Halmaverse

6/10 Configurable Halma/Ugolki TLDR: A 3D implementation of Halma game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halma (similar to Russian Ugolki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugolki) with configurable board sizes and difficulty levels. It generally plays okay, though the AI won't present a challenge even at "hard" level if you know this game. Good: + free + options for board sizes bigger than the usual 8x8 + 2 extra modes where you pick up boosts for pieces + pleasant music So-so: +/- while the 3D view with chess pieces is okay, in the 4-player variant it can happen that 2 players get pieces of the same color. That gets visually confusing +/- AI isn't strong enough. I expected to lose at "hard" difficulty when playing 2-player Halma. Well, I played this game (the Russian "Ugolki") as a child, over 30 years ago. Not sure I'm still skilled in it. But the AI was too easy to defeat +/- I'd actually want a 2D option, like typically in chess. If wouldn't cost much effort for the dev to make it, compared to the 3D presentation. Yet it would make the desk clearer since in 2D you don't have any visual overlaps of pieces +/- it's not always clear that it's your turn in a 4-player game. Maybe there s…

"Halmaverse" is a loose rework of a Chessboard game called "Halma" (or "Hoppity"). The game works more like checkers than Chess, each player moves a piece one square (or jump over another player, but this does not "capture" that piece like it does in checkers). The objective? A mad rush to get your pieces in the opposing players corner before he can get his pieces into yours. Okay I guess, except this isn't a finished product, it's more abandoned Early Access junkware on Steam. The developers abandoned this 12 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming…