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There is nothing quite like Outer Wilds. Simple as that.

I can't tell you it's sort of like this game or that game, because it isn't. Outer Wilds is something different. It has left an impression on me, and I consider it one of the greatest games I've ever played. It has won numerous game of the year awards, and for good reason.

There is nothing to fight in Outer Wilds, except time. Although, even time is something you ultimately have as much of as you want: Just only in 22 minute chunks at a time.

I can't say much without ruining the magic of this game. You'll wake up in your little village on the day you are scheduled to launch into space. Taking a mosey through your town will provide you with some tutorials and a few clues about what is going on in your solar system that you likely won't recognize as such quite yet. That's fine, because like everywhere else in this game, you can come on back anytime you like.

After that, you are handed a bolted together space ship and a majestic solar system to do with as you please.

Avoid looking things up online about this game as much as you can, because that solar system is something to explore; And the more you get to know it, the more impressive it will become. The sheer amount of moving parts in the corner of space you call home would already be an impressive feat in video game design. However, once you start to understand how those moving parts are impacting each other, it'll start to boggle your mind just how mad-genius these developers must have been to not only come up with it all, but actually put it all together in a way that works. It's like a well oiled machine.

One thing I will say because it will become clear to you pretty early on (22 minutes in, to be exact), is that you are waking up on your solar system's final day. You have 22 minutes to do anything you want. Fly anywhere you want. Get out and delve into caves or buildings anywhere you want. Explore the depths of the sea on a nearby planet if you want. The solar system is yours do with as you please... for 22 minutes.

Then your sun goes super nova and destroys everything, including you.

Except you'll wake up again at the beginning of that fateful day. It's a space adventure version of groundhog day. Nobody else knows what you are talking about when you try to explain you've lived this day before... perhaps 100 times before. But for you, this means you have an unlimited number of 22 minute days to try and figure out what is going on. And as you explore, you'll start to learn that the WHEN of being someplace can sometimes be as important as the WHERE. That solar system isn't static for those final 22 minutes of existence. Things are changing, and that's where the genius of it all starts to come to light.

For every discovery, there will come new questions. Why are you reliving the same day when nobody else seems to be? What are all of these mysterious things you are finding around your solar system?

Eventually you will unravel all riddles; You will solve all mysteries: Why the day is repeating. What that thing you see explode in the sky above you each day you wake up is all about. You'll learn the fate of a civilization that came before you (or if you have the amazing dlc, more than one civilization.) And eventually, once you've seen all there is to see and really put the pieces together, you can reach one of several endings. Well, some endings can be reached much earlier, but they aren't good endings.

There is no combat in Outer Wilds. There is nothing to fight except that 22 minute clock. But that doesn't mean there are no dangers. You will die, and not always because of your exploding sun. Sometimes you will suffocate. Sometimes you'll fall to your death. Perhaps you will be eaten. Or, if you get particularly creative, perhaps you will even break the space time continuum (yes, that is actually possible in a few different ways).

But fear not, for each time you will wake up as if nothing happened and try it all again. Each time you will likely wake up with just a bit more knowledge than you had the last time your eyes opened upon that exploding thing in the sky. Each bit of knowledge will lead you to somewhere new, where you will learn more and also come away with yet new questions you didn't know to think about before.

In the end I really can't recommend this game enough. As long as you are someone who is into exploration and solving mysteries, and doesn't mind a game that has no combat, then this gem is something you really should check out. Your life will be lesser for missing out on this one if you find it at all interesting.

Let me put things in perspective: One of the most terrifying things you'll meet in Grounded is a Koi fish. He is the king of his pond. Nay, he is akin to Poseidon, a god defending his realm from trespassers with rageful vengeance. To tiny teenage you, he is nothing less than an invincible terrifying leviathan of the deeps.

So, color me surprised.

I shouldn't be. Surprised, that is. I really shouldn't. It's made by Obsidian for goodness sake. You know, the people behind these little barely heard of games like Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic 2. With legendary games like that under their belt, what was my block on this one?

