Recent reviews by Deathslinger Smoocher

Pitbonnie my beloved....

if anything ever happened to Astarion I would kill everyone in the party and then myself

I entered the thunderdome and now Springtrap and the phantoms are beating me with steel chairs while I lay here in the fetal position

I absolutely, 100% recommend this game for people who, like me, enjoy creative freedom and maybe even enjoy interior design. It's a more niche interest, that not many games cater to to a degree that is truly satisfying. Designing and decorating a house in the sims is fun, sure, but I want to design my own furniture to put in the house too. Fortunately, and much to my glee, Hokko Life offers me that level of creativity. If I want to make a bed with a cozy cottage feeling that's not just a square or a rectangle, I can do it.

There's a few bugs of course, and it can be a bit slow to start, but once you figure out how to make a bit of money and start crafting some items you can really start to think about what you want your town to be and start working towards your goal. The bugs are honestly pretty minimal all things considered, this biggest one currently is that you can't pick weeds, and it's already known and being worked on.

My only real issue with the game itself so far is the Fishing, maybe it's my poor reaction time or my difficulty with multi-tasking, but... I have yet to successfully catch any fish. I find the mini-game for it rather frustrating honestly, and have a bit of difficulty balancing coordinating my eyes and hands while also continuing to reel the appropriate amount so I don't break the line.

Granted, I'm neurodivergent and can sometimes have a hard time doing things that are easy for more neurotypical people. I'll definitely continue trying to get the hang of it as best as I can, but if you're a neurodivergent person like me just be warned you may also find the fishing a bit difficult and it may take a little longer for you to figure it out.

I'm sure with a bit more practice under my belt I'll get the hang of Fishing eventually though, just gotta keep trying - maybe it'll improve my (frankly abysmal) ability to multi-task a little if I'm lucky.

Friend nearly killed me with a tree, 10/10

Seriously though, this game is super ridiculously fun - one of the best features by far though is the number of players you can have. There's nothing quite like chilling with 6 of your friends at once while you bully a giant electrical deer for it's horns several times over.

There's hardly a dull moment - I'll be working on building stuff and suddenly I'll hear one of my friends going "oh ♥♥♥♥ there's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of dudes I need help". I'll be cutting trees, and suddenly there's a troll striding towards me or a tree narrowly missing a friend who walked by as I landed the final blow. Sometimes ♥♥♥♥ gets real crazy and you start a domino effect of trees, so you're yelling and panicking with your friends as you try not to die to the many logs raining upon you.

This games a hoot, and the more friends you play with the merrier. Be careful that you don't accidentally end up playing until 8 am because you lost track of time though, it's pretty easy to do.

Edit now that I've finished the story:

I absolutely, 100% am in love with this game. I'm honestly pretty sad to be out of quests to do, I'd love more of this game to play! I could sit in this game for hours just going around doing tasks and collecting animals.

It took about 7-8 hours total at a /very/ casual pace for me to finish the game, for $13CAD that's a pretty good bang for my buck, especially because I really enjoy these types of games and there aren't many of them that fit my tastes so perfectly. I would love to see the world expanded upon and added to, this game really is just one of my favourites that I've played and I really am so sad to be almost out of things to do.

All the games areas are so pretty and come with new animals to discover, it was so hard at times to choose which ones I wanted to put in my cafe - I wanted all of them, but there isn't enough room for them all!

I did break the game once or twice - I ended up in the ocean under the map at one point, and somehow broke things so that I was doing the swimming animation in some invisible water instead of walking at another - but these were easily remedied by using the 'return to cafe' potion in the inventory, doing a quick save/quit to title and then continuing the game. Slightly inconvenient to do, but not a huge deal by any means since it was easily dealt with. I do, however, have a weird tendency to break games I play without trying - so my experience may not be yours.

I do still stand by my wish for a bigger cafe - simply because it would mean more room to decorate and have animals. I redesigned my cafe on a few different occasions after acquiring new furniture pieces and it was always fun to do. The furniture selection while placing/picking up can be a bit of a pain when it refuses to pick up what you want it to, but other than that very minor issue the decorating of the cafe was pretty fun. I very much enjoyed trying to figure out how to best make a cool-looking cafe while also making sure it was functional and had lots of seats and trees for the cats.

I'll still be playing a bit more despite being done with the story - I still have 2 steam achievements left and several animals left to find in the world. The music is nice enough that I can see myself opening up the game on a stressful day and just riding around on a giant cat for a while to relax. I really do love this game, I would love to see more like it! <3

//end edit//

Played for just under an hour and am pretty pleased with the game so far - it's cute, not laggy, and the only real issue I've had so far is that sometimes my character gets a little wonky while going up inclines - all in all, not much to complain about performance-wise as of right now, which is more than a lot of games can say these days.

I haven't explored a whole lot of the map yet, but it looks to be pretty decently sized with quite a few things to do and areas to unlock - there's lots of cute animals roaming about to collect, and the cooking minigame is pretty neat in how it's implemented.

