Recent reviews by Silky Rough

Silky: Initial intrigue
Rough: Overwhelmed

I hesitated at this title. Intending to play with family, it required an XBox account which is starting to get really annoying. Why are so many titles on Steam requiring 3rd party accounts. I'm on Steam, and have been for years, to *avoid* this neccessity.

Still, thought I'd try it solo first before shelling out for family accounts.

The concept and the art had me impressed quite quickly. Pressing M to bring up the map and set a waypoint only to realise that 30 cm was a long way was a small buzz. Imagine being that small. Took a while to work out the food and water (just bang the grass blade and it'll fall) and why we need to analyze everything.

So, OK, make armor, make weapon, make lean-to etc. Check, check and check. Survival this size is fun. Exploring, and responding to mission objectives seemed like an OK way to pass the time.

And it was, until you die.

Damn, don't fight that one again. Respawn, somehow with my spear, run back get gear, bug that killed me before came at me again, try to escape, die. Damn, stamina ran out. Respawn, half a spear, run back, it gets dark. Torch is in death bag. Run into something again. Die. Respawn, this time no spear (?).

After a while this got tedious. I 'superquit', time to read some guides. OK, get better armor and 'block'. Sounds good. (I'm a survival game vet so just follow the cookie cutter methodologies right?)

So, somehow, found I could make chestnut armor quite quickly (so why bother with the 2 types before that) so went and filled my inventory with all the goodies and did just that. Wanted to also make a weapon that needed thistles so I had a chance out there. Found one down near the pond, while searching for more, got ambushed by a mosquito. Tried running, ran out of stamina, got killed. Respawned, went back to get my stuff (again with half worn spear) got stuck under some 'branch', wolf spider one-shotted me. By this time I'm at the 'FFS' stage.

Stop. Superquit. Watch some playthroughs. Did some chores around the house, came back, tried again.

All the while running around collecting every damn thing I could find, some of which made sense, some seemed just to make the game look bigger. Options are falling out of my eyeballs, completely over the top lists of things I could make, when, so early in the game, game has given me no compelling reason to make any of it. Not yet at least.

By this time, every death is met with 'FFS' until I got sick of trying. Considered buying the extra copies to get off this silly single player roundabout, but with this gamestyle, and some unexplained crashes, after 5 hours I gave up. I sought and received a refund, (thank you Steam for this)

A quick read of the forums has the usual fanboys flexing about how good they are with single player but there's enough people asking and complaining about it to qualify my own complaints here. This is unusual with MP games that have an SP option, because they're usually better scaled.

So for mine, any game that has you yelling 'FFS' every 5 minutes, as you die yet again, needs some work. And it's not the dying that's the problem, you lose nothing, it's having to run all the way back in a cluttered environment, sometimes as you approach darkness (and can't sleep it off because you must sleep exactly 8 hours so you stand there doing nothing, waiting for it to get light, either in the evening or in the morning).

It got annoying.

Perhaps, once it's been fleshed out and some balance added, it's an Early Access title after all, I'll revisit. For now, on the lookout for another title, better scaled for SP, which if good enough, will see multiple copies purchased... Anything that doesn't prompt yet another 'FFS' moment as I throw my hands up in despair at some pretty tough, and annoyingly repetitive, resource gather and then die gameplay.

SP Only? Wait.

4/10

Silky: I like fish & aquariums
Rough: This is not fish and aquariums

Free, with heaps of stuff locked, requiring DLC which either don't work or lack value. If you have an issue with unnatural coloured fish, crappy animations, bubbles going sideways, mixing of salt and fresh water species and not even a basic background image or 2, don't.

2/10

Did not recognise DLC.

Silky: Has a 'what's next?' feel
Rough: What's next?

It IS EA so any review is going to be limited to what we have now. And what we have, at time of writing, is an intriguing, very casual game set on a planet that we're supposed to make habitable. Not difficult to play, easy to understand if you just think for a minute. Seems a bit toooo easy to terraform, some things seem a bit short-circuited, but I'm sure there will be some added complexity, or at least longevity, added as time goes on.

Don't be looking for the depth of Subnautica (see what I did there?) at this early stage but there's certainly enough content to make the low price worthy of a look.

2 man dev' team, which is pretty impressive. For the price, have a look, get in behind these guys.

As it stands, 7/10. Comfortable we'll see polish and content.