Enter stage right: Free weekend on steam at the same time I happened to be bored. Here I am, nearly 40 hours into this thing later, wondering what took me so long.

It's good. I mean, it's a survival game. So if that isn't your jam, then this likely won't change things for you. But it's pretty good. I've been playing it mostly solo and I still love it, although I can see where playing it co-op could be fun.

This game is more Valheim than it is Ark, much to my delight. In some ways, it is just a better Valheim. I mean, for one, it is actually a finished product. (ba dum, tsss!) But it also has more story going on than in Valheim. There's even some dialogue.

But like Valheim, it is mostly about exploration and growing in strength by crafting more impressive gear. It is exploring new corners of the huge yard, finding some new resource you have never seen or vanquishing some massive beasty (read: tiny insect) that you've never been able to best before. It is using those new resources to unlock better equipment, so you can adventure to yet more dangerous parts of the yard, get into new places you couldn't reach before, and defeat monsters (little bugs) that used to thrash you.

It even has the monsters (insects) eventually getting upset that you've killed too many of them and launching raids on your base, very similar to the good ol' Val of the Heim. So there is a reason to build a base, and to surround it with walls. There is a reason to build defenses. Perhaps a tower you can stand atop to pummel your aggressors with that bow made of a sprig and some plant fiber rope. That tower might serve you just fine, until your aggressors are bees or some other flying beasty (bug) you've over hunted.

This game has atmosphere in spades (and it actually has a massive spade in it, too). It sells the 90s in which it is set. From the juice boxes to the action figures, it sells being a kid again. It sells being a tiny part of a big back yard so well. But it also sells some terror, too. The wolf spider in particular is particularly jarring the first time you spot one on the prowl... Or, heaven forbid, if your first run in with one is because it spotted you first.

Then there's that Koi fish. *Shivers*

The hounds are so close I can hear their growls as I move among a small group of trees, attempting to skirt around them. CRACK! A stick breaks beneath my feet. I whip my view to the decaying zombie dogs.

Did they spot me?

No. I'm good. Their growling isn't angrier sounding. They aren't looking at me. Good, on to get this clue.

Suddenly crows burst into the air to my left, their wings and their cawing loud in my ears. The birds were close, but not close enough that it was me that startled them. I crouch and sidle up against a pile of dirt for cover. My gun drawn to my shoulder, I swing the iron sight left and right, scanning the bushes.

I'm not alone. A cowboy shootout is but a moment away. Is it another solo? A duo? A trio? My goal is to take the first one by surprise, hopefully dropping him with a head shot to help even up the odds.

And this is just the first compound I'm walking into that match. This is the first minute or so of the match. That's hunt. It's not just a shooter. It's a freaking experience. This isn't Tarkov or one of it's imitators. Hunt is something else; It's own beast. It's unique and it is unmatched.

In short, Hunt is a gaming masterpiece.

Hunt is gaming done right. It released 5 years ago, but the devs never gave up on it. They've released content since that release. New guns. New bosses. New monsters. Ammo variants. Dual wielding pistols. As of a few days ago, dynamic weather. The list goes on and on. And you know what they have charged for this gameplay content they have pumped into this game over the last 5 years; For the hard work of all of the developers and artists working on a 5 year old game?

Not a single cent. Not a thing. You buy the game, and they just keep giving you content. They keep making Hunt better and better, and they never lock any of it behind a DLC.

The result? A masterpiece that they have, and continue to, fine tune half a decade after its release. And are they giving up on it anytime soon? Not by the looks of it. With a port over to a new Crytek engine 5 years more modern than the one it was built in planned to be completed by next year, along with a new map in an entirely new biome around the same time, they seem committed.

This is gaming done right. Because of their dedication to the game and continued addition of free gameplay content, this game is continually hitting higher concurrent player numbers than ever before. It is the same reason it is not uncommon at all to find players with literally thousands of hours in hunt.

