Recent reviews by DavidHelkowski

My feeling is that this game is a pile of garbage, and I've only played it for all of 5 minutes so far.

Why do I feel this way:
1. The game doesn't support widescreen monitors wider than 16x9 without using 3rd party mods. There is a mod for it, downloaded by 44,000 people. Consider that for a moment. The lazy devs of this game know that 44,000 people have this problem, and they can't be bothered to fix it.

2. You can't shut off depth of field. You can turn it to 'low' only, and it is still really high. Go look online and this is widely discussed. Many people hate depth of field, myself included. There is a mod to shut it off, but the only one I found requires using 'steamless' which is a thing to remove some of the Steam DRM in order to patch the executable. Really? I have to remove some Steam DRM to get rid of depth of field? It's ridiculous.

3. The game crashed for me on the 'casual / experienced' selection. There is nothing wrong with my setup. I have a modern computer with all the latest software. I am a software engineer with 20+ years of experience. The devs constant claim of it being our fault their buggy ass ♥♥♥♥ doesn't work is silly. The game is buggy.

4. The max fps the game will do without mods is 60fps. There is no unlimited setting, and nothing higher than 60. I can't even...

5. The first time you run the game it takes 5+ minutes to compile shaders. I have a fast modern system. That's a long time.

Do yourself a favor if you care about quality gaming and don't buy this game.

I have nearly all the various DLC and add-ons for this, except for Designer's Cut.
Every time there is a promotion there is no discount off of that, and the bundles are only discounted off the price of everything not the price of the things I am missing, making all the bundle discounts completely useless.

They really should fix this otherwise I will never pay $15 for the one remaining thing I am missing.

Think "Factorio in 3D with weaker monsters"

Different from Factorio, the machines are large and unwieldy. You can create them easily, but placing them on the map is awkward as there is no grid. You can, though, create your own create by laying down foundation blocks. Even with the foundation blocks, there is no standard grid to snap to, so it still remains a task for the player to line everything up.

Currently there are no tunnels available, so your options for crisscrossing belts are to either just overlap them ( which is allowed but looks terrible ), to use multiple layers of height ( which is why later tiers of the game often involves factories with belts 10+ stacks high ), or to make an elevated platform and go under it for some things. With an elevated platform though, you can't "cut holes" in it; you can only leave out one of the rather large foundation blocks.

Awkwardly, the game imposes arbitrary blocks in your ability to build later game items ( later "tiers" ) by forcing you to produce a large number of difficult items within the tier to advance to the next. This does force you to learn how to make a scaled factory at each tier though, giving you some sense of progression through the game.

Your character dies rather easily, forcing you to constantly collect edible plants if you want to stay alive. You can build all manner of high tech "items", but there are is no armor of any sort, so you die almost as easily at endgame as at the start. I say "almost" because you can get better weapons.

You can craft many items without machines, but you are forced to use one of two types of "crafting benches" for many of those. The "crafting benches" are smallish structures about 12x the size of a conveyor belt piece. As a result of this your map will quickly get cluttered with these things as you end up needing them a lot.

Not only do you need these structures to make many items yourself, you have to wait to create them holding down a button in the interface. Compared to Minecraft, which makes most similar items immediately when made yourself, this is very tedious. In Minecraft, you would make machines to automate complex series of items being needed to go together. In Satisfactory you do it to save the annoyance of holding down a craft button.

The complexity of the item builds is quite low compared to advanced mods in Minecraft, but it is still an enjoyable experience connecting everything together and building out all the various items you can.

The main challenge of Satisfactory is scaling up. The game is all about increasing the size of your factory and connecting all the resource nodes together to produce the most difficult items available as fast as you can.

The game is very pretty visually. This can though be a problem as there are many plants impeding your view that can and will lead to you walking off cliffs and dying because you can't see through all the plants in the way.

Fun game despite the various downfalls; would be neat if in the future they have custom map generation or terraforming of some sort.