My only real issues with the game so far are pretty minimal, and honestly pretty inconsequential tbh, but they are as follows:

The colour selection is a bit unintuitive and difficult - instead of having sliders or a colour wheel, it's multiple squares of colours that you then have to select within. It'd be nice to have it be a bit more user-friendly in selecting, but it's not the biggest problem to ever exist.

The cafe is pretty small, it would be nice to have a bit more room to put furniture inside, especially because the furniture all seems to take up a pretty decent amount of space. Again, not the biggest issue, but a bigger cafe would have been nice.

Ultimately the issues are pretty minimal, the game overall is very cute and the graphics style sort of makes me think of a watercolour painting with how everything looks - it has a cute charm to it.

It's a bit difficult to navigate with mouse and keyboard initially, but a few minutes seems to be enough to get used to it, the game says it's optimal with controller - once I can get a USB adapter for my old PS2 controller and (if I can) get it to work I'll probably give it a spin and see the difference for myself. Mouse and keyboard is definitely doable however, even if not optimal.

Overall, a very nice game so far - good for just sitting back and relaxing.

Parkasaurus is a zoo tycoon-esque game where you, the player, build and expand your very own dinosaur park. Despite being early access, the game so far is incredibly fun and well-polished, and I hope to see it develop further as zoo tycoon and similar games were (and still are) one of my favourite sorts of games. I still have zoo tycoon 2 even to this day, but unfortunately windows 10 can be fickle and it often crashes, so having a game that captures the same sort of enjoyment, and even exceeds zoo tycoon in certain areas, makes me incredibly happy.
To make things easy, here's a quick breakdown of the pros, cons, and some suggestions for things that could improve the game experience!

Pros:
- The terrain tools are simple and easy to use, which makes building habitats easier

- You can customize the colours of your buildings! (and the balloons/cotton candy that you sell!) most people might find this rather useless, but it's a nice little touch and allows you to really make things with your own style

- The graphics are simple, but have a nice quality to them.

- The systems that allow you to see how private the exhibit is and how close to the water the plants need to be are interesting, at first i didn't really like them, but I've found that they add another level of thought to where you should most optimally place things and it's encouraged me to get a bit more creative visually with my exhibits, these systems have really grown on me, and I like the extra bit of considering they make you do.

- The game is more interactive than I remember zoo tycoon being (though it HAS been a while) - the added aspects of needing to keep track of your hires, make sure you hire the right people, and do the digs after having your scientists explore through the portal, are a nice way to keep the gameplay interesting

- Replacing your older and less sturdy fences with newer ones is incredibly easy. Need to upgrade that old wooden fence to some electric wire fence? Just place it right over the old one! Quick and easy without the hassle of tearing down the old fence, hoping your dinos don't escape, and placing down new fence.

- The hanging/string lights. I really, REALLY, like these. They can be a bit tricky at first when you're still figuring out how to place them, but once you get the hang of it they are absolutely awesome and allow for a lot of creativity. You can place them on top of the decorative arches you can buy and have them go between two of them, you can have them along the tops of your exhibits, you can do a lot with them. I've gotten a bit creative with them at times, because it's just so fun to see what kind of neat things you can do with them!

- The dinosaurs are extremely cute, even more so when you put hats on them!

- I have yet to really find any gamebreaking glitches, and I only crashed once when I went into sandbox, placed about 50 eggs, and let the dinos fight it out with both guests and each other. It was worth it.

- Sometimes when a dino picks up a ball to play with it'll spin in place really fast, it's far more amusing than it has any right to be. (it also fixes itself after a few short moments of spazzing out)


Cons:

-Money is incredibly easy to get once you get going, I've got 200k+ on one file and no clue what to spend it on. Maybe there could be some super rare and also super expensive dinos to encourage spending? or more decorations and such, just something to spend all this money on.

- The end of day mechanic often interrupts other things I'm doing, some way to pause the game or for it to wait until you're not doing something would be nice.


Suggestions: (I'm sure some of these are already being worked on, but they're worth mentioning nonetheless)

- The water tools work fine, but the ability to make waterfalls with them would be fun - making neat waterfalls was always my favourite thing in zoo tycoon, and it can really add to the habitats visually.

- More dino variations and colours! A lot of the dinos in game currently are within similar families, and they have a lot of similar traits, seeing some more bizarre or interesting dinos would be nice. Seeing more variation in their colours would be nice too - the secondary colour can already be different, but all my T-rex's seem to be the same shade of green - adding a small pool of 3-5 shades of the primary colour for each dino would really liven things up.

- More things to do with science and heart points. I've got a couple different saves going where I've already maxed both of them out, so seeing some stuff added to them would give me more to work towards

- Some sort of undo button or CTRL+Z capability - maybe I'm just blind, but I can't seem to find an undo button for when I accidentally place something wrong, and CTRL+Z didn't work either (it's instinctive to do that combo at this point bc of photoshop and sai)

- Some bigger lots! My favourite aspect of these kinds of games is to make as big and nice of a park as I can, but I always seem to run out of room, having some different sizes of lots available for your park would add a lot.

