Recent reviews by [NN] MyChrysalis

As of making this review, I cannot suggest getting this game, even on sale.

ASA does have a few advantages over ASE (Ark: Survival Evolved) in that it's much prettier graphically, there's a few UI tweaks that made navigating the menus easier and I liked the "preview a server" feature in which you can see what specific mods are installed on a server before joining (instead of using external websites for information), but that's about it.

Instead, ASA has many disadvantages such as groundbreaking bugs returning to ASA that have been squashed in ASE, extreme issues with trying to maintain a stable frame rate (some ingame options help, but you're forced to use console commands to disable things like clouds for more performance), crashing and one of my big gripes: "Premium Mods".
(Note: I would HAPPILY support a mod dev for using their mods - and I have done so for some ASE mods like Primal Fear and even Annunaki Genesis/Extinction Core back in the day - however I don't trust doing it through the game itself because there's a huge chance that ASA is taking a cut of the profits that should go to the mod devs instead)

Maybe some time in the future, this could be worth it, but as of early 2025, I can't say yes right now.

TL;DR - Hated the game on release, considered a refund and ignored it for a while. Came back this year, felt a completely different vibe and so it deserves Labour of Love IMO.

Bought this game on release in 2016, probably one of my biggest regrets of a purchase at the time and I despised No Mans Sky (NMS) for years, hating the game so much that after about three or four hours of play, I was truly considering a refund, but completely forgot to finalise the refund and get my money back.

However...

NMS managed to pull an entire 180 on the gaming world and went from Overwhelmingly Negative to now Very Positive thanks to constantly updating, listening to feedback and truly aiming to "rewrite the wrongs of the past". I enjoyed my ~120 hours going from galaxy to galaxy, discovering my own, enjoying the little trials and missions and even immersing myself into the story which was pretty neat.

I'm glad that I forgot about this for a while so that I came back with a not-so jaded mindset to see the new feeling and love it has now. I voted for Labour of Love in the Steam Awards because I think this truly deserves it. Well Done Hello Games.

A nice little game to come back to from time to time when I feel like it. Gotta keep racing.

Furry Battlefield best sums this game up.

Didn't play for long during the beta, but I certainly had mixed feelings. There's some things that really badly need tweaked such as the scout snipers wallhack ability being a little unfair (I feel it should only notify the sniper themself OR a very short range of nearby teammates, rather than giving away my position globally) and the bulls explosive weapon feels a bit harsh, but other than that, I had some fun. Maybe throw in a leaver penalty because getting forced into in-progress and losing substantially (1000+ to ~100 while dominated) causes a lot of the fun to get taken away.

I'd certainly recommend this to my furry friends.

An awesome game with some great mechanics, a good feel and overall enjoyable time with the downside of a low replayability routine, a semi-stale feel after a while and connection issues/glitching.

I've played the game solo and (mostly) duo with my friend, we've been having a massive blast and things can progress pretty quickly even on default settings, so we've been loving it! The bosses have unique feels, some are pretty silly (IE: "Electric Dommy Mommy", "The Rat(tm)" and so on), some are rough, but rewarding (Stonemancer etc) and some are downright silly, although funny (Grandma Tailor). We overall LOVE how the game feels, however after a while it does have a sort of downside of "staleness" with the constant need to go excessively farming for certain materials (iron, silver, tech scrap etc etc) and you can eventually reach a point where the game feels really slow.

Our biggest issue however is connection. My connection isn't perfect, but it's pretty good and their connection is similar, however in many cases we stumble upon issues of either one of us lagging out (public servers) or I tend to get auto-kicked for "poor connection" when they host a private game, causing a lot of frustration, especially as the lag/connection issues renders me unable to move or perform actions, a massive pain in the ass when fighting bosses or doing certain quests.

Overall a great game, but expect to feel burnout really fast.

Sorta 50/50 on this one.

Overall, I enjoy the game and what it has to offer, but there are some things that bug me like the building mechanics, the endings and some other quality of life issues. Planet Crafter (PC) is a neat little time passer and seeing the effect you as the PC are having on your planet is awesome which I have to give credit for, so you can tell this was certainly done from a committed, caring team. Kudos to you all.

However, the buildings crashing into each other and weird floating issues/artifacts with some buildings caused displeasure on the eyes and I know that given a few more months, PC will put out another patch or two to fix it. My biggest gripe however is the endings which is spoilered below for obvious reason.

The game features three endings but no matter which one you choose, you don't really feel like you're getting "an ending". You can go with Sentinal Corp who just say "We'll re-evaluate your prison sentence, but you're staying in jail until then", go with the smugglers which is "You're an outlaw, stay low" or go with the Wardens which is "We might not even be alive, but follow us at your peril". For me, having no "real" ending sorta hurts considering how much effort has gone into terraforming the planet. I want to see if SC were truly liars and kept us locked up, or the smugglers killed us or if the Wardens were really alive or not, some sort of closure, but lacking in that ruined the experience for me.

Overall, a solid game and pretty nice, but certainly needs some QoL fixes and some changes to the endings.
3/5

After over 10 years in Early Access, 7DTD is finally getting a 1.0 release on PC and Consoles.

At time of posting this, 7DTD is my fourth most played game on Steam and it's good, but can quickly get stale without MODs and has some performance issues, graphical bugs, connection (Multiplayer) and hit-reg issues (PVP). Still however, I get these occasional "Two week Minecraft server" vibes where it's nice to install a bunch of mods, start a server with a few friends and just go ham for a bit.

Worth getting right now as between the 22nd and 29th of April (2024) it's on an almost 80% discount currently and you get 1.0 when it comes out plus all future changes. The price will also hike up when 1.0 comes out, but if you don't have the game 10 years down the line, I doubt you'd be getting it now.

Democracy never felt so good.

A game with more ups and downs than your average roller-coaster, but it is what it is.

Incredibly fun with friends and stressful on higher difficulties, although with so much happening all the time, it's fun to just come home after a day at work and blow bug guts everywhere or dismantle some robots. If the studio behind this continue doing what they're promising to do and lean towards letting players enjoy their fantasy of being an insane freak with steroids and explosives let loose on aliens, it'll continue to do well.

Keep it up.

The studio behind Atomic Society has shut down and may I bid a kind farewell to them with one more positive review.

While I don't own this game (and won't be able to now), I have played this via my partners Steam Library Sharing and it was certainly... something. I won't lie, it was a bit frustrating at first trying to figure things out, but it was this sort of smaller game that didn't force too much on you at once and I respect that. Grew to enjoy it even with a short playtime.

I hope the studio behind this takes care.

10/10

Despite having a couple of very silly moments (Number 69 in Paldeck is a tall, female furry-bait that "loves" Pals and humans, plus everyone's relatable Pal "Depresso"), this game is honestly a ton of fun. Sure, most can boil it down to "Pokemon with Guns", but I like to think that this has a lot of points and perks that would have been awesome to add to the Pokemon universe.

Basically Pokemon x ARK... and I love this