As of this writing I'm 800 hours into hunt... And I still learn something new all the time. It is a game where the premise is pretty easy to understand, but with all of these years of additional content and slowly perfecting what is already there, it also has layer after layer of depth. Depths you often can't even see until you've delved into the layer above it.

Recently they reduced the amount of their real money currency, known as BBs, you earn in game. People have begun writing negative reviews about it. That's fine, that's their opinion. They are allowed to have it, but it doesn't stop it from being a very entitled opinion. They conveniently ignore in all of those reviews that Crytek also removed the BB cost from everything even slightly gameplay related in the very same patch.

So yeah, we get less BBs now, but they are also now exclusively used for buying cosmetics. Things to look pretty. That's it. Because the developers of hunt do NOT sell power. These cosmetics won't even change the iron sights on any gun, because even a small change to iron sight might end up being some sort of advantage to someone who likes that iron sight more.

But no, these entitled gamers aren't happy with a masterpiece game that has dedicated devs still producing completely free content for a 5 year old game. No, they want to be able to easily afford to buy all the cosmetics they want for free as well. I mean, devs don't have to pay rent or eat, right?

Me, I look at it like paying my taxes. I like the country I live in. I'm patriotic that way. I enjoy a lot of benefits, including my freedom, but also streets and schools and clean water. So to me paying taxes is the patriotic thing to do. Freedom isn't free, as they say.

I look at games like Hunt in a similar light. I see the hard work of the devs. I see their good faith and the respect they give to us, the gaming community, by being quite deliberate in never selling power or charging us a cent for any gameplay related content. Bought this game 5 years ago, you have access to all the guns and tools. Bought this game last week, you have access to all the guns and tools.

So while I've never bought BBs directly, I buy a dlc pack with a legendary hunter skin and a couple of gun skins now and then. Sure, partly because I think the stuff in that particular pack looks cool, but also because I'm perfectly willing to toss these guys a few bucks now and then in thanks for my 800 hours, soon to be more, of enjoyment.

Great game. I see a lot of reviews about the game being too hectic and to just farm on the first planet. This is bad advice, and they are missing a key element of the game. This game isn't your standard cooking game and it doesn't have your standard goals. It's got a dark side.

The problem these people are having is that they are playing it like it is Plate Up! or a Cook, Serve, Delicious game. They are trying to make the orders just right and make everyone happy.

Do not make everyone happy in this game. Or at least... don't let them leave to tell anyone about how great your burger was.

If you make the perfect burger and then let that person leave your restaurant alive, you gain prestige. The word spreads about how good your restaurant is. With more prestige comes more customers. So the reason all these reviewers are struggling with frantic days as early as day 2 or day 3 is because they aren't killing enough of their customers. You can get paid by letting them eat and tip you, then killing them before they reach an exit portal.

I hear you asking: Why don't you just take their money off of them after you kill them? Don't overthink it. It's space. Maybe it's all digital. They paid with a card man! Or something.

The point is that this game can actually be so slow it is rather dull if you get a bit too overzealous in your murder, keeping your prestige too low. The amount of customers you get is based on your current prestige relative to the necessary prestige for the planet. So that first planet everyone says to stay on? Yeah, that one can get real crazy real fast if you gain any prestige at all. And the rat people on that planet don't pay or tip well.

You don't want things crazy. You need to kill some (sometimes all on "accident") of your customers to keep the freezer stocked. Do you know how much harder it is to get away with murder if your place is hopping? Do you know how much more meat you need to feed a packed joint? So yeah, now things are hectic. You have a zillion customers, which means you need to be performing mass murder on the regular to feed them, while also dealing with toilet backups or whatever else happens to be going wrong that day.

It's an interesting take on the cooking game. You find yourself working out ways to kill certain species that have too much hp to quickly down in the bathroom, or that are immune to your cleaver altogether. On the second planet there is one particularly slippery species that flees at the first sign of trouble, but has 3 hp; Just too much to easily down before they can dash off.

