Recent reviews by falo

I was very late to playing this, and I'm glad I did. While it's an unforgiving game, especially early on, It's been a standout experience from the disappointments of the last few years. Great quests, wonderful voice acting and facial animation, enjoyable gameplay, and just lots of fun. An open world done extremely well to make you not care that you're revisiting locations across the map, which is a huge step up from the usual massive world of standalone locations that happen to be connected by terrain seen in other games.

It's not perfect - I think the save system is an interesting idea, but ultimately will put off casual players unnecessarily while giving no real gameplay value. The mini-games for some activities (lockpicking, maintenance, etc.) are novel, but clunky, and often buggy.

Despite these flaws, I had a blast playing through the game. I've played some of the DLC, and they stand or fall on their own merits, but the core game is solid and well worth playing through. On to KCD II!

I find myself Torn. The Theresa quest is fine as a story, but is absolutely awful to play with unnecessary amounts of running, retracing steps, and uninteresting gameplay. Worse still, it drags you into this incredibly long flashback story with no warning, so you're suddenly cut off from the main game that you were enjoying.

On the other hand, Mutt is a good dog. Yes he is. He's such a good boy.

But it, just avoid talking to Theresa. Ever. It's safer that way, and there are better wenches available.

You could grab it, but only in a very good sale. It has lots of interesting systems, but everything struggles to hang together well, and becomes frustrating after a while. The fiddling changes being made, and some of the developer opinions expressed within the Steam discussion forums gives me a heavy vibe of early access with an unclear direction.

It's going to scratch that itch that Star Citizen / Starfield aren't quite hitting, but it's got some rough edges which conceal some even rougher bits in the middle.

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As I play more, I have to drop my recommendation. The systems built around automating the production process are painful to use. As you read more of the history of changes, it becomes apparent that there's just a mess here of conflicting design choices that need cleaning up. Given the amount of grind all this involves, and the ridiculous (real)time scales involved in some of the activities, it's disrepsectful of the players to have it in this state.

Another survival game with promise, that is going to die if they don't actually do some product management. Someone needs to grab ahold of them and tell them to rip out redundant systems/items, and sort out what they have before they try to make it more complex. The priority system is stuck in a weird halfway house of not being as limited as something like Medieval Dynasty, but not actually being granular enough to allow proper control, so villagers make odd choices.

Like many early access games, it is also going to suffer if they keep listening to the squeakiest wheels in the discord who are some of the stupidest people I've encountered in any gaming community.

This is utter garbage and I have no idea how the reviews are so positive. Once you've gotten past any fan love for the universe, the gameplay is just dull, poorly structured, and repetitive. There's no sense of peril or achievement. The reason the trailers jump around so much is to hide how poorly this plays minute to minute. This feels like a fan enjoyed sketching cartoon orcs, and was shown that you can use a stock game engine to rig them and get them to move. Avoid it, even in a sale.

Gameplay wise, this little taster seemed fine. Classic Commandos with some prettier graphics. Maybe a bit limited, but it's very hard to tell from just a prelude mission.

Unfortunately, if this is meant to be representative of the final game, the engine is in a dire state. Performance is awful - a 4080 Super shouldn't be sitting in the 30-40s on a prelude level with not much going on.

Huh, have I not recommended this yet? That seems insane to me, but then it's probably because I've been distracted playing it. Early access for Satisfactory was great - despite the occasional bug, you could see continuous progress towards a game that was going to be better for the player with each iteration. That has now been realised with the 1.0 release.

This game is the perfect chill out game, but can tie you up for hours more than you intend as you try to craft a new design idea into the perfect factory just so that you can ... build more factories!

Love every minute, whether solo or with friends.

It's worth adding that I'm now even more hours in and finally going for nuclear for my first time. I love the way your scale of factory ends up naturally changing as you unlock capabilities for large scale transport so you start thinking world scale rather than local scale. Making your way around the world as your train network goes about its business can be incredibly satisfying as you add more and more lines and routes and tear your hair out over signals!

It's a game with promise, but it needs a lot of work on balancing the systems, as well as some additional interfaces to help you actually find the problems. At the moment the AI characters seem to constantly self-sabotage, even on easier difficulty modes, and you will have to spend all your time trying to get them back to positive positions only to find that others are busy screwing things up while you're doing that. It's also impossible to properly inspect your population. The game will tell you that you have N prisoners, or X criminals, but there's no way to easily find these individuals (which would be fine if it wasn't possible for them to be on the lower bunk of a top down bunk bed ...).
As a concept it's great (influence the lords, who in turn influence the villagers), but the execution isn't enjoyable at this point in time. Very much feels like it's been configured by a developer who's forgotten what it's like to have fun playing a game and instead wants to see constant hard swings of his system for testing purposes.

A puzzle game all about changing the future (and not just in the story). Each decision you take has to be balanced with your acceptance of risk vs reward for both that level and the overall run. Incredibly simple to play, complex to master, and thoroughly enjoyable throughout. Plenty of replayability from both the random generation (which is balanced well) and the variety of unlocks / starting loadouts that will let you chop and change your style of game each time.

A game that seems to go downhill with every release, including the age old "ooh, look, let's use a new engine" time soak that then results in a worse game as they're not actually very good at using the new graphics capabilities while retaining actual gameplay. Dull and repetitive, and the novelty of the seventh day soon wears off.