Recent reviews by FlargBlarg

It's a terrible game in the best way for the first 8 or so holes, but after that the par starts doubling and the shots you need to make become very precise, which is a horrific combination for a game like this with slow floaty physics.

One buggy bounce now costs you several minutes of actual real time, which means the time to beat a hole goes up exponentially. I was beating a hole about every 5 minutes, but holes 9/10 jump to being like 20+ minutes each.

Looking at level data I can see it only gets worse, with hole 30 going up to par 35.

I miss Crucible so dearly and this is the closest thing to it on the market, imo.

Also I play Blood on the Clocktower with one of the character designers and he's neat.

I can't really recommend it in good conscience to most players. It's buggy, it's not polished, it's got terrible AI, it hard crashes. Just go play better games like Civ V or Civ VI. If you really want sci-fi, Endless Space 2, Master of Orion 2, and the GalCivs all exist.

With that said, I purchased this because I have played all of those and wanted a change of pace. For $10 on sale, I do think I got my money's worth. But I do strongly think you should look at all those other games first.

I was a pretty fervent defender of DD1 - I thought (and still think) people who complained about the difficulty were just not good at the game. I beat that game and got the speedrun achievement for it to prove it. DD2 is different, and for the worse.

In DD1, if you run up against a hard boss, you run and save your squad, then fight it again in 20mins.
In DD2, if you're having trouble on an end-of-run boss, you just have to do another 2-3h run, sorry. Oh, and you can't flee the fight, so you just lose your whole party. Oh, and you *will* lose the fight, because the buffs one gets from the meta-progression altar are *desperately* needed to beat those bosses, so if you're good, enjoy hitting a brick wall where you have to bail out of solid runs 90% of the way through because you're under-meta-progressed to do the cool thing and beat the end boss.

In almost a decade and a half on this platform I've requested a refund I think... 3 times. This is one of them.

Can't believe it's still getting updates. The OG idler is still great.

Softlocked twice already in less that two hours.

Wait for the bugs to get patched.

Edit: Three times. This level of major bugs in the first, linear stretch of the game is not excusable.

I've played way, way too many games in my life. I've seen almost everything and I'm jaded as hell.

This is a breath of fresh air. Play it blind if you can.

Shameful technical issues on modern hardware for a game released only 5 years ago. I have a 1440p 144hz monitor. Not only does the game not go higher than 1080p, it won't even allow fullscreening on that monitor and doesn't auto-revert settings, which means attempting to fullscreen softlocked me and forced a restart.

Much worse than that, the game speed is tied to the framerate, which means I either have to use a spare monitor or fiddle around with settings to lock my framerate to 60hz in order to not play at 2x speed.

WayForward is apparently aware of these issues and has been for years, yet refuses to patch or support them in any way.
No matter how good the game is (and I don't know yet, to be fair), it shouldn't have an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with these glaring issues, and WayForward shouldn't get your money for a game they refuse to support.

I wanted to like this game - Terry Cavanaugh has been brilliant historically, and I love roguelikes, but the RNG is just brutal in this game without enough player choice to offset it. I don't lose in Slay the Spire without feeling like it was my fault, but I do in DD more often than not. Even in individual turns, I spend a lot of time thinking in StS, and here I can basically just slam down options because the optimal choice is always clear.

Just go play StS for roguelikes or VVVVVV for Cavanaugh.

In short: This is Banjo Threeie, but it's also weaker than Kazooie or Tooie.

If you can go back and play the Banjo games now, and enjoy them, you'll like this. If you can't, you won't.

Collect-a-thons are one of my favorite genres, and Yooka-Laylee is one of the best in recent times. That said, it doesn't quite have the same charm as the Banjo games did, but it has the same problems they did - awkward camera angles, getting lost, and not knowing when you'll need a power-up from a future world to do a given challenge.

World design is also worse, with less solid landmarks and no fast-travel, although you're never more than 30 seconds away from where you want to be, since the characters move quickly. The choice to let you expand the worlds, but only give you 5 worlds + hub was a mistake, I think, since the novelty of the environment wears off pretty quick.

That said, even though it is worse than the Banjo games pretty much across the board, it is still very solid, especially in a genre without much modern love. Sandbox collect-a-thons are rare nowadays, with the last good ones I can remember being either very short (Grow Home) or a while back (Sly series, Mario 64 and Sunshine). For that alone, I can recommend it to fans of the genre. Just play the classics first, if you can.