Recent reviews by Delfofthebla

There are few developers in the world that know less about game development. A studio of devs that kinda knew how to code stole an idea from what is highly regarded as a very evil company and then proceeded to mess it up in every conceivable way. They might even get away with the theft, but unfortunately they don't have the skill to maintain what they stole.

They buy unreal assets, flip them into the laziest and lowest effort implementation they can, and then wait 6 weeks to do anything else substantial. The devs work at a snails pace and seem to always do the exact opposite of what the community asks them to do. Not that I think community whining should dictate game development or anything, players don't always know what's best for a game even if they think they do.

However Ironmace is as shortsighted and ignorant as the average low skill player. They constantly make drastic and crazy decisions that have very immediate and obvious consequences--then seem to be surprised at the negative reception. They then fail to follow up with any sort of "master plan" that ties those changes into new or enjoyable gameplay. The game is always in a constant cycle of repeating the same mistakes over and over and over.

Sometimes they will drop a patch that surprises the community. It's amazing! Everyone is having a great time! Then paradoxically, they work faster than they ever have before and they revert that patch the very next day because it doesn't line up with "the vision". The absolute maximum amount of time you can enjoy this game is one week, because they will inevitably ruin any enjoyable changes on the following hotfix. Then they will wait 6 or more weeks to do anything substantial, let alone an actual good change.

I have had a lot of fun with this game. I really have. The steam launch wipe was easily the best state this game has ever been in, and I've been playing since the first playtest. Unfortunately they then spent that entire wipe (and a few weeks of the next one) working on a feature that nobody asked for (Arena) and a gear matchmaking system that they turned off the literal very next day.

They spent several months on two things that weren't necessary and that did not improve the core gameplay loop at all--then took a 3 week vacation. Upon returning, they normalized all gear, lowered TTK to instantaneous (everyone oneshots now) and essentially deleted the entire reason to play the game.

It's just exhausting to constantly be flipping from enjoyment to utter disappointment every time they try to implement their vision. I want something very different than the lead developer (SDF) does. I want more skill expression, I want longer time to kill, and I want PvE to be both fun and engaging. SDF wants a battle arena where everyone pokes at range and hangs around doors until someone gets oneshot. It's so unbelievably stupid.

Do not pay for this game. You can try the free to play mode for a week or two, get bored, and then quit. It's the most effective way to consume the game. Do not get baited into hoping things will improve. Do not get excited for new features. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt.

They will fail you. They always have, and always will. Ironmace deserves to lose their lawsuit, and they deserve to lose this game. They don't have what it takes to develop it.

Man what the hell happened between the demo dropping and the release? It feels like a completely different game. Some of the changes are good, but in other ways not so much.

The main problem is, it's endless with no meta progression system. There's no bosses, and no goals. By 15 floors of grinding you're ready for it to be over, but there's no way to end it aside from taking off your gear and letting mobs kill you. Nor is there a reason to end the run. Once you let it go on long enough you sort of "absorb" a lot of the traits of other build types, so the desire to experiment with other builds fades the more you play a single character.

At least with games like Risk of Rain 2 you can end it by going for a specific permanent currency farm, or by choosing to fight a final boss, or doing a specific thing for an unlock. There's nothing like that here. You're just endlessly grinding for...no reason at all.

I've only done 2 runs and they both went on for way longer than I was happy with. After my last run I just closed the game because I could see I was never going to lose and I had gotten everything I wanted to.

There should have been bosses. There should have been character unlocks. There should have been gearset unlocks. Every itemset should have an item for each slot. It should not have been infinite. I could go on and on, but ultimately this is just a very mediocre game that traps you in a perpetual skinnerbox loop.

EDIT: Sidenote: steam says I played primarily on my steamdeck but I literally didn't even install it on my steamdeck lol.

This is what the first VR tech demo that the world should have seen upon purchasing a VR headset. The kind of game you expect to see on a demo disk. "Included free with the system" kind of vibes. That's not to say that it's bad, but it's certainly nothing to write home about.

It's the kind of experience you'd expect people to gawk at and say "Wow! This is pretty great! I can't wait to see what kind of VR games I can play that actually cost money!"

Except it wasn't the included free game. It wasn't the starting line for a revolution in technology. It was the "peak" of an industry that was, quite frankly, dead on arrival.

Half Life:Alyx is fine. But I wouldn't recommend anyone actually buy hardware to play it. I wouldn't recommend someone pay money to own it. I wouldn't recommend anyone download a mod to play it without VR. I wouldn't even recommend watching a youtube summary of the story. HL:A simply exists, and should be treated as something you'd play if it was free.

Except it's not free. It costs $60 lol.

It's missing the actual spark that makes games like this worth playing. Sure the art is great and there's theoretically a lot to explore, but it just wasn't doing it for me. I didn't feel like there was any point to my character, or his build. Enemies are about as dumb as they can get and can be defeated with no investment and no equipment.

I picked a mage start and dumped all of my stat points into that. I started my character and all they gave me was a rusty sword. I wasn't happy about that but I figured they'd ween me into the magic eventually. I did eventually get a spell, but it wasn't anything super interesting, and the reality was, my rusty starter sword was just better. I used both for a bit but it didn't change how I played or make my character feel any more interesting.

Some other nitpicks would be that the soundtrack gets really repetitive very quickly, the font for the game was kind of hard to read and was kind of distracting, The game is made in unity so the whole thing just felt sluggish and clunky, as almost every 3d unity game does.

I wanted to like this game, I did. And perhaps I could have given it a bit more time. But I felt like I saw the "bones" of how the game worked enough to see the writing on the wall. I could tell that my character progression was going to be very basic and boring, and that the game was not going to even need that meager progression. It really bummed me out.

