Recent reviews by Tom Tardis

Enjoyable 2D space mining simulator.

There are times you just want to chill and mine space rocks. This is the perfect game for those days.

This is a fun, relaxing game: it's mostly open world exploration with a touch of puzzle solving thrown in. Nothing is particularly complicated, though, and anyone should be able to complete all the game's objectives in 10 hours or so.

Your character can't die - there's no actual danger, no fighting, and no stress. So the game is all just exploring and getting in to different places with the tools on your van. You upgrade the van as you go, with a few upgrade tiers along the way, and each upgrade opens up access to new places.

That and the various fetch and carry quests eat up most of your time in the game. The main quest, which involves destroying RF jammers and unlocking transmission towers, is fairly straightforward. You just need enough scavanged parts to unlock the next tech tier and keep things moving forward.

I enjoyed meeting the characters and exploring the desert on Cigalo. I just wish the game was longer, with more to do.

It's Factorio in 3D.

If you love factory building games, you will love Satisfactory. This is still the best of all the first person factory-builders, and it's just getting better with each update.

10/10 would exploit a planetary ecosystem again

Wow. Found a tree. Hit it with an axe. Now I have wood.
What do I do with this wood?

I don't know, because while I was in my inventory screen looking at my wood, a wolf ate me. Now I'm a kilometer away from my wood, I have no resources, and even if I did have resources, I can't figure out how to make any other tools or how to kill that ***** wolf so I can get my wood back.

While I would walk five hundred chunks for my wood, this is not the game in which I would do so.

Refunded. "Where'd my wood go?"

I started out enjoying this game... until winter came.

Don't get me wrong - this game faithfully reproduces the hardships of winter, but it also gives you no way to recover if you don't have enough stored food. At least, let us fish using mussels for bait, or something...

The systems in the game are still pretty broken. Things like the villagers eating all your stored food, and food running out even though there was plenty just a few minutes ago. Or villagers running out of things to do and just sitting around. Or the spawn being way too close to one of the monsters you need to kill, so that monster eats my villagers. And then I kill it. And then it respawns.

I was enjoying this game for a couple of days, but then it just stopped being fun when my whole village died, and the only way I got through winter was as a ghost. I think I'll go find something to play that's not quite so depressing.

RIP my whole village.

This is certainly a good *looking* game, but I'm having problems actually enjoying it: the biggest problem is the inconsistency of the tracks, the lack of balance, and the fact that the AI bikes "cheat".

The core problem is that motocross racing is not just about "going fast." It's about managing your energy and tackling obstacles on a course to maintain your speed.

So let's start with the tracks: I ran the first race and pretty easily beat the AI bikes on the medium difficulty. On the second race, I found myself having to run sections over and over again, because the track had whoops and jumps that were simply impossible to sail through, due to the poor handling of the player bike's preload/seat bounce system.

On a real motocross bike, you can compress the front forks or the rear shock by appropriately leaning and managing the throttle going into a jump Do it right, and you can sail further or rise higher on a jump.

BvA tries to implement this, and it seems to work to a limited extent, but this is where "the AI cheats" comes into play.

You start the game with a smaller bike (a 250 2-stroke, if I recall), yet the tracks are sized for the larger, faster bikes. So you can't actually make the doubles or fly through the whoops like you could on the bigger bikes.

Except that the AI bikes don't seem to care about that. They will sail over a double and make a perfect landing, even though they are traveling the same speed as me. I can run the same section, preloading, seat bouncing, or doing both - yet get the same basic result.

Looking at the path the bikes are taking, it seems like the AI bikes are basically taking a pre-recorded run - then just playing it back at a slower speed. So they make every double. They go through the whoops with no problem. They nail every turn and basically can't be pushed off their course in a collision... yet the player bike can attempt the exact same path and speed, yet constantly crash or fail to make jumps.

For this reason alone, I'm saying "don't buy" on this game. And that's disappointing, because I enjoy off-road racing games and riding ATVs IRL. But the races in this game are just not enjoyable.

This is a great combination of simple survival, base building, and simple missions that you can power through without needing preternatural skills and twitch reflexes.

I wanted to do the things you see in the trailer... design and build houses.

Instead, I get a game with some stilted dialog that has me renovating childrens' bedrooms. This is not what I signed up for.

I have been having fun with this. I could write a very long review, but I'll just sum it up:

1. No, it's not Factorio or Satisfactory. It does borrow some elements from both, but it's also simpler: your builds don't have to be enormous, and as buildings can do more than one thing at a time, you don't need hundreds of structures. My main ship is roughly 100 meters long and 50 meters wide, and I've reached the end of the tech tree (where you move on to the end game content... I think. I'm still building the last structure that the capstone tech unlocks.)

2. Yes, it's in space. No, it's in no way a realistic space game. Think of it more like "Treasure Planet".

If you like base builders and games that let you be creative with building and base design... this is worth the money.

WHY DO YOU HATE ME?

Foundations won't line up on builds.
Chests won't line up when turned 90 degrees.
But I can't... stop... playing....