Recent reviews by Doehg

hilarious how everyone in this game (including, if not particularly, the player) is going around ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everything up and ruining all this science. Research Director, Dr. Derek Manse would be, if he isnt presently already, horrified at current events. I mean we're going around just murdering unique specimens and devastating local ecosystems to get some resources to, like, open a door or make a weapon. It's truly monstrous behavior. I hope we get to see Research Director, Dr. Derek Manse, or at least find out he's okay.
Also absolutely LOVE the recently added kyle hill cameo. Not to mention he's the maybe-official-not-entirely-clear (Nuclear) "Plant Supervisor." Also going around the facility being a general menace. Like, I'm pretty sure I saw him standing on the body of a Gatekeeper Jotun (big tanky enemy that's very hard to kill), that I have to assume he killed somehow. Best part, though, was when you first meet him in a room absolutely FILLED with green, radioactive waste. I see it, put on my hazmat suit (because like that is a *lot* of green goo that is normally *very* radioactive), walk up to him thinking bros ♥♥♥♥♥♥, then after listening for a bit think "huh that sounds a lot like kyle hill," then get the journal entry for a "Dr. K. Hill, Plant Supervisor" and OMG ITS KYLE HILL. Then i see the geiger counter at his feet and decide to see how radioactive the room is (because no way is bro not 90% cancer at this point). Jokes on me tho, because, obviously, in the presence of nuclear power's #1 fan kyle hill, the radioactive waste is more realistically safe, and is not actually radioactive. In this one room. With the guy who was just talking about how safe nuclear power is. Like he does in real life. Like nuclear power is in real life. Then I leave the room and all of a sudden all the nuclear waste is highly radioactive again because it thinks it can get away with it when Plant Supervisor, Dr. actual Kyle Hill isn't looking.

i like game is good game

I was quite excited until i saw the speed limit and PCU were still around. The lack of rotors and pistons is also suspicious. I understand that even with planning and a good foundation they'll take a good amount of work to get working, but it's still a foundational thing i'd have like to have seen. Of course, they could just... not have them. which is fine, i suppose.
The game also crashed when i crashed the red ship into the blue ship. The little bit of the crash i did see ran significantly better than a similar event in SE1, and despite the graphical upgrade it runs just about as... "okay."
The building is less fluid and more restrictive than starship evo's similar design, and with the PCU and speed limits i doubt it is nearly as well optimized. Of course, evo doesn't have collision destruction, but I personally prefer performance over that.
It's difficult to not compare this game to KSP2, with all the similarities, but unlike KSP2, SE2 seems much more likely to succeed. It isn't promising anything nearly as grandiose as KSP2 did, so I'm hopeful they'll actually deliver something in-scope. It doesn't quite feel like it's held together with duct tape either, but it's certainly not as large as an improvement as I hoped. Still, it is important to mention that it *does* actually seem to be an improvement beyond a graphical upgrade, something that cannot be said for KSP2. Not to mention the studio working on the game has about as much relevant experience as you can hope for.
I'm fine with just being able to build (see: years of starship evo), but with how much i focused on the survival viability of ships i built in SE1, its a bit weird not even having conveyor tubes yet in SE2. Even if they did nothing (since there's no item system i can see), I would still like to have them...
The ray-traced lighting is awesome. In a lot of more traditional games, baked lighting and other tricks can still look great, but space engineers is pretty much a perfect example of where ray-tracing shines. There's a single major light source (the sun) that, without an atmosphere, is exceptionally sharp. Seeing stark shadows lay across your ship from all manner of protrusions makes it look absolutely immaculate. It's incomparably better than what is in SE1. On the higher two graphics settings, ship lights also get raytracing, which makes them look amazing. no more volumetric lights leaking through your hull and such. Admittedly, even when on lower settings, the volumetric lights still look way better than they did in SE1. I have a 3090, and don't notice much performance drops from using the higher settings. "High" graphics gets me ~90 fps in the relatively empty scene where i just tested the lights, and "medium" puts me above ~100. Idk if I've played SE1 on this computer, but SE2 seems to run well for the modern game it is. Overall, massive graphical improvement, without any obvious major issues. like KSP2 had...
I really like the copy/paste and undo/redo capabilities. I'm hesitant to say they're the best of any comparable game, but I really think they're the best of any comparable game. Of course, making a full judgement on that will take more time in-game than what I've put in so far.
I'm really looking forward to planets. They were a little jank in SE1, and I can't wait to see how planets that were (supposedly (ideally)) planned from the start turn out. Especially water. The whole boat and submarine thing is cool, but even just a barely viable fluid is better than oceans of ice. I hope the planets are really big, too.
I'm neutral about how far out multiplayer is planned. It was a huge part of SE1 for me, even if i barely interacted with other people, but at the same time i appreciate the focus on other, core parts of the game first.
I don't like progression in SE survival. I didn't like it in SE1 and I'm very skeptical of SE2 doing it. of course, the system in SE1 was abhorrent garbage, so the bar that SE2 has to clear is basically on the ground...
I also don't like how you can go all the way up to 20 m/s without taking damage. That's 45 mph. Which is insane. I want my ship to get beat up from impacts, not shrug off a high-speed crash into an asteroid like it just hit a garbage bin while backing out of the driveway. As long as i can reduce that, I'll be fine, obviously, but if i can't, i will be very unhappy with how pristine my industrial mining ship looks.
Overall, there's not much to go off of here. It's not so bad that I can write it off like i did for KSP2, but its not so good that I'm hyped and sure it will succeed. I think if i had to pick, it's on the good side, but because I'm still skeptical (see: PCU, speed limit, lack of rotors/pistons), I can't quite recommend it. I'll go back in for the rest of today and try and build some stuff, so it still might barely eek out a thumbs up, but for now, not so much.

