Recent reviews by Shoklan

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG *STAB*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARHHHHHHHHGGGGG

Swordship feels like playing an old Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up but where you turn your enemies into weapons. It’s like if you took a comedy sketch where everyone was accidentally hurting one another but you were composer getting them to do it – and you were hyped on cocaine while doing it.

The game spins the camera around but the enemies still come from the top: usually. Unlike the old games where you found power ups by killing enemies, you unlock them Rougelike style after you beat a level. You can get some very useful power ups; my favorite so far is the slomo when grabbing a crate only because I have had not so great luck with the blocking spawns power up. The enemies are well designed and easy to tell apart. The attacks are varied as you progress; I also like that after you unlock groups of enemies you can see them randomly. That helps keep the variabiliy of the game going run after run.

The music in this game is really wonderful. I wont even pretend that I don’t keep listening to it on the trailer every time I come to the page. It really nicely keeps the mood of the game but does not distract you from the game while you’re playing it.

Yeah, the price tag feels a little expensive for the game but so long as they don’t abandon it then I think they have a lot of room to grow into. Some different music, some different level gimmicks and some more enemy variability and it will be fine. They could even add some novel ships beyond the sword ship for all we know.

All in all I definitely recommend.

Some games want to give you an experience; journey actually gives you one.

One of a Kind Survival Game.
If you like Survival games and haven't played it yet: do.

Unlimited Spoopis

The Forest is another game in the Survival Genre which tries to use Environmental Storytelling to push a plot. You can play with your friends or you can play alone - which definitely gives you a different experience. Alone - so I'm told - feels a lot lot a horror game where you'll fear leaving the walls of whatever you've built. With friends, it was good fun but definitely doesn't feel like a horror game: FREE BONES!

We'll start with the stuff I didn't like first. Like most survival games there is crafting for shelters, walls, defenses and cooking. Unlike most other survival games that I've played, crafting buildings in this one feels pretty pointless. There are about four buildings that actually matter: Drying Rack, Bonfire, Water Collector, Shelter. Anything that produces light barely matters and you have to constantly feed fuel to the fires to get the initial "overburn" to really see in the darkness - or really far at all.

Walls are fun but we built on an island off the coast of the main island so we basically just started building random stuff for fun since our base never got attacked. Which is real unfortunate because this game has one of the best building systems I've ever played with. The buildings are cumulative so you can build what is basically a blueprint that your friends can collectively dump resources into. And, everyone can see them and since there is a visual blueprint you can actually lay out your base "Blueprint" in full for discussion. What a great idea!

Since it's Environmental Storytelling, you can basically skip all of it until the end while murdering everything along the way. This is what happened to us - we ended up running into the caves to wipe out the natives and just kind of picked up whatever we found - on our way to kill more of the natives. This isn't really the game's fault but more the way we played so beware of missing stuff until the end when you have no choice but to address the story that you don't really understand.

The combat is surprisingly fun and one the better Combat systems in a Survival Game. Ranged weapons are not broken and do not nullify enemies into a shooting range and melee feels really good with trading blows with the Cannibals. This isn't really due to the system being complicated but much more about how well done the animations and the interactions with the Natives themselves: they flee, they try to kind of spook and intimidate you, they call their friends. Enemy and animal variety was pretty good and you get introduced to newer enemies at the right times - at least for us. Learn how to block; you're going to need it.

I mentioned the Night above but it's really a positive: when it's dark it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dark. Wandering around at night can get you lost really fast. Everything moving around you - leaves, trees, animals - will making you constantly on edge thinking about if you're about to get attacked in the dark. Following enemies in the dark is just hard so you wont know how many there are nor where they ran of to. Running around in the Forest really does feel like moving around in the woods stumbling onto deer and opposing murderhobos while you try and find a stable water supply.

A few annoyances around multiplayer we ran into where one time we died and my friend had to afk to do something else. And, I got stuck in the plane behind him for a full hour - not game time, real life time - since it was impossible to actually get around him to play the game.

