Recent reviews by MeatsOfEvil

Tactical Breach Wizards is a delightful tactical game that's both fun and engaging. The writing is witty and made me laugh a few times. The game scratches that tactical itch perfectly, and it's nice that you can plan out moves and redo turns as needed, making it pretty low-stress for a tactics game. The wizards themselves are a joy to use, and the amount of defenestration is a nice bonus.

Only a few hours into it but everything seems solid, especially as the dev team is pretty small. Combat is responsive, upgrades seem interesting. Story seems minimal so far but for games like this I prefer it that way. Looking forward to seeing more of what Trinity Fusion has to offer.

Early Access Review: Once known only as the "Pokemon with guns game", when this hit early access it turned out to be a fairly standard and chill survival game, with some fun base-building elements and mild factory game influence. The twist on the formula is Pals are used to make your base work, as well as serve as the foundation for combat alongside your third-person shooter player avatar. The "catch them all" mechanic is fun, there's a surprising amount of map to explore, and the technology progression is satisfying. Like riding your first flying pal, or fully automating the production of the early game resources. Breeding is a little arbitrary right now in that you gotta use a third party website to see what the offspring of any two pals will be, but it's fun unlocking new pals long before you'd be able to catch them in the wild, or tactically breeding pals with favorable traits together to make very specialized pals (like extra fast, or a strong fighter, or a productive worker).

Some downsides right now:
-Setting up a base capable of producing cake seems like the most worthwhile goal but you can knock that out pretty early
-Fighting against RNG can make breeding a little frustrating
-Some of the late game activities get really grindy (like grinding up 100+ pals to condense into one super-powered version)
-Once your base gets to be more of a factory, the lack of prioritization or the ability to give direct orders/jobs makes it very hard to control how the pals spend their time
-Gathering ore is cumbersome, basically requiring a dedicated base for itself (and you only get 3 per guild)

Overall though it's an amazing early access launch and if they keep at it, this will be a great game. The early and mid game content is very fun and addicting, and when you get to be an advanced player you can see the limitations of the game in its current state, it's otherwise fairly well polished and stable. Highly recommend.

PowerWash Simulator is an experience. It's hard to tell from gameplay, but you can sort of see it in a Let's Play - the relaxation and calm that is causes in the player. The game saves your progress when you drop in and out so you can play for as long as you want. If you like the idea of making grime gradually disappear until the entire level is sparkling, stop reading and start power washing.

(this review is a bit reactionary due to the launch and initial reception). I've played a heck of a lot of Payday 2, and I understand the tendency to go "WTF, there's fewer heists and features and servers no worky". And yeah, it was a bummer not to be able to play much in the opening week while the devs toiled away fixing the servers. Guess they didn't have several hundred thousand testers available to trial out the servers during QA? (sarcasm). Honestly I'm just gonna refute what I assume are the most likely reasons to hate on the game as is:

The servers: It's a new (for Starbreeze) tech that they needed to use to support crossplay, a decision that makes sense in the long term view of the game so that the community can be equally supported in one pool. During that miserable opening week the devs had hour long livestreams every day keeping people in the loop on what they were doing to fix things, and now I have no trouble playing online at all. They delievred on the fix, it's just a bummer that all the reviews were formed during this outage. I think it's realisitc to give devs some slack launching an online game because that stuff is hard to test to scale and rarely works on launch.

The content relative to Payday 2: The previous game has been developed and supported for 10 years post launch, and they want to give this game the same level of treatment and care going forward. Features will be added as they use the proceeds from heist and cosmetic packs to release free updates and features for everyone. It'd be nice if this were all layered on top of what we have for Payday 2 but it's a new engine and a clean slate and it makes sense for them to release the core product and then add stuff to it over time than to make one big megalith release.

The progression system: I get what they were going for, they want people to experience different playstyles and for your rank to represent more about how much of the game you've seen vs how much farming you've done on particularly profitable heists. It didn't work out, and they are working to update it and I'm sure it'll be better in the future. For now, I'm content to enjoy what's there.

Negatives out of the way, I'm having a lot of fun with this game! I love the new stealth features - it feels a lot more like Hitman (in a good way) than a binary "oops I crossed the invisible line it's shoutout time", and there's a lot of creative freedom now. I'm still getting used to the skill system but there are some interesting synergies to be discovered by combining the buffs between skill rows. I can't put the game down and look forward to watching it grow over time.

