Recent reviews by Comrade Corvid

Animal Crossing with drugs.

Certainly the most enjoyable MMO I've played in years. The main story is great, actually up there among some of my favorite games in the whole Final Fantasy series. Heavensward's story alone is outstanding. As an MMO, it's a tab-targeting system, much like WoW, only a fair bit slower-paced. In exchange for this slower pace comes a lot more fight mechanics to deal with, and that keeps fights exciting when you're dodging all kinds of attacks and maneuvering around the areas. The duty roulette system works wondrously for matchmaking groups together, which is necessary because you absolutely have to do dungeons in order to progress through the main story. To keep plenty of players available for players who are playing through the story, it scales the party to the dungeon's level so as long as everyone is at the minimum level required to run it and is attuned, you can play a pretty wide variety of instances instead of just doing the same endgame dungeons over and over or being stuck doing the dungeons which are appropriate for the particular level you're at. Crafting is still a mystery to me in many ways, but a fun one to say the least. By far the richest crafting system I've seen in an MMO. The community is friendly and helpful all around. I can count on one hand the unpleasant interactions I've had and even those were mild annoyances at worst.

I came from WoW to this and see no reason to go back unless you're just a PvP addict, which isn't this game's thing, so to speak.

I've been holding off on reviewing this game for about a week now, but just about all my spare time I've had outside of work has been devoted to it. Coming off a run through all of Theme Hospital about a month back, this game's predecessor is fresh in my mind and it's good to get this straight right away--there's next to no way to avoid comparing this game to Theme Hospital and that's half the point of its existence. This game is meant to be a modern version of TH and in that aspect, I think it shines marvelously.

The overall atmosphere is incredibly similar in spirit. Puns a plenty and dry PA announcements issuing warnings that a fire drill is in effect due to an actual fire and other surreal phrases fill the game with the same vivid amusement that the original had going for it. The music is fun, if repetitive. I would say the exact same thing about TH. I adore playing games like this because I can consume podcasts en masse while playing them, so in all honesty, I've had the music off for a good bit of my playtime. That said, I found it charming enough while I listened to it and I enjoyed the addition of the DJs as a source of humor and character. The art style is pleasing to me and it seems to have been designed to be something which can look nice without being too strenuous on hardware and without looking terribly outdated in a few years. Look at some tycoon games from the early to mid 00s then look at the original Theme Hospital or Roller Coaster Tycoon. I'd personally pick the older ones even though they weren't graphicaly mind-blowing for their times. It might have been neat to see RCT make the transition to 3D, but we just weren't at a point yet when 3D could age that well in those kinds of games. That they played it safe with pretty simple textures in this seems to have been fairly intentional and the sort of claymation art style is a lot more pleasant to look at than some of the putrid character models of say, any of the Cat Daddy Games builders/simulations from the mid 00s.

TPH is pretty difficult all around. TH wasn't exactly a pushover, but if you really set your mind to it, you could figure out a formula that would work on most levels without too much of a headache. I don't have any issue with the game being difficult, but the cause of much of the difficulty in TPH seems largely unintentional to me. The AI pathing is pretty rough. That's probably the biggest issue here. Staff and patients go about their business in incredibly unusual and inefficient manners, walking all the way across the hospital to go to a bathroom when there was an empty one right next to them to start with. I've had a much easier time handling bottlenecks by ensuring that I have a minimal amount of thin hallways, but they still seem unavoidable at times.

TH and TPH both have more or less the same Reception->GP->Diagnosis->GP->Treatment procedure and you would think following the same formula for successful hospital flow in TH would carry over to this game. But something doesn't seem right with it, and I can't quite place it from just tinkering with layouts myself yet. Ordinarily, I would have several GPs at the main entrance followed by a diagnosis area with more GPs offices in it followed by a treatment area. To some extent, I have this working, but from what I can tell so far, the main cause of death is all the walking back and forth from GP to diagnosis that patients have to do before they can be treated. A big contributing factor to this is also the issue with patients wandering off while queueing to satisfy various needs while still maintaining their place in the queue. Some solutions: let it continue and deal with the inevitable ghost epidemic, micromanage every single office queue, or remove all distractions, which will make things move smoothly at the cost of patient satisfaction. I can't exactly recall how queues work in TH, admittedly because I just never really ran into this sort of problem that often to the point of crippling my hospital, but as far as I recall, wandering away to go to the restroom seemed to give up patients' current spots in queues. I could be very wrong about this, however.

It's extremely easy to become overwhelmed due to the way the reputation system works in tandem with your patient count. You may have issues early on if you build too much too quickly because you simply won't have a high enough reputation/patient count to sustain yourself. Later on, you may be unable to handle the hoards of patients swarming in. Your primary methods of controlling reputation are to decrease it by increasing prices and to increase it with marketing (a welcome new addition which I will expand on a bit later). I've had some success with keeping prices raised up somewhat while utilizing marketing to level my reputation back out, but there's a very weird point at which patients will simply refuse to pay for services, which seems to vary wildly. I've had them go for extended periods happily paying 1.5 times the base rate and had them refuse to pay at just a 10% increase. This may be some degree of ignorance on my part, which is fine with me since learning how these things work is half the fun sometimes.

