Последние обзоры n8phen

Star Stuff is a hidden gem. It's a charming and fun game that may look simple at first, but could end up taking hours to 100% depending on your position in the shared brain cell queue. Just check out my playtime, and you'll see what I mean.

The concepts that make up the game are basic in design, but they're progressively presented and mixed up in smart ways that make it fun and satisfactory to figure out how to solve each puzzle, even for those who are new to programming.

I'd only wish it had workshop support and a level editor so that the community could create and share their own levels. But even without that, the game is still worth the price.

If I was better at tracking my playtime, this would've been a refund. The Last Alchemist could've been a great game had it had some more time in the oven as an early access title, but as a full release, I simply cannot recommend it.

The art style, music, and sound effects for the game are great. It is pretty stable (at least I didn't encounter any bugs), and the whole alchemy system is interesting (in theory).

But my biggest gripe with The Last Alchemist is that the game simply isn't fun. And that is mostly due to its bad inventory system, followed by other minor issues.

To speak about the minor issues first:

• The pacing feels excruciatingly slow at times. The crafting tree for this game is huge, and everything must be done manually without any kind of automation (at least until the point where I played). Doing literally anything takes time, so you'll be spending a lot of time gathering the same items repeatedly and then waiting for things to happen. Honestly, it's not fun after a few hours. It's an odd decision to have the player passively wait a few seconds for every action, especially when those actions are tied to animations that don't allow the character to do anything else, instead of simply skipping the clock ahead. This is made way worse by the inventory system, which I'll get to soon.
  
  
• Some buildings require “insight points” to be built, which are a resource that you can only get by “selling” items to a machine. The higher the value of the item, the more insight points you get. This is an odd design choice, as it forces you to spend time gathering materials and crafting items you don't need just to progress. It's a time sink that doesn't add anything to the game. It would've made more sense to have insight points tied only to the research system, but as it is, it's just a nuisance that seems to be there to artificially extend the game's length.
  
  
• Controls are simply not good. From placing items to interacting with NPCs, everything feels clunky and unresponsive.
  
  
• This one is more of a personal preference than anything, but I found the protagonist to be quite annoying, to the point that I gave up on reading his dialogues. The writing overall is okayish at best and cringy at worst, but the protagonist is simply not likable. He's always mentioning how old and frail he is, and it gets tiresome after the first few dialogues. Like, we get you're the victim of a curse dude, you don't have to remind us every 2 minutes. And also, he's missing a leg. And has hand mobility issues or whatever. We get it. But it's not fun to play as a character that's constantly whining about how bad everything is. It's not relatable, it's just annoying. Really weird vibe for a game that's supposed to be “relaxing” and “chill”.

Now to the main issue: the inventory system.

We've been well past the “wasting time with inventory management is interesting for players” phase of game design for a few years now, so you'd expect a crafting game that heavily relies on item management to get it right, right? Wrong. You see, somehow Palpatine returned, and he decided to design one of the worst inventory systems known to man while working at Vile Monarch, apparently.

To put it simply:

• Whoever designed the whole drag-and-drop thing should be tried for their sins (not really, but oh well). I can see how it might've seemed like a good idea on paper and how fun it could've been to implement and see it working, but in practice it's not just bad; it's infuriating. Dragging items around doesn't seem to work half the time due to bad collision detection, and when it does it's slow and clunky. I can only imagine how much worse it would be on a controller or for someone with motor disabilities (how ironic).
  
  
• The stack size for all items is one for both personal storage and chests. Yes, one. Keep in mind that personal storage is very limited.
  
  
• As other reviews have pointed out, storage isn't easy to come by and takes a lot of physical space. You'll soon find yourself tossing items on the ground because you have no space to store them, and storage is simply not worth it. See those nice, organized shelves in the trailer? Yeah, that's fake. That's not happening. At all.
  
  
• There's a lack of quality-of-life features like auto-sorting or any kind of interaction with nearby storage. You'll have to drag and drop everything manually, and it's a pain.
  
  
• Due to the alchemy system's considerable variety of items, you'll be dealing with a multitude of materials, essences, and hodgepodges of different types and categories. Oh, and some of them also share the same appearance. So you have a bazillion non-stackable items to manage manually that sometimes look more or less the same, without any QoL features, with a terrible drag-and-drop system, and with limited personal inventory and storage. See where I'm going with this? You can imagine how fun it is to manage all that after a few hours.

Summing it up, The Last Alchemist has potential, but it doesn't feel like a complete game. It's a chore to play sometimes, with systems that make the game feel slower-paced and longer than it should be. The game is not worth the time investment it requires. It's a shame because the art style and music are great, and the alchemy system is interesting, but the inventory system and the other issues mentioned make it a hard pass for me.