But you need his meat to make burgers for this other species on the same planet. And this slippery alien doesn't go to the same places the others do, so the traps you have been using to kill the others don't tend to work on them. This is just one example of the hurdles you find yourself trying to overcome in this very different game.

Because in Godlike Burger the only way to fail a run is to be killed. It doesn't actually matter if you get the orders right. It doesn't really matter if you fail to make your customers a burger at all. They'll just up and leave and drop your prestige rating. It'll slow down business, but sometimes you want business slow.

After all, leaving no witnesses is much harder in a packed restaurant.

This game is an absolute masterpiece and the greatest survival crafting game ever made. At least so far.

It's been years since I first finished it, and here I am going back through it yet again. And that, my dear reader, is half of what makes this game great. You can finish it. There is an ultimate goal. It has an end. So many of these things end up in perpetual early access or just go way too sandbox, forgetting that there needs to be an eventual end goal (Looking at you, Valheim.)

Subnautica sucks you in from the first moment you climb into that escape pod amidst chaos and fire. You feel the urgency as you plummet to the planet below, things breaking off the walls of your pod from the force of the shaking. Before you can even control your character, you'll find yourself physically flinching in real life as debris bouncing around your pod, a pod straining for all it is worth to remain in one piece, fly towards your noggin.

And then that's it. You find yourself on a magical alien world that glows at night like the Avatar movies. You don't know what happened to your space ship. You don't know what planet you are on. You know precisely 1 thing: Standing atop your floating life pod you spin around; Nothing but water as far as you can see in every direction. Well, water and the absolutely massive wreck of your former space vessel sticking out of the sea in... some direction. Is it North of you? South of you? Even that you won't know for a while. But for better or worse, that massive ship wreck is the landmark you'll use to keep some sort of bearings.

Your only companion is a tablet with an occasionally snarky computerized female voice.

"Several leviathan class lifeforms have been detected in the area. Are you sure whatever you are doing is worth it?" She asked me at one point as I explored the ocean floor.

As you begin to explore more of your surroundings and gain the ability to dive deeper and deeper, you'll notice another characteristic of Subnautica that makes it stand out from most survival games: It is NOT procedurally generated. Every nook and underwater cave is hand crafted. Every new biome you discover will fill you with a new sense of awe because each is filled with little details you might miss if you don't take your time.

And sometimes you'll come upon something truly mysterious. You'll feel that rush of adventure as you cautiously approach some new odd thing, likely glowing some new color you haven't yet encountered. Is it dangerous? Is it benign? Is it filled with some new resource or maybe even pieces of wreckage from your massive ship that might give you some new toy to craft? There's only one way to find out, Cousteau.

Subnautica is usually peaceful and almost always beautiful. But, it is occasionally terrifying. And that's part of what makes it amazing. It invokes real emotion. You'll build yourself a home; Maybe several. You'll feel that sense of safety and peace when you return with pockets full of resources, your PDA lady yelling at you to seek hydration immediately. You'll be glad to hear the familiar, "Welcome aboard, Captain," when you walk through your hatch after a long adventure of exploration. You'll slowly discover what befell the other survivors of your ship, their escape pods scattered across the ocean.

You may even fall in love with an aquatic friend at some point. You might begin to feel protective over it, leaving it at home when you plan to venture to more dangerous locals.

I'll likely never forget the first time I heard the roar of something absolutely gigantic and apparently very angry come up from the dark depths years ago when I first played this. I remember turning around immediately, saying out loud, "Nope. All the nope. Huge bag of nope."

And ultimately, if the day does come when you find a way to escape the water world you have somehow managed to make your home, you might even find yourself sad to see it go.

10:30 pm: Kids are in bed. Timberborn is on sale. Let's give this thing a whirl finally.

