Recent reviews by Joosh

In the 40 hours it took me to beat this game it absolutely consumed my life. 100% recommend. I'm excited to try out Space Age!

Fantastic game if you love roguelike deck builders.

Super fun game but there are a few problems holding it back from a recommendation at this time.

1) Super difficult to play crossplay with friends on PS5 consistently. Servers for playing with friends are spotty and constantly making it difficult to join friends on steam. I have more time trying to play the game with friends than I do actual play time.

2) You can play an entire mission in a public lobby then the host can kick you before you extract and you can lose ALL of your EXP, and rewards from the mission. Had this happen after a challenging 40 minute mission where we 100% full swept everything. The host ran into one of my grenades and died. We ressuplied him before extracting and he kicked me from the match for killing him. I lost 40 minutes of my time because of someone being butt hurt over accidental friendly fire with no consequences. This wouldn't be a big deal if I was 16 and had 8 hours a day to play games. But usually I have 1 hour at most to play games and my entire hour being thrown away like that really sucked.

Hopefully something can be done about those 2 complaints. Hosts should not be able to kick people that easily when the mission has been going for so long. Maybe do a vote kick system or something like that. Really ruined my night when that happened.

This game is like animal crossing but:

Instead of Animal Friends you have no friends.
Instead of buying cute furniture at the store you rob every store blind for all they've got
Instead of eating fruit to chop trees you starve to death on rotten mice

But at least you can:
Play 1 to 1 real time!
Die alone in a fortress you built with your blood sweat and tears for 100 hours

10/10 It's animal crossing with extra depression

Fantastic game with even better music. If you are itching for a "Slay the Spire" type game but with interesting ship battle mechanics then this is right up your alley. Could not recommend this game enough. Hope the devs get the support they need to release more content for this absolute gem.

11/10 for cute animals

This game is amazing. Great art design, visuals, music. Honestly blown away by this hidden gem. If you enjoy turn based strategy gameplay you need to give this a shot. Was shocked by how this game doesn't "tire" me out like other turn based strategy games do. I can't really think of any flaws so far outside of one crash that happened. But thankfully the game has a good autosaving feature so I didn't even lose any progress.

The game is insanely well made. The sound design, visuals, voice acting, story, atmosphere, is all nailed and the game is an absolute pleasure to explore.

BUT: Similar to the 2008 original game. The Plasma cutter is FAR too powerful and overshadows all other weapons. 4 hours into the game on Hard difficulty and I am 3-4 shotting most all enemies. Which then drop 6 ammo on average. Giving me a giant surplus of ammo.

If you want a good challenge, refrain from upgrading the plasma cutter super fast. Also play on Hard. Normal will be WAY WAY too easy as long as you have okay ish aim (Mine is really bad and I manage)

Just because the game doesn't have card packs does not mean it is not pay to win. If you want a chance to be even remotely competitive you need to drop hundreds of dollars, or get extremely lucky on your card drops.

It is a shame too because the game can be so insanely deep and fun when you are evenly matched against an opponent with similar collection level.

I 100% this game in 30 hours.

The games biggest flaw is this:
The first two competitions are very tightly designed. As you are learning the game and getting ingredients randomly the game retains good challenge. The first 2 competitions are the first 20% of the game despite looking like 2/5's of the game. Due to the nature of how your shop expands and you get more access to doing more things every day. The last 80% of the game is trivially easy. I had nearly unlimited money without interacting with half the games selling mechanics. I had fully upgraded cauldrons on the first day of each 10 day chunk. I didn't ever have to interact with the haggle system during the competitions. My potions just straight up won. This game needs adaptive difficulty or at least different difficulty modes.

In spite of all that above I still recommend the game for the characters and relationships. The game is so dang charming and heartwarming. The characters feel real with real problems. Things don't always work out for everyone. So if that sounds good to you with a little potion grinding on the side then pick this up on sale.

