Recent reviews by Aanatr'anawrath

I ignored this game for a while because it looked to me like a AAA (derogatory) cashgrab. Maybe it is, or more to the point the rapid fire ‘DLC’ for it is. However, I will say I’ve been having fun and the game doesn’t shove it in your face that you don’t have this or that DLC (while playing). You get a little icon bar at the main menu, but it’s not like there’s events that pop up with greyed out text telling you that you could have had the magnificent golden cup of unlimited vassals if you’d only paid $4.99. The library of events you can get seems to be tied to the DLC you have unlocked in some cases (some DLC gives more variety), but even with just the base game you won’t really feel like you’re missing anything. The intrigue system is neat, and I like the emergent storytelling you can get from the various interactions. I rate it 1/2, worth the price (on sale). If you’ve got my flavor of ‘tism it’s probably a 3/2, worth it at full price but don’t buy it, you’ll forget to eat.

In and of itself, as it stands I'm enjoying playing this. If you liked it the first time but can't swing the old UI/UX or graphics it really is just Oblivion but pretty as far as I can tell. This is getting a thumbs down from me because the EULA is fruitloops and Bethesda doesn't seem to understand the reason why Skyrim (and oldblivion, and morrowind) still have a following is because the open modding culture they USED to promote keeps the old games alive.

This game is really going somewhere! (See what I did there?) In a lot of ways it's ye olde colony sim + voxel based building, but it's got a certain... I don't know what. I've played a lot of colony sims and I broadly like them, so take that into account. I don't think what this game has over other colony sims will push it over the line for anyone who doesn't like the genre, but I do think that anyone who enjoys that type of game will like this one. Additionally, each time I come back to it they've made substantial improvements. I have no reason to doubt that this trend will continue.

It's sort of ye olde survival crafter in the sky, but don't let that talk you out of it. I've been saying for years that you don't have to do something groundbreaking to make a good game, and this is proof of that. It's still early days and there's plenty of time for them to mess things up or make them really exceptional, but as it exists now it's just a really solid entrant into the genre (with some unique setting elements). The fact that you can fly your base around rather than having to range from it and back means the world can be quite large, and it definitely the most unique thing about the game mechanically. The base building does a few things I really wish more games like this did: base parts can clip through one another and the environment (let me decide if it's unsightly, I am not being prevented from placing down a wall because there's a pebble clipping .2 microns into the overlarge wall bounding box), there's a snap mode where you can pick the origin and rotation from the available snap nodes, and (partly as a result of the previous) base parts can snap to edges and centers so, for example, I can place pillars either at corners or in the middle of floors. I will never understand why so many games of this type will limit your pillars to one or the other of those places. The combat is very easy, but you're also never fully out of danger (if you're paying attention it's trivial, but the enemies can kill you quickly if you stop engaging) which I think is the perfect place for a game like this one to be. The creature and environment design is extremely good, and overall I think it's on track to be my favorite survival crafter, which is saying something as that is also broadly my favorite genre. I have notes: it can be hard to land exactly where you want to while gliding, even if you're going quite slowly sometimes you will pop back up and that can make landing precisely difficult. If you're in the third biome and let your island drift into the maelstrom it will pull you back to the second instead of spitting you back out, I'd want it to reject your passage through in either direction, and some other little gripes, but 1, it's still early access, and 2, if this was the full game I'd still say it's worth full price.

Do you play DF? Then... you... kinda need this. It's that simple.

If, like me, you understand that sometimes loosing can be fun too(!) — and, be assured, you will have SO much fun playing this game — then I can't possibly imagine a better game. Just remember to be careful around cotton candy.

