PacketStorm

Nice casual game on the niche, but after a while gets boring.

Fun game to watch your packets zip around the world to their destination, or watch them all bottleneck and try not to think about all the angry customers you are responsible for. Also had no problem playing on Linux.

This doesn't feel like a completely flushed out game to me. As other reviews have noted, there's no tutorial, no in-game explanations for what different things do, not even an "Exit" button or main menu - ALT+F4 is the only way out. It's a pity that the developer seems to have left the game in the current state; it wouldn't take much more for it to be a worthwhile game.

This game is certainly not for everyone, but for those who love to work out connection strategy, this is a great game. Sure, it's short, but one of the points is to just keep racking up the research to make it all go faster. No matter how much you upgrade, it will always need more as you make things more and more complex. This game also helps with memorizing major worldwide city locations in terms of where they are geographically. Makes me curious what criteria DjArcas used to select which cities to represent in the game. (e.g. Why Mecca and yet no Cairo or Dubai?) I'm pleased that there are no silly city duplicates, but it always throws me off when I know of certain NA cities that are duplicate names of EU cities, and so I look in the wrong spot (e.g. Birmingham, Odessa, London [yeah, weird one to be thrown off on, but I still check Canada for some reason] )

The game is mostly well-made, but has some fundamental flaws that prevent me from recommending it. The gameplay consists of connecting nodes on a map to allow packets to travel between them. Packets will occasionally travel from one node to another over time, but the most effective way to create traffic is to connect a Data Center to its target/destination node. However, in later levels, you will want to start out by connecting a cluster of nodes that are close to each other, then waiting for packets to spawn and travel between each other. After you earn some income from this, you can grow your network and eventually connect Data Centers to their targets. That's all there is to it, due to the following issues: Upgrading nodes is a waste of time. The benefits of doing so are always outweighed by those of just creating more connections between nodes. Be warned, though: the more connections you make, the more your Running Costs increase. Prioritize connecting new nodes to your network over creating loops/shortcuts for data centers. The transaction feature is confusing. A data center will begin a transaction to its destination for a limited amount of time before switching to another destination. There is a permanent upgrade you can purchase between games that shortens the lengths of these transactions, eventually resulting in data centers wildly swapping targets between nodes across the world. This means prioritizing making connections between a data center and its targets becomes less helpful as you upgrade transaction speeds. There's no apparent upside, so the more you upgrade transaction speed, the more samey the game becomes as you lose all reason to strategize besides connecting the world as cheaply as possible. There's no "quit game" button. You'll have to alt-tab out and close the process yourself. Overall, this has massive potential, but it needs more polish and some features that add strategy. I'd be addicted to PacketStorm otherwise.