Another is that the server doesn't actually save the state. You must save your own character at shelters otherwise you lose progress. This makes absolutely no sense at all when we're playing on a server being hosted by someone else. You will lose progress if you don't personally constantly save.


Another was that since we were all doing our own tasks and split up often, some of us didn't end up having all the tools necessary to get to the end of the game. As a five-man group, one of us got stuck behind because of this while we basically tried to finish the game. If you do this then the bad news is that you all have to vote at the end otherwise you can't finish the game. We ended up just watching the endings on Youtube after doing all the work to get to the end.

Also, game works in Linux completely in Proton 6.3-4.

Anti-Cheat means it's not playable online in Linux.
That's the whole point of the game so I cannot really play it.
Game looks nice in the Tutorial level.

Damn Good game.

If you’re looking for a TL:DR: game is fun but has some challenges.

The first time I opened the map to see all the different systems we could visit I was basically sold on the game. The first time we made our system hop, we almost got trapped in hellscape and had a blast trying to get off that planet.

Empyrion - Galactic Survival is - well - a Survival Game that adds the idea of different planets and systems to explore instead of simply other towns or woods or whatever that splotch over that hill is. What’s nice about it was as you explore the menus, it gives you something to plan for while trying to build up some semblance of safety where you are. As you scroll out, there are hundreds of systems to explore with their own rings of planets and moons and asteroid fields - which really is the allure of this game. I want to float around the Galaxy and do stupid things.

Out of the gate, there are lots of geometries to play with when building bases or anything else which is a nice change from other Survival games where you’re kind of stuck with a few pre-defined structures. Sadly, the internal structure of the actual block shape wont impact where you can actually place anything since you’re still locked into a cubic construction system. This does make a good number of the more interesting shapes rather impractical to try and use on anything you build.

The plethora of pieces to care about makes navigating and management also challenging. Finding out just how to build your first actual base was annoying until you realize that you need a core or a starter block to build off anything. Different blocks are tied to different kinds of structures which are denoted by the initials HV,CV,SV,BA which are just not explained. You’re going to be reading the descriptions of the stuff you build; you’re going to have to just about all the time because you’re going to miss important details. My mistake was not realizing that shields will require a Pentaxid to fuel them and there is no warning about this until the shields don’t work - except the last line in the text. A better idea maybe would have been that you don’t have any shields until you’ve actually fed your Vessel Pentaxid and therefore you’ll be forced to realize this. There is a good amount of finding out the hard way.

Likewise, there are lots of small stats and management that goes into a base which make sense but just don’t feel intuitive at all. I know that I need power and to do that I need something which makes power but I don’t know anything about Solar Panel rates from looking at the device before construction; there is no real way to optimize buildings or make decisions about if I want something until I’ve made it and realized that I either don’t need it yet or it’s missing necessary components. The Solar Panels need a Capacitor else they’re really not much use once the sun is down - and the base doesn’t store anything. Explore the Control Panel as soon as you can.

Contrary to some complaints, the combat isn’t bad for a Survival game and fights in space have been pretty fun. Having my friend float around in a tuned Small Vessel hecking out resources in Zirax controlled space to avoid pulling us into a space fight with our starter Capital Vessel only to be discovered by a wandering drone led to quite the episode of us coordinating his docking while everything in the system came to murder us escaping with a queue’d up lock to a different system for just such an emergency is why this game has been fun. The complaints about being outgunned are certainly true though. The Defense Station that sits just outside the atmosphere is a space graveyard of failed attempts to kick it out of the orbit. After building a prototype to try and kill the thing, I point-blanked it with 6 pulse Lasers 49 times before it finally blew apart my small vessel and I lost. The AI for the enemies in the game is certainly questionable too. I’ve watched as three factions of different types mingle with one another as if they’re not even aware of each other until I am taking shots at them and then they’re all after me like there is some pact to murder non-NPCs in the Galaxy on sight.

All in all, I’m not regretting buying it and it’s probably my favorite current Survival game.
I think that the criticisms are pretty fair though; the game is very ambitious and they haven’t delivered yet but the platform is there and so long as they’re continuing to diligently add the pieces patch by patch I’ll keep playing it.

Complicated but promising.