Recent reviews by Mintdragon

Edit: formatting, and I forgot to enable comments.

I wanted to wait for Planet Crafter to come out of Early Access before giving it a review. This is... a difficult game to review.

First of all, this game is not 1.0 ready, not even close. There are so many bugs, rough edges, QOL features you would expect to be there but just aren't. I've done two playthroughs, one during Early Access and the other in "1.0" and I honestly can't tell you what the difference is between them, besides removing the old music and replacing it with new stuff, I guess.

I don't know if I like this game. The first third is sandbox survival, the second third is base building, and the last third is an idle/clicker game where you make numbers go up. It is truly bizarre, and I'm pretty sure my nearly 190 hours as of writing are from the dopamine high of making number bigger.

Some reviews I've seen compare the automation in Planet Crafter to Satisfactory or Factorio. That is an insult to both Satisfactory and Factorio. In Satisfactory, you have nuclear power plants that require solid and liquid fuel in order to output energy to the power grid. The plants produce radioactive waste, which cannot be used or destroyed and must be stored safely. In Factorio, you have nuclear reactors that require solid and liquid fuel in order to produce steam, which you can then use another machine to convert into power and then add to the grid. If the reactor is ever damaged while it is over a certain amount of heat level, it will explode. This is an oversimplification on both game's mechanics.

In Planet Crafter, you have nuclear reactors. That's it. Full stop. You place them down, and they magically add power to the grid. Wirelessly. Solar panels work during the night time. Power lines do not exist on Store-Brand-Mars. You may think that I'm making a big stink over a game that clearly is not an automation game having lacklustre automation, and I would agree, but one of the achievements is called "The Factory Must Grow", so clearly the devs knew what they were doing.

Every time I interact with the drone system (yes this non-automation game has drones) I want to rip my hair out. Each inventory has a cog icon on it's UI screen, that cog has three things it can do; demand, supply, and set priority. You cannot request and demand the same item. So if you have a machine that has a byproduct of water, but it also requires water to work, then too bad, do it yourself. You cannot restrict inventory to a specific size. If you only want 5 of an output, too bad, craft it yourself. If you want to use autocrafters, which auto-craft... items, (it's not an automation game tho promise) then you have to have one inventory for each item. If I need iron, silicon, and titanium to craft [X], and I set my drones to deposit into one inventory, they will fill that entire inventory with silicon. I've watched it happen right in front of me. And I was screaming.

Drones have a docking platform they stay in when they aren't working. When they are working, they have infinite range and can no-clip into the map. Kinda like we can as well, I guess. A drone will target any item in any inventory regardless of range, then. So you might assume that if you have a farm or a mining operation that you should put a drone platform near both with some drones so that the farm drones can work close to the farm, and the mining drones would work at the mines. You would of course be wrong. I have never been so angry at a game before then I have from watching my mine drones come over to my farm while my farm drones work at the mine. It is utter chaos. There is absolutely no way to tell them not to go in certain areas. They don't even use the teleporters you can use! So you just have to wait as one drone from one side of the map comes all the way over, picks up the thing, then goes all the way somewhere else while there's a drone sitting idle literally right next to where it needs to work.

The more time I have spent with this game, the more I hate it. I don't want to hate it. It's cool to watch the planet change as you terraform it in real time. It's cool to go from having to rely on oxygen canisters in order to not die to being able to breathe outdoors. It's cool to build your base and then later having it destroyed because the water levels are rising. But I'm a hard core survival nut so of course I like that stuff. I just cannot recommend this to people. I'm sorry.

I bought this game on a whim because I was looking for necromancer games and I do not regret it. As someone who has never been interested in playing Vampire Survivors, I may actually give it a shot if it's as fun as this. The game has a lot of self-aware moments, and quite a lot of ♥♥♥♥ jokes, as you might expect. Boners, hur hur hur.

This game is not for everyone, but it's absolutely for me.

I should should probably give this a negative review, because this game is only for extremely niche audiences, but I just can't bring myself to do it. This game is Myst, plus Walking Simulator, plus something out of my worst nightmares. Yes, that is in fact a jab at the combat. It's gross, and creepy, and wet. As of this review, I haven't finished the game, but it's still one of my favourites this year. Scorn is experimental in a way that most other games aren't, and I find that refreshing.

This game hurts me on so many levels. The atmosphere is Alien Isolation mixed with Dead Space, the gameplay is Left for dead mixed with DOOM 2016/Eternal, the setting is a Space Hulk and Gothic cathedrals. Everything works except for the game itself. Audio from NPCs cuts out frequently, there's no music at all, every single map mission is "go here, do this, go here, do this, stand here, shoot, shoot, shoot, purge the heretics" for hours.

But the feeling of being a giant hulking Angel of Death stomping through the not-so lifeless body of a spaceship, listening to the sounds of Tyrinids scuttering around in the vents, then encountering a Gene-Stealer with a Lascannon and ripping him apart with your Storm Bolter is incredible.

This game is better AND worse with multiplayer. Everyone who isn't the host WILL have 9,999 ping and you just have to deal with enemies moonwalking, not being able to reload your weapon, teleporting around randomly, horrible framerate and the exact same single player mission structure of "go, shoot, go, shoot".

