Recent reviews by DonGrobione

I truly like the game, as it scratches my gaming itch just right with its weird mix of base building, resource scavenging and anime inspired combat. But I can understand that this game is not for everyone, which is made clear with the mixed reviews here. To me, this feels like a passion project by the (Chinese?) developers, which is hampered due to language barriers, lacking resources for development and a bit of feature creep, which makes the new player experience rough.

There are several modes to play, like the Tour Mode, where you scavenge for resources across several mini missions until you have to extract and defend your base for several waves. This also works as a kind of “story mode” and the dialogues of the (mostly) fully voiced characters is either a bit strange or completely nonsensical. It feels like the dialogue was machine translated a few times until it lost most meaning. I can only guess here, as I did not research that on the internet. But I think at some point alien technology was found, then there was an AI uprising and most humanity was destroyed. There is a cyber slave cult that worships its AI overlords and of course the “resistance” or EUA (Earth United Army; I had to look that up, as it is not mentioned in the game) the player is part of, fighting guerilla warfare with their mobile bases.

The game does it best to introduce its game mechanics in broad strokes, but you are still left alone to figure out the details (some features are not mentioned at all, like reciting local operatives). Especially as the game does not always use the same terminology to for items or its functions, and you are forced to guess from context, test it yourself or search the internet.

There are also Return to Dawn Base, a kind of randomized challenge mode and Infinity Siege where you test your base against waves of enemies with limited starting resources. I did not play much with those, as I still have to unlock a lot to make my base viable. I did not test online co-op.

I did not encounter any game breaking bugs or crashes, but it is kind of a jankfest at times. Especially concerning enemy AI. Last night I was on a mission with a lot of elevation and a bit of platforming. The Chasers (enemies that spawn under certain conditions and chase you down) clipped through the floor and attacked me through walls. I tried tanking the damage until I looted the “mountain fortress” but had to stop as they nearly killed me twice.

There are also four “classes” Tiger Squad (all-rounder), Owl Squad (Engineer), Hare Squad (Scout) and Mammoth Squad (Solider/Damage Dealer) for your Operatives. Operatives are playable characters you can get to either play as your character for missions, assigned to your home base to boost functions or send to intelligence missions to gather resources for you. Besides the Operative you play in the story, who literally has a skill named Plot Armor, all Operatives are randomized.

Sadly, there is no demo to try the game for free, but if you like base building and rouge like mission combat, buy it on sale.

Is The Invincible a good game? Well, that depends on your definition of „game“. A friendly description of this product would be an interactive story, heavy of narration, without any fail states. Personally, I tend to „walking simulator with illusion of choice story progression and good world building“.

There are no fail states or skill checks of any kind in this product, you basically press W for 6 hours (or so) and wiggle your mouse around until you see a circle to click to trigger some kind of interaction. Movement often felt slow, cumbersome and clunky.

On the other hand, the retro futuristic style and the world design is gorgeous, the ambient sound and music is on point. The story and world building is also good, but it has to be, as there is no gameplay loop to speak of.

Except the previously mentioned points, I liked this product and completed it in one sitting. There are 11 endings, depending on a few key choices in the last hour.

I would strongly recommend waiting for a discount to around 10 to 15 Euro. This is not a 30€ product.

As of writing this, the game is still in early access and you will notice. The story campaign is incomplete, there are some janky movements here and there (the unstuck button is there for a reason) and a few UI choices could be improved on. But overall, I like the game. So much so, that I almost only played it in my spare time.
The Devs announced that they will leave Early Access in the coming future and release the 1.0 patch which will change up a lot of the early game, to make it less tedious, and I can agree with that. My new player experience was enjoyable, but enjoyable but quite grindy.

For new players, I would recommend waiting until the game leaves Early Access.

Nice mix of idle game with the occasional interaction to get some special resources and the like.

Overall I liked the game, especially the in-game option to auto solve puzzles, QTE events and auto-healing. Only the subtitles were to small for me, fortunately there is a (nexus) mod to fix that.

What I disliked was the overworld, with its unending re-spawning enemies and annoying process to access the bunkers for the blueprints. So I ignored them for the most part.

Graphically the game looks fine, but the models for “the real humans” were a bit much in the uncanny valley zone to my liking.