11/6/2023 Update: Steam only has thumbs up or thumbs down, which really fails to capture the nuance for a game in active development, especially Desynced as the developers seem very motivated to incorporate community feedback into the DNA of the game as it grows. My original review landed at a place of "I want to play this but it's not ready yet", but I'm changing to a thumbs up because I've seen some of my specific feedback actually get addressed in patch notes since my original review, which I think is a great sign for the long term viability of the game.

My current recommendation if you want an innovative take on the factory game genre is to wishlist and follow along for now. If you can't wait and either don't mind that the game is only really fleshed out in the early game (as noted by the devs), or want to get in on the ground floor with helpful feedback to help the game grow, then go for it. If you prefer to play something more complete and fleshed out, come back later. I think Desynced will be worth it in the long run, even if not quite yet.

To be fair - Satisfactory is still technically "Early Access", but that game is in its final stages of development while Desynced is in early stages and trying to enhance the development pipeline with player input. A little apples vs oranges, but hey I'm doing what I can with the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" options here.

The following is my slightly edited review from when I played around a few patches ago, which the developers responded to and have actually addressed a few of the specific pain points from back then. It's gotten better since then but hopefully the review is still valuable as a reference point for what sort of early access jank you should expect to find if you want to get in at this early stage...

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I really want to like Desynced. The premise is really cool - all the buildings and robots are frames where you can swap different combinations of modular components. Even cooler, one of those components lets you write "behaviors" using a simple drag and drop programming "language". For a long while I had a lot of fun figuring things out, writing new behaviors to optimize things, solve the problems that I'd create with that latest update.

Right now though (9/8/2023) I just can't recommend it, it's too rough around the edges. Behaviors lack some basic functions that are borderline essential for meaningful programs, or just don't work the way you would think they would. Extensive testing will show contradictory results on behaviors that are critical to setting up the pattern you want.

The whole "no belts just bots" thing sounds neat until you're stuck playing the "why won't any robots take this delivery" game. The more you try to optimize it, the more you run into weird stuff like storage containers reserving all of the inventory slots for deliveries that never happen, blocking the interactions that you're trying to set up.

After searching the reddit, wiki and YouTube I've given up getting the drones (tiny robots) to play nice. Granted I had some specific edge cases in mind like trying to get drones to build up on terrain that the normal robots couldn't reach, but it turned into this battle royale between me, the UI, and robots trying to take on impossible deliveries while the drones stubbornly stayed in their launcher.

The game's got great potential, but currently it needs some polish and TLC. If you're looking for a complete and fully functional experience then I'd say keep an eye on this one but maybe don't buy it just yet. If you're willing to deal with jank to get to experience that early innovation stage of the development then go ahead, you'll have fun. Just make good use of the game's built-in reporting tool to give specific and detailed feedback to help the devs along.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. I've had two incomplete playthroughs.

The first had ironman mode on. Coming from an XCOM background I thought this would be a fun way to play - lose a character, have to fight on without them later. Turns out, what this actually means is if any story characters (which are almost always present) die in a mission, the entire campaign ends. That was the end of my first run.

My second run ended when I was deleting some potential recruits from the recruit tab (DO NOT DO THIS!!!!), as they were lower level than my current roster so I figured why not. Well I found out why not. The very next side mission required a team larger than I was now capable of producing. The mission is not skippable, there is no autosave before I made my roster mistake, and there is no way to add recruits. I literally lost this campaign by clicking some wrong options in a menu.

It's otherwise fun! But I can only have so many runs get bricked by game-breaking oversights before I give up.

Simply incredible. One of the best games I've ever played, and I was 5 years late to the party. DLC is even better than the base game.

This game... I almost don't even have the words. The graphics are pretty, the gameplay is fun, the story is engaging. But it's so much more than that. It challenged everything I know about videogames, and even made me question the meaning of life itself. It's one of three games (along with Mass Effect 3, and The Walking Dead) to make me cry, EVER. What's more, this story would never have worked in any medium other than a videogame. It's a unique story, that you owe it to yourself to experience.

This game is fantastic. The demo was amazing too (and separate from the main game, worth playing on its own). This game will mess with your head in ways that you never thought possible. And then revel in the way it's messing with your head. Which will make your head explode. To the delight of the game.