I genuinely Like this game but it suffers from a bunch of little problems that stop me from recommending it.
All my annoyances with the game (TLDR at the end)
1) The game takes a LONG time to get going. The game does not need tutorials for half the things it has tutorials for. Things are pretty self explanatory and the hand holding gets annoying. For example I had a tutorial for how to climb a ladder FIVE hours into the game. At that point I had already climbed 10+ ladders. It's little things like that, that add up over the course of the game.

2) Trickle feeding the player quests. Multiple times so far through my playthrough I have run out of quests to do. I'm normally not a completionest or anything but the game doesn't really make the main quest super clear. And thats totally fine. But I shouldn't run out of quests to do and have to just fiddle my thumbs running around until the game triggers a new quest to drop in. I don't think it would overwhelm the player to have quests come in quicker.

3) Gun Variety, The weapons and gun play are painfully average. 90% of enemies die in 1 shot to the head which is cool and makes sense. But the guns you have access to for the first 30% (10-15 hours) of the game are not the best at hitting headshots without getting decently close. No matter how good you are at aiming, there is going to be some RNG on whether you hit your shots at mid to long range because of the reticle spread of all unscoped weapons. The sniper rifle has a max capacity of SIX rounds which is not super useful. But if you don't bring a sniper with you then you are f***ed against sniper enemies. The game DESPERATELY needs an in depth gun upgrading system. Swapping out barrels and sights and parts. What is here is just so mediocre. It gets the job done but it could be so much more.

4) Enemy Variety: Currently 13 hours in and I have still only seen 2 type of zombies (1 is EXTREMELY RARE and not impactful at all) less than 4 types of human enemies and 2 types of animal enemies. The repetition of encounters is getting painful. This game needs more variety in enemies.

5) NPC's: The game has great main characters and a good story, I have no issues with that aspect. However all the NPC's in the game and side characters are clumped into main "village" type camps. Thematically this makes sense. But when the world is completely devoid of any friendly NPC's outside "save the trapped person event" it's kinda sad. It makes the world feel so empty and I lost hope in finding anything TRULY intriguing because there were not any NPC encounters that require negotiation or tense fight or flight scenarios. Its either A) oh no a horde of Zombies I better ride away from here. Or B) Oh hey look a camp of bad guys, time to wipe them from the earth and loot them.

6) Difficulty: DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME ON NORMAL OR EASY. I made the mistake of playing on Normal mode and the game is far too easy. I have only died 1 time so far and it was because I fell to my death. On normal mode, resources are so abundant that you will never be empty on anything. Due to this you have the capability of healing yourself 15+ times instantly in a menu that basically pauses the game as you heal. Unlike games like the last of us where you have to apply bandages with an animation, in this game you instantly just heal like you popped a potion in Skyrim. This would be totally fine if the game didn't punish you for not being stealthy by swarming you with Enemies when you mess up or make a loud noise. Its like the game is trying to balance being a stealth zombie survival game and an action zombie survival game and can't do either aspects well. Not sure if Higher difficulty would fix these issues or make them worse but Normal is frustratingly easy.

7) Loot: This game has far too many loot objects. The recipes for Molotovs, Bandages, Crossbow bolts, Nail Bats, etc. Don't share any materials in common. This removes any difficult choice making the player would have to make. For example if bandages and molotovs shared ingredients then the player might have to choose between clearing out the last nest in an area at low health, or crafting a bandage to heal up to try and scavenge for more resources to make a molotov. What is here now is just "Do you have the ingredients to craft 'X' item?" If yes, craft item until you can't carry anymore, If no, find loot. The looting system doesn't do anything to add unique choices to the game. Its just filler for you to press "E" as you explore to pick stuff up. Which is so infuriating because this game has so much promise.

I harped on a lot of aspects of this game. I truly don't hate the game but they came so close to having something truly amazing here. Don't buy this game for full price, wait for it to go on sale for $20 or less. The game has a lot of good aspects that I didn't mention but you can see those aspects in other reviews.

TLDR: All the gameplay systems come together to create a game that is painfully mediocre. The game can't decide if it wants to be a stealth survival game or an action survival game and it doesn't execute either aspect particularly well.