It's very nice to see nurses serving a much broader assortment of roles instead of the pitiful three functions they had in the original game with doctors operating nearly every room. So far in this game, I've either had a few more nurses or a pretty much even balance between doctors and nurses, but this has varied depending on what treatment rooms I've focused on for each level. Receptionists no longer exist as statues which are permanently glued to their desks, doomed to the eternal suffering of admitting patients with no breaks. They now exist as fully-fledged staff members with needs and skills to learn. About that; every staff type has various skills which may be trained and the training system is far more robust than before. Where TH was simply a matter of making your training room into an efficient fully-skilled consultant factory, you have a lot of variation of skills in this game, and added challenge is found in the need to have different skills for different roles. A doctor trained in diagnosis might not be the best choice for a treatment room and vice versa. I'm especially fond of this addition to the game, although I can totally understand it not being everyone's cup of tea since it adds a lot of micromanagement to what was formerly something you could get by with barely paying any attention to after training your first fully-skilled consultant.

There is now a sense of connectivity between all of your hospitals in unlocked items, which are unlocked in whatever order you please by means of in-game currency, and with research now carrying over to new hospitals, which is welcome considering how much more research there is to deal with now (although to some extent, the research is simplified by removing individual drug research and whatnot). I've yet to unlock everything, but I suppose after you do so research simply becomes a means of generating additional income.

Some miscellaneous comments: Room templates would be a VERY welcome addition to the game, and one which probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement. I absolutely think that there is some need to keep queues from stalling due to patients' wandering off without having to sit there and watch each room. There seems to have been a lot of fuss over the lack of a sandbox mode, which would be welcome, but isn't something I feel some absolute need for. I personally find the epidemics in this game to be mind-numbingly frustrating and overly long games of Where's Waldo, although they are actually challenging compared to the relatively easy ones presented in TH.

Conclusion: I love this game, even with its flaws. Would I recommend paying 35 bucks for it? Probably not, but I think it's justifiable if you REALLY want another Theme Hospital in your life.

One time I was playing this over LAN with friends and my friend fell asleep on his laptop and nuked himself.

Fallout 4 is a video game-a good one, really. It's just not much of a Fallout game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orngkcOM3Mg

I highly approve of Moonbase Alpha.

An old favorite of mine. I distinctly remember just seeing this on an EB Games shelf when I was 14. I loved the box art at first glance and upon further inspection, I discovered that this game involved the building of a secret island lair, from which countless dastardly schemes could be unleashed upon the world. "Perfect," said young Myself. The only reason I really remember this experience was because the oldest woman I have ever seen working at a video game store tried to get me to show her some form of ID because it was rated Teen. I told her I was fourteen years old and I didn't know of any kids my age who had IDs who weren't sheltered because I didn't know any of these kids because they were sheltered and sat at home playing games about learning and stuff and living life like an inspirational poster, only to dream secretly at night of escape and perhaps even breasts or penises or whatever body parts they learned to like.

Anyway, I bought this game, took it home and installed it and it ran horribly on my Compaq from the dark ages. I had what fun I could with it barely functioning, but ultimately it got tossed aside for a while UNTIL I GOT A DESKTOP THAT DIDN'T HAVE WINDOWS ME ON IT. I spent days installing games that I once thought were meant to run with the in-game models either upside down or simply invisible for the first time in double digit frames and with all of their visual effects present. I made my way through the pile and then suddenly arrived at this little gem from the past. I reinstalled it and away I went into my second world domination career.

My apologies for the story. Moving onto the game, you are tasked with the objective of constructing a hidden lair somewhere on some unknown island (where bumbling tourists and slightly less bumbling secret agents happen to wander to) with the intent of world domination. You must start smaller, however, and your options slowly unfold for you as you progress. It's pretty much Dungeon Keeper in a Bond movie setting. Over time you will research new rooms and equipment to further your schemes. Unfortunately, over time your enemies will become much less forgiving as well. You will eventually have to build a front, an island hotel to lure tourists in until they grow bored and leave. You will have to capture skilled individuals to train specialized minions. But most importantly, you will carry out evil deeds from your control center.

This brings us to the world domination portion of the game. This is basically a view of the globe on which you will place minion pieces used for stealing cash for your lair, plotting new heists and whatnot, and carrying out said shenanigans. These plots range from stealing the Eifel Tower to clubbing seals and to obliterating the city of Nashville, Tennessee, thus eliminating country music from the world; your singular act of goodwill throughout the course of the game. It's bursting with humor, much of it slapstick or parodic of spy fiction in general. If that's not your thing, you may not enjoy the game so much, but me? I can't get enough of it. I will say, however, that this is probably where the game struggles most. Playing from this sort of board game-like perspective can become pretty monotonous at times and you ultimately just spend a lot of time waiting. You have to keep a near constant check on it near the end of the game and this becomes nerve-wrecking once you're being bombarded by meddlesome agents at your home base at all hours of the day. Something in the interface to show a sort of minimized view of the information this screen provides during base construction/defense would have been nice.

