Recent reviews by LuceCat

It feels like someone evaluated what was fun about lethal company, and what wasn't, and competently made a more palatable game based on the premise.

It's solid. Pick it up.

This just felt like a quick and dirty little gamelette meant to capitalize on a growing trend established by better games.

Give it a pass.

Games that do it better;
Lethal Company
R.E.P.O.

Sure, it has friendlier and more in depth game systems, better characters, and the art is so much better it's not even comparable.

But it is only like 30% as degenerate as CoC I.

Disappointment.

I've really enjoyed it, and I recommend it.

However, it is not the game I thought it was when I bought it. I expected a sandboxy ship building game all about creativity and self-expression. I compared it to games like Space Engineer, Avorion, dwarf fortress, or Empyrion. This is nothing like those games.

Ship pieces are very restrictive. You have a lot of limitations about where you can put things, and how you can build your ship. Now, some of that is gunna make sense and be expected. You want shields near the hull, for instance. Some of it makes no sense, like rocket modules can only have doors on the sides, because the crew has to sit at the bottom. There are a lot of limitations like that, and building things 'correctly' has a pretty huge effect in combat. This means there are way more incorrect ways to build a ship than there are correct ways. I quickly learned I was not playing a build-your-own-cool-ship game. I was playing a puzzle game.

At first, this really annoyed me because I had a ship in my head that I wanted to create. A ship with laser weaponry and powerful shields, something that would feel at home as a star trek federation ship. So I made it, and that ship sucked beyond belief. This is normal when starting a new game. You're supposed to suck at first, so I worked at it. It still sucked. I figured I had to learn more about the game until I could make it work. I read guides online, I played the game for hours and hours and hours. I built other ships with different ideas, learning about what I 'should' be doing from the community. Those ships kicked ass.

So I played for another hundred hours, learning what to do, and what not to do. I made more ships. Those ships kicked even more ass. I looked at my first ship designs, and I knew how to fix them; Throw them out and don't build anything like that. Shields aren't as important as armor. Lasers are kind of bad.

So it wasn't the game I wanted, but it's a game I thoroughly enjoyed in the end.

It's a cool puzzle game, and I've enjoyed the heck out of it.

An accurate simulation of the gig economy.

It's okay.

Pros:
-Everything involving ED-E was very sweet and warmed my heart. You know his parts were written well if they can make me love a floating metal soccer ball who KEEPS RUNNING IN FRONT OF MY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GUN. It really gave me a new appreciation for my already-favorite robot buddy.

-The DLC is fairly challenging in some ways. To anyone doing anything but the most broken builds, you're going to die at least once. I went in fairly unoptimized on purpose, choosing rule of cool over power. I found myself quick-slotting stimpacks and mashing them more than once. Courier's Mile? Freaking deathtrap, but in a good way.

-The level design is pretty good. There are lots of nooks and crannies, the warheads unlocking areas is a neat gimmick, and there are plenty of hidden collectibles to explore, some of which are absolutely worth picking up.

Cons:
-The DLC is too forgiving in some other ways. Some of the hardest difficulty was lugging items around to sell. I ended up gaining 50k in caps from gear, swimming in stimpacks despite using them liberally, and picked up over 40 weapon repair kits from all the supplies laying around. That is... considerably more supplies than I needed to beat the DLC. Obscene.

-The quest design is very bad, to the point they will force you to do something and then finger-wag at you for doing it. Ulysses actually admonishes you, telling you, "Just don't play the DLC bro, that's the moral thing to do" Which is narratively stupid beyond comprehension. Everything is very linear until the end, where you mass-effect pick what color ending you want. Not engaging. Not interesting. Bad.

-The writing is in general pretty poor. Every conversation with Ulysses feels like I'm talking to a Reddit mod. The self-importance and faux intellectualism comes across like it's supposed to feel genuinely impressive. It is not. Ulysses is an unlikable and uninteresting character that is poorly executed.

-This DLC is very short. Compared to Honest Hearts I saw everything there was to see in maybe a third of the time.

TL;DR All-in-all, it's okay with upsides and downsides. I don't think I'd personally recommend it to anyone. If you're completely out of things to do in New Vegas, and you need more, maybe I could recommend it. If you do buy it, just know you're in for an action-packed loot-heavy DLC with poor quests and a poor script.

The best Bethesda game.

By pure coincidence, it was not made by Bethesda.

In the beginning, I made the world. I created a handful of humans. I nurtured them, guided them as they grew into different cultural groups. They expanded, covering the world and filling it full of little human inventions. I watched them grow and mature over thousands of years.

Then, I made a new island, placed a pair of elves on that island and went to bed.

I awoke from my slumber six thousand years later to find all the humans were extinct. The elves had committed genocide. All the human cities had been destroyed and reduced to dust. Their lives, their monuments, their way of life deleted from history.

So I turned into a giant crab and single-handedly crushed every elf on the planet until all sentient life had been destroyed.

Made some more humans and started again. This time, no elves allowed.

First up a warning. This game is for people who like map-painting, turn-waiting, spreadsheet-simulator-type games. If you don't enjoy games like Victoria II, you will not have any fun while playing this game.

With that out of the way, this game absolutely slaps for that kind of vibe.

So what is the game? Aliens are invading the earth. You play the role of an ideology, and the organization that supports it. Your task is to spread your influence, capitalize on the hysteria, gather information, and formulate a plan for dealing with the aliens. Will you submit to them? Resist them? Learn from them? Destroy them? Profit from them? After choosing your ideology at the start of the game, you'll compete with other ideologies to shape the populations of the world to your way of thinking, eventually becoming a powerful international shadow-government. Using that influence, you strike out into space, colonizing it and extracting the planets and asteroids until you can finally, eventually, stand on (semi) equal ground with the aliens.

Try and avoid spoilers, as each faction you play as tells you a little more about the aliens (With loads of confirmation bias!) which unravels a more complete story about who the aliens are, where they came from, what they want, and what happened to bring them to earth.

Still not as good as the Sims 3.

Smaller scale with everything being instanced instead of openworld, but hey they added over a thousand dollars of DLC.