Recent reviews by Helmic

ZERO Sievert gets lots of comparisons to Escape from Tarkov, and I imagine the comparison would also hold for the similar game mode in The Division. I've played neither, as competitive multiplayer games can be a pretty toxic experience and I really just don't like the premise of griefing as gameplay, I don't want to be the dude who ruined someone's lucky find. So having a single player PvE version of that basic premise was interesting.

I can certainly see the appeal. As other reviews will mention, the mechanics of aiming, accuracy, damage falloff, and visibility all come together to force you to play cautiously and tactically, ambushing bandits from one spot before disappearing into the treeline to pop out at them from a flank, trying to think of where they might outflank you or if some random animal or monster might decide to come after you and force you to shoot it and give away your position.

The loot is pretty straightforward to understand - you scoop up loot (in an enjoyably gradual way, as items reveal one by one to simulate your character having to look through containers to find everything, leaving you vulnerable and increasing the excitement), and then you have to get to an extraction point to keep that loot. It's an enjoyable tension.

However, the game despite apparently being in 1.0 is very unpolished in terms of presentation. Items have inconsistent capitalizztions. NPC's instnatly display their dialogue the moent you click it in a menu, givng an impression that you're simply reading through a log rather than actually holding a conversation - there's a reason most games break up NPC text into bite size chunks and have the words gradually appear, it gives the impression that they're actually talking to you. They don't change what they say either in subsequent conversations, which just further gives the impression you're just reading a sign with an arbitrary name on it rather than a character. Your character is very liable to get stuck in geometry, only for the UI to announce to you that you need to hold CTRL + WASD to nudge yourself free as I suppose the dev had no luck in fixing the clipping bugs.

Menu elements like your inventory frequently have unspeakably awful UX from waht presumably came out of the dev simply not knowing how to make something work more elegantly - so for starters, dragging and dropping one item on top of another item in your grid-based inventory doesn't swap their locations, requiring annoying menu juggling when trying to squish things together in a stash. There's no conveniences like a "stack all" or "deposit all" button to make offloading your loot quicker while at base while maintaining a set loadout, though mercifully crafting uses items in storage as well... though it just makes the annoyance of trying to sell items to a vendor more apparent. This compounds issues with other jank in menus - weapon repair kits, for example, don't simply let you right click and then specify what weapon to repair, you can't drag and drop it on a weapon to repair it, you can't even double click it and then click on the weapon to repair. No, what you have to do is first unequip the weapon you don't want repaired[i} to make room for equipping the weapon repair kit [i]in the opposite weapon slot of the weapon you actually want to repair. I sure hope you have room in your inventory to hold your massive 4x2 weapon for a minute if you don't want to drop it on the gorund and start blinding feeling around for it in the tall grass to retrieve if you have to move for any reason

These aren't deliberate design decisions, but just very obviously the attempts of a developer to work around their own limitaitons as best they can. And I can't help but respect it, because they clearly do understand the gist of what people like about this genre and brought it to a single player audience, little touches and tweaks to very carefully manage player behavior to make sure eveyrthing ffeels tense. I guess that's just the essence of eurojank, you're playing a game that struggles at some very seemingly basic things while giving you a completely unique experience, requiring you to trust the judgement of a man that doesn't undesrtand you can't just render clickable text in the exact same way as uninteractive text and expect players to know that that's supposed to be a menu tab. I just tried to move my farm over so it'd be a little easier to grab the items it generates between runs, only to realize it just straights up deletes it outright with no refunds of hte many resources it took to build.

People refer to this game as being Tarkov with QoL improvements, but seeing as my own expectations were never set so low my comparison point is most other games or just computer programs in general. I do appreciate the QoL features that seem very obviously to have been nods to community feedback, like hitting a hotkey to teleport between locations in the bunker, but I can't do things like hold a key to split a stack and see one half of the split stack being dragged by my cursor so taht I can visually see that it's working and that I did the key combination right. I am very spoiled by games putting a lot of thought into these sorts of ergonomics and ZERO Sievert is a lot like hanging out with a dear friend on their couch that has a spring poking through the fabric and poking you in the ass. The reason you're here is still good, you're going to have fun and enjoy yourself, but you're going to be enjoying yourself in spite of constant discomfort.

I backed this game a long time ago and finally got around to playing it after forgetting it for so long.