The game is pretty tricky to figure out and will probably take a few practice runs to get the hang of before you can really start progressing. I'd say the first half or so of the game is learning all the intricacies where the second half is more of a "here's an island, go wild and work towards this ultimate goal" sort of thing. This is an objective-based game and there isn't much point to just letting your base idly run without moving forward in the story a bit. In that aspect, it's not particularly open-ended and this actually does restrict it quite a bit. Don't go in expecting any sort of free mode. There will be none of that. Of course, if you want, you can totally give yourself all the items and a ton of cash and just make your island into an insane deathtrap for incoming agents.

Which brings me to one of the game's strongest features: its base construction. You have a limited space in which to build your island stronghold and there isn't really one way you have to go about it. This is where the game most certainly gives you the most freedom. You can opt to have a very open base, with all of your rooms sort of running into one another for easy maneuvering. Or you can take the route of twisting, tight corridors chock full of traps both deadly and confusing to the enemy (or even your own minions if they're not careful). Your goal in base construction is more or less to keep your heat-generating rooms as far away from the entrance as possible, while keeping things like minion barracks and mess halls towards the front. Or you can always just fill the entrance corridor with flame pits and slaughter every intruder before they even get a chance to step through the door. The AI is just smart enough to keep you on your toes, yet dumb enough to get themselves into some silly predicaments fairly often. About the AI, though, it should be noted that your minions are not directly controllable while in your base (apart from your avatar and your handful of main henchmen), and this can lead to some awkward situations, often involving their unnecessary deaths or dismemberment.

I could ramble about this game for a good while, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head that's worth mentioning. I would like to lay out some pros and cons, I suppose:

+Wonderful base building; again, traps are a load of fun to play with
+Great art direction and style; TF2 reminded me of this when I first saw it
+Superb music
+Lots of humor, though this is always subjective
+Tough, but very satisfying to succeed at
+Polish, polish, polish. I don't know of very many glaring bugs in the game

-World domination feels kind of like playing a board game, which may not be what you'd expect from this and is also fairly monotonous/stressful as it almost always eats away your minions
-Fairly steep learning curve. Some objectives are relatively unclear in their descriptions
-Minion AI often leaves a lot to be desired. There is a henchman that will more or less destroy your base if he enters combat

Would I recommend it? You bet. Almost every flaw present here can be looked past pretty easily. I know fun is a bad word, but at the end of the day, this game supplies loads of it.

If you're into physics sandboxes, then that alone should be a decent enough reason to purchase this. It's in its early stages and is already pretty polished considering that. New parts and features are being added relatively frequently as of this writing. The game is pretty simple as of now. I can see it expanding decently in the future. Right now, though, it's a neat physics sandbox where you make siege engines, or at least something like them. Your objectives are usually quite simple: kill all the people/destroy all the buildings/get to point B somehow. The later levels are pretty well thought-out, I'd say, and while most of the levels are pretty simple, it's fun to try to figure out unnecessarily complicated methods through which to achieve success in them. You COULD just slam into the building on the first level. Or you could build a better mouse trap, as they say.

Other notes: It's nice that you have a sort of cheating system at your disposal if you so choose, though you will not receive credit for the levels if you opt to use it. This allows you to build ludicrous devices and melt your PC. You can make your device indestructable, which can lead to some interesting anomalies, as well as ignite objects with a click of the mouse. Neat. If I had anything to complain about here, it's that it doesn't come across as the most well-optimized game. My PC isn't gonna blow everything out of the water, but it's no slouch either, and while I must admit that most of my creations are pretty silly and huge, even some of my more sensible machines can bottom the framerate out. That said, I get the feeling that this will be worked on at some point in the game's continuing development.

Long story short: buy it, it's cheap, you can destroy sheep with giant sawblade bulldozers.

It's essentially Paper Mario with South Park characters - and this is a good thing, mind you. A very good thing indeed. If you're a fan of the show and you like RPGs you will almost certainly enjoy this game. The humor is top-notch, balancing original humor and references to the show very well, and it plays excellently. On the other hand, it is very short. I can't imagine anyone getting more than fifteen hours out of a playthrough. I took about twelve hours and that included countless distractions. The game is also very easy, save for a few optional boss fights. There is a difficulty setting, though I didn't fiddle with it much. Considering it's an Obsidian game, it's also very polished. The only problem I ever ran into was the occasional flickering of the main character model in cutscenes.

One note: it is admittedly a bit expensive, considering the length and amount of content. I probably wouldn't have gotten it myself if I hadn't had some Steam credit lying about uselessly. I would probably recommend waiting for a price drop for anyone but the most hardcore of South Park fans, who have probably already bought the game in the first place.