It's ALMOST worth playing. Which is the really frustrating thing. It's less popular than other BGS games (with good reason I think, but) this means there are fewer and lower quality mods. To make matters worse BGS continues to operate in a way that heavily implies they don't really understand where the popularity of their games comes from (at least imo). I definitely wanted to play real money for texture mods for this single player game. Credit where it's due, it's more stable and playable 'out of the gate' than a lot of older games (fully vanilla skyrim would CTD with some regularity, I think in almost 300 hours I got one and that was even after I started using mods, so I can't be sure it wasn't a mod induced error). The universe does feel a lot more empty than in other games, but I'm not sure that's as big a problem as it's made out to be. Space should feel a little empty, imo. It's hard for me to point out exactly what it is about Starfield that lead me to be less satisfied with it than other games. I suspect it's a lot of small things coming together. I want to like it. I tried to play again just now for the first time in months and by bad luck on my part they pushed an update just yesterday and not all the mods are on the same page (some have updated for the new patch others haven't) in a way that makes it so I can't play today at all unless I want to go back to a full vanilla run. Despite the fact that vanilla Starfield is much closer to modded Starfield than any play of Skyrim I've done since the very first one (I try to do an unmoded run of any game once before going to mods) I think I'd rather go back to not knowing what to play rather than run Starfield without the tweaks I want. I can't really think of a more scathing review than 'it's only marginally better than sitting here not knowing what to play', but... that is what I'm feeling. The sad thing is unlike Skyrim or Fallout 4, where you can very nearly make it whatever game you want, the mods for Starfield are much more limited, so while it had potential, I don't see it crossing the finish line on community effort, especially not when BSG is going to be pushing reasonably frequent creation club patches that will break the mods that do exist. Skryim doesn't have the enduring legacy it does because Tod Howard is gods perfect game dev CEO, it's the community which grew up around the game (in some cases literally by this point), and sadly BGS seems increasingly out of touch with that community. It doesn't give me a lot of hope for TESVI..

It's a bog standard survival crafter, done well. I can't say I don't have any notes, but it's basically exactly what you're probably expecting. I've been saying for a long time that a game doesn't have to defy the genre to be good and for me this game is proof of that. Nothing about this game seems done just to subvert expectations, they seem to have just put together a very solid example of a game in this genre, and it works. It's fun, the combat isn't the smoothest, but it doesn't need to be (you're a marooned sailor, not a warrior of legend lol), the progression is satisfying (the problems you have at the end of the game are not the same ones you started out with). If you don't like survival crafters this is not for you, if you do it's more than worth the price of admission.

It's a cute, cozy fishing game. Nothing spooky is happening here at all. You did, in fact, not see a giant, many-eyed, serpentine, monstrosity out of the corner of your eye. You just need to rest. 10/10 everything is awful just the way I like it.

EDIT: They added an offline mode. It's now good value for the price.

It shows potential, but suffers pretty badly from the combination of being always online and early access (I assume). If they get the frequent disconnects figured out then my review would move from negative to fairly neutral. I will never understand the fascination with always online games that would otherwise be fine single player or small party experiences these days. If I want to play a game like this one alone or with my friends, I don't want the added constraint of needing to have a solid connection to some third party's servers. If I want to be playing alone and I cannot because of an outage or something similar that's downright infuriating.

The build system WOULD be good, except for the hard limits on build objects. I get that they have limited server resources and that since they are hosting all these online realms they have to find a way to limit server size. I feel like the pretty straightforward way of doing that would be to let players host their single player games client side and continue to feel befuddled by their choices in that regards, but given the game they seem to be trying to make it still means that I cannot make the beautiful elaborate castles shown in some of the 'in game footage' on the steam page, much less the kind of grand designs I typically come to games otherwise like this one for.

The combat is fun and feels good, and progression works in a way that I feel is rewarding, if I hadn't lost a bunch of things to disconnects I would have no complaints, but as it stands... well... I'd like to be clear that I have quite fast and very reliable internet. I don't have d/c problems in other games, I can play No Man's Sky, World of Warcraft, or any number of other online games for hours on end with no trouble, but I've gotten disconnected during gameplay several times in the 40ish hours I've played, which is far more than the rate I get dropped in other similar online games.

I understand that they're not a AAAA studio with unlimited budgets, and they are providing a lot for a very small price. I want to be on their side, but I'm having a hard time saying I would recommend the game at this juncture.

That said, I don't expect to stop playing until I've beaten the story, and if they can untangle the issues they've got now there's a very good chance it would get a glowing recommendation from me down the line. Right now, maybe skip it as the aspects of it that work wonderfully now are arbitrarily hamstrung by the enforced build limits and spotty always online servers.