Recent reviews by Sorting Algorithms

This game is so good it accomplishes one of the most difficult tasks on earth: getting people on the internet to admit they were wrong about something.

The thing that makes Satisfactory fun when I find similar games like Factorio and Dyson Sphere Project tedious and frustrating is the lack of fail state or loss of progress. All resources are unlimited, there's no pollution or invasion mechanic, so long as you keep your power grid strong enough to support everything the only limit is what your computer can handle. Because it's in first-person 3D it is much less tedious to organize and connect everything because you aren't limited to a single plane. Letting you have fun and play around instead of having to strictly optimize from the get-go in the name of survival is such a good choice! The constant babbling of the Glados knockoff and the Borderlands AI knockoff can be switched off, as can the pretty uninteresting combat against the ambient native fauna, and the strong modding support means almost any bit for friction can be sanded off in a few clicks.

My least favorite Arkane game by far. The most open-ended concept they've had winds up being a series of strictly-regimented checklists. It's focused entirely on killing seven villains that have less characterization than your average corpse in Prey. A third of the villains don't even have powers. The original ending was a wordless 10 second cutscene fade to credits, now you get a cheap Borderlands intro showing all these awful characters having a great time as if you like or care about any of them. The entire character progression system is awkwardly cobbled together from the randomized trinket system in Dishonored and half the trinkets only effect the online multiplayer component. The online multiplayer is frustrating for both sides, and not worth all the sacrifices the game made to build itself around it. They randomize the lock codes so you have to do their tedious glyph-matching puzzles.

Deathloop is like watching a skilled architect bomb at open mic standup because someone at the office told them they were funny once. This type of wacky irreverent arcadey game isn't what Arkane is good at or known for and it's embarrassing to watch them try and fall so short.

Kenshi recaptured a kind of gaming magic I've only felt a few times in my life: Playing Morrowind over summer vacation in middle school, and playing Mount & Blade in my first semester of college. The lack of a formal structure or campaign combined with the chaos of the overlapping esoteric gameplay systems encourage a kind of free-wheeling abandon that has kept me playing long after I abandon most games.

I didn't care that the first game had generic writing because there wasn't much of it. The host quips about fleshing out narratives from the first game but the writing isn't any better, there's just a lot more of it and the game draws more attention to it. You have to click through paragraphs of text every time you start a game, campaigns have dialogue trees full of empty and meaningless choices, and victory often requires you pay attention to details buried in the word avalanche. Especially since this is a game built around replaying the same few challenges over and over, it really grates having to decipher a randomly-generated murder mystery over and over by grilling people about their favorite foods and solving timing minigames. Even the Endless mode is composed of the same handful of generic plots that you have to flip through every time you progress.

The original Hand of Fate was a lean, addictive experience. The sequel tries to expand on this but bloats it into something tepid and inert. I have so many cards to unlock and stories to complete, but don't particularly care to because there is tedium and frustration that wears you down every step of the way.

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As a certified rat tickler, the depiction of rats in this game is maybe one of the most scientifically accurate ever rendered in a video game.

For a few hours this game is hugely addictive, however eventually you realize that the entirety of the game is just grinding using the same few assets and abilities over and over again with slightly different numbers. If you like or don't mind grinding maybe you'll fare better but for me I had no interest in spending hours and hours trying to make your resource numbers go up so you can buy upgrades to make you slightly more likely to succeed against a difficult boss fight.

The Purifier mechanic is one of the most infuriating things I've ever encountered and instantly killed any interest I had in playing this game. At this point the game has modding support so you can technically remove it yourself but beyond that it's an incredibly grindy slog of a game that actively punishes and trolls you by making dungeon rewards be actively harmful unless you play double or triple the amount of floors required to beat a level.

I liked the original Flash game years ago but the sequel adds a ton of grinding (including real-life timers for getting resources) and a story that is very dull but requires clicking through pages and pages of dialogue after every mission to progress.