Recent reviews by Dom

Norland has a lot of potential. While it may not reach the depths of it's peers, it's still fun if you enjoy colony sims.

What I Like:
Politics: The game's political system allows you to form alliances, wage wars, and manipulate factions, etc.. If you're not paying attention, it's possible to end up with unfriendly neighbors on your border.
Colony Management: The colony-building aspect is fun, but there could be more depth here as far as building rotation, road types, etc.
Character Development: Watching your characters grow and develop is satisfying. They have to share knowledge with each other or it will be lost when they die.

What Could Be Improved:
Action System: The action queue system can be confusing.
Lord AI: Lords often seem to disregard orders, which is incredibly frustrating. It often seems like you're suggesting something they might possibly consider doing at some point in the future (maybe).
Limited Options: While there are many things to manage, the options available often feel limited.
The GUI: Takes up a lot of space on the screen. Some popup messages were inconveniently placed or too large; this was especially annoying during the tutorial.

This is a good game. A lot more depth to the story than I was expecting.

The game itself can be fun but is a total cash grab and highlights much of what is wrong with the gaming industry. They literally released paid DLC during early access. I don't know how anybody could trust anything this dev says unless it's "F you, pay me."

My original review was positive, but was from Early Access. The censorship controversy has made me revisit this, but not for the reason of changing the content -- I honestly don't have a dog in that fight. On principle, I'm very against censorship, but I've not played the game enough since EA to notice what is being removed.

And the reason for that, and the reason I'm updating my review, is that the selection of game modes for each level was removed to make them fit a linear story-line. I don't really care about the story for this game, I was more interested in the swat sandbox. But that's my fault for buying a game in early access; they sometimes change into things I don't feel compelled to play anymore.

I no longer recommend this game.

This game is definitely not for everybody; if you lack patience, you may want to find something else to play.

I have 63 hours in this game at the time of writing. There's a storyline for each of the hunting reserves, but they failed to hold my interest for long; I've not done more than a couple of the missions in each location before getting distracted with exploring and hunting. I've found it is more satisfying to approach a hunt slowly and choose one animal to hunt and equip for that, rather than going out and blasting anything that moves--your trophy score will likely end up much higher when you play like this as well.

Pros:
- This game is absolutely amazing to look at. The environments are beautiful. Animals (And humans) leave grass matted down where they've walked.
- Decent amount of weapon options; rifles, handguns, bows, shotguns
- Good variety of animals to hunt
- Multiplayer hunting is a lot of fun, providing you work together
- DLC hunting locations can be played by everyone as long as the host has purchased it
- There's a lot of assistive features that can be turned off if a more realistic experience is desired (Highlighting animal tracks, rest locations, etc)
- Leaderboards show friends trophy scores compared to yours, gives you a method to compete against friends
- Game is still being actively developed
- Each of the maps is massive

Cons:
- Animal behavior is not the greatest -- it's not unusual to shoot a single animal in a herd, and then have time to wipe out another 5 of them as they glitch and run in circles around you rather than running away.
- Might be a little too heavy on the DLC
- Not much customization available for your player character
- Trophy score doesn't always make sense
- A lot of small bugs

This is probably the best game of the Mass Effect trilogy.

The first game of the series sets up some great lore, but gameplay got tedious and many of its missions seemed repetitive. I ended up losing interest half way through and eventually uninstalled, never having finished the story.

Then, Mass Effect 2 happened. I purchased the game in a sale bundle with ME1, but it sat untouched until I eventually installed it to lessen the number of unplayed games in my library. I was immediately drawn in; many of the issues I had with the first game were not present in this one. The story writing was top notch and shocking realizations are made, the voice acting was fantastic, and the main characters were extremely memorable. This is the game that sucked me back into the series; I devoured this game, immediately purchased the third one despite the controversy surrounding its ending, and then went back and replayed and finished the first one.

I cannot recommend this game enough. When people mention Mass Effect as being one of the best game franchises ever, I strongly believe that is mostly due to this game.

This game has eaten many more hours of my life than Steam will ever know.

I first played this game as an Alpha release. While feature limited back then, the mod community really stepped things up to make the game consistently new and interesting. As development went on, the game became more complex and challenging with the addition of a real career mode.

While some of the new additions have introduced new bugs, the game overall is fun, interesting, and unlike pretty much everything else on the market.

The mod community for KSP is still amazing, by the way.

If you like space, play this game.