Don't feel like writing a review atm. It's bad tho

Way too much inventory slot management, durability management, weight management, and just general "slog" gameplay activities. You spend more of your time in menus and doing survival-esque gameplay than you do actual interesting activities. I've tried to enjoy this game on several occasions but I just can't do it.

Incentivising people to build their caster characters around a melee stat just so they don't have to drop as much stuff on the ground is just terrible gameplay design.

No Borderless Windowed option. No Windowed Resolution options (only manual resizing)
No in-game key rebinds, only a text file you can edit out of game.

Outer Wilds is not for everyone. There's no combat, no talent trees, no difficult systems to master, and despite the user tags, it doesn't really have puzzles. (In the way most people expect to see, anyways) First and foremost, Outer Wilds is an exploration game. And there is not a single game in the entire history of time that does it better.

You fly your ship, you read some messages, and you enjoy the sights. In its most basic form, that is Outer Wilds. But that sounds kinda bad, right? Honestly, it might be, for you. You have to really want to get invested in the game world, and be willing to actually appreciate the visual wonders. I usually struggle to get invested in stories and worlds for games these days, but Outer Wilds? It sucked me in like no other game has before. The story is woven into your journey through it--making it all that much more impactful.

Outer Wilds is a master of atmosphere and immersion. The physics engine, art style, the setting, the beautiful soundtrack. It's polished to perfection and hits all the right notes in just the right way. I was more immersed in this game than I ever have been in any AAA RPG.

If you've heard of this game before, you might have also heard that you can only play it once. That isn't some sort of hyperbole, it is an absolute truth. Outer Wilds is, at its core, a progression game. It's not RPG, it doesn't have talent trees or timed unlocks, but it IS a progression game. Rather than progressing within a set of specific mechanics however, you progress with your knowledge of the solar system and the history within it. The "Puzzle" that you are piecing together is one made entirely of very basic information.

Once you know, you know. There is no more mystery at that point. You've seen all there is to see, learned all there is to learn, and all of your questions are answered. it's over. You cannot play it ever again. Obviously this means that if are the type of person who cannot resist googling something when they get stuck, or have already been spoiled on what occurs during the game, then Outer Wilds is probably not for you. The journey you make while learning the beats of the story is crucial to your enjoyment of the game.

Despite this con of zero replayability, I believe that this game is still worth your money, and still worth your time. If you are the type of person who is willing to sit down, explore, read, and think about what is happening around you, Outer Wilds will offer an experience that no other game can provide. If you are capable of enjoying this game even a little bit, you must play it, and you must finish it. You will not regret it.

This is one of the buggiest "full release" games I have ever played. Rollbacks, server disconnects, multiplayer zoning issues, not being able to trade items to your friends despite them being right next to you when it dropped, i could go on. I think most people have faced and discussed these particular issues to death.

But that's truly only the tip of the iceberg. Chests spawning outside of the map, memory leaks leading to slowdown, Loot not being able to be picked up or dropping in places you cannot access. Echo rewards not spawning until you restart your game, invisible walls that block your path, echo progress being rolled back if you waypoint elsewhere directly after completing them, and more! I could honestly go on and on.

I cannot play for more than an hour without dealing with some kind of frustration. Sometimes it's network related, other times it's bug related, and sometimes it's even gameplay related.

The endgame starts with an incredibly long slog through what I can only define as "filler" or "white map" gameplay. It's boring, and it takes 10-20 hours to complete. What's more is that completing this is not account wide, meaning if you want to play multiple characters, you are stuck doing the same boring campaign followed by the same boring endgame filler, all to get to the starting line of what most ARPGs are all about. It's just a hot mess.

There's a good framework of a game here. There truly is. In several years of content updates and (more importantly) bug fixes, I think it could be a solid 7-8/10 game. With the current state of things though? No. This is not a proper version 1.0. This is not a solid launch. This is version 0.7 or 0.8 at most, and I cannot recommend anyone play it for any reason until they address the stability, performance, and design of the entire game.

At launch, you could call this game a scam. Zero content, broken systems (they only really had like 3), and just an overall lack of polish.

7 years of updates later, we have gained a lot of polish, and quite a few new systems. For many people, this is enough. To those people, I say: Have you ever played a single video game in your entire life? Because I cannot imagine having my standards this low. Hold Left Click and Navigate through menus. That's this entire game. This game...is garbage.

Missions are repetitive and boring. Planets are repetitive and boring. Every galaxy is the same. Every combat encounter is the same. Every single system and every single mechanic is as deep as a single drop of water. There is not a single activity in this game that is worth your time. Not ONE.

Perhaps the only highlight of my entire time spent with this game was upon arriving on a new planet. I saw a big worm creature burrowing through the ground and flying over my head. I thought that was quite the spectacle. Truly something worth exploring for! If there's more like this, sign me UP!

But then reality settled in. The worm left no tunnels, no caves. It did not have a home to find. When it burrowed into things, such as my ship or a NPC settlement, it did nothing. The worm is nothing more than a background art piece. It has zero impact on gameplay. Then I saw the exact same creature on two other planets within an hour of seeing the first. A cool idea completely ruined by the shallowness and repetition of the encounter.

And that's this entire game. It's either boring and repetitive, or the novelty of something new wears off immediately due to the repetitive procedural generation.

No planet is worth exploring. No upgrade is worth chasing. No ship is worth obtaining. They even have freaking MMO-esque daily missions via frigates. I want nothing to do with this garbage and neither should anyone else. In 7 more years we might have a game worth $20, but it aint worth $0 at its current stage. If I was paid $60 to play this game I'd ask to refund their money back to them.