Recent reviews by Vintage

Decided to start reviewing games since I play almost exclusively Indie EA titles hoping they come out well.

So Elin..

Potential: 10/10
Current: 7/10

If you are amicable to isomeric games then you are looking at a game with limitless potential. They are coming out of the gate day one with workshop support and the base game is incredibly complex and profoundly flexible.

it is a roguelike "prologue" to the indie success that is Elona. Is it as good as Elona? I never played Elona and the discussions across multiple platforms is split on if its Elona's true successor or just a Elona flavored simulator; I'm convinced they'll ague about that until both games are left to the archives of history.

What I do know. It makes a statement and will steal your time.

My mix of games I enjoy that are applicable to comparison;
Rimworld
The Matchless Kungfu
Kenshi
Dwarf Fortress
Terraria
Minecraft
Mount & Blade Bannerlord (Doesn't play similar, but for balance comparison)

^^^^^^^^^
If you like the above you'll find something here.

The Short;

If you want a complex, main character focus Rpg with crafting/building and the ability to raise your own settlements and family (sort of.. WIP right now) and the ability to loosely direct followers or assign them to your party for combat purposes then you found a rare golden egg. We'll see how it hatches, but its worth whatever they charge.

The long starting with the good and work my way down;

The game is insanely complex, even in its current state you're not going to *win* and walk away done with this title. Combat wise you can be a mage, tank, dps melee, dps range, and a bunch of weird ♥♥♥♥ inbetween - martial artist is entirely viable, I played most of my first playthrough as a Warmage but basically just punching things and throwing lightning when that didnt work until I decided a sword might be good, but I didn't feel I lacked for it because my martial art skills kept up with me.

Steering away from combat, the game uses a familiar crafting system in many roguelikes, and I'm looking at Kenshi for this one, that each crafting station has recipes, but also is a precusor to others and it branches out in complexity over time. You start gathering rocks, vines, and trees to make workbenches. Then quickly you're processing goods at sawmills, kilns, and forges to keep unlocking further items. Your skills impact the quality and obviously the quality evolves the usefulness of gear you make. The challenge here is there are.. many.. bottlenecks that will most likely get worked out in time. Right now the biggest is clay, which as of right now until winter comes when you can harvest snowballs freely, requires you to get lucky and find a potion/drink you want to throw away on a cheap piece of clay and you'd need a lot of luck to get enough to actually get past this bottleneck or wait until your first winter, or journey pretty far north which your combat level wont be there by the time you need it.

Building comes in lagging somewhat behind the other mechanics so far in that I can see the EA energy coming out. The building follows the crafting tree workbench tree as I described above.. mixed with the main questline.. which gives you more building options.. which allows you to expand your base tier.. which allows you more options for building.. and you get the idea.. everything is tied together, but I wouldn't call it neatly.. more figure it out, check the wiki, or pray you know where to get what you need.. which brings me to my next point.

Exploration, Expansion, and Progression; Elin is not a small world. It works in a world-map vs tile-map system, looking at Rimworld for this one, so you start on a tile in this big world where there are other city to explore and dungeons to raid.. But there's a catch.. you can't start the game until you claim this tile as yours and agree to pay taxes on it forever; Ding-Ding we've hit my main "gripe" with Elin's current play through which is the fact you can't go straight into adventuring, you're gonna be a land owning aristocrat whether or not you like it, congrats you're bourgeois now - don't let the peasants rebel. Kidding.. sort of, the reality is its an EA game and I think this singular (stable) start option is design to pump everyone through the building/crafting/management mechanics so they can hit 1.0 with all the kinks worked out. However, it is somewhat annoying that in this big sandbox you immediately claim a large developing chunk of dept. And while you can run away from your plot immediately you have some challenges; You'd immediately get your ass kicked and you only get bonus gold bars by shipping goods from your base, which are a completely separate (for some reason) form of currency from the coins you get for shipping goods, but directly tied to how much revenue you generate. And Gold bars can only be found by luck or this mechanic, and are used for buying specific crafting recipes or QOL items like a tent (mobile base). I for one would like to be able to start in a NPC town, buy a house, and incubate myself there before I have to be pioneer - but I believe that option is coming in the future.

My final synopsis is that its a great game with a lot of potential, in its current state it's entirely worth the $20 pricetag, but whether or not it will be the game of an indie generation will depend on it leaning into the sandbox aspects it has already put in place.

Kenshi is a beautiful mess. Showing it's age before it ever escape early access and doing things that a game of its time shouldn't be able to do. But, I digress..

Kenshi is a unique game that blends numerous genres relatively seamlessly. I see it recommended for people anytime someone asks for a game suggestion. Because it is so many things and checks so many boxes; Sandbox, RPG, builder, survival, crafting, 4X, life simulator, apocalypse, scifi.. some weird pseudo zombie situation.

Now does it always do it perfect? Hell no. - I'm writing this review because I saw the prompt because I just closed my game window. Why? My only character glitched through a wall and got trapped in some NPC's bed in a house that he's technically trespassing in now and he cannot escape. Am I mad at it? No, that's just how Kenshi is sometimes. There are so many systems trying to interact at once from character position, to collison, to terrain heights - and we're not in Unreal Engine 4, the copy right on whatever potato software they built this thing in had its copyright end like 5 years ago. I don't even know how the game boots.

Anyway; So yes. Get the game. It's an RPG+RTS+Sandbox+Whatever you're looking for.

You want to rule the world; Go for it.
You want to be a farmer; Get farming.
You want to be a miner; It's boring, but get digging.
You want to be a simple crafter in a town you don't own; Get crafting.
You want to be a slave; Kinky, call me.
You can do anything you want in Kenshi with a spark of imagination and a sprinkle of luck.. Cause the one thing I forgot to mention.. Kenshi doesn't care about you.. You aren't special.. It will rip your character's arm off and leave you in a bloody puddle while you pray that some random NPC takes pity on you.. There's no second chances in desert and there's no God to hear you scream in the fog.. Welcome to best unforgiving game you're ever going to play.

It was a beautiful attempt.

However the developer was bought out by a separate company and the project was immediately scrapped. There is no development or support at this point. The game was pushed into a "final" stage shortly after their buy out so it never actually finished its early access stage.

I wish this game would get picked up by a new developer that could give it the tlc that it deserved. It was like a cute 3D cross between minecraft and rimworld,

Rimworld is the ultimate small scale strategy sandbox on the market. The levels of depth for characters, items, events, and etc. is unparalleled on the market to date.

With the addition of mods your game becomes more and more tailored to your perferred experience. Just know that Rimworld's storytellers are unforgiving and actually finishing a colony is not the goal of the game, it's the challenges and the storyline that develops as you work to that goal.