I'm probably not the target audience for this game, but I can't recommend it at full price. Duck Detective is a (very) short game that involves more guessing than actual detective work. The game forces you to make certain assumptions that are simply nonsensical for all the previous context that was given by completing phrases with words from different categories.

Overall, it's a fun and cute little game, but the whole “detective” premise fails to hold up, and the whole thing felt like watching a YouTube video.

Do you know when a new indie game drops out of nowhere and it turns out to be the best thing you've played in a while? Yeah, Abiotic Factor is one of those cases

Sony should stick to relaunching Morbius a third time instead

It feels like beating a dead horse to write this, but considering how weirdly positive this game is, I feel the need to say that SS: KtJL simply isn't worth it.

Imagine you took the classic 4-player co-op gameplay loop. You know the drill: you go into missions, kill a host of enemies, get crafting materials and money to upgrade your gear and eventually go out into higher difficulties, screaming “for Karl!”, “for democracy!”, or anything along that line.

Now take that, but you completely obliterate enemy variety, you design the 4 classes to be played essentially the same, and you set it up as a goal for your team to go and create the most jarringly uninspired, boring mission objectives as possible.

And that is the WHOLE game. A game that was supposed to be story-driven, but has a mediocre story at best and the signs of a publisher-forced live-service system splattered all over it.

It is weird to say that the game simply doesn't deserve to be bought, as there isn't a game to be played here. The best part of it (the cutscenes) can be seen freely and in full on YouTube.

It is important to mention that considering how negatively the game was received by the general audience and how non-existent the current player base is, it is highly unlikely that it will receive any updates after the planned 2 or 3 seasons and after WB runs out of trash-money to throw at it.

The game's visuals are stunning, but Wizard with a Gun is packed with a bunch of grindy mechanics that make it feel longer than it actually is. Two hours were more than enough to make me realize where this was going, as the flavor faded and it became boring quickly

After playing I Am Future for 8 hours straight, it started to feel less like fun and more like work.

I'll make a quick breakdown of my main issues with the game:

• Progression: Really slow and every task feels like a chore until late in the game.
  
• Movement: Just boring. Moving is too slow and it's hard to tell collision boxes for objects on the map. In a game where you're constantly going from one spot to another and dodging things, this gets old quickly.
  
• UI: Clunky and dated. Not the worst look, but inconsistent (for example, sometimes ESC is used to exit a menu and other times it's right-click). I feel like controls in general need an improvement.
  
• Building: Just “meh”. Setting up and moving things around could be more intuitive for this kind of game.
  
• Crafting: Needs an overhaul. The filters don't help much, and scrolling through many options to find something is a pain.
  
• Farming: Repetitive, demanding multiple boring steps.
  
• Gathering: Grindy, made even worse the by slow movement and the weird rule for certain resources of only moving one of them at a time.
  
• Inventory management: Messy. You'll often end up having to access multiple storages to get something simple done.
  
• Automation: More annoying than actually helpful. There's no automation for crafting, only gathering. The other two options for robots are virtually useless.
  
• Fishing minigame: Not gonna lie, it's one of the worst I've seen in video games.

I usually love games like this, so giving it a thumbs down feels really odd. The game is good, but it needs more polish. I'm gladly changing my review if things get better through the Early Access. For now, I consider it to be a “has potential, but not there yet” situation.

I've preordered Tribes of Midgard two years ago, only to request a refund upon its atrocious launch. The marketing team, in an attempt to ride the Valheim hype, tried to brand the game as a survival, which it was not. Instead, what we got was a lackluster roguelike tower defense game, leading to everyone being disappointed. The joke "Tribes of Mid" became so prevalent that people adopted the name unironically in the forums for a while.

That said, the developers have somehow fixed this mess to an extent. The inclusion of a genuine survival mode encouraged me into repurchasing the game. The game is still very far from perfect. The UI remains abysmal, like a bad mobile game, and the overall game design feels convoluted and directionless. It's as if they spent their entire budget on the cool animations and misguided marketing efforts. However, the game now finally delivers on its original promise: being a mid Valheim clone. And an enjoyable one.

The game is dead and unplayable. Due Process desperately needed custom P2P lobbies and a PvE mode to be saved. Its focus on competitive PvP matchmaking, alongside the inclusion of a battle pass and other unnecessary flashy additions, has negatively impacted its playerbase growth, much like other games that followed the same now outdated format. Due Process SHOULD have been PvE-first. Having followed its development for years, it is saddening to witness such unrealized potential.