Recent reviews by Maple

What a whimsical concept. There are definitely some parts that are a little squirrelly, such as the takedown camera clipping through walls if you're too close to the wall. I've also managed to fall out of the map on one occasion. It could also *really* stand to have auto-saves. But the platforming and puzzles are quite solid and I'm having a blast!

Very cute, very chill little game. Build up an adorable little garden for your bunnies.

Only downside right now - despite having Steam Cloud support listed, it is not properly implemented. I changed computers and my progress did not come with me (and my Steam Cloud, even with manually triggered syncing, continually lists at 0 bytes uploaded). But that's not the worst thing, I was able to at least pull my saves in a traditional manner with a thumb drive and move them between my computers manually.

Latest Review:
Once again the developers of an amazing sci-fi action-fantasy PVE with great potential, show that they have no clue how to balance a PVE game.

The developers look at the stats, see that there is one gun everyone is having fun with (read: is the only gun that functions in high-level content) and nerf the ♥♥♥♥ out of it. Instead of improving the weapons that suck, they make the weapons that feel good feel like crap.

To the Arrowhead team - stop with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nerfs. Look at the underplayed weapons, and address fixing why *those* weapons suck, rather than forcing suck onto anything and everything that has an iota of utility. You folks are getting cause and effect way ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ backwards and it's actively harming the game.

Prior review:

I'm cautiously optimistic. Sony recently reversed the mandatory PSN requirement, which is a good thing. If you're a new player looking to buy the game still make sure to do your research and ensure that they have not dropped any new draconian policies.

The game itself is super good fun, especially if you have friends to play with regularly. The core gameplay right now involves two factions, one of which is highly reminiscent of Terminator 2, and the other reminiscent of Starship Troopers. There are hints of a third faction dropping in the near future. Based on the details I'm hopeful they will be Predator inspired!

Avoid playing IdleOn at all costs.

Early in its development IdleOn was kind of cute. Unlike a lot of games in its genre it used to be possible to do just about everything that matters without having to P2W, because you could grind the premium currency in-game.

Once the developer had enough players on the sunk-cost fallacy mindset, a ridiculously exploitative P2W gatcha mechanic was added to the game via "Pet Followers".

Pet followers:
- Have exceptionally rare pets that offer absolutely game changing mechanics (example: having all of the major in-game buffs active at once, instead of the normal gameplay of having to constantly pick just a small handful the best ones based on what activity you are doing).
- These rare game changing pets are going to rotate out and be unavailable in the future per the developer. This is clearly to drive up Fear Of Missing Out on the good buffs.
- Can only be rolled once a week for free, which means even if you could spend years trying (and you can't due to the rotation), you are almost certainly never going get the rare ones for free.
- Can be rolled again and again for a new premium currency (that is only available for real world cash). This means players who want the strong buffs will need to spend hundreds (though statically likely they will spend thousands) of dollars to unlock them before they're gone.
- The developer has stated that in the future they will be tradable, BUT ONLY THE ONES ACQUIRED THROUGH PAID CURRENCY!

I used to play this game on my phone and use my accumulated Google Play currency to give the developer money, since it was a nice little game made by one developer, and it was so successfully avoiding all of the highly predatory practices normally found in the genre. I wanted to support the developer. Because I played a lot on my phone, Steam shows a lot fewer hours than I've truly played. However the "Pet Ffollowers" explanation goes full on exploitative money-grab gatcha, demanding all of the money from the game's whales who have strong sunk-cost fallacy at this point in time.

Unless something major changes I'm done with this game, and you should avoid it too.

Teardown is devilishly great fun. Planning the routes takes some thought and a good amount of ridiculous destruction. I love it when a plan comes together.

Note: This review was written in Early Access

I really want to like Satisfactory better. But there's just some headache inducing factors.

Crafting items takes more "hammers" for a more complex item. Hammers just cost you time sitting there staring at the crafting bench as a little noise plays. First of all the scaling just makes making more items tedious rather than anything - the complexity of the material cost is already enough of a hindrance to make late tier items hard to craft, this just doubles down on how tedious it is. I understand it's to make the crafting bench less glamorous in late game - but if you're desperately trying to use it to build items to fix a problem you shouldn't have to find alternative entertainment on top of that.

Additionally: Give me a "no noise" option on the crafting bench to toggle the building sounds when I'm sitting there. I'm going to hear those stupid noises in my sleep.

Some of the mechanics are actually rather fun to figure out - the base building is fairly forgiving at first. The conveyor belts take some getting used to but the since deconstructing items gives you the full price back, the stakes are low enough some early base revision actually feels fun, as you feel refreshed when things start to make sense.

Then you reach fluid mechanics. Those gave me such a headache I have quit playing the game and will likely not return until a later update. The UI is incomprehensible at first - you see that the pipes are flowing but the water isn't going in the right location. So I've read multiple guides, watched about an hour of youtube videos - and I'm still struggling with getting plumbing to work right on my 4 coal generators. One or another keeps glugging- even though I have pumps and have followed every little trick for balancing my water. I am fed up with trying to sort it out and I am going to spend my time elsewhere.

