Recent reviews by IamSparticles

I'm recommending this game with some reservations. First off, yes, the launch was rocky. I tried to log in on launch day and sat in a queue for about 30 minutes before giving up. Then our power went out and was out for 2 days. When I came back, no more queues. I got in immediately. It took about 20 minutes for the initial game files to download and install, then I was able to play. No problem. The game looks gorgeous, and the flight models are significantly improved. There's definitely a lot of activities to explore and play around with.

That said, there are bugs. As I generally expect of any new game on a scale like this one. I haven't experienced any crashes or major functionality issues but... just as an example, the first time I tried to start career mode, the initial airfield I picked turned out to be remote enough that the terrain was completely glitched. There were big bumps on the runway that made it impossible to take off. And if you can't take off on your first flight, you can't progress to the next part of the career mode. So I had to reset and pick a different airfield. After that, I still get some weird issues. In some missions, the default flight path has way too high a cruise altitude. Also, I get tons of Infractions for speed limits, with no explanation of what speed I should be flying at.

Despite all that, I'm having fun with the game. They've already released a first hotfix, and I expect things to improve significantly. So I'm happy with my purchase.

This game reminds me in many ways of one of my favorite games of all time: Star Control 2. It doesn't quite have as much depth or freedom of choice, but they do share a lot of gameplay elements.

Do you like Factorio or Satisfactory? Tired of the endless grind of collecting/crafting one resource just so you can access the next one? Would you rather spend your time designing and optimizing your factories? Shapez2 is an industrial automation puzzle game. Your goal is to feed the vortex with the shapes it desires. Harvest raw shapes from the surrounding space then cut, rotate, combine, and paint them until they satisfy the vortex. You can essentially place as many machines as you want. You're only limited by the space you have available and the resources you can reach. And once you finish the most basic tutorial stages you can reach quite far indeed. It's a huge map with lots of randomly distributed shapes and colors to use for your manufacturing purposes. Once you've finished one sequence of shapes, you can easily tear down your factory and retool to work on the next one. You can quickly copy and paste factory sections and save them as blueprints for later.

This game is elegantly simple, but deeply engaging. Draw 8 cards. Discard some if you want. Use them to build a poker hand. Better hands score more chips. Score enough chips to beat the blind before you run out of hands, then move on to the next round. Buy upgrades in the shop between rounds to improve your scores. Try to find winning combos. Keep playing to unlock more upgrades. That's pretty much it.

Gameplay is a lot like Valheim, but without a lot of the annoying things that make Valheim tedious. Plus, it's prettier and there's just a lot more to do. The map is littered with quests. I haven't tried co-op but from what I've read it needs some work. One of the big complaints is that quest completion is server-side, so if anyone on the server completes a quest, then everyone has completed it. I think that takes some of the player engagement out. But I'm fine with single player for now. 36 hours in and I'm not getting bored yet.

You can pet an owlbear cub.

This is one of those games the feels more like a collection of mini-games. That's not a bad thing. At least in this case, the mini games are integrated really well, and they're fun, with tons of rewarding unlocks. It's a perfect game for me on Steam Deck because I can play for a few minutes at a time, feel like I've accomplished something, and set it down to do something else.

The core gameplay is fun, but there are a lot of features that are still not implemented, content that is missing, and the game is really unstable. In fact, I haven't been able to play more than a few rounds this week because it keeps crashing every time I try to play. If they ever get things working better I'll revise this review.

I've played Dwarf Fortress (free version) in the past but only really dabbled with it at a very shallow level. The biggest hurdle to my enjoyment was always the blunt instrument of the keyboard-only interface. Nothing gameplay-wise has really changed. But this new version makes it so much less of a chore to do things that I don't even mind paying the $30. I don't know why they waited so long to make these improvements. It seems like a no-brainer to me.

I started playing in VR. While it's still diffucult, my awareness of the car's orientation and motion has gone way up. Along with my enjoyment.