Käyttäjän Empterdose viimeaikaiset arvostelut

The platonic ideal of an EGA adventure game. Ever wonder what those old-school adventure games would be like if their parsers didn't suck? This. They would be like this.

I will admit that a couple of the puzzles stumped me, but the silver lining is that I got to take advantage of the delightfully Web-0.1-esque hint book.

The good: it's like SMB3.

The bad: it's like SMB3, and I'm not very good at SMB3.

When I got up yesterday morning, I didn't think I'd be staying up late on account of a network architecture survival horror game, but here we are.

I'm going to keep playing because, at a little over an hour in, I've clearly seen almost none of the game. lol no I requested a refund. But so far, this feels like another Ori: a big studio's attempt at stealing a piece of that attractive indie pie. Grounded checks all the right boxes for an open world survival action adventure game, but it feels like it's still missing a heart.

Satisfyingly tight gameplay loop and well-honed aesthetics. Slows down considerably/feels kind of grindy through the last few hours if you push for 100% completion, but hey, don't forget that you're doing that to yourself. Highly recommended.

Mindustry draws a lot of comparisons to Factorio, for obvious reasons: superficially, they both appear to be about factory construction and resource collection/cultivation. Under the hood, though, I find them to be refreshingly different: to me, Factorio is ultimately an optimization game, and Mindustry practically encourages the opposite. In Factorio, unless you're playing on a death planet, your defenses will eventually far outpace the modest offensive capabilities of the biters. Mindustry, in contrast, is a tower defense: the longer the map wears on, the more challenging the enemies. So between the two games, your base develops in very different ways: whereas Factorio will have you throwing things together as you start knowing you'll have endless opportunities to improve, Mindustry to a great extent encourages careful thought about base layout through the midgame. As the map wears on, you'll spend more and more time shoring up the frontlines, with less and less opportunity to tweak your infrastructure. The changes you do need to make to your supply line become more and more haphazard, with conveyor belts crisscrossing each other willy-nilly in whatever arrangement is necessary to get things done quickly, consequences be damned. If Factorio is like programming, then Mindustry is pounding on the keyboard at 3 AM the night before the big demo.

As far as nitty-gritty technical stuff goes, it's worth mentioning that the game's multiplayer mode handles latency much better than does Factorio. If you want to play a factory-building game with a friend who's a long ways away, you're going to have a much better time with this.

I love Mindustry. You should try it.

I love walljumping. Screw this noise though.

I don't get why this game receives the acclaim it does. It's frustrating in all the wrong places that prevent me from really getting into it.

The movement controls respond sluggishly, which is not what you want from a 3D action platformer. Moving your character feels like you're dragging a weight around. It's not just slow movement acceleration, because cornering feels like it takes time, too. Recovery time after actions feels long as well. Basically, none of your characters interactions with the world feel snappy. I ended up feeling like I was fighting my character and the environment itself, not the things in it.

The camera movement is also frustrating. Side-to-side trucking feels a bit heavy, but isn't too bad. The real difficulty is that vertical movement fixed: the game elevates the camera to where it thinks it should be. And with that comes automatic dolly movement as the camera pulls toward or away from the character based on how closed-in the environment is. This often means that you can't easily see your way out of a literally tight situation, making it difficult to see where you're trying to go, let alone pull off any precise manoeuvers.

The scale of the game is also strange. On one hand, there are lots of times when the camera maintains a narrow FOV; but on the other, the UI and text size and placement don't feel properly adapted for 10-foot use. Whether you play on a monitor or from afar, you'll feel uncomfortable. This isn't helped by the game visuals feeling simultaneously too light and too dark: dark bits are so dark you hunt through them by bumping into things, whereas lit areas can feel blown out. In both cases, you end up feeling unable to properly make out details.

As for the rest of the visuals, they're mediocre. The game uses a lot of bright, solid colours, so the dithering widely used for transparency effects in place of actual transparency sticks out like a sore thumb. And yet, it's not prominent enough to feel like an artistic decision. But it can't be for performance: the game often stutters for seconds at a time and has a difficulty maintaining 60 FPS (Ryzen 7 3700X, RX 480, oodles of RAM – far above the terse recommended specs). The visuals of the game feel like an homage to the troubled 3D games of the late '90s and early '00s before we had enough texture memory to go around, and that's not a good thing.

I made it through the first chapter of the game, somehow. Really, I'm not sure how: I had a difficult time following the game's guidance from one goal to the next, and often found myself wondering what I was supposed to be doing. I felt like I was drowning in mechanics – hats? badges? – before I'd truly grasped even the basic movement mechanics of the game.

As I said at the beginning, I had a frustrating experience with A Hat in Time. Given the vast – overwhelming, even – number of positive reviews, I'm left feeling like I must be the one missing something, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I wish I could: it seems like there must be some good gameplay in here somewhere. FWIW, I am not new to platformers, 3D platformers, or action games. (I play Super Mario 64 to 120 stars every few years.) I tend to think that none of my frustrations with the game come from an unfamiliarity with the genre, or with the tropes upon which the game is built. But for now, I'm too beleaguered with mechanical issues to enjoy the game itself.

Short but sweet. Probably the most creative puzzle game I've ever played. Makes excellent use of the medium in which it exists. The pricing is frustrating; for the length of the game, it seems quite overpriced, but on the other hand, the intricate art and animations clearly took time to develop. Maybe wait and get it on sale, but do get it.

This game is cute, but the gameplay is frustrating, and the presentation needs polish.

Fishing is a constant, unsatisfying loop of catching small fishing, recasting them as bait, then having other small fish steal them before you can hook larger ones. So you equip lures which cost in excess of the value of the fish you _can_ catch, and... still catch small fish, just ones which were futher away or deeper down.

The game's unlock system (unlock system? Really? Why not just at store? Why do I have to _unlock_ the stores? Why are there _multiple_ stores?) is predicated on completing quests by catching types of fish. But the types you need to catch are identified by name, and until you've caught an example of that type of fish, your catalogue only shows an outline of its shape. The outlines are all very similar, so it's not much to go on. You also have to remember to click the “New Quest” button to begin a new quest, but there's never an option; the game assigns you the next quest of its own choosing. So why aren't quests just started automatically?

The fish are flat-shaded, and have no animations to bring them to life. Well, the fish obviously swim a bit and rotate themselves to orient to the lure, but other than that, fish spites are completely static. No excitement to see the bait, no reaction to being hooked, no response to being eaten by larger fish, nothing. The only part of the player's cat avatar which animates are the arms, which, along with the rod, swing around in a linear arc like they're pinned on.

The single music track loops monotonously. Bring your own soundtrack. Exploration of the game's data directory shows a second track; maybe it's used deeper underwater. Fifteen minutes of play wasn't enough to hear it used in-game.

Let's face it: this game was released in 2015, and has received only one content patch in addition to a handful of bugfix releases since then. The developer is clearly satisfied (or at least accepting) of the overall game design, so as much as I would consider these to be fundamental design issues, I think the chances of seeing any changes made to these areas are basically nil. Go buy Ridiculous Fishing on your phone instead; it's a better game all around, and nearly half the price.