You can see what Scorn looks like visually from the videos and screenshots. It's obviously a very visually interesting game. However, you're not going to really get much more out of it due to the intent to be as vague as possible - there's no dialogue,you just kind of fumble your way through the game. The visuals and body horror are unsettling, but because of its dedication to a complete lack of context, well you have no *context*, and so anything that would make it more than a macabre art gallery is hidden in the art book which very annoyingly did not come with my backer pledge despite it apparently being *critical* to understanding even the very basic plot.

Which is a shame, 'cause the story and basic themes of the game would certainly have elevated hte experience if they were actually in the game. Instead most of the events of the story are going to completely fly over even an attentive player's head, and Scorn is *far* from the type of game you'd replay over and over as its puzzles are not exactly its strong suit and the combat is... just there. Neither of those things I would necessarily condemn by themselves, but if a game expects you to go hunting for details in multiple playthroughs it has to *motivate* you to do that in the first place. People can piece together much of the plots of From Software games purely through playing the game and paying attention to details both becuase those games actually want to share their stories and include all the information you need in the games themselves and not the artbooks and because the games are fun and have compelling NG+ features.

What you're left with is basically just creepy vibes, which are a lot less creepy when you're missing important context like "oh, this is a society that literally builds everything out of recycled corpses, this isn't a giant alien or whatever." You'll spend a lot of the game lost, but not in the unsettling way but because you can't find a thin hallway hidden in a tight corner in the dark that you have to discvoer to progress, or having to navigate one of many identical looking areas which is a feat given how much effort went into designing the literal walls in random hallways. Much of the game is the feeling of "I don't know what hte game wants me to do and I want to quit but I guess I'll keep looking" and then "oh, there's where I need to go, finally."

The ending has some fairly shocking content, given all the prior imagery leading up to it the parasite gores and then binds the player character in a way that's pretty clearly meant to allude to rape, but again without the artbook to give vital context it doesn't really make any actual impact. It very much feels like the game struggled to be released (originally there was a plan for the game to be split into two parts that later was scrapped in favor of doing the entire story in one game) but as short as the game is I don't see how it could have ever been enough for two games, it just feels like there was supposed to be a lot more.

Maybe my expectations just weren't in line with what was being offered. But the heavily expanded, more interesting setting that exists only in the artbook would have made for a very interesting game had they decided to make it. Maybe there's people who figured out everything that was in the art book by themselves and this game was meant for these geniuses and not my phillistine ass. But I imagine I'm not all that different from most people reading this, and most people are going to go through this game and be as let down by the game never wanting to share anything interesting that isn't gore. The game clearly has its niche, there's people who are able to grasp the themes and philosophy behind it, but for those of us unable to grasp that context it's just walking through meat tunnels ,pressing WASD and LMB until you figure out the interactable is a basic slide puzzle, and sometimes standing in a corner for like 60 seconds as you watch an enemy slowly makes way across the room and into a meat hole so you don't have to spend 1/3 of your ammo killing it to get past it faster.

While the gunplay elements are really good, the rest of hte game struggles to keep up with it.

The roguelike elements aren't particularly well balanced, as you get upgrades exclusively through purchases with currency. The starting drink you get for free has a massive impact on how quickly you can get currency, with drinks that build your econ early snowballing into a massive advantage and those that don't really limiting your run. It leads to a situation where the meta seems to be to just reload a bunch until you get a good drink.

This problem is compounded by the fishing minigame. Normally in video games, fishing minigames are a way for you to chagne up the pace of the game and relax for a moment before getting back into the game proper, and in theory this is what the fishing minigame in OTXO would be - it's extremely simple, no skill relaly to it other than recognizing hte water ripple pattern that means it's time to reel it in, and as far as I can tell the actual money value of the fish you get is random.

But the fact that it has money value means it can't serve its seemingly intended role as a way to chill out from a pretty intense game. See, OTXO, being a very hard and very fast game where you can lose really fast, smartly makes restarting really fast... but if you actually use{/i] the quick restart option, you start with $0. So if you want to start with money, potentially enough money to start with a second drink - and remember, this game only operates on money, so money accumulating drinks snowball and getting two drinks that synergize to give you more econ can by themselves win you the game - you have to do this long, uninteractive fishing minigame. Every. Single. Time. You die. It sabotages its own pacing by making the optimal way to play the most frustrating, and transforms a chill activity into an annoying chore.

