Latest Reviews
Stellaris
Stellaris is filled with good ideas, and it’s not difficult to see the outline of a great space strategy game where those ideas could come together. But beyond the early game, it’s only compelling in bits and pieces – it turns into a largely uneventful slog after that. Paradox has...
There are a lot of good ideas in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, and it certainly looks like a great tactical space combat game. But it struggles to build that into a coherent whole, making it tough to recommend unless you’re willing to utterly dedicate yourself to fully comprehending the inaccessible systems...
Armello
To be fair to Armello, any turn-based multiplayer game struggles if the players you’re competing against are slow or incompetent. The big problem is that even when it works smoothly, there’s nothing special about Armello beyond its style to elevate it beyond passable. But if anything goes wrong, and its...
Dungeons 2
It’s a shame Dungeons 2’s above-ground RTS battles are so primitive and poor, because the underground dungeon-management stuff actually works fairly well. It’s nothing new or special — another would-be Dungeon Keeper successor — but that’s not the worst idea in the world. Dungeons 2 could have been a nice,...
Endless Legend
Endless Legend plays out on one of the greatest, most beautiful maps in strategy gaming history. It combines style, substance, and setting into a marvelous overall experience for both empire management and tactical combat. It struggles slightly with strategic depth, but this is a science fiction and fantasy strategy game...
Bound By Flame has one huge strength: the harmony between its entertaining combat and role-playing systems. Granted, its weak storytelling does weigh it down, and its performance on PS4 is a bit of a bummer, but the strong core of its gameplay powers it through to transcend these flaws. Bound...
Banished
As a city-building game, Banished is dazzling. It combines simple charms with transparent, complex systemic interactions, and a tough-but-fair difficulty curve. My only real criticisms of it is that it left me wanting more, such as strong overarching long-term goals, like a campaign mode. That might have pushed Banished into...
Blackguards
I wish that Blackguards' character progression system wasn't such a mess, because if it worked, I'd be delighted to recommend the entire low-fantasy role-playing package without hesitation. But character development is such an important and defining part of any RPG that this cluttered and confusing system has a big impact...
CriticDB tracks 8 Rowan Kaiser reviews, averaging 70/100. See the score distribution and their highest & lowest rated games below, or browse every Rowan Kaiser score in the Reviews tab.
Rowan Kaiser score distribution
- 90–1000
- 80–892
- 70–793
- 60–691
- 50–592
- Below 500








