I like games with a little random element to it. Give me choices and give me various outcomes that come from them, and let me figure out the best way to handle this. Win or lose by my own choices.

FreeHolder is one of those games, setting you in the role of 3 recently escapes slaves trying to make a living for themselves on a small farmstead in the time of Romans. Every year you will have a goal of money and grown wheat to meet to keep your farm. As you go along, your characters level up and gain new abilities to help you keep up with this, as well as being able to accumulate new tiles of land around your farmstead (which granted does push up rent, but also maximises places to gain resources).

There are a few goals to keep in mind. You must of course plan your months of the year wisely to ensure you have grown enough wheat to meet the tariff. You must keep an eye on the money you have and try to make yourself more than enough just in case. You need to make sure there is enough food to feed all your characters and keep them healthy, fuel to heat the housing in the winter months, building materials in case you want to construct new buildings or paddocks, reagents in case someone is ill and so much more. Add to this that some food items are perishable and need to be eaten first otherwise you lose it entirely. At first it’s a bit confusing to figure out, but once you know where to find things you can probably keep your stock up high enough to not have problems.

There are areas outside of the farmstead of course, and these consist of a number of small towns you can go to gain information and make use of opportunities, a tavern where you can meet various… interesting characters, and the main city where the main market is located and where you will likely be selling on extra supplies to mount up your monetary total. Believe me, set someone aside to keep doing that at least once a month and you will do well, but make sure you don’t sell things you might need.

The game is a little bit confusing to play at first, as the direction is a little lacking. The market interface especially took me a while to figure out. Once you know what to do though, the game plays very well. It does its best to give you as much information as possible, although it is usually the more important stuff such as “you need this much wheat and money”. Each character is assigned a certain number of ‘turn’ slots they can use per month, with a few actions taking more than one of these. Using them wisely is key as the move slots do not pass over from month to month; and these slots get reduced if a character is ill.

FreeHolder is available now on Steam Early Access (which means the game could change a lot from the version I’ve reviewed now) from $9.99 or £6.99 – and there’s even a demon available if you wish to try before you buy. I would recommend this game, as it’s a decent little game and I don’t see many turn-based roguelikes based in the Roman Empire era.

7.5/10

Hey, remember Digital Homicide? The games company that wanted to sue 100 nameless Steam users, and when they asked Valve for their real names Valve turned around and said ‘Nope!’ and then removed them and their games from Steam? Yeah, that was weird wasn’t it?

Before that though they also filed a lawsuit against Youtube critic Jim Sterling for ‘assault, libel and slander’ for one of his reviews against one of their games. That lawsuit wasn’t revoked when Digital Homicide had to cease production after having their games removed from sale (and after filing ANOTHER lawsuit against Valve for having done so), but now that lawsuit has been dismissed with prejudice. That basically means that the lawsuit cannot crop up again.

In a blog post about it, Sterling wrote that the whole ordeal was a drain upon both his resources and emotions. Basically he probably wouldn’t have recovered the costs already involved if it went to court, so a dismissal is the best result possible for him right now. He also says that the suit was dropped after his lawyer explained to the plaintiff, James Romine, what would happen if the case went to court.

“That it got as far as it did, went on for as long as it did, is atrocious – especially when this is a case that amounts to a game developer wanting to silence a game critic. I personally viewed, and still view, the lawsuit as an attempted attack on my freedom to do my legally protected job. I personally perceive it as an attack launched by a man who is unable to deal with criticism in a reasonable fashion and has sought to blame me, continuously, for his failures.” Sterling said.

I thought the story was already over when Digital Homicide went under, but it’s good to hear that the lawsuit is now dead and gone for good.

Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a sequel to an indie game called Space Pirates and Zombies from 2011. Right now the sequel’s been in Early Access for about a year, but it would seem that the developers of the game have been having some trouble behind the scenes and because of it a much anticipated gamemode has had to fall by the wayside.

Developers MinMax Games put out a post on their Steam community page recently that broke the news to the game’s community that unfortunately the planned multiplayer arena mode has had to be scrapped, along with a lengthy apology for having done it. The problem it seems that is due to a lack of multiplayer backend functionality in the Unity game engine that they’re building the game in, they just can’t get Arena to work as well as they feel good releasing with the game. They state that they “have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4. But at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.”

As mentioned, many players were really looking forward to the multiplayer and had even hoped that the game might one day get a co-op campaign mode too. Needless to say, the scrapping of Arena has kind of nipped those hopes in the bud. It does seem though that the majority of players have taken the news well, with most of the responses to the post being quite positive and a number of players saying that they have respect for MinMax’s honesty with them about the state of the game and the now-dropped feature. Always nice to see people on the Internet acting rationally for once.

If you’re curious about the game though, you can pick up Space Pirates and Zombies 2 right now from the Steam store for $19.99/£14.99.