- More enrichment items, the specialized feeders are nice, but it would be really nice to have more solely enrichment items, I can't help but feel my dinos are getting a bit tired of playing with nothing but a ball all the time :P

- Some sort of way to specify what sex you want your dino to be (or some way to sell extra dinos/trade them for one of the sex you need?). It can get really tedious placing a bunch of eggs only to have all males hatch, then get more eggs hoping to get a lady dino so they're all socially happy only to have yet another male and too many dinos in the pen for them to be happy. Some sort of system to sell the extra dinos for the gems you need to make more eggs, or to trade one for the sex you need, or even for something with the eggs where if there's already so many males or females it hatches as what you have less of, would be an absolute lifesaver when RNG decides to be an arse.


Overall though, this game so far has been really fun to play, and I've had no issues with its optimization or any game-breaking glitches. It's nice to have found it since, again, zoo tycoon 2 is finicky at best for me.
I'm excited to see where this game goes, probably one of my new favourites in all honesty.

Good job Valve, you killed it.

- no pubs / valve servers

- even casual mode plays like a comp match, it's basically a choice between competitive or slightly watered down competitive

- community servers are empty / sh*tty / literal cancer

- no longer able to jump into a game for 5 minutes while waiting for food and ♥♥♥♥ around with friends

- literally why would you do this


I have 6k+ hours and I'm actually debating cashing out/selling everything I own even though I previously had no plans to and frankly don't want to, but the fact they are apparently not bringing back valve servers ever is extremely inconvenient. I live in Canada - in the northernmost city of my province, and Washington valve servers were basically the only decent servers I had reasonable connection to. So now my options are essentially jack and ♥♥♥♥.


please valve just reverse your god awful update

First things first: it you're expecting some sort of full-fledged action game, don't bother. Major/Minor is a Visual Novel, and expecting anything else will earn you nothing but disappointment, as it is fully marketed as nothing but a VN.

If you're unfamiliar, Visual novels are stories told through text and pictures, often times without any sort of reader influence whatsoever (Higurashi, Over the hills and far away, etc)

Some may have a few options/reader input that can effect the story (The Innocent Luna: Eclipsed sinners, Hatoful Boyfriend)

And even fewer will have a massive amount of choices that can affect the story in ways ranging from the change of a simple word, to a completely new dialogue and scene (Dysfunctional Systems: learning to manage chaos, Sound of drop: fall into poison, etc)

So far, from the 3 chapters that are out, this game sits at the middle of the last two examples - it has quite a few choices, some of which have effects that are minor in nature, others of which make a notable difference. Once the SMS system is implemented, I'll probably have as many save files as i do in sound of drop (so far... about 3 pages of save files, all working towards different endings to the game)

Honestly, I picked this game up because of a mix of things - the story caught my attention first and foremost, I'm sure a simple glance at the other VNs in my library can quickly tell you that I like interesting and unique stories. A VN where you have to balance 2 lives on 2 separate planets while trying to save both? Yes. Absolutely Yes. It's an incredibly interesting concept, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing where it goes.

The second reason I was interested in the game, I will admit, was because of the anthros. Guilty as charged of the heinous crime of being a furry. Seriously though, I really do love some of the character designs - they're interesting and unique without being overly blinding (I've seen... much weirder anthros) The bunny brothers especially are absolutely precious, and have such interesting personalities.

The third and final reason, in all honesty, is because of the negative reviews. I enjoy reading VNs, especially interesting ones with a story I can really get behind. I was extremely curious whether the negative reviews held any merit or not, and some of them, in my personal opinion, really don't. Some of them are gripes about common Visual Novel components.. like lack of gameplay, or a bland narrative. I'll admit the narrative is a bit dull at first, but what do you really expect when there's nothing going on at first? You've got to build up to the story after all, you can't just immediately go into the action in a Visual Novel with no explanation of why it's happening, that's terrible writing.


the menu system is definitely a bit unconventional and outside of the setup found in most visual novels, but once you learn the buttons and controls, it's not too much of a hassle.
There are also a few spelling errors here and there, but nothing really major, and not terribly often.


All in all, this is definitely, in my opinion, an excellent VN. I'm very excited for the next chapter to come out.

I rarely buy early access games, and even more rarely do I review them, Slime Rancher is only the third early access game I have purchased, and is probably the most impressive one to date.

The game as it is right now runs extremely well - I've had no gamebreaking glitches, a single crash (likely my own fault), and absolutely no graphical or AI issues.

Considering this is the developers first project, I have to say I'm highly impressed - you can tell a lot of work has gone into the game thus far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the updates take us.


The content right now, as expected of early access games, is limited - you can complete the objectives currently available within a few hours. The only thing you can really do past that is continue to explore and gather slimes, and buy a few neat upgrades for your vac and farm, but even despite the lack of things to do it can still be incredibly fun to just open the game, feed your slimes, and explore a bit.

People aren't lying when they say this game is a feel-good game either, I've been on depression meds for 14 years and this game is more effective in minutes than any of my meds have been in years.

What can I say though, I have a huge weak spot for cute ♥♥♥♥, and these slimes are really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ adorable. If I die, it's probably because my heart couldn't handle the tabby slimes.