*update: I'm sorry I doubted you keen. this ♥♥♥♥ so peak. but like only in the way SE1 is peak. It's still janky as hell and doesn't have much content, but for an alpha it's very good. The building strikes an awesome balance between, well, SE1 and starship evo. Which is to say, beginner friendly while still having great potential. The copy-paste is as great as i thought, maybe even better. However, I do wish there was a copy/paste history like in factorio. everything else i said still stands, though, so it only barely gets a thumbs up. still a thumbs up!

*update 2: spent some more time building, and there are so many bugs. but, notably, only bugs. I'm still not getting any vibes of "catastrophic foundational issues" like i did with KSP2. Well, not any beyond what I'd expect from space engineers...
so that's good.

The AI in this game is a complete joke. I rarely win on the max difficulty, and rarely lose on the difficulty one below that, so I just have them set to the absolute minimum so they don't bother me while i slog through the campaign. Normally this wouldn't be an issue in any other racing game, but the tracks are all bland, similar, and easy, so the racing itself provides little challenge. They're way too long, and way too simple to be worth optimizing. You just can't put in hundreds of enjoyable laps when it just feels so bland and repetitive. Of course, i played a lot of redout 1 and plenty of other grav/twinstick racers (along with just racing games in general), so if this is your first time, don't listen to me here; I've heard plenty of other people complain that it's *too* hard, or quite good, or even *better* than R1. Alas, this is my review, so *I* get to complain about the experience.
Anyway, this leads to the campaign just feeling like a slog. there are so few maps and tracks that you just end up doing the same stuff over and over again. This is not helped by the fact that i hate tartarus and the marinara trench (i enjoy being able to boost and see the track thx), so there's even fewer tracks i actually want to play. Finally, because I have a lot of racing experience, the lower tiers (honestly I'm considering all the way up to S) feel agonizingly slow to play. arcade mode is fine, but all the ships are over-balanced to each other, and it's *only* fine. I was really looking forward to optimizing a "build" in campaign, but you can pretty much always just put on your best parts and fit under the score limits.
After 25 (twenty-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-five) *hours* of slogging my ass all the way to S tier, i decide to grab my S-tier parts and head back down to the lower tiers. I build a SULHA with max top speed, thrust, and passable steering (note: very little strafing and basically zero stability) I run a time trial on a map that favors that build, and beat the score by *twenty seconds* on my first try. as expected. I do a race on a map that also favors my build somewhat, and the AI is somehow able to catch up with me on straights using B-tier speed components. Not surprising in retrospect, but it *really* does not help this games case. Overall, it's painfully mediocre. I may have played 25 hours of it, but I honestly don't think I enjoyed more than a few of them. I just kept playing out of a vain hope that it would get better in the higher tiers, once everything was faster and more difficult. It didn't get any better. You don't go that much faster. The tracks barely change at higher speeds.
Notably, those few enjoyable hours were probably just in arcade, running laps in neo-tokyo on practice mode. Because, yeah, time trial is just one lap from start to finish now, so you can't post insane lap times while running the track for hours. you have to press "restart," then wait for it to restart, then wait for it to start, then be sad because the music restarted... Though i usually play with music off because the soundtrack is such a downgrade from R1.
Also holy ♥♥♥♥ the voiceovers, map, and ship descriptions are agonizingly cringe. Like for ♥♥♥♥s sake you can't call the SULHA a "glass cannon" that has earned the name of "cannonglass," despite not dying after hitting a wall like it did in R1. While in R1, I would start ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ my pants when the voiceover said "hull breach" because I knew I would get turned into a fine paste next time I hit a wall, if I start hearing the warning beeps in R2, I just stop boosting for a bit and I'm fine. Even if you hit a wall at low health, unless you have literally no durability score (which is not true for any max-score build), all it does is delay regen (unless you only barely hit it), which only delays boosting, which only matters at very high difficulties (i.e. it doesnt matter for the average player). In R1, delaying regen meant staying in the imminent death (pant-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥) zone of your healthbar. And nobody would unironically call a ship "cannonglass." Cringe behavior.
I honestly just recommend getting Redout: Enhanced Edition. The vibe is way better, though the driving is a little harder. I think R2 did a slightly better job at the driving and technical controls, but didn't capitalize on it in any way, and utterly ruined the vibe. Catastrophically decimated the vibe. Took the vibe out back and shot it twice in the back of the skull, then buried it six feet under. Never to be seen again.