I'm giving it a positive review because I can personally look past the awful flaws and enjoy the game for what it's trying to be, but I'm not sure if anyone who isn't a Warhammer fan would enjoy it.

Please play The Fall.

I love this game so much. The plot is mature and thought provoking, the voice acting is fantastic, the atmosphere is horror, with no jump scares. It's dark, it's unsettling, it's heart-wrenching at times.

If you put a gun to my head and told me to come up with something that I didn't like, I'd say that the controls are pretty awful. I played on controller, and I found aiming to be extremely sluggish, and there were several time where I died because the game ate my inputs. Thankfully, combat is pretty forgiving, and most of the time is spent solving puzzles and exploring the environments.

This is one of my top ten favourite games now, if only just because of the last ten minutes or so. Please play The Fall. Please.

It hurts my heart to give this a negative review...

The premise of Calico is "what if Animal Crossing, but you run a cat cafe?" That's an amazing idea, however, the game is a perfect example of "death by a thousand cuts". Everything just sort of "feels" wrong, with no clear indication as to why. I'll now attempt to explain what exactly I mean.

You can pet every single animal in this game, and there is exactly one animation for all of them. This means that you pet a cat the exact same way that you pet a dog, horse, pig, deer, raccoon, grizzly bear… So you’re not really petting a crow, you’re petting a loud black cat with wings.

You have a cafe that you can buy furniture for and decorate however you want it to look. The good thing is that you can place objects wherever you want, the bad thing is that you can place objects wherever you want. There’s no grid system in this game, and nothing stops you from placing objects through walls.

You know that part where I said that this is Animal Crossing but you run a Cat Cafe? I mean that. That’s all you do. You cannot fish, collect items, craft items, farm plants, or interact with the world in any meaningful way, besides talking to NPCs. Speaking of NPCs…

The AI in this game doesn’t seem to understand what walls are. Or how to stop walking in circles once they start. Several times I’ve spoken to a person who was previously moving, and as soon as I exit dialogue with them, they stop and stand completely still until I either unload the cell or reset the game. Animals behave like this as well. It seems I’m the only thinking creature in an empty, lifeless world.

You cannot fail in this game. When the clock strikes 6 AM, you just keep on going. You don’t spend money on ingredients for your cafe, the game hand-waves it away as magical food that never runs out. You don’t even need to be at your shop to make money. You could, theoretically, leave the game running for as long as you want to and never fail.

I’ve been really harsh on this game because I want it to be better. LGBT representation in video games is rare, the artstyle is extremely cute, and having a cat cafe with a tiny horse is everything I’ve ever wanted, really. There’s some great foundations here, I just hope the developers work more on it.

I'm definitely not the target audience for hidden object games (HOGs), but I really enjoy puzzles of all kinds. I picked up a bunch of these games during a sale, and this one was the first one I finished. Not a bad first impression. I found the plot really boring, but again, not the target audience. The artwork is gorgeous, the voice acting is alright, and the music is great.

This DLC is a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Cons:
- The enemy zombie models are reskins of the ones in the main game. Same AI it seems, too. I don't think they're "bad", just kinda uninspired
- The first boss is extremely easy to cheese. Run up, hit him, jump backwards, repeat until dead. I've only cleared the first level, so maybe it gets better, but it's not a very good first impression
- I personally don't feel that combat is one of Dying Light's strengths. Sure it's serviceable, but it's not really why I play the game. This entire DLC is combat. Honestly, the levels remind me more of DOOM more than anything else
- There's not a lot of verticality in the first level, at least not when compared to the main game

Pros:
- It's Dying Light
- The atmosphere and sound design are really, really good. It really does feel like you stepped into an entirely different dimension
- The weapon models are gorgeous. Yeah sure, they're also reskins, but they're very pretty reskins
- It's just more Dying Light
- There are skeletons. They block your attacks. I don't really have much else to say about it other than I like having a new enemy with different AI that I have to learn
- It's pretty challenging. I play on hard, and the reskinned runners can easily pin you into a corner if you're not careful
- It's just Dying Light, and Dying Light is one of my favourite games ever made

As a standalone experience, yeah, this content is really bad. But as an add-on for one of my favourite games? Sure, I'll play it.

First of all, if you have epilepsy, or are sensitive to rapidly flashing lights, do not play this game. There are several sections where the game flashes many different colours at once in quick secession, and I ended up with a headache.

Second of all, do you remember the internet in 2005? Because that's what this is. "LOL SO RANDOM XD" internet humour, the game. It's also slightly racist, at parts? I don't know if I'm too sensitive or something, but there's this one section during the plot where you go to a china-town adjacent area, and all the NPCs sound like stereotypes. I guess that's the joke but I dunno, it kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

It's not even a good acid trip, I'm going back to Rusty Lake.

"Hey guys, play Project Zomboid with me! It's my favourite game and we'll have a great time!"

So my friend got three other newbies to play with her (myself included) and it was fun. Until one of us got infected, got The Fever, and had to be put down. Then my other friend got bit by the one that turned and had to be put down as well. Our first session ever went from "comedy hour with zombies and friends" to "TellTale's The Walking Dead" in about half an hour.

I love this game.