Recent reviews by Akrasia

great game, challenging

This game is clearly heavily inspired by the world-famous Nand2Tetris course, which is taught in hundreds of universities in order to teach the basic concepts behind building computers.

As someone who is currently taking the course, it's a very fun take on it, which gamifies the concepts while also adding challenging twists occasionally. Overall I find this game to be extremely promising.

In terms of cons, I would list two minor suggestions from playing so far:

A) Gameplay - in some cases I found myself needing to recreate the exact same gate I made in another level, making it slightly repetitive and much more complex than necessary (for example, the Full Adder level, which ideally I would have implemented using a half-adder I made in a previous level). Adding more gates to the game, and letting us unlock them after each time you complete a level, would be nice in my opinion and truer to the nature of what the game tries to teach, and avoid annoying redundancy.

A) UI - the UI could be improved a bit, it's not very intuitive; I think giving the game to playtesters without a computer background could improve this. In particular, the placement of the triple-AND and triple-OR gates, as well as the icon/naming of the "game log" button which shows the level mission again. I would move the triple buttons to be BELOW their normal counterparts rather than next to them, and the UI change its icon to maybe a question mark or something similar.

Started playing last week; pretty fun game! I really enjoy the cool "overworld" and "underworld" feature, which isn't something I've seen before in city-building games!! Cool graphics, I think this game definitely has potential

Addictive, simple in concept, and great in execution. Fantastic game!

Basically Portal if it were FPS instead of puzzles

This game is a giant rabbithole.

POE is one of those games that has seemingly endless content, for better or worse. I'm almost at the maximum level, and I'm still learning new things in the game on a daily basis; The entire campaign is more like a tutorial, with the "endgame" being the vast majority of the game.

It's got a insanely comprehensive and dynamic leveling system; just google images of the 'Path of Exile Skill Tree' to see what I'm talking about. That's probably what first drew my attention to the game, and it's something I love about it; you can play the game however you like best, instead of being limited to a handful of classes as in most MMOs. The game has a lot of content and is consistently churning out large, significant updates/overhauls every couple of months, with patches inbetween.

The game is also genuinely free, all of it, despite the insane amount of content. This is because Path Of Exile's marketing strategy is microtransactions (not pay to win, though); you can finish all ten acts of the campaign (several tens of hours of gameplay) without feeling urged to pay a cent.

It's also got an extremely nice and helpful community, which is probably a necessity considering the cons of this game:

The game heavily relies on external resources. In addition to having a steep learning curve to understand how the game works, you're going to regularly go online to look things up on the wiki (because they aren't properly explained ingame), go online to trade things ingame (because the game doesn't have an ingame market/auction, instead you list it on a pathofexile-specific craigslist), download additional applications to check which gear/build is most effective (because the ingame calculations can't properly calculate your DPS), or literally just join a community discord to bombard other gamers with your questions.

Essentially, things that you'd normally expect a game to provide, are instead created by the community. This is my main bone to pick with PoE, and I think why most people end up leaving before long; the steep learning curve is only amplified by the lack of ingame resources to teach players. If you download this game, don't hesitate to look things up on the wiki or ask questions on the community discord.

While that's a pretty severe con, it's outweighed by how fun the gameplay is. While the campaign is a tad limiting, once you reach the "endgame", the game just keeps getting better and better.

This is a great game - each playthrough is different, and if you like the game you'll probably come back to it in the future. It has a wide selection of mods to play with if you ever get bored with vanilla gameplay, as well as fantastic (optional) DLC that can be purchased for very cheap when it's on sale (about the cost of one hours minimum wage, which is well worth the +100 hours you will net from buying the DLCs).

Rest assured though, the DLC is optional - it's a fantastic game without any DLC. Well worth the money spent.