Recent reviews by LungJuice

pretty good imo, the far end game can be lacking for some people and the pvp may not be varied enough for people who just want to do that all day. But for everyone else it is great.

The Following was written by me some months ago in MS excel (late October???) shortly before I stopped playing starfield for new world season 3 and other games. It is just a bunch of somewhat organised dot points on things I have noted and issues I have with the game, not a proper review. And over 1800 words long, which I haven’t written so much in a long time wtf.
Then just before I published it now in December, I added some additional items to the bottom with a couple duplicates, and the ice cream analogy.
BUt I cant really recommend this game to any person without a significant interview process and/or a free demo for them to try first, sorry
The entire thing is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oHFwKT_Fh5mpO8m40Rq6ex30VJHG4nEtZzc8Ou0Ze0k/edit?usp=sharing
---------
My dumb ice cream analogy of TES + starfield (sadly I could never get into the fantasy of the fallout series, everything being ruined by nukes just deflates my excitement/fun I guess)
--Morrowind 3 flavours of icecream , fudge, berry-ish flavour (that is a bit tart like gelato) and butterscotch or something, but the cone is basic yet functional (but cliff racing mosquitos will try and bite you every 30 secs while you eat it while the locals and guards call you nwah if they walk past you)
--Oblivion really nice vanilla bean but has more and more chunks of ice in it the further you eat into the cone / go up in levels (which obscuros OOO mod fixes effectively), Vanilla wafer cone
--Skyrim vanilla and raspberry flavour blended and dyed blue, like those blue heaven milkshakes, still vanilla cone that became a chocolate cone with later official updates + SkyUI
--Starfield has some nice things sprinkled in like skittles and cookies/whatever in it but the icecream part itself is just unflavoured and maybe unsweeted plain icecream, not even vanilla, extra big vanilla wafer cone
--Fallout 3, I dunno, matcha green tea?
--Fallout 4 Peach Tea???
-------
The start of the list below:

the public seemed to be expecting more of a space fantasy RPG rather than a sci fi RPG
hence people are sad by the amount of barren boring planets (and as mentioned below struggle to find interesting places reliably because most people don’t scan every planet and look at the planet stats to guess what it may look like on the surface), and then disappointed again when all the planets in the galaxy have evidence of human activity every km or less making the exploring the unknown seem a bit ridiculous
Starfield issues:
user issues:

-players who are looking for interesting places to fight enemies on planets don’t know how to avoid the boring barren rocks with very distant randomly generated buildings/caves/dungeons
--- game needed to tutorialise the "three dots on a planet thing means there are points of interest" at all as well as have a "signals found" thing under the planet name when you haver over it like Spore. Spore made it very clear when a planet had civilisation/loot/event on it via blue (intelligent life) or yellow (special loot or pirate ambush) radio waves, starfield not so much unless you are aware of the three dots thing, which reddit told me about
(the above is assuming that the 3 dot planets with the points of interests are actually hand made points of interest with potential side quests etc. and not also procedurally generated buildings)

- many side quests in NA city are just about talking to people and activating buttons etc. certainly doesn’t appeal to everyone, skyrim sidequests are more combat adjacent for the most part

-bullet sponge humans in shooting games just never feels good
- elite enemies red bar health bars wasn’t very intuitive for me at first, didn’t realise they were segmented until looking at screen closely. The segmented red bars kind of blend together for me, might be just my vision
-aliens kinda all look the same/similar as weird reptile/lizards/insects at first glance lost of green/brown colouring on them too, doesn’t appear to be any earth animals, or anything like mammals/fur covered creatures, no small critters except bugs, I have seen trees making bird noises but not birds in them, no life in New Atlantis ponds etc. I would have expected more animals to have been exported off earth somewhere, or at least genebanks made before people departed earth for cloning later on since synthetic lab grown meat exists
---- Even fish would be nice but I have yet to encounter a coastline
-99% of intelligent enemy variety is only humans with gun in a few different coloured uniforms, the last 1% is MAIN QUEST SPOILER
- maybe 2 perk points per level would have been better because it feels like you need at least 30 points spent to unlock and power up things if you are trying to do a bit of every tree, making your ship good, making your ground shooting good, outpost stuff etc.
---- would upset the progression speed of each tree a bit, so make sure you cant choose from the same tree twice in a row?
- outpost building could really use a free mouse mode to select stuff instead of the WASD moving the cursor making it hard to select wires etc. I suspect it is a controller thing first, like the UI
- beginning storage is rough, players want to intuitively carry all the valuables in a dungeon to sell them, but the vendors don’t have enough money much of the time (also why are the atms I hacked in game months ago still got the error screen huh?)
--- this makes the need for a value/weight ratio info mod very important- one of those essential mods IMO
------Somehow a Starfield inventory fix mod is already out with all the stats you could need, nice. (I want it slightly less packed though, like 15% thicker rows)
---------No value/weight for the in world item hover yet, waiting ont the mod
- why doesn’t my dream home trait house have a icon on it like the outposts do, now I have to remember where Nesoi is every time I go away for a while
---- Dream Home Location: Olympus System: Planet Nesoi, East of Alpha Centauri, South of Cheyenne
- cant get rid of unwanted landing zones, could intentionally troll myself by landing everywhere possibly could on a planet to fill it with icons
--- it kind of happens unintentionally by just looking for resources or a perfect multi biome outpost spot