Other various nitpicks:
1. There are many "enemy plants" you can't destroy ( maybe possible once the highest tier is reached?? )
2. You can and will often get stuck in plants. If you don't have a chainsaw and items to power it you have to kill yourself to get out of it. This is a ridiculous bug. The game should detect and unstick you if this happens.
3. Various tips and tricks that should be known are not, that I've seen, described anywhere in game. You should go read about such things online at some point to learn some of them. ( examples are the multiple hotbars and the ability to upgrade things in place )
4. You can get higher tier items from crash sites before you reach the tier. You can't see their information weirdly till you reach the tier.
5. The chest markers that tell you where your stuff is when you died vanish if you quit the game and reload from a save. Always get your items before you exit the game or it can be very difficult to find them again.
6. The best item for health is an inhaler, which restores all health. As an inhaler, you'd think you could take partial "puffs" and restore some health... but no.. you must always use an entire "inhaler" even if restoring just a bit of health.
7. No way to increase health pool
8. If trying to build a ladder to something far away, the ladder placement becomes invisible despite still working.
9. You don't get the game map till pretty far in the game. It's arbitrary and annoying.
10. Moving long distances requires using tubes you travel through. A warp item at higher tier would be nice...
11. No way to "blank screen" that I see to save rendering resources when just waiting for things to happen.

Various good things:
1. Even if you die by "falling into the abyss", the game will place your items in a chest where you were last touching the ground. ( or possibly nearby )
2. Things that interact with conveyor belts can generally "snap to them"
3. The power grid can be just one giant grid and doesn't seem to have a max of power going through it. This actually seems pretty cheaty.
4. You get back all resources when destroying things you built previously.
5. Inventory size does get larger progressively as you pass tiers in the game / accomplish goals.
6. You can save the game anytime ( multiple saves )

The mouse movement is not "exact" and feels sluggish. Jumping is very finicky, and it makes the game hard to play since it has many jump dependent challenges.

It has view bobbing while walking, which cannot be shut off.

I love puzzle games of this sort but the bad mechanics of the game immediately turned me away from the game such that I quit after a few levels.

This game is horrible. I was expecting DOOM with fancier updated graphics. Instead what Bethesda has created is this:

1. Linear levels ( at least the first few; the only I've tried so far ). Remember the fun of the first part of the first level of DOOM? Where it was essentially like a normal size deathmatch level from classic gaming and you could reasonably run around and kill all the enemies, and could ramp up the difficulty for more challenge so that you have to dodge all enemy fire to live? That was great. That was fun. This is not fun at all.

2. Broken "glory kills". In the previous iteration of the game, glory kills were optional. If you didn't perform them the enemy would still fall over dead. In this game ( or at least it seems??? ) enemies that you don't glory kill seem to come back to life. Result, since you inevitably don't have enough ammo to shoot them again: You have to glory kill every enemy; which is just boring to watch and not at all in the style of a good run and gun.

3. ?? Shared ammo ??. In the old game / games I'm pretty sure there was different ammo per gun. In this one they seem to be shared or some insanity. I only see one type of ammo, and if you use all the ammo up in one gun it seems to somehow drain the ammo mostly from other weapons also. I don't understand what is going on here and the end result is that I cannot selectively use guns as appropriate; I am forced to only use the weapons with the largest ammo reserve.

4. Forced "zoom" in order to use secondary railgun fire. This is just irritating and unneeded. Secondary fire should be possibly without zooming.

5. Unclear and large ammo usage for secondary fire. Secondary fire takes 4-6 ammo per shot! Basically don't bother with it unless you are playing on easy or are forced to use it to kill a certain enemy type, as if you use it for any normal enemy you'll be out of ammo in no type.

6. Irritating required "double jumps" from the start. Did you know DOOM Eternal is also like a Mario game with excessive numbers of bottomless pits to fall down? Yes. DOOM Eternal is a platformer. Sorry you can't enjoy killing enemies... nope... you'll need to focus on jump timing from the start.

