.
Pretty fun, but could become repetitive very quickly.
