Recent reviews by Chef

Turns out Civ7 was here all along

These reviews confuse me. With the current state of games in 2025, this is an absolute gem. Exactly what it says on the box, despite the "Letterboxd" reviewers slamming it for pretentious reasons.
Skin Deep provides 10+ hours of fun, with an interesting yet optional story to go along with it. The art style and delivery is phenomenal, and reminds me of the gems made in the Source 1 engine a-la TF2.
Each level is familiar, yet provides a context dependent twist, and no mechanics become overused as the pirate variety forces you to mix things up.
Even if you don't like playing single player story games, give this one a try, I promise.

Tunnet gives you the exact same feelings as getting stuck into that old flash game "Motherload" in all the right ways. Tunnet is slow yet you are frequently intrigued by all the various discoveries you make. Tunnet is horrifying yet you push on because you believe in your network, efficiency, and your goals.
I truly haven't played a gem like this in decades, and the simple addition to "play on" after the ending, just to push your data rate up on the global leaderboard is enough to make me come back over and over again.

The Planet Crafter has such an insane amount of content, and a very decent content delivery system that I have no choice to give it a good review. The terraformation system and the visual changes it makes to the planet you are on are brilliant. It feels GOOD to progress.

My one critique is quite generic, but the game truly feels early access. Hitboxes, terrain popping, performance at times, graphical bugs, lack of information and strange physics made me check multiple times whether the game was in early alpha or not. It's extremely jarring.
Further to this, I am typically the builder/creator of the team, and this is perhaps one of the worst games to be that. The grid systems all have floating point issues, similar pieces don't line up with one another, and there is no ability to just move objects instead of emptying them and replacing. Just adding a new section to your base can take hours if you are perfectionist.

Still gotta give it a positive, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the depth of content is so good.

There are a lot of mechanics here that are "just because" Minecraft did it, or Terraria did it, or Satisfactory did it. Mechanics that just serve absolutely no purpose except it is for whatever reason mandatory in a cubic survival craft game. You can potentially look past this and just grind for the sake of it though, if you enjoy that kind of progression.

The art and cubic style is also a choice; Nothing about the art itself lends to a voxel based game as everything looks over-detailed and you can't figure out what's important (unless your bot pulls out it's laser pointer...)
Purpose is also lacking here, as there is no reason to spend heaps of time building a cool ship or house except for adding a meat shield to it. There's no reward because it will look like out-of-place junk anyway.

This game just needs some direction, rather than being a mixing pot of already done to death concepts.

In a vacuum this would be a pretty peak "cozy" game. Unfortunately we are not in a vacuum, and since Dinkum begun development, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Stardew Valley, and Hello Kitty Island Adventure have all existed.
This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that every single aspect of the game (except Australia ha ha) has been done before in a more "complete" manner, with the only redeemable quality being the (spoiler alert) lab technology, which even then was the only remaining part of the game for me after less than 10 hours of gametime; 3 of which was cycling days until the lab guy moved in properly.
This all being said, the multiplayer aspect really did shine compared to the aforementioned games. It really felt like a co-op experience rather than someone else just visiting your island. That was right up until you realised that the "specialist" buildings could only be built by the host of the game, and if you all decided to specialise in different skills, everyone else's was entirely wasted.

In terms of gametime, me and my friends picked this up over a free weekend and essentially completed the game in my listed hours spent. It was fun co-op experience for sure.

I can't really figure out who this game is for. By all regards it's a lacking version of POE1, with an attempt at the pacing of Diablo 2, with all the same failures as vanilla Diablo 4.
The boss fights are "epic", but immediately overshadowed by learning the 2-3 skills they use, and simply not walking into them. If the bass balance was any further tilted, maybe my mouse would vibrate enough to get me into some danger.

It's very refreshing to see a game led by a small team so fleshed out. Every step of the way, Roboquest thinks about the player experience; from a tutorial which asks you your preferred sprint type and crosshair position, to failsafe systems for the 1 bug I encountered in 24 hours which was a non-issue due to anti-softlock features.
And to top it all off, it's a complete game. Scaling difficulties, achievements, secrets, and a banging dynamic music track.
This is easily one of the games of all time.

Addressing negative reviews: Long queue times are entirely caused by players trying to cram onto the same server. It has always been. and always will be an option to not do that. I moved servers after day 1, and have never queued again.

As for the review:
New World takes the combat of Valheim, and the grindset of Runescape, slurried into one heck of a game.
Nothing in the game forces you down a certain path. You can work on one profession or all of them. One weapon, or all of them. WoW actively punishes the player for playing the game the way they want to, where New World encourages it by providing a lengthy progression path with great payoff no matter what it is.

My only gripe is that New World can often forget to hold your hand through the game, which sometimes is actually a positive rather than a negative.

There's also fishing.

The singleplayer is a nice ADDITION to the main game, being a multiplayer PVP experience. That is where this game shines.
I played countless hours of starfighter in EA's battlefront 2, as it was genuinely the most fun I could have in that game. The same devs behind it have created this masterpiece.
I have come from playing Elite:Dangerous as well, using a thrustmaster and Extreme3D Pro Joystick. Both of these seamlessly worked in Squadrons better than elite, however remapping was required (This is very normal).

PVP is insanely well balanced, sound design is immensely cool, player agency is all there within customisations.

As a Star Wars, and space sim fan, this is all I could ask for.