Recent reviews by Allus

Interesting game concept. Its music and art-style are excellent, but the English translation is pretty awkward, which is not great in a game primarily about texting people.

Overall I enjoyed it--just keeping my fingers crossed that the devs can get the translation polished up before release.

TL;DR: Portal: Revolution is for you if you are (a) a masochist, or (b) thought what Portal 2 was missing were some really obtuse puzzles with zero explanation, and which punish you for experimenting.

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I did end up finishing this game. However, it has two major issues that caused me to not enjoy large parts of it.

I take issue with the developers' statement that, "All new mechanics and advanced portal tricks are taught to you." If that's true, then their idea of "teaching" some of these mechanics is to throw you into a test chamber with them and let you figure them out via trial and error. The second half of the game is better about this, but when the 3rd most popular guide (as of writing) for your game is an instructional video on how to beat one specific level, then you've failed as a level designer. (For the record, that was the only test chamber in the game I had to look up the answer to.)

"But," I hear you say, "Portal is all about experimenting and finding what works! Trial and error is the name of the game!" Indeed it is, dear reader. There's just one, major problem. This game...

You read that right, this is a Portal game that punishes you for just trying things out without thinking three steps ahead. On multiple occasions, I was on the last step of a long test chamber, made what would turn out to be the wrong move, and was forced to start the entire puzzle over from the beginning. (The blue-portal-only puzzles at the beginning are particularly bad offenders.) That's not fun; that's just busywork.

The end result is that the player is conditioned to not take leaps of faith, to not "just go for it," lest they have to take the walk of shame back to the start of the test chamber and start all over again. Portal 2 gets around this by creating soft checkpoints for the player as they progress through more complex levels: raising a platform here, creating a ramp there. Given the complexity of some of Revolution's levels, I don't know why the devs haven't done the same.

I was really hoping for a follow-on to Portal 2 which introduced some new mechanics and used them to make some interesting puzzles. What I wasn't expecting was for said mechanics to be dropped into the game with no explanation, leaving the player to fend for themselves in an environment that punishes experimentation. While the second half of the game does a significantly better job introducing and creating puzzles with its new mechanics, that doesn't excuse the first half being an exercise in pure frustration.

Ultimately, I cannot recommend this game.

I hesitate to call this game "horror," since it never really scared me. For me, it evokes the same morbid curiosity I get from reading the SCP wiki. Combining that experience with a gameplay loop where you use callers' descriptions (some more vague than others) to deduce what manner of anomaly they're experiencing in their homes was nothing short of genius on the part of the developer. The Windows 95-inspired interface through which it is presented only serves to elevate the experience, and is the proverbial icing on this cake.

The calls and their order are scripted, so there's no replay value, but the experience I had was well worth $15, so I don't mind at all.

I really wanted to like this game, but it just didn't hook me like Factorio did. It takes a lot of effort to build things, and too often it forces you to tear up and rebuild them, which cratered my motivation to play any further.

As many other reviewers have already said, this game is essentially Rimworld in spaaaaaace~. However, I much prefer this game to Rimworld for the simple reason that preparing and planning ahead for potential disasters will actually help you mitigate them, rather than simply postpone your inevitable demise.

Also, this game is made by possibly one of the most responsive game developers I've ever come across. Reported bugs are fixed at lightning speed, and new features are added regularly. The dev is clearly passionate about this game, and the possibility that it might get abandoned before it's done has never crossed my mind.

If you liked Rimworld, but would prefer it not try so hard to wipe you out at every available opportunity, or if you would rather defend your base in spaaaaace~, then this game is for you.

I love this game's concept, and it has tons of potential, but it's still at the point where playing it feels more like you're fighting its bugs and quirks, rather than overcoming its intended challenges.

Also, as of writing, the last public update to this game was almost a year ago. I definitely wouldn't recommend buying it until the devs demonstrate a commitment to releasing more frequent updates. At the rate they're going, there is a real chance that substantially similar games with more attentive devs and more frequent updates will steal this game's potential player-base, causing it to be ultimately abandoned due to lack of interest.

Probably my favorite way to catch up on my podcasts while not actually being on the road.

Force-feedback steering wheel, pedals, and head tracking highly recommended to improve your immersion.

Honestly, I can't be motivated to write a proper takedown of this game, so I'm just going to bullet-point all the problems I had with it. TL;DR: Probably play Just Cause 2 instead.

• Ctrl is the "menu back/cancel" key and cannot be remapped.
  
• Planes are controlled with WASD plus two other keys for the rudder which you'll never remember, instead of being mapped to something sane like the mouse.
  
• Shift is handbrake and Space is "yeet yourself out of the vehicle and parachute away while it explodes into a ball of fire," so there will be many accidental yeetings while attempting to make tight corners.

• There is no minimap. Get ready to pause the game to look at the map constantly while you're liberating a stronghold in order to find the last few chaos objects. Massively annoying, breaks flow, no excuse.
  
• Bad subtitle timing. Mostly in the latter half of the game, the subtitles often run way too fast for the dialogue they're following. Guess they ran out of QA money.

• Ammunition is very limited, and it grinds things to a halt when you have to scrounge for ammo while raiding a base. I recommend installing an infinite ammo mod at the earliest opportunity.
  
• No throwable sticky bombs. Let me say that again: there are no throwable explosives that can stick to objects in Just Cause 3. They made a sequel to Just Cause 2 and left out the absolute best weapon in the game. Shameful.

• The game constantly disconnects from Square Enix's servers, pausing the game and asking you to reconnect every single time the connection drops. I very swiftly blocked the game from connecting to the Internet entirely via my PC's firewall, which in turn, brought about another issue...
  
• Mandatory online DRM check-ins. Just Cause 3 still has Denuvo Anti-tamper, some 7 years after its original release, and requires an Internet connection to check in and make sure you haven't done something naughty with it or whatever. Thankfully, if the main game executable can't connect directly, it will pop up a window and ask you to paste some text into a website and paste the response back. This does, however, mean that you may not be able to start the game at all if you find yourself without an Internet connection.

Get a kick-ass paint job and help provide humanitarian support to Ukraine? What's not to love?

#TruckingForPeace

Still the best way I know to time travel 12 hours into the future at will.