Recent reviews by tomble

Strong on all points - gameplay, story, aesthetics, sound design, immersion, characters, length, quality. Rarely dispelled suspension of belief for mewhich is something I tend to struggle with. Excellent game that I'm glad I got to play through.

Unique and engaging, I quickly got hooked on discovering what had happened to the crew. One of the best gaming decisions I've made was to pick this up.

9/10

Fantastic remake of HL1 that replaces the worst parts of the original and augments the whole lot. The early game has clearly aged somewhat, but the overall quality and polish of the game improves as you go (something I've never experienced in any other game!). I didn't know Zen could be so good.

Highly recommended.

Enjoyable game, the story pacing was on point and despite it being quite an easy game in general, I always felt like I was moments from death. However, the game left me with blue balls in terms of answering its own questions. I get the feeling that the writer doesn't really know where he's going with things. The DLC answers a couple of the original game's dangling questions but opens up even more.

I'm really split as to recommend the game for that reason, so here's what it boils down to.
Pro: the game is fun to play and you'll enjoy learning more about the world and its characters as you progress.
Con: the game will never address most of your burning questions.

Very fun - what dead island (past the first hour) should have been.

Positives:
- Well implemented parkour system which takes time and skill to fully master
- The melee weapons and combat moves feel good
- Excellent environments and setting
- Immersive gameplay

Meh:
- Crafting is a bit average
- Bow is fun but has the range of a plastic toy bow
- Ranged weapons cannot be upgraded
- The main character has sawdust for a brain and is kind of a ♥♥♥♥

Bad:
- PC port isn't perfect, plenty of "button double-up", auto aiming (so you often cannot aim precisely, a huge problem when trying to snipe with the bow)
- Suffers from the 'bioware cutscene effect': you are a useless lump of flesh in cutscenes. The guy's right there! Shoot him with one of your 23423 guns!
- Could have used a little more polish; there's nothing more frustrating than losing a time trial because Crane decides not to grab onto a ledge, or vault off a wall to his death instead of jump up; some other minor "could have used work" things
- Skill trees are largely boring and you will ultimately get all of them (so no specialisation or differentiation)
- Ending and final boss fight is 0/10, major plots are not wrapped up


Ultimately: buttload of fun, doesn't get old for a long time, can sometimes be frustrating but well worth the money.

Promising to begin with, this game seems to have ceased active development despite never leaving Alpha (they had 6 years!). Their blog is active but that seems to be about it. Their dev team is evasive, sometimes even abusive. Avoid for now.

I've sunk at least a 100 or so hours into this game prior to Steam.

I highly recommend this game for any fans of Dwarf Fortress and other similar free-form settlement management sims. It's basically a watered-down version of DF with a greatly improved user experience and its own flavour of gameplay.

I can't recommend this game yet, due to its bugs, the rough state of balancing, and the awkward gameplay flow. To go into more detail:

- I was forced to start a new game twice within a couple of hours due to gamebreaking bugs which prevented me from starting new videos.

- The game world hours progress extremely quickly and are very hard to keep notice of. It will seem like an evening has passed, but actually a week has. In this week you have likely eaten once, not slept, played 1.5 games, studied once... you get the idea.

- Those hours progress at that speed *no matter what*. Even when you're in menus deciding on things, or choosing clothes to wear to an event, time is rapidly trickling away. This creates an almost tangible blanket of stress that covers the whole game. At all times you feel rushed and unable to sit back and think about your next move. It feels contrary to what a laid-back simulation ought to be about. A sims-style game speed setting (1x speed, 3x speed, 10x speed etc) with vastly reduced base rate of time advancement would go a long way to solving this, as would time pausing in most decision-making menus.

- As a particularly frustrating example of the above: sometimes you are given tasks to do by friends, which generally are expected to be completed within a week. Due to the above time issues, you could go to an evening event, get home, record the video and have the task expire before it finishes uploading because most of a week passed during that evening's (short) event.

- There are a lot of bugs. Courses just seem straight-up broken; most of the time I resumed a course, my character would be putting time down against nothing. The tutorial system often breaks and leaves the game in a broken state. Sometimes after starting a game, you get interrupted and can't resume or create new games.

- The tutorial flows feel tacked-on. For instance, it shows a tutorial bubble while you create your first video. It describes what the screen does and how you select reaction cards for your video. But the cards are not well explained, matching the cards up with symbols is not explained, power you spend on reactions is not explained, and worst of all while you're reading the text, a countdown timer appears to force you to make a decision.

These are easy enough to fix in time and I look forward to updating my review with a positive recommendation.

If you're particularly adventurous, feel free to give it a buy; it's not the worst game out there even in its current state.

The simulation engine behind this game is weak. You can't break the mold and make an interesting genre/topic combination, even if you pump lots of points into it with a crack team. Got this amazing idea for a Vampire Simulator with strong design, engine and technical expertise powering it? Soz bro, the combination is "poor" and reviewers will trash it.

The platform genre bonuses and penalties are really odd and actively stifle your creativity. Nobody seems to care if you just pump out CoD1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in a row. If you make a killer hit, a well-paced sequel some time later with a better engine and 100x the fans and lots of hype doesn't generate any more sales or reviews.

GDT is more than inspired by 'Game Dev Story'... it's basically a complete rip-off of it, and unfortunately it just doesn't have the same charm. They didn't really improve or update the basic formula, either... for instance, some new genres like 'Tower Defense' and 'MOBA' etc would have been cool.

I recommend the game only because it is fun for a while, until you start to see what little exists behind the polish... it's technically worth the money.