WE STAY HOPEMAXXING

Not particularly large (I've 100% it and both DLCs in the time above), but the gameplay is fun and relatively unique, and the visuals are absolutely immaculate. Vibes unmatched. We all love fishing, so who wouldn't love fishing with a bit of eldritch corruption as well?

very silly. 10/10 would fry again.

this game is an unplayable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. i like it, when it works, but it barely works. it freezes whenever i try to play it, primarily when my controllers get close to my headset. which, unsurprisingly, happens quite often in a vr game. it's obviously been primarily developed for quest (poor graphical fidelity, though it still looks fine), so i seriously don't understand how I'm encountering issues with lag on a PC that can run cyberpunk at high frames and graphics quality. It's honestly atrocious, and i cannot play it anymore until it's fixed. I don't see many people complaining about this, so I imagine its due to some simpler issue that should be fixed with a patch or some local changes. of course, that's no excuse. this shouldn't happen to a game on full release. it should work. it should be tested.

as for the game itself... it's alright. nothing great. a lot of the low-quality, arcadey, not-taking-full-advantage-of-vr ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ from arizona sunshine has... shone through. It's still good (and much better than arizona), but I like h3vr and boneworks and such and want to see more of that level of fidelity in games. which is reasonable to not do. still want it tho.

the graphics are better than i expected, or feared. so many vr games have transitioned to looking like ♥♥♥♥ because of the requirements to run on a quest, but i suppose due to improvements in their power and specifically good development in this game leads to it looking quite good. not great, but that's been a running theme here...

being in the dark, with just a little light from not-your-headlamp looks absolutely stunning, at least on the oled screens of my bigscreen beyond. I was seriously in awe, and now have a significant desire to go look at other vr games now that I have it. I even used to have an index, so to see an improvement on that is quite something. obviously this is a lot to do with the headset, but the game still has to be able to take advantage of it, and this game certainly does.

the gunplay is okay. not great. the AK feels a little anemic. Like, a lot anemic. I would expect a rifle caliber to do more damage than what looks like a 9mm, but it honestly feels like it takes fewer shots to kill those rat things with the pistol than the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AK. and don't give me "oh but the ak shoots faster so it would be too powerful if it did more damage," no ♥♥♥♥ off that's stupid, especially considering I have very limited ammo. The pistol should be the backup, and significantly worse than a whole rifle that very well looks like it's firing 7.62 and not 5.45. though even 5.45 should do more damage than 9mm...

the story's been interesting so far. don't know how it develops, considering I can't play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, but i like metro enough to expect it to be good, but still be okay with it if it's bad. I'll take just being able to walk around and do stuff metro-style to be good enough for me to keep the game. because of the unacceptable performance, though, I can't currently recommend it.