feeling strong pressure by the game design to "need" to invest quite a bit into everything
(skyrim on the other hand let you be a successful warrior without ever touching magic or stealth/ranged)
partly exacerbated by needing to be decent enough at ship combat in terms of player skill and ship gear to make it between planets and locations of interest where you might be fighting in FPS mode anyway
my felt the need for minimum skill point investment into the trees table
how many skill points I felt I needed to invest into each tree

phys social combat sci tech with crew total skill points estimate tech solo/no crew skills
min 12 12 16 20 12 72 20+
preferrred 40 24 40 48 24 176 40+
max all 64 64 68 64 68 328

in skyrim/tes I was happy to focus on other skill trees/playstyles after playing the game a lot
in starfield not so much, felt weak or missing out on stuff even more so if choosing to not use a crew for ship functions

need a separate difficulty slider for ship combat and fps combat, ship to ship combat in 3d space doesn’t come easy to most people, higher skill ceiling to dodge etc
really skinny scroll bars/quantity selectors for the mouse to grab on, wtf
UI in general for PC is rough, Somehow I liked morrowinds more
the local map obviously, both for cities but also local area biomes would be nice
kind of hard to find at long range the minerals you want for bases, want longer range on that, or a better preview from orbit when choosing a spot of how much of each type there is (a source of my planet landing zone clutter on the map for some planets)
mounts/vehicles would have been fine to add the game IMO, the distance from landing artea to edge is like 3.9kms,

STEAM review character limit nearly reached

A great second screen micro then macro management game. New activities you unlock need to be micro'd for a while (usually 8 or 250-400 times) at which point they can be automated at a chosen priority level.
New chapters of game content come out every month or so.
This thing could probably run on a Nintendo Switch pretty easy as it has no fancy graphics beyond progress bars, a handful of icons and a scrolling log of story item progression.

Excellent execution on the short film in all aspects
Only con is that it doesnt have 1080p but that isn't needed or really helpful here since it would could just start to be in conflict with the style of the film at that point. Everything was more than clear enough anyway

The first noob pack is good value (borderline essential after a week or two if you can afford it), and so is the next one, the third one (ascended ascended pack) also is good but the value starts to taper off here, the fourth is hardly essential.
Join the discord and read the channel pins for best progression advice

Just as good as the one from the old days, if not better. The hardest AI is said to not cheat anymore too

Pretty good resource management game, I got this thing when it was v0.6 on their website and paid extra for some feature that may now be made standard (the extra side mission type stuff). Still worth it. If you are unsure of what to do next then just look at your research

Stages of Factorio: New game > Every mineral deposit is too far away > mostly self sufficient mining > self sufficient electrical powered mining and coal smelting > go bigger in scale > finally start researching or be ended by the natives > get heavy armour and better guns > "greet" the natives > .... eventually start taking all the resources and construction logistics robots on many things, factories making factories etc. .... full weapon and power armour upgrades, destroy the world with the shotgun

Far too much fun for a dollar.
Probably not as much fun if you aren't doing this in co-op.
176.4MB download size when I grabbed it.

Lots of silly gore and pigs, the paintball gun and top-notch jokes were welcome discoveries.
I suspect that quite a few of the assets are free ones.
First time I ran it pressing F12 to screenshot and the steam overlay were not working, I havent tried after a relaunch.

Back to the farm for me!

Loads of content in this game if you try even just a little bit. Stacks more hours of gameplay if you have extra objectives like: explore everything and have a world where there is a chest with at least one of every item (not including modifiers). If you get OCD and want to have a FULL chest (or 2) of every item then you should really max out your gear and start digging up the entire worlds.

Additionally I've recently spent many hours playing with all the 1.2 stuff (offline though because of location) for the first time.
ORIGINALY REVIEW: "I really liked the game, but I couldn't find the stupid Whoopie Cushion.", 2011-12-28.

Seriously not a single whoopie cuchion for me, ever. I'm going to just have to make a solid plock of dirt that fills the entire screen with myself in the middle and just kill worms for a few hours. :(