The last annoyances I think will be fixed in due time as they progress on development. Trying to lay out the factory while standing inside of the factory is painful at best and disorganized at worst. A feature to do some sort of "blueprint" where you can prefab and place common sections would be a huge help. A "top down" camera mode of some sort (with drones) when building would help make it easier. More tools to help me analyze my overall factory would also help - inputs and outputs and overviews of where I'm burning more resources than gaining. But these all seem like pretty obvious ones that will likely get fixed during development.

Kill It With Fire is a wonderful catharsis.

It's not super difficult. The spiders can do annoying things to you, and run away, but they cannot truly harm or kill you. Yet it's a blast! It took me around 9 hours to get to the end of the plot, and even then I haven't touched all of the modifiers or found all the secrets - and I'm excited to go back for that content.

Kill It With Fire is a unique energy. The cartoonishly over-the-top violent energy is a beautiful chaos to behold. The collectables and challenges really add a lot to keep it fun and addictive despite the spiders themselves posing little to no threat.

I really really wanted to like Deep Rock Galactic more than I did. I even think I might need to give it a second chance in the future, preferably with a friend with experience in Deep Rock Galactic. But my initial impressions are total disappointment.

My hope for the game was a focus on wave based combat with a small focus on resource gathering. That is what the videos led me to believe. However it's more of a heavy emphasis on cave exploration and mining with occasional swarms of enemies to mix it up. It just felt like I was playing Minecraft with guns and a bad flashlight. The mines were winding and confusing and it took near an hour for 3 people to find some basic resources we were tasked to gather. It left me wanting to play Minecraft and I haven't touched that game in nearly a decade.

Also I could not find much to redeem the hub world. It's kind of cute, but it doesn't help immersion. It's terrible from a gameplay and usability perspective especially for new users. After repeatedly trying to convey that character select is "the yellow computer with the red keyboard" we realized there are multiple yellow computers with red keyboards. Apparently in the far flung future you can have a spaceship, but networked computers are just right out. Please just give players a proper menu-based menu as an option so we're not playing "why didn't you know that you could do that in base?"

The one thing that really shined was the personality. The dwarves and their mining gear definitely covey a convincing atmosphere of rough-and-tumble space mining.

All in all if you have a friend who already plays the hell out of this game - talk to them, pick their brain, and get them to play with you. You might be able to have a good time that way. If you're a new player looking for something deep and interesting to unravel on your own - look elsewhere. It's convoluted with almost no guidance or conveyance. There was no feel good moment of "figuring it out". If resource grinds with multiple alien named substances that just appear to be palate-swaps puts a bad taste in your mouth, definitely steer clear.

I do not like Hollow Knight. I think the gameplay is extremely slow, boring, and tedious. It looks like there is probably something very endearing about late-game. But over two hours in and this game is so slow and so empty. I don't feel like the game is progressing despite having found three or four areas! Combat is a chore, a tedious chore.

The plus side is the graphics are gorgeous.

What's most annoying is it took about 2 hours to realize how empty and boring and slow and poorly designed this game is. So now Steam is trying to fight me over a refund. Stay away!

This game is an interesting concept piece, but falls utterly flat on it's face. Everything about the game is in need of polish, from an awful UI (for such an extremely sparse UI as it is), to intentionally poor control layout, to the combination of these factors exacerbating its brutal difficulty. It's impressive how such a simple game can fail on so many levels.

The game is brutal in it's difficulty. Not because the enemies can kill you with a single hit, or that they greatly outnumber you, or that you have very limited ammo, or that it's intentionally difficult to aim your weapon properly, or that some enemies appear to be able to absorb prodigious amounts of ammo for little to no good reason. No, the biggest difficulty creator is the fact that there is no rhyme or reason to the control layout beyond the normal movement and aiming and firing controls. Yes, the game is supposed to have a difficult mechanic of maintaining your weapon. But the button placements make no sense - they neither emulate the firearm that you are using, nor are they set up in a way that encourages a logical pattern. They're just generally clustered around the WASD keys like the developer just slapped them down whenever he thought of a new feature that guns have that he had yet to implement.

The only hook into the plot (what little plot there appears be) is from audio tapes that have a poor voice over that you may or may not find near the beginning of your adventure. There is nothing that will make you feel like you have a need to complete the plot, other than any intrinsic desire you may still harbor for completing the game for the sake of completion alone.

Also, a very special frustration that I managed to encounter is the fact that the game offers no way to reset one's controls to the defaults, but the UI that gives you control hints entirely works on having the default controls. So if you change your controls you'll either need to give up on using the tutorial UI, or find them online (at the time I write this I was incapable of finding them listed), or delete your registry keys from Windows so the game is forced into returning your defaults to you.

The only people who should buy this game are the heedlessly masochistic and the curious game developers who want to explore the concept and how not to approach it. Even then, wait until it's on sale.