I NEED MORE!!!!! GIVE ME MORE!!!!! but like not right now. i will be occupied with the factorio space age release tomorrow.
the game is actually surprisingly unique as far as factory builders go. gonna nerd out about it for a bit, since theres a lot of really interesting bits of how the game works. the core feature (the trails+ants combo) sets it apart from other factory builders in that your potential throughput is not primarily dependent on faster belts or inserters or stackers or such, but rather the amount of ants you allocate to a specific area of the factory and how efficiently they can work. since the ants only live so long, the amount you have access to at any given time changes based on how quickly you can produce them, which is based on how quickly you can feed the queen, which is based on how quickly you can collect energy, which is based on how many ants are collecting it (and how efficiently they are), and so on. this leads to overall resource management being closer to something like satisfactory or shapez (ish), where you build around a steady-state equilibrium solution, based on limited input rates, rather than a game like dyson sphere program or factorio, where you instead have limited collectible resources, but somewhat unlimited collection rate. basically, it's differentials all the way down.
this game, however, sets itself apart from other steady-state factory games with its ants and how they determine factory size and collection rate. the most interesting thing is how this applies at both the small and large scale. a single ant has a limited walk speed, and while they're walking, they aren't collecting, depositing, or otherwise working. since you only have a limited number of ants to work with, every second one of those ants spends walking around reduces the overall productivity of the factory. of course, you can't avoid all walking, especially in collector ants, and doubly especially for energy-collector ants (at least in this demo (i see the item-holding logic gate further in the tech tree (god the spaghetti potential is immense (i cannot wait)))), so the balancing act arises naturally between the number of buildings/initial expense, the amount of walking you can accept your ants doing, how difficult and time-consuming it is to set up, and how horrible you're okay with it looking. the conveyors of near every other factory game mean that the size and complexity of a certain production stack do not limit its efficiency (if designed correctly), with the only limits to efficiency being the tech level of the constituent parts. though a better design might cost less and take up less space, that only means you need to wait a little for more resources to accumulate or to just expand a little, which is rarely an issue. shapez 2 limits your space (which i love for the same reason i love what this game's doing), but it's pretty much alone in this, at least in early-game. late-game is a different story, but i expect the same problems and solutions to exist in this game, so nobody gets any points for that. except factorio's beacons. maybe one point for that. though this game could certainly have a beacon-like device. oh and factorio megabases. but only like 0.01% of factorio players ever even build one (i definitely didnt just pull that statistic out of my ass idk what youre talking about).
the large-scale effects come from how you end up with a limited number of ants. the ants (aside from the special ones you start with) have a limited lifetime - five minutes at the start, though this can change (sorta (ill get to it)). in order to not end up with no ants, the queen of the colony produces larvae at some nonzero rate, so long as she's fed. this rate is what limits the number of ants you can have access to at any given time. the math is thankfully quite simple. since each ant takes X minutes to die, you will have, on average, 1/X ants die every minute. this is countered by the queen producing Y ants every minute. to find the equilibrium number of ants, we need to just find how many ants we would need in order for Y ants to die every minute. luckily, this is simple enough to do without differential calculus, but if you want some extra credit, you can find the (relatively simple) differential equation and solve it. to find the growth ceiling (the max number of ants), we just need to find how many "1/X ants/min" fit into the queen's Y ants/min, or simply multiplying X*Y. it should be noted that the number of ants in the colony will theoretically never reach this number, since the net increase in ants/min (apm) will approach zero at the same time, but it will get close, especially over time. as an example, the babies live for 5 minutes, which means 1/5 of an ant dies every minute. if the queen is producing 10 apm, then she would be able to support a maximum of 50 ants. any more than that, and more ants die every minute than are produced. this number is also the same if you use the upgraded ants, since although they last ten minutes, they cost two smaller ants, which means that effectively two small ants die every ten minutes (2/10 = 1/5). also, in this example, it would take 8 minutes to get from 0 to 40 ants, but a whole 'nother 12 to get from 40 to 49. if you use the longer-lived ants, 0-40 takes 16 min, and 40-49 takes another 23. The growth ceiling is also almost always significantly less than the artificial maximum put in place by the game, so just using the small guys is pretty much never a limiting factor, at least in this demo. i see that life sensor on the tech tree.
anyways, enough math. enough review too, honestly. is this even a review? no clue. dont care. can't wait until this gets more complicated in the full game and i have to account for new weird sh!t affecting the growth ceiling.

people have been saying this is the most movement shooter movement shooter and i am inclined to agree. you can go stupidly fast, for a consistently long time, and without spamming jump or slide or some combination of the two. it's very silly, the characters are great, and the guns feel quite good. the perks dont feel like they promote particularly unique "builds," but they're still good. I only took 9.6 hours to 100% the game, but it was a great time the whole time, and i would definitely play some more if i had some friends who played it. i did try to get to the final boss (the satellite) without grabbing any artifacts, and because this is the movement shooter ever it's physically possible, but was quite sad to run into a force field and the game telling me to go grab the artifacts and play the rest of the game first. otherwise great. maybe not enough game in the game for the price for some people, but if you can get it on sale, or have the cash to spend, i would totally recommend it.