Recent reviews by Drury

cool game, dude

So you can probably tell by the review score that the game is more than capable of meeting players' expectations, but what do people come here for in the first place?

It's easy to assume it's some sort of crazy factory simulator for geniuses, people with engineering degrees, the entire population of Germany, or at least people who are "into that technical stuff", but that's only partially true. Factorio is, simply put, a fun videogame about building things with an industrial space theme. If you liked tycoon games like RollerCoaster Tycoon, Transport Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, or citybuilding ones like SimCity, Cities Skylines or Caesar 3, you probably already know the basic gist. You build a sprawling factory to gradually achieve a single, big task, and it's really fun to watch it in motion. The big twist on the formula that Factorio brings is that it borrows crafting elements now common in modern mainstream games to make the building less a matter of using money to make money, and more about crafting basic resources into usable items. It just so happens that these items are buildings that you build your factory out of. In essence, you're building a factory-building factory, hence the common mantra "the factory must grow".

This self-serving growth isn't a goal unto itself, though. At the top of the crafting pyramid are the so-called "science packs", a complex item that exists solely to be consumed to progress the game's tech tree. Said tech tree starts you off with simple tools to familiarize yourself with the basics of mining and smelting, and eventually branches out towards truer and truer automation, culminating in a factory that literally builds itself using thousands of flying construction drones. The mere prospect of that can make a new player's head spin, but in reality the game actually gets easier once everything gets automated, since you can just sit back and watch things happen. The ultimate goal is naturally to climb to the very top of the tech tree, however you don't have to worry about aimlessly building up to that point since there are plenty of interesting intermediate steps worthy of investigation. The game sustains a steady drip-feed of new technologies that often change up the formula completely, such as new forms of power production, item transportation or even access to completely unique production chains like liquid oil and radioactive uranium, so you're very unlikely to go bored during the 40-60 hour playthrough.

In terms of challenge, it can seem as though the game is very complex and hard, but as I said before, the bigger your factory gets, the more you can afford to chill. For this reason the game rarely gets described as "hard", but it's not exactly a cakewalk either. You do get an infinite amount of space to build your factory however you want, but at the end of the day the resources won't craft themselves, and a bare minimum of planning is required to lay things out at least a bit logically. You can build your mines on the opposite end of the factory to the smelters and connect them with a single line of belt, but you can't expect to smelt a lot of items that way (been there, done that). Not that it's necessarily a bad way of doing things, but let's just say there's better ways as well. This extends to practically all facets of Factorio, making it a game that's easy to play (and beat), but practically impossible to master.

Hopefully this has been at least a bit helpful to anyone trying to get a clearer picture of this game and understand why people praise it so much. Needless to say, I love it lots, still returning to it now and then for a playthrough whenever I don't have better things to do that week. It's well and truly one of the best games to come out of the past decade and I wish more people built up the courage to give it a shot. Did you notice there is a free demo? If you're still on the fence, give it a go. You're welcome.

The game starts off with a cinematic that leaves you more confused than hyped, followed by a badly designed tutorial that seemingly drags on forever

Then you are dumped into this large, beautiful, seamless open world which, unfortunately, upon closer inspection turns out to be nothing more than just a bunch of same-ish enemy compounds with meaningless filler space between them and some designated fast travel spots dispersed throughout which still leave you to travel on foot a bit too much for comfort.

Said compounds are quite fun to infiltrate though, there's a lot of very well-crafted and nerve-wracking stealthing to be had, and the game offers quite a lot of ways to go aobut it, but sadly even though enemies get bulkier in response to your tactics they never really force you to drastically change up your playstyle. You can just keep researching upgrades for your same old toys to overcome whatever the enemy throws at you. There's no real moral system that'd punish you for killing, but going guns blazing is still a bad idea since it's kinda messy and noisy and you almost always get swarmed and die. This begs the question why the game gives you so many fancy tools for killing, yet considerably fewer and more boring tools for sneaking.

Speaking of being (non-)lethal, you can capture literally any person you come across and have them join your support team behind the scenes where they research things for you, or you can even play as them, creating a very real incentive to not kill everyone you come across. Which then comes back to bite you when a boss fight occurs and the game suddenly expects you to kill the boss despite not being geared for such a task at all, leaving you with no choice but to ♥♥♥♥ it back and cheese your way through.

In terms of contextualizing everything, the little story there is could be best described as utilitarian. You have a character talking to you on the radio nudging you towards rescuing hostages/prisoners, stealing blueprints for new toys and other such activities, but at the end of the day this feels more like going through a checklist than a story framing these activities you embark on, making them feel like pointless chore.