And that's just kind of how the rest of OTXO works. While the gunplay is carefully considered to make sure there's a constant tension between headstrong aggression and tactical cunning, some of the most powerful drink combos encourage you to ditch that excellent gunplay for more boring but effective alternatives. You have the option to permit or ban any weapons from a run, and there are drinks that only benefit a particular type of weaopn, and so it behooves you to narrow down the weapon selection to just those that you have the drink for in the first bar, basically killing the much more interesting gameplay of adapting to very different weapon types every few rooms.

The story is nonsense. There's such striking visuals, greyscale and red, some (seemingly) bizzare charaters, and the implication that there's more under the surface. There is not. The striking visuals might give you a headache after a bit and make it kind of hard to see what's a weapon, what's an obstacle, and what's background or a wall, but that's somewhat forgiveable. Having a giant praying mantis whose only job is to let you view your non-interactive collection of collectibles, without so much as a hint of being even al ittle interest ing, is less so. The story is just about putting on the pretenses of there being a story in hopes you get fooled into assuming there is one and you're just not good enough at the game to unravel the secrets that aren't actually there.

I'm being hard on the game because the core of hte experience is so impressive, with so much attention paid to the core loop of moment ot moment fights, with enemies that are fairly clever but who you can outwit with tactics like throwing your weapon as a distraction, picking up another weapon, and them blasting htem while they're facing hte wrong way in order to save your precious bullet time for the enemies following you that you wont' be able to get the drop on otherwise. But it just makes the rest of the game supporting that excellent bit so much more disappointing, it feels like had there been another person helping with the game they could have put in those finishing touches to make the game work so much better.

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The best own music game out there, making the intensity of the music match your fight what will eventually become a bullet hell as you hose down enemies with an extremely satisfying laser beam that grows more powerful as the song amps up. Just like the original Beat Hazard, you can use a variety of perks to adjust the difficulty of hte game to suit what you want out of it, you can decide to play on the lowest difficulty with four tricked-out weapons and lots of extra lives and just enjoy breezing through your favorite album or you can disable everything but a single weapon with no lives in order to pump it all into passive score-boosting perks. It's as relaxing or as stressful as you want it to be.

THe progression system in particlar is fantastic, with every track you complete unlocking a new, procedurally generated ship based on the song that you can purchase using the in-game currency (there are no MTX). These ships all ahve their own unique stats and appearances, and also come with a set of four challenges. Complete two and you get that ship's module, which you can attach to other ships to further tweak their stats.

The challenges will often specify something like completing a song with a specific word in a title on at least this difficulty or scoring this many points, or will sometimes ask that you complete a song by the same artist that you used to unlock that ship in the first place. This, combined with how you unlock ships in the first place, incentiivizes you to contsantly keep finding new music to play in your search for legendary modules while you naturally try out new ships all the time and figure out your preferences.

The gameplay itself is of course just as satisfying as in the original, with some new tweaks. There's a new "Zen" difficulty that is punishly hard and justifies the entire hunt for ships and modules. All songs have a separate leaderboard for just hte standard ship, so if you want you can also try tackling Zen without the benefit of a tricked-out build and really set yourself up for a challenge.

The game also now features music recognition, recording audio from your desktop, a line-in, or a microphone to play music from streaming services. This means it's rather easy to continue to find new music to play, but it also means you can compete on daily and lightning leaderboards for songs that regularly rotate out. Everyone tries to get the high score on the same song on Spotify, with the top ten players getting an Elite ship, a procedurally generated ship that has better overall stats. This makes for fun competition, and the competition isn't exactly fierce - you don't even need to max out your score-boosting perks to place decently enough to get your ships, so long you're enabling all the scoring perks you can and are playing on the highest difficulty without dying. The comments on the leaderboard even give a bit of a sense of comraderie and community.

Unfortunately, for those who REALLY care about being competititve and geting that #1 worldwide high score on a competitive song, the game fundamentally has issues with RNG, namely with the Bag of Goodies perk which generates a bunch of pickups at hte start. They're randomized, so while normally tey're +1 score multiplier pickups, they can be +5 or even +10's or they can be ammo for your weapons - and the people who have the best scores tend to have lots of +10's in that initial section. And because you're building up your multiplier throughout the song, an early boost has a MASSIVE impact on your final score. It's disappointing that the game doesn't use seeds to have some consistency and ensure a fair playing field, and it's infuriating when you're struggling to unseat the current #1 record holder and ahve to restart the song DOZENS of times while alt-tabbing again and again and again to your browser to restart the song from the beginning because you didn't get a good initial boost.