7:30 am: Wife is asking me why I am still up. I try to explain to her that my new maple farm finally matured and my beavers can now finally finish my super dam. With it they will achieve the largest reservoir of water ever witnessed by beaverkind. She doesn't understand why the ever present danger of droughts fading into the annals of beaver history is so significant. She wordlessly hands me a very awake baby and walks away to start her work day.

Joking aside, although that story is based on actual events, this game is pretty fun. It's a harsh environment colony builder like many others. It isn't as ruthless as some, Banished comes to mind, that can see your colony come to ruin quite quickly due to fairly easy to make oversights on your part. Oh, don't get me wrong. You can accidentally kill your beavers. It is easy to starve them to death. Early on it'll be due to mismanaging the most important resource of the game, water. Later on when you have a thriving beaver metropolis, it'll be because you ran out of water.

Yes, both times the problem was water. The problem will always be water. Well, sometimes the problem is there aren't enough logs if you had every log in the universe; But mostly, it's water.

When you are new catastrophe will probably come from mismanaging your rivers. Late game it'll be because you struggle to hold enough water to survive the ever more severe droughts.

But water my friends. Water! That is what makes this game so much fun. Your beavers actually manage your resources pretty well on their own once you've got them set up. Where you, ever present godlike figure in the sky, come in is planning out how to extract every ounce of value you can from that precious blue stuff flowing by in the river. Your oh so cuddly civilization consists of an army of super cute beavers! And beavers like to build dams. So build dams you will. Build dams you must.

You will use epic tons of lumber to channel and shape the flow of the water. Build large reservoirs that you can release bit by bit as your beavers drink up their little stream during a long drought. Build dams to create beaver made waterfalls that increase the speed of the current. Force that water into a tighter channel to create even more water speed. Then build water wheels to milk that fast flowing water for power to run your industry.

Oh, did I mention that you are raising freaking beavers! They are so freaking adorable.

Supreme Commander veterans will be most at home here, but a clone it is not. By borrowing bits and pieces from various other RTS games out there, this game has become it's own beast. Don't go into this expecting it to be exactly like another Supcom/TA.

Ashes of the Singularity is a mixed bag. It is best described as a combination between Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire. It is an RTS with a streaming economy based around forming groups of units into meta-units (called armies in game), and then fighting over spots on the map that take time to capture like a Relic RTS.

The campaign is honestly pretty meh. The difficulty curve spikes rapidly in places, only to be smooth sailing again for a few stages afterwards. Despite these difficulty spikes, veteran RTS players will probably find themselves blowing through the campaign pretty quickly. I had to surrender twice during the campaign, and both times I finished the stage no problem once I knew what was going to happen.

The story is predictable, rudimentary, and tacked on. The voice acting is pretty terrible, especially for the female. The in battle conversation is just text that is jarring and constantly yanking your view away from what you are trying to do. Not only is the in game text not voice acted (probably a good thing with the poor quality of it anyway), but there aren't even animations or portraits to make it interesting. The in battle dialogue can honestly be skipped, and it wouldn't change the experience much as most of the conversation boils down to, "Insert middle-school play complexity of dialogue to justify this battle." The player starts off as a "neophyte" that is brought in to assist the big boys, and suddenly about 3/4s of the way through you have apparently made enough of a name for yourself that you are considered "quite powerful." However, I didn't feel the crescendo here. It just felt tacked on like the rest. Suddenly I was strong and scary, I guess because I had won so many battles, but there was no real explanation for anything.

Overall, you aren't missing much if you skip it and just jump into skirmish or multiplayer.

The multiplayer is where this game shines. I was top 10 or 20 at one point during the beta, so I have a fair amount of ranked games under my belt. It's slower paced than most RTS (although, still much faster paced that Sins of a Solar Empire), which means success isn't based just as much on your apm as it is your strategy like most modern RTS games. On bigger maps, your ability to keep track of and control multiple fronts at the same time will still be relevant though, so APM isn't completely irrelevant.