As the credits roll halfway through the game, you're left wondering what could have been. There's no way in hell whoever made this wanted it to wind up the way it did. It's not a bad game by any stretch, it just feels like the developers realized they weren't going to be able to ship the full product so they frantically focused on getting the gameplay right before they were inevitably forced to ship much too early. Unfortunately, all that resulted in was a game that's interesting to play, but lacks any tangible reason for the player to care.

Thanks for reading this Metal Gear Solid V review, Satellite Reign is a fun game and you should buy it when it's at least 75% off.

It's not a 4X game, it's not Transport Tycoon, or Railroad Tycoon, or Civilization, or Banished or Factorio or anything like that. Repeat - this is not anything like any of those games whatsover, and it doesn't try to be, if you just want to build trains or shipping lines or keep a Martian village alive, look away, this is a completely different genre. Think more in terms of Age of Empires, or Company of Heroes, or Starcraft. It's a bit more relaxed and with a very low APM requirement, but it's still a very deep competitive PvP game. And it rocks.

There is a rather lengthy campaign, but it won't motivate you to progress with the story. There is a minimal one, more or less just backstories of various characters. The real meat is the gameplay, and in this aspect it's really, really good. You play 30 minute RTS skirmishes against excellent AI, seriously I've never seen AI like this in an RTS before. It's almost like playing against humans, except you can slam spacebar at any point to pause the game and ponder your next move, kinda FTL-style. Your main objective is to buy out your opponent's stock and basically do a hostile takeover - if you don't know what means, don't worry, the game has an excellent tutorial. Money is obtained not by mining resources (this simply adds them to your endless storage), but by selling your existing resources at opportune times. Since selling a resource makes it cheaper and thus less profitable, you will need to build various buildings that convert cheap resources into more valuable ones (but do keep in mind that "valuable" is a temporary thing - sometimes food can be worth less than the water used to make it, which is when you want to sell your food farms and build a bunch of water wells).

That's the core gameplay loop, and it's oh-so-perfect. You'll be building and rebuilding your base nonstop depending on the current state of the market, which shifts according to how players affect it. And after a while, you learn that you can use the invisible hand of the market to grab other people by the balls. And that's where the real game starts.

For instance if your opponent goes full power-hungry electrolysis just to get all the oxygen for life support of their massive base, and you go full power production just to sell power to them, then you're the one laughing. You're gonna be laughing even harder when their plan backfires so hard their options slim down to A)have no power B)have no oxygen or C)have no money. The ultimate kek comes when, whatever option they take, their stocks take a plunge and you buy them out for a dime. If that sounds appealing, invest in this game immediately. If not, go build trains in Mashinky I guess.

What do you do in Red Faction: Guerrilla?

So imagine your life is so amazing that one day you decide to join your dingus brother on Mars to work as a miner. But when you arrive, he immediately starts talking to this hot chick from some anarchist group, and then he has you smash some buildings for said group (and definitely not take the credit to impress a specific person). Karma catches up to him superfast though as the cops actually do give him full credit and kill him instantly, and you're now super mad and ready to join the anarchist group and avenge your brother. But then it turns out they're super lame and can't even knock a factory over, so that's your job now. The cops take offense to this and always bring out a tank or two to stop you, as expected. At that point you just sorta run around the city knocking down buildings before the tanks catch up. This goes on for a while until there's literally no buildings or cops left, which is when more cops from Earth arrive on their big-af space-cop-cruiser, but you just give that a good ole' knock as well, and that's just about enough to establish yourself as the ultimate breeding material.

Which is all fine and good, but it does leave a lot of important questions unanswered, such as: What do you actually do in the game? Who exactly benefits from us destroying vital infrastructure? How do the cops always know where you are even when they can't see you? Why is the game so incredibly fun at first, but gets really frustrating towards the end? Is the hot chick actually an ancient martian scientist primitive cult member?

Actually, nevermind, they do answer that last one. As for that first one (and then maybe also some of the other ones assuming I don't bore you to death with my typings):

It's a GTA-type game, and it being a GTA-type game, there's a surprising amount of fun things to do. Can't exactly do an illegal street race or visit a strip club (I hope they get around to building one where that orphanage used to be) or rob a store or deal drugs, but who needs all that when you can do a myriad of other activities, such as knocking buildings over with a hammer, bringing structures down with thrown explosives, practicing controlled demolition with a rocket launcher, or destroying infrastructure with a giant walking robot? And then you have various side activities, such as running from the cops, cop cricket, and the safe house run. The game is full to the brim of fun and diverse activities, all it takes is using the right wording in the review. Lacking that, we could just say: what is there, is fun.