But that is a very niche gripe with the game that's only going to affect people who are already extermely invested in the game. For only casually competitive play where you're just trying to dunk on the three other people who also love the same song you do it's perfectly acceptable, and for the people who aren't massive ding dongs and don't care aboutr leaderboards in a video game it's really a fantastic way to appreciate music.

It's a mishmash of several different game concepts thatcomes together really well. You shoot a variety of alien bugs a la Left 4 Dead, with even a couple requiring help from a teammate to escape quickly (msot thankfully won't kill if there isn't a nearby attention teammate). In between shootouts, you mine for goodies like you would in games like Minecraft or Terraria, carving out the fully desctructible terrain to platform your way to materials you'll later use to craft upgrades and cosmetics.

Perhaps what's most interesting, though, are the elements it lifts from the Monster Hunter series. While the gameplay itself doesn't directly resemble Monster Hunter, the back-and-forth pacing between combat and sedate gathering is reminiscent of the series. But the overall RPG progression system of the game is very much inspired by Monster Hunter, with players plotting out what misisons to take based on what materials they need to craft the things they want. For a game that's ultimately about grinding endlessly, having the ability to pick your own goals on what to do next really helps keep things exciting as you anticipate your next big reward.

And while you can reach a point where you're essentially fully kitted out one of the four characters in a reasonable amount of time, the variety in possible builds means there's almost always something new you can be working towards or experitmenting with.

There's even a bar that will allow you to purchase a round of beer for all your teammates, giving you a buff just like Monster Hunter's meals. While the buffs themselves are disappointingly lackluster, the sheer fun and creativity in the whole endeavor is fantastic - spending hard-earned resources to serve up the entire party beers that causes them to blow up repeatedly up for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles is great fun.

That so much work went into making a feature that has next to no impact on the actual gameplay seems to reflect the game's overall design ethos - there's so many things that don't really exist for any reason other than it's fun to see them and talk about them with friends. The game has no microtransactions and instead lets players indulge in playing dress-up with their silly overmasculine and slightly insecure dorfs. It provides ample opportunity for friends to goof around and have fun.

My only real gripe would be the relatively tame impact of many buffs, perks, boosts, and upgrades. While it does mean that a fresh player isn't completely useless when playing with friends who've grinded for much longer, it does make it sometimes hard to appreciate the effects. Spending a perk slot to move 8% faster while sprenting, when you only have a scarce handful, just doesn't feel very impactful. New guns are fun to play with, but due to the class-based nature of the game there's not a lot of room to be constantly unlocking new weapons as rewards.

It's an absolutely brilliant game, the most fun I've had in a game in years, with even its most complex and fiddly bits seeming to have real purpose in either driving long term satisfiaction in progression or pacing the game to space out the adrenaline-pumping highs with quiet or relaxed moments where you just need to sharpen your weapon, heal up, and then track down that boss monster again to continue the fight.

It's also a game that gets some very critical things wrong in terms of usability, with multiplayer in particular showing the game's online heritage as a Nintendo exclusive. To have a friend join you in a storyline mission that has cutscenes in it, you must first start the mission, progress far enough in that mission until you have seen all the cutscenes (which can take as long as 20 minutes to accomplish as you'll often be told to find something with limited direction before the relevant cutscene plays), and then you ahve to abandon the mission and then recreate the mission again so that your friends can join. Oh, and all your friends have to have seen the cutscene as well themselves, so they all have to be doing the same thing, no exceptions. This means that playing with friends in anything other than postgame content almost prohibitively time consuming, and since the main campaign where all these shenanigans occur can easily last you 40-60 hours (I'm 90 hours in at the time of writing this review and I still haven't beaten the main campaign yet) a lot of people simply will never reach a point in the game where they can just play the damn game with friends.

And that's assuming your connection keeps up. For what seems to be a peer-to-peer game, everyone I play with suffers from constant disconnections despite clearly still being connected on Steam and on Discord. Players who are disconnected are then forced to face a boss that's had its HP boosted quite a bit all by themselves. And if you fail the mission because of that disconnect, any resources you spent trying to boost your rewards like vouchers (you get only one a day and can only hold up to five) or investigations are destroyed.