As it stands, I'm waiting on the first patch to repair the game, to get it to a standard I would expect for the price, before offering any kind of extensive review. Yes, it's playable, obviously, but the number of things broken and the time it is taking to fix it, is disgraceful.

Giants messed up to meet a deadline and if anything is to be learned, it's stop developing to deadlines.

5/10. Just.

*Being at least my 5th iteration of this franchise, and at 247 hours, I think I am entitled to a qualified opinion on this game and I don't GAF what the fanboys try to defend in comments. If you do, and it's buttlicking BS, I'll kill it anyway.

Silky: Having fun with water
Rough: Water having fun with you

This game seems short on content and options compared to other city builders.

That moment you find yourself in, after spending 3 hours building a dam, watching the water back up and you marvelling at your engineering prowess... when the water goes around the mountain, through a gap you never saw, and floods your town in 20 feet of water and everything stops.... is priceless.

That's when you realise that's where the fun is.

And sometimes... there's just no water at all and all your beavers die... because your engineering prowess is actually not very good at all.

It's EA, more to come for sure, good fun as it is.

8.5/10

Silky: A more complete Banished
Rough: Micromanaging that completeness


In short, in order to prevent crime we need to build a church and to keep them happy we must supply lots of alcohol.

It stands then that the shortest path to victory is to fill your town with pissed Christians.


7/10 : Needs balance. Needs to be finished. Time killer. Might update as it's closer to finished if I'm still playing.

I am not going to quit just yet.

That is all.

Silky: Lots to do
Rough: Upgrading pathways

Dyson Sphere Program is an interesting take on the factory build genre where you're developing large scale power generation all the way to a Dyson Sphere... which is needed to continue to expand and so on. You start as a bot on a single planet knocking down a few trees & rocks and finish having warped to other stars, built one or more Dyson Spheres and built and built and built and built...

And it's here that I must point out what I consider this games biggest failing. Granted, it is unfinished and I haven't looked at the development map so this may change...

...BUT

Spam. That's all you end up doing. Once you have access to the 3 tiers of assemblers and 2 tiers of smelters, in order to go large scale production, it's a case of spamming the same build, that you've likely perfected, over and over and over. Sometimes on your 'starter' planet or even 50 light years away on some other planet orbiting some other star but build you will... repeatedly. Unlike Factorio (or even Satisfactory) there's no continuation of upgrade options. There's no reason to tear down to build more efficiently or any such motivation. Head to new planet and just keep spamming. Same build over and over and over.

Which made restarting to perfect the game start to become too tedious to bother. Yes, you have blueprints (which is not particularly well implemented) and developing blueprints to manage effective flow does add some fun but the blueprints ultimately end up just making the factory spam easier.

Any game where the finish starts to lack purpose and comes down purely to the quantities you can produce and not the efficiency of the operation needs a little bit of patience... or some time away AFK as your research ticks over.

Having said that, restarts are fun if you're the type always aiming for that 'perfect factory' or hoping to stamp out your sphere into the cosmos in record time. I just found it odd that in one such replay I made the Dyson Sphere much smaller than I could, purely to get it built without excessive tedium. That's usually not a good design point.

Nonetheless, at 400 hours at review time, it's obviously good enough to get some fun out of it making it good value for money.

8/10

Silky: Seemingly lots of options
Rough: Tedium with spurts of boredom to liven things up


Tedious and repetitive at times but it sucks you in to playing ever longer (hoping for it to improve?). Literally found myself falling asleep clicking 'End Turn' on 2 occasions though so 'engaging play' wouldn't be on my list of adjectives.

Although fanbois will argue differently, many, many facets of Civ 6 are obvious, with a leaning towards any and every 4x game ever created.

Some strange design choices, like changing civs frequently and annoying 'índependent' civs you can't turn off, make the play feel disconnected from building *your* nation in your likeness. I felt less emotional about my people and more attuned to getting the process right to keep them quiet.

Occasional glimpses of humour, some of it quite tongue in cheek (yes, we do worship our bank accounts, don't we?).

Map creation seems broken to me. You set your map with same options, using only a different seed, and you get vastly different geography. Sometimes you're left wondering where the resources are. Inconsistent, often requiring a re-roll because it's literally a crap map.

Look for the obvious upgrade path, presumably DLC, with what might appear to be an incomplete game.

If $60 is a lot of money for a game, wait for the specials.

6/10.