The two races aren't exact copy pastas of eachother, but neither are they drastically different. Their units are different in both look and in the manner in which they attack, but in the end both sides tend to have units that fulfill the same role. For example, PHC has artillery cruisers and dreadnoughts, while Substrate has drone cruisers and dreadnoughts. Their method of attack is different, but they both basically fulfill the same function. The same can be said for other units. Both have a close range, tanky, t1 unit that costs only metal, and then both have a t1 longer ranged fragile unit designed to sit behind those tanks. One shoots a laser, the other shoots a rocket, but they are essentially the same thing.

If you prefer to spend your RTS time in multiplayer or skirmish, than this game is an interesting take on the genre. While Ashes isn't doing anything that hasn't been seen before, it is taking the good parts from various other RTS games and mixing them together into a concoction that is new.

I had never heard of this game before the Steam release. I picked up the 3 pack early just to give it a whirl and gave 2 copies to some friends of mine. For those of you that don't want to read the whole review, I'll just come out and say that I absolutely love the game. One of the better games I've played so far in 2014. My friends and I have had a blast playing it, and if that isn't the bar for what constitutes a good game, it should be. That being said, not everyone will love it. Read on to see if this isn't your bag.

GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is highly reminiscent of the Dragon Warrior games or the early Final Fantasy games on the NES. If that last sentence instantly sets off bells of nostalgia for you, then you will probably like this game. Don't run out and buy it yet though! The game is deliberately 8 bit and old school, where you walk around a 2d world getting into random encounters that pop up out of nowhere. The point is to level, hope for rare drop loot, and beat bosses at the bottoms of dungeons to complete quests.

The battle is where this game shines especially if you have two friends. And that is also this games biggest weakness. The game is still fun solo, but the companion monsters from your ranch (think having a stable of pokemon), are usually sufficient enough but stupid. This not only lowers the fun of enacting well crafted plans with your friends so that all of your moves play out in perfect turn order like a well choerographed bank heist, but also makes certain battles very difficult. The point is, if you go this solo, there may still be points where you'll want to group up with someone else in the world.

Beyond that, battles often get tough and intense where your life might hang in the balance of which member of your party a monster attacks or if your healer has enough agility to get his heal in before the monster gets his bite in. The battles are pretty fast paced and can swing from good to bad quickly. The battles also reward strategic thinking, but it is possible to brute force your way through much of it just by grinding out another level or two if things get tough. The combat is definitely where this game shines.

CLASSES:
There are 8 classes that all play differently from eachother. Some of the classes are similar in style and role but still manage to maintain their identity. I have personal experience with the Warlock, Conjurer, Wizard, and a ranger that I specced to play like an offensive lightning slinging druid. All 4 were casters, yet no two were alike. The conjurer is all about damage over time and can heal almost as well as he can kill while the Wizard takes more of a straightforward approach and just hits stuff upside the head for huge single hit numbers with fireballs and the like. The warlock life drains constantly and uses his own HP to cast instead of mana while the Ranger almost always goes first in combat due to high agility, can hit things upside the head with his staff for a respectable amount of damage to save mana on trash, and could still chuck around heals and spells with fairly strong results.

THE STORY:
Something about time travel. Who cares? I wouldn't call story this game's strong point. It's there, but it hasn't exactly left me pining for a tie in novel.


FINAL RESULTS:

The good:
+ Fun MMO-like game set in a old school NES RPG setting.
+ Great fun with 2 friends
+ Can still be fun solo, but may require grouping at points.
+ Combat is excellent and nail biting
+ Classes are well designed and play differently from eachother
+ Terrible graphics that pleasantly remind us of a bygone era.

The Bad:
- Some battles are nigh-unsoloable. (lookin at you Guardian)
- Can get a bit grindy at times.
- Terrible graphics that remind you of nothing because you weren't gaming in the 80s.
- The boat ride between Balzackia and Piatta can't be skipped after the first time :(
- Story is nothing to write home about.

Great little game. Simple to learn, but gets hectic quick.