Oh, just to make things worse, those scarce vouchers and uses for your investigations are also used the moment you post a mission, whether or not you start it. You often have to remake a mission because other players can't join it until its remade, so get used to having to choose between your friendships and your willingness to part with your last voucher. It's needlessly vindictive and punishing for a game that's overly fond of crashing on many people's systems, there's no good reason that those vouchers couldn't just be spent the moment you get your rewards.

But I still recommend the game. It's not in as bad a state as the original Dark Souls at launch, and it's an utterly brilliant game. It's hard to know what to gush about first: the sheer variety in playstyles afforded by the fourteen different weapon types that all almost play like unqiue genres of games, the exquistiely paced boss fights that alternate between quiet tracking and gathering and loud and bombastic combat, the loving detail put into everything that makes the forests sway in the wind and interact with your hunts or how a Tobi-Kadachi will leave those marks on the trees you find by using them to scratch itself in a lovingly rendered animation, or the massive variety in weapon and armor assets that all have their own niche uses that give you an excuse to collect them all and theorycraft new hyperspecialized builds meant to play a specific role against a single boss, or how item-only progression fixes a lot of problems with level-based progression in RPG's by removing problems like overlevelling or shoehorning you into a specific playstyle forever...

It's so hard not to gush about the brilliance of the game, and that makes it so much more painful that the port doesnt' quite do it justice. It's not even that bad a port, my game has only crashed once in 90 hours of play as I'm using a CPU with FMA3 support - an AMD FX 8350, a CPU that generally doesn't do very good in games but holds a steady 60 FPS at 1080p with a GTX 1070, I can only assume the game's been multithreaded competently. There's rebinding options and graphic options and little touches that make it clear real effort was put into the PC release.

But the parts where it does fail hurts the most, because Monster Hunter is very much a cooperative game at heart and a game with such brilliant interplay between a team and a monster that could easily combo anyone to death that makes one wrong move just doesn't deserve the disconnects, the crashes, the performance issues on different PC's, the horrible UX problems for playing together, the mean-spirited wasting of vouchers and investigations when it's the game that messed up.

I still recommend the game. I still want people to try it, even if it's only for that two hour refund window, because Capcom has promised to support this game and I think people can still love this game despite its serious flaws. There's just been so much love put into this game that you can feel, the real appreciation for having all these systems interact to create what can only be called fantasy nature porn. There's what seems to be dozens of lengthy animations of cats cooking you food in the most flamboyant way possible for what amounts to just a buff, thousands and thousands must have been spent just animating that alone. There's too much effort here to just dismiss it entirely.

If the game works on your machine, if you have friends patient enough to deal with the need to use what are effectively even more annoying Friend Codes in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Steam game, if you like Dark Souls-like combat systems, if this game seems interesting to you, this is probably a game you'll want to pay full price for. But if you're unsure, wait a few weeks and see if these issues have been addressed.

I love the game, but in the state is in right now I simply cannot recommend it. Connection issues, bugs, and a lack of things to do make loving a game that deserves to be loved unnecessarily difficult.

But behind all of these launch issues that are only really to be expected for an Early Access game is a beautiful stance fighter that borrows the transient online interactions of Dark Souls to create stories of self improvement through respectful competition. Up to two other players can be in the same area as you, and if you meet them the game is open PvP... but you'll usually find people are quite friendly and more often than not will cooperate with you to help you progress through the game. Even the ocassional ganker will usually pick you right up off the ground after beating you up - you don't lose anything by dying except maybe a few seconds and you're brought right back to full HP. The interactions you see grow out of these simple rules are just amazing and it makes being a part of the community surprisingly a positive experience.


The PvE content unfortunately is incredibly short and fairly dull. NPC's do little more than turn their head while text scrolls by underneath them, no gesticulations or hints about how that NPC feels about what theyr'e saying. The story might as well not exist except for the few voiced boss fights that actually lend a bit of intrigue to what's happening. Environments are beautiful but hard to navigate, with lots of invisible walls and knee-high unscalable obstacles making the whole thing feel like a bunch of gussied-up corridors that look too similar within each area to make it clear which direction you're going (the forest areas in particular are notably nondescript and it's easy to spend lots of time running around in circles). And the map in this game is hard to parse, making finding your next objective a pain as you stop randomly stumbling into bosses and start needing to hunt down the one you haven't found yet.