If you are a bit savvy with tropes, most of the story is fairly predictable. There are a few twists and turns at the end, but they are done as DLC cliffhanger bait. For which I have no interests, the base game was sufficient for me, especially as the DLC seems not be really worth the money.

PickCrafter is a mobile game, complete with handholding tutorial "click here, then here, ..." without explaining anything, daily login bonuses and introduction to microtransaction after 4 minutes playtime.

Starfield is one of those games I would like to vote neutral, as it has good stuff but also a lot of things that rub me the wrong way.
Not everything in the main story was of interest of me, but overall, I liked it. I will not spoil anything, but I was quite esoteric at times, but whatever. The factions questlines are better.

But what really grinds my gears is the menu and user interface. It is convoluted and cumbersome to navigate. The menu change animations look good but introduce a delay that will get annoying fast. Especially if you need to move from one planet to another. The vanilla inventory is borderline unusable, and I am so grateful to the “StarUI Inventory” modder as it this is how it should be in the first place. Hopefully there will be other mods to split the items in more sections that now, because whoever combined food, chems and med packs into the “Aid” section was a mad man. In general, the inventory requires some quality of live functions like blocking items from being sold.
You can open specific menus with hotkeys, for example if you press “I” for inventory and then want to switch to your quest log with “L”, you first must close the inventory. Then open the quest log.
The key bindings are also not optimal and needed changing, especially if your have a QWERTZ keyboard. Tab is your menu and general “close this window” button. Except when you must press and hold Tab or use Escape. There are a few buttons who have several functions assigned to them and “R” will annoy you the most. After a space fight you will double press R to open the loot screen and select everything, but it will also reject all incoming transmissions. This will be resulting in regular rejection of quest rewards and then you must manually call the quest giver yourself.

Overall, I have the feeling that the game was designed in a way to waste your time. You will have to fly from one planet to another often. This requires a lot of menus navigating and loading screens. The transition animations look good but will get old fast. Especially in the later part of the game when you want to complete your special powers menu. To do so you will fly to the space station, talk to Vladimir, get the coordinates of the artifact. Fly to the planet and land, walk two to five minutes to the temple while scanning random stuff to increase your survey data of the planet. Run around the temple until you find the entry. Complete the “booster pack minigame” watch some animation, kill an NPC. Then start over again by flying to the space station. This will be fun the first-time couple times, but on the 20th iteration it will be annoying at the latest. At some point I was so done with the, that I entered the no clip command in the console and start auto running to bypass the environment. Did I mention that each screen transition either involves a loading screen or some kind of animation?
On the topic of powers, I almost completely ignored them. I gathered them rather late in my playthrough and found them quite lacking in impact and usability. I really wished Bethesda would step back from the whole “I am the chosen one” approach to storytelling. It would be much more interesting to be just some guy in space doing his best to survive.

The powers where not the only parts that broke my immersion. I a time where humanity is space faring and has true autonomous robots, why to I have to survey planets myself. On foot! This is just stupid.

I only encountered one crash to desktop and had only handful game breaking bugs, like quest NPC falling through the floor and being inaccessible. Altogether the game is playable, but only enjoyable when the modders had the time to bring it in a usable state or fix some stupid design decisions.

I cant believe this is a free fangame, it is good

This is one of those games that would need a neutral review, but those do not exist. First, I like the game. Even if the core gameplay loop is repetitive, the loot randomised until kingdom come and controls are a bit jankey. I can work with all of that. But the confusing and often unintuitive user interface is a problem, which took me many hours to get used to it.

When you play the campaign missions and are interested in the story, you will have a bad time. Depending on the situation and character, the subtitles are in various places on the screen. Therefore, you must know exactly where to look to not miss anything. The voice acting is okay, even if corny and ham fisted. A fatal flaw is the sound mixing, which is all over the place. In some missions you clearly hear the character voices over the BGM and battle noise, but on others not so much. Sometimes one character is almost mute and sometimes the BGM drowns everything out. The conversation triggers in missions are sometimes set in a way that you must focus on not dying and not on the dialogue.

I was also quite annoyed that the "Complete" Edition of the games, does not contain the new DLC. I would strongly suggest waiting for a sale.

I liked the game, even if the time rewind mechanic is a bit confusing at sthe start. It took me around 12 hours to beat the game, but I have tto admin the last 2 hours draged on. I wanted to know how the game would end, but I had no patence for the puzzels any more. Because they do not realy get complicated only more complex.