Yeah, it's not always that the buildings go down as easily as they should, sometimes they go down way too easy (especially when you're still inside), but every time they do it makes me so happy and not at all anxious about the structural integrity of my residence. But no, really, destroying those buildings is just so fun, and I'd love to tell you more about it, but steam reviews aren't a great medium for delivering pure divine experiences, so I'd recommend just like, playing the game and seeing for yourself. As for the cops, they are super fun. Contrary to enemies in most videogames, they can actually hit you and kill you, and they tend to do just that about 5 seconds into your very serious and calculated demolition mission. Now I come to realize I must have dropped a "not" when I was talking about the cops being super fun, sorry about that. They're frustrating, but, as the stealth gamer you undoubtedly are, considering purchasing this game about shooting guys up and blowing up their bases, you must be thinking "hey, guerrillas are meant to strike and then hide!". But, my dear reader, you must already understand, as it's already been established earlier in this review, that they always know where you are and so there's no stealth in this game whatsoever. I had that same thought as you too, you see, but the fine gentlemen who programmed the enemy AI didn't. So every time there's too many cops, you are expected to run to the safe house, get rid of your wanted level and then resume your blowings up, rinse and repeat. This is bearable at first, but gets really grating later on when the cops respond faster and in larger amounts.

There's a crazy lot of fun to be had in this sandbox, and you won't have to dig deep to get it either, but as you do dig deeper you'll start finding used condoms, so be ready for that.

Okay, most reviewers got most of the bases covered. Yes, it's actually an RTS with all the micro and macro and metagames involved, yes, it's great with a controller, yes, the devs are active, yes, Quartermaster is a waifu (one that's inferior to Hopper). And yeah, there's local splitscreen multiplayer, holy crap. And a spectator mode, and replays, and all the good stuff you want out of an RTS. Really can't think of anything it's missing. Okay? Okay.

Here's one thing other reviewers tend to whine about instead of being helpful - the campaign and its perceived difficulty. Not gonna say some missions aren't annoying, not gonna say the game's not hard. Just one thing - and I'm gonna take a page out of the modern games journalist's book here so bear with me - this is Dark Souls of RTS. It's not unfair, it just makes you work for your victories. You are expected to attempt each mission multiple times, fail over and over, develop a strategy, then win. Matches are short, you'll fail in 2 minutes, try again, no problem. Each mission has a hint, use that. Check the rules, scout the map, check your composition, know your units, formulate a strategy, win. Don't brute force missions, that won't work. It's a strategy game. You are meant to make meaningful decisions, not spam and pray. It's not the most APM-intensive game under the sun, you only ever have a few units to work with, so it's all about that execution. If you can't deal with your lack of progress, take a break, think about your strategy, your life, your emotional debts, and try again.

With that out of the way, on to the actual review:

9/10 treyarch pls nerf the fox thanks for reading

So I've been following one of the devs on Twitter for quite some time for nostalgic ramblings about old games I've never played and funny drunken tweets on friday nights. Having passing interest in his game, I thought I'd finally give it a try, since he shilled it while it was on sale and all.

I thought it was going to be a chill game. It wasn't. It was a very hard one. Most of the time not the good sort of hard.

But before we get further devastatingly ahead of ourselves, Teslagrad is a game of a surprisingly old genre that is rapidly gaining popularity these days - especially for a genre with no official name. So let's give it one, why not - Teslagrad is a littleboyinascaryworld'emup, or a LBSW for short. As it goes with games of this genre, you play as a quiet little innocent boy thrown into a very scary (mostly because it's so frustrating to navigate) world which he explores to find its dark secret. It's also all very cinematic and you'll be chased by a bunch of nondescript bad guys. Sometimes it gets especially dark and becomes slightly horror-like, but don't worry, you'll never see child guts even if the implication is extremely strong.

Here's the thing though - unlike most LBSW games, Teslagrad is actually quite challenging, and not just for the usual reasons (where the ♥♥♥♥ do I go/how the ♥♥♥♥ was I supposed to know to do that). It's a pretty tough platformer. It also serves as a model example of why most LSBW games aren't tough platformers. Their little boy player characters control too cinematically (read: tons of input lag as they try to put their little legs in order) to allow any precise movements. And to throw you another curveball, Teslagrad has a bunch of these electricity repulsion/attraction mechanics that are mapped to the keyboard in a frankly bizarre fashion. I had to remap everything except WASD and I still struggled wrapping my head around doing all that electromancing stuff in realtime as the game demands (especially during boss fights)(yes, it's a SLBW with bossfights).

It also uses aforementioned repulsion/attraction mechanics for puzzles, but that was actually fun so I don't know what to diss here. Most puzzles have just one solution, that's kinda bad. Kinda really bad, thinking about it.

If you're a fan of BLWS games, though, this one does the job just fine. It has a cryptic story told through the environment, it has the cool cinematic "little boy looking off to distance" moments, it has creepy old men trying to grab you, you get to zap them with a giant laser gun (oh wait that's not a SBLW thing is it), it's all handdrawn and nice and pretty, the music is great and it'll be over in 5 hours.