But when you do finally meet one of the three actual boss fights, they're a real treat. They're convincingly voiced and their delivery makes the tidbits of lore they reveal actually interesting and they can be surprisingly tough but fair. At least until you've figured out the deck system and figure out what three-hit combo you can spam endlessly at them to kill them easily even on their hardest iterations, but up until that point they're fun fights.


But to play those later iterations, you have to first game levels in Combat Trials, the dedicated PvP portion of the game where you duel other players 1v1 in a best of 5 match. The game is inarguably a PvP-first game, but that there isn't even the option to continue progressing through the game through PvE is quite annoying. I'm saying this as a very PvP-focused player, there is only one PvP mode and doing that one mode over and over and over again gets old and I wish there were other ways to gain these combat trial levels so I can take a break once in a while.

But good lord, the fights. The combat system in Absolver isn't mechanically very demanding, using only two buttons for regular attacks and alternate attacks (moves you can do in place of your normal attack to mix things up) and generally not requiring godlike reflexes. But by doing this, the game immediately thrusts you directly into the best bit of fighting games, the mindgames. Understanding what combos your opponent uses for their bread and butter, throwing out a ducking move to duck under the high kick you think is going to come next only to be surprised when they knew you would catch on and instead throw out their axe kick to smack you in the noggin. Your opponent starts parrying your attacks because you got a little braindead and just started spamming attacks, so now you start intentionally doing imperfect timings so that they miss their parry, throw out feints so they parry thin air and then get smacked in the face by a quick follow up punch. It's incredibly satisfying to play for how accessible it is, it feels like the perfect answer for any Dark Souls or For Honor player that is tired by the antics of the respective developers seeming to ignore their competitive communities.

As the store page will tell you, you put your attacks together in a "deck" of attacks, stringing from one to the other automatically unless you use one of your four alternate attacks to change things up. This brings a lot of expressiveness to fights in addition to the fashion choices and different combat styles (three which you can choose from the start, one secret you can discover in the game). Through the course of a match you can feel like you're getting to understand your opponent, predict what they're going to do next, what kind of person they are. It's endlessly entertaining.

But the grim reality is that the game's connections and bugs disrupt this beautifully choreographed dance far too often. My opponents and I not too infrequently will start teleporting around, sometimes straight off a cliff for an instant death which will likely decide the whole match. It feels like one out of every five matches my opponent will just disconnect right at the start. Hackers seem to be a common occurance already, and that's only when they're being obvious - more subtle cheaters seem to be using stuff like infinite shards to spam abilities in a way that you might just chalk up to extra investment in the Will stat. And you can't even 1v1 someone in the dedicated 1v1 mode yet through an invite, making the community's tournaments hard to organize.

The game just is not ready to be put up for sale yet despite its underlying genius, and the disappearing playerbase seems to be proof of that. This game deserved a far better launch. I'm hoping that in a month or two I can turn this into a recommendation, but I'm afraid there might not be people to play with by then.

It really does hurt to do this, but for $40 there are just way better games out right now. The camera is constantly wrested from your control at inopportune moments, bugs like floating enemies and glitched out bosses[gfycat.com] put a real damper on the fun.

The game is of course adorable and it looks wonderful, the music is amazing, but the accusations of boneheaded level design are unforutnately true. You'll often spend 10+ minutes scaling obstacles, maybe falling off a couple times and climbing back up, only to discover that you lack an ability or key or expansion to reach the prize. You can't help but feel frustrated that the game doesn't have the decency to put its gating mechanics at the beginning of these long obstacle courses so that you don't waste so much time for nothing.

The camera is often overly busy, as though the game really doesn't want you manually controlling it as though the right analog stick hasn't been invented yet. There's even a dedicated camera reset button on the right trigger which is a really strange sight in 2017, and if you're not using a Steam Controller with jump bound to the right pad click you're probably going to be forced to use that camera reset button a lot.

Speaking of which, I most certainly hope you're using a controller because this game won't even let you rebind your keybindings. You can't use simultaneous mouse and gamepad input either, so I highly recommend rebinding your controls through the Steam Configurator to get something somewhat reasonable. Over the shoulder third-person segments don't even let you shoot by pulling the right trigger, so mode shifts are practically a must for comfortable controls.

It's tragic, because there is so much to love about this game and what it could have been. I'm a huge Banjo-Kazooie fan and while I feel like I got my $10's worth out of the Kickstarter I don't feel like I can really recommend this game for full price. Maybe if later patches address some of the technical issues and provide more options, maybe if the game introduces the Steam Controller API so that controller players can rebind their controls per segment or minigame, then this game might be worth buying if you're nostalgic for the old Rare platformers, but until then you should wait until this game hits the bargain bin.