7. Irritating "wall climbs" from the start. Prince or Persia wall climbing and movement is integrated and important to the series. It feels seamless and enjoyable. It is not so in DOOM Eternal. It is tacked on junk imo.

8. Did I mention the game is terrible and I hate it and have no desire to play it?

9. Poorly designed levels. In the first few levels I encountered many low ledges I wanted to jump on, and no matter what I tried I simply couldn't jump up onto even reasonably low ledges. The jumping / edge grabbing implemented into this game is just plain garbage.

10. Broken control selection. I leave my Xbox One controller plugged into my computer pretty much always. I went to play DOOM Eternal. Was I offered to play with mouse and keyboard? No; it just says "loaded controller layout". I went to settings and attempted to change it to keyboard/mouse layout. I was able to do so, but all of the on screen prompts and instructions stayed telling me what buttons to press, which is useless as I wasn't using the controller. I unplugged the controller; the prompts remained wrong. I had to unplug the controller and restart the game to get proper instructions. This is just bad UX. I can't imagine they had much UX testing as this would have been discovered.

11. Forever and a day to install and run the game. With a XX GB install, I really think that only the assets and data for the first few levels should be initially installed. You should not have to wait so long to start playing the game.

12. No recognition of memory shortage. I generally don't reboot my computer. Apparently my memory got fragmented or something and Windows system was "using" all 32gb of memory. This caused my initial attempt to play the game to be laggy and terrible. Did the game recognize it had insufficient memory and was constantly using swap? Nope. It just ran terribly. I figured out what was wrong and rebooted. Everything was fine then...

In closing, this is the worst game I have played in years. It is worse the initial release of "No Man's Sky".

This game seems terrible. From the very start it is unusual that you cannot run backwards, only forwards. There doesn't seem to be any reason why it is limited. There are bible verses all over the game; in an intrusive fashion. Why do we need bible verses plastered all over a video game exactly? I seemed to fall through the edge of the cliff in the very first 10 seconds of playing; it is unclear where the edge of things you can land on is. It is unclear in the first 15 seconds of playing what you can touch that hurts you and what you cannot. I shut this game off after playing for about 2 minutes. I could not figure out how to exit the game with the keyboard; I just hit alt-f4 as the in game menus seem no good.

The sound effects are quite horrible also; the 'ugh ugh' sound immediately gets on your nerves.

This is one of the worst escape room games I have ever played. There is basically only 1 room in the entire game. It has two "difficulty" levels that I have seen so far. Perhaps more after the "normal' and 'hard' are beaten?

The first time I played the first level I unlocked all the locks and the bar didn't fall off due to a glitch. Had to redo it over to get it to unlock. It worked on the second time through.

There are many situations where you cannot grab objects like you think you should be able to, not because you cannot actually grab them, but because the game is super finicky about where you grab objects and it changes based on where the object is placed.

When attempting to change clock time you cannot tap the buttons that I see reasonably. You have to "clench your fist" on them, which looks weird and is a pain.

This game is insanely difficult, and that is exactly what makes it awesome. First you just reach the end of a level. Then you try repeatedly to get all the extras. Then you look at the high score times and go "how is that even possible." Then you watch the replays and learn the tricks of the game ( corner 45" bonus edge jump, jump bonus for slowing down while jumping, etc ), and then you try to get a perfect run. You can reach the high scores; and you will question whether you are sane to have played the level 200 times in a row to get the high score, but it is worth it. Once you get there you want to keep doing it.

The mechanics of the game are very much like a "super monkey ball 2d". If you played that on dreamcast, you will know what I am talking about; the momentum is very important and the game is full of finicky jumps that require exact timing.

Do you want a real authentic challenge? Get this game. Do you want to be extremely frustrated and enjoy every moment of your anger at the game? This is the game for you.