Recent reviews by TechnocratiK

Top notch game. It's basically Firefly meets the Sims meets Prison Architect.

Though in early access at the time of review, this looks very promising. To reduce Mon Bazou to a car building/racing game does it a disservice. It captures a highly-stereotypic---if not downright parodic---essence of rural Quebec life that illustrates the author's deep connection with the source material. Maple syrup and cannabis farming can consume as much, if not more, of the player's time than actual car repair and racing, making Mon Bazou feel like a nascent 3D Québécois Stardew Valley. I cannot overstate how much Mon Bazou overcomes its prima facie simplistic graphics with a highly immersive environment that is, being accurate to an albeit-cherry-picked reality, enhanced by its barrenness. Driving scenes aside, the gameplay is rather casual; figuring out where and how things are/work is relatively straightforward with no tutorial (though a background in northern rural life helps), and a couple of brief partial playthroughs were enough for me to work out what is expected of me as a player. The game world is impressively well-scaled in space-time, with the faster-than-real-time day/night cycle and in-game clock being well-compensated with shorter game-space distances between map locations and fast work times for activities such as eating poutine, drinking maple syrup, cutting down trees, and chopping them into logs. Mon Bazou is neither hard (staying alive is not difficult) nor easy (the path to building wealth is not evident); it is neither graphically simplistic (there's a ton of stuff to interact with) nor complex (objects are simplistically rendered); it is neither realistic (rural Quebec life is as subject to the human condition as any kind of life) nor inauthentic. My only complaint is that the author has chosen to include, shall we say, 'federalist elements' in the game that one might argue gives it a wholly unnecessary political subtext. Otherwise, 10/10 for an early-access game.

Admittedly, I don't usually play these kinds of games---I'm doing this review for the summer sale., and I figured a free-to-play review would be innocuous. With that out of the way, this game is clearly intended for a touchscreen device, and quickly became annoying to play on PC. I don't mind that there are no keyboard controls, but asking me to click-and-drag (i.e., swipe) constantly when using a regular mouse is a game-breaker (literally) for me. Also, the game takes itself way too seriously (i.e., Yu-Gi-Oh in-a-nutshell), which is hilarious, until I realised that the animations and speech made the pace of the card game annoyingly slow. I will take the Pokemon Trading Card Game on the (original) Game Boy any day over this nonsense.