The game is promising. It looks lovely, its systems look to be interesting, and its sense of humor is enjoyable. But at this point it's simply too unpolished to really be worth buying.

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The most obvious problem is that there are no (reasonably functional) speed controls. The game, as far as its UI will inform me, has exactly one speed, sloth. People move like molasses and completing basic tasks takes ages. And despite this pokey pace, you can't sit back and relax as you strategize as you would with other games in the genre because there's no real-time pause ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ - sure, there's an undocumented pause function if you hit the Pause Break key, but this can often crash the game. The result is that you need to quickly queue up your commands, almost a bit like Starcraft but without the immediately obedient underlings or any of the good UI design that went into that game.

This is made worse by the awful controls - the game's framerate is still not as good as it should be so it's already not quite responsive enough on reasonable hardware, but inconsistent controls make planning out your base maddening. When placing items, right click both returns you back to your regular cursor/interact mode and removes items under your cursor, either queuing placed items for destruction or immediately removing what you just placed. The result is a lot of frustration as you have to swipe away to an empty part of the map to safely right-click your way out, or risk misclicking with the flakey FPS when trying to click the menu item to swap out of item placement.

Placing rooms of course breaks this convention - right click will remove placed floors, but it does so immediately without any queuing so you can very easily cause messy problems that you'll then need your minions to slowly fix, and if you right click in an empty area you don't go back to Interact mode like you'd expect.

And Interact mode, where you can click on stuff and see information or view the station from the point of view of your colonists in first person (which is neat and even has a low-res camera feed filter), also doubles as your mining tool, so you'll frequently be mining things when you're just trying to click on a moving colonist.

Oh, and you have to do all this when it shakes the screen due to eathquakes, meteorites, and cave-ins, which are annoyingly frequent and make it hard to just control the game.

Then there's just the bizzare key placement. Y and N are something you need to frequently hit, and I mean frequently, which is rather uncomfortatble since the game expects you to have a constant WASD grip. The three main building tools - the aforementioned Interaction, Room, and Item modes - are bound to J, K, and L respectively. These keys are nowhere near WASD where your fingers will be resting most of the time, while Z, X, and C right underneath remain unbound. Why? The keys are at least rebindable, though you'll have to spend a good amount of time figuring out what keys are important and which are pointless from experience. The tutorial doesn't even bother telling you want the keys are, and the UI doesn't bother listing the keybind either on its icons.

These may seem like small nitpicks, but bad controls combined with time pressure in what's usually a more methodical genre make for an incredibly frustrating experience.

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And then we get into the typical EA problems.

The game provides very little feedback on why your colonists aren't doing what they need to do. I can have three full barrels of water and water fountains everywhere, yet my colonists will mysteriously die of dehydration regardless. Hopefully this eventually changes, but for now it's complete guesswork as to what's wrong. In a good Dwarf Fortress-like game you don't always know immediately what little cog in your operation is causing a holdup, but at the very least you have tools at your disposal to figure out what's going on. Those tools apparently don't exist yet, mousing over a colonist gives some physical information but you can't get useful stuff like the last letter they wrote or recent complaints or anything like that, instead forcing you to dig through the often busy feed (while the game is still running in real time, mind you). And since the game is buggy, you can't ever feel confident that you're losing because you messed up, you're always wondering if the AI is just being bad and not doing obvious things like eating when it's hungry.

Then there's the lack of content, bugs, and general unfinished state of the game that you'd expect out of an EA title. Yeah, it's nothing shocking, but it's nothing special either that really demands your money now like Kerbal Space Program or Darkest Dungeons or Space Engineers. Updates happen, but they sure as hell take their time. This game's been in EA for a long time and it still feels like it has a long way to go.

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The game simply isn't ready for your money. I want to love the game so much and it feels like in two years maybe there will be a game worth playing, but as it is now it's just a really pretty piece of junk compared to other Dorflikes like Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, or even other EA games like Stonehearth. It's not Spacebase-DF9 levels of terrible, there aren't unexplainable oxygen leaks that eventually kill everyone with no further promises to improve, but it just gets so many little things wrong that it can't hold a candle to a game like Banished.

Wait and see, the game has the potential to be great.