Hahahaha look at all these losers crapping up the review section for their badge. Look at me contributing.

But yeah, this is a masterpiece. Get it. Just like I just got my 100XP.

I don't normally review Early Access games (and, as we all know, Steam reviews = serious business), but seeing as I'm already more hooked on this than a bunch of feminists on cheap alt-right bait I just can't help myself from writing this surprisingly necessary message in a bottle about why you should or shouldn't buy this game and throwing it into a sea of messages in bottles about how much peeing and crap-sucking is in this game.

So, for starters: there's a lot of peeing and crap-sucking in this game, if you didn't know already and really needed to know. There are other things to do - not an awful lot, mind you, but that doesn't matter, because this dev plays the forbidden card - mechanical depth. While in a game like GTA most of what you're allowed to do involves killing and driving (and don't get me wrong - I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love killing and driving), it will only reluctantly allow you to do things that don't involve killing and driving, such as being a functional adult. GTA is like that friend of yours from across town who keeps offering you weed and gets you to do the stupidest crap more for his own entertainment than yours. Why would you eat, drink and wash yourself when you can run a bunch of people over, blow up a bunch of cars up and still get away with it? In this bizarre slice-of-life analogy, My Summer Car is more like your dad. "There's no damn food in the house, do the damn groceries and don't forget my beer like the last time. And get a damn job you slob, and I mean a real job, not that rally driver thing you keep babbling about." Except dad forgot to tell you who you are, where you are, what language you're speaking, how to drive a car and how to get to the store. But you know what will happen if you don't listen.

Not knowing how to do things is a huge part of the fun and I don't want to spoil any of it, but let's say if you think Euro Truck prepared you for anything, trust me, it didn't. Suffice to say getting things moving in this game is quite the realistic procedure, and doing the most mundane of tasks generally involves fumbling at first and not really knowing what inputs are expected, but once you get in tune with the game you'll begin to figure it out instinctively based on your combined knowledge of the real world and the game's eccentric control scheme rather than relying on established videogame norms. Then the real summer can start.

My Summer Car will make you responsible for your well-being, and provide real consquences for not obliging. You pee and drive a crap-sucking truck not because that's what all the cool Steam review guys did for laughs, but because if you don't, you won't have money to buy gas for grocery trips and your bladder will explode. And don't think it's that easy - I mean, peeing is obviously quite easy (don't forget to force it out when you start dripping), but to do pretty much anything else in this game you have to drive some type of vehicle several kilometers down some of the most treacherous roads in gaming history. Not that there's lava around or anything - they're just really narrow, and generally have a ditch on either side where if you get stuck, you're stuck for good. It's a bit cruel that not even AI will stop to help, but that's Scandinavian hospitality for you I guess. And if you do get to your destination, don't expect fanfares or an XP bar increase or anything of the sort - you just do your job, collect your money from the NPC, drive back home.

If it's starting to look a lot like the game took a page out of DayZ's book with the whole "do a bunch of mundane-yet-immersive stuff and get a slap across the face for reward," that's because it kinda did. But this game has ca- oh wait, DayZ also has cars, but this game has car building.



I mean, good car building.



Of all the overly complex and daunting-yet-strangely-fun-in-the-end parts of the game, the car building is perhaps the most of all those things. You walk out of your house, you see a garage, and in front of that garage an empty car frame. No suspension, no interior, no engine, no nothing. Then you open the garage and find all of those things, broken down into hundreds of different parts neatly showcased on the shelves, waiting for assembly. This is the point where you begin to regret your purchase, but don't refund just yet, it gets worse. Tens of hours later, full of Finnish swearing, sauna-sweating, firewood-chopping, engine-building, gas-stealing, tractor-driving, beer-drinking, road-raging, part-ordering, vehicle-rescuing and falling into septic tanks, you have your car in front of you, beautiful, shiny, just the color you painted it, with your custom parts on, all the bolts tightened, all the fluids poured in.

It doesn't start.

Angriest review of all time time.

It's not often that I rate down because of a community (c'mon look at my tf2 playtime) but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.


The ♥♥♥♥ you will have to put up with in Altitude 2016:

Only one or two populated servers at a time

Both play a garbage afterthought gamemode played on the same ♥♥♥♥ map that has no walls in it, all balance thrown out of the window

Everyone teamstacking.

If the one populated server gets filled, they will rather kick you than try to populate the other 50, even if some of them might be running a sane gamemode for a change.

Everyone giving you ♥♥♥♥ for not having a high level and killing them, especially if you do so with a "noob plane" that would be balanced on a proper map.



This game is like if TF2 playerbase got nuked and the last remaining populace was allcrit cp_orange players. This game is a postapocalyptic wasteland with nothing to see but garbage.

Run away, Simba.