Recent reviews by saikogekido

This is a game that almost didn't exist and has no right being this good for free from a single dev. Bunlith is amazing and incredibly talented and hot and it really shows in this game.

After playing for more than 20 hours I can honestly say that this game can be fun, but the amount of barriers in the way of that fun are kind of ridiculous and turn it from what would be a great game into an unsatisfactory time waster.

Progression in video games is a hard thing to get right. Most building automation games provide progression through advancing automation or the quality of materials that the user is able to work with. Satisfactory provides this through a multiple milestone, multiple tier, multiple phase system with side research progression and of course base construction and it almost gets it but fails in several key areas. Each milestone must be completed by gathering X numbers of resources, general in the hundreds to thousands of the resource. Milestones can be completed in any order, but there is an optimal path to complete them in which is not going to be apparent on a first play through. Milestones are gated by tier. Tiers are gated by phases. Phases are gated by specific milestone and construction completion as well as donations to the space elevator that itself is gated by a milestone in an early tier. It would be reductive to say that this boils down to farming resources to unlock new things that make it more efficient to farm resources, because there is a lot more to it than that. The game deliberately changes the types of resources required for milestones to force creating new construction lines for the new resource that must be generated. It does not take long to literally start creating elaborate factories, often with the use of external calculators and hours of adjusting overclock levels, to produce literally 1,000 of a resource you can't use for any purpose except to unlock more milestones. If there was just one of these resources, it would be fine, you could create your maguffin generator and work on optimizing it more and more with requirements, but there are literally dozens of these useless resources that you will have to construct that serve no purpose for increasing your efficiency. This is made more painful by gating basic features behind milestones. For example, blueprint construction is a Tier 4 milestone. This means you will have completed all of Tier 0, constructed a space elevator, reworked your factory multiple times by individually deconstructing and reconstructing it countless times, fed the space elevator 50 of the maguffins after hours of waiting for the best optimized setup possible to produce them (discovering the next phase requires 1000 of those maguffins), and that you can't unlock the milestone for blueprints until you unlock 3 other milestones to be able to produce the resources required for that blueprint milestone. And then you get blueprints. Which should have been something in maybe Tier 0. Having to tear down your base manually and reconstruct it took literally hours from all the times I did that to reposition splitters and mergers and constructors, etc.

The buildings do not tend to fit together in an organic or satisfying way (trying not to make the satisfactory joke too much). Think of the buildings as Tetris pieces like 4 long being the stick and 2 square being the square, etc. One of the first buildings you get is a smelter which is 2 long. It can feed 2 constructors which are 2 square in shape. This requires a splitter which is 1 square. Now try and picture that on a grid in your head. You have the 2 long piece (smelter) then add some space for conveyors, and then the 1 long piece (spliter) then space for conveyors. The length now is about maybe 4 long by 1 width on a grid. Now add the 2 square pieces (constructors). The length is about 6 long and suddenly 4 width. This quickly becomes an issue when you start dealing with production lines where you commonly need 6 constructors (that's 12 width) and you factor in that you can not actually terraform beyond building platforms in early tiers. The inability to flatten out space for these gigantic constructions is an issue that some would argue is part of the puzzle, but we have a lot of other games in this category where you can alter the terrain or don't have to deal with a slight incline affecting the layout of your factory. That said, it did look nice when observing one of my reinforced plate + rotor factories in full production from a lookout tower and how it was neat like a little city built into the land. Building that was a pain, due to having to be at ground level for most of it or building additional lookout towers. Honestly, a top down build mode such as via a drone would reduce so much of the time wasted on refactoring, though blueprints should be available a lot earlier.

Energy production deserves its own section. When the player starts the game, they soon get power requirements for various buildings. The first power generator available is a biofuel generator built into the hub. A second one unlocks shortly after that. These need grass or wood to operate. By doing MAM research, which it is up to the player to unlock, they can improve the fuel by refining grass or wood to biomass. Then a second unlock is biomass to solid biofuel. These can be created by constructors. However, there is a separate biomass recipe for wood and one for leaves. So you need two lines of constructors that feed biomass to another constructor that feeds the biofuel to... oh wait your built in hub generators can't accept conveyor belts. That's okay, just create 3 additional independent biofuel generators and add a splitter to the biofuel constructor output and now you have a full assembly line for it. But also like some vestigial generators on your hub? This is one of those arbitrary design decisions where like obviously they could have just added conveyor inputs to those but they didn't and it adds more work for the player similar to how some of the resource requirements are just arbitrary numbers of things.

Have you ever opened a jigsaw puzzle or lego set and looked at all the pieces in front of you and started figuring out ways to make them fit together towards either completing a picture or some massive AT-AT or whatever? A big thing with most puzzles is being able to see all of the pieces. It is up to the player to decide how those pieces fit together. This game hides the puzzle pieces. It gives you like 6 at a time and asks you to solve the entire puzzle. Without following a step-by-step guide you are not going to see half of what the game is holding back from you in this century. That whole thing about biofuel above could almost be ignored if you knew to rush coal generators ASAP because coal is an infinite resource in this game. There are build paths to get you there fast, but you have to know them. You have to read the guides. If you try to figure this out on your own, you're gonna find that you often have two pieces that fit perfectly together but now you got more pieces and actually this one piece fits better with that other piece. Constant refactor with the game not providing the tools to support it (again blueprints can take hours to get unlocked if you aren't running a guide). To that end, I would argue this is not a puzzle game where you figure it out. This is a guide game. This is a game where you find someone else's full playthrough so you can see all the pieces and avoid all the pitfalls. Honestly, just being able to see what are in the locked tiers would destroy this argument and I would accept it as a puzzle game. Given that you can't see what isn't unlocked, then you can't solve the puzzle for real until you unlocked everything. If you want to get to the fun stuff in the trailers, read a guide, play with friends, and expect to not get there for many, many hours.

Short atmospheric horror that does it better than most horror games.

I heard it was bad and I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt but like.... yeah. For every good idea this game has, there are at least two glaringly terrible ones. For example, I liked how capture points don't involve a specific unit concentrating really hard on planting a flag to units can just occupy a space near the capture point. Immediately afterward it asked me to build a "Requisition Generator". Pardon? Is it like a 40k crypto miner?? And you have to build generators on highly contested points? I don't think the Mechanicus would agree with that decision. It does have mods, so maybe it could be saved one day by like some UA level overhaul, but the workshop is fairly barren right now. Might be a while or never.

I want them to get another shot at this, because I like the style, but there are a lot of problems that make the game very hard to recommend, at least for the Arcade mode. They could maybe take lessons from this and nail it in a new game.

• Art Style is really nice
  
• There are some nice filters and effects
  
• Sound is mid 90's, which is perfect
  
• One really big board with a lot going on
  
• Several smaller boards to choose from
  
• Option to zoom out and view the whole board

• Too many effects obscure the ball
  
• Ball color makes it very hard to track
  
• The default zoomed in camera does not do a good job of following the ball
  
• Most options in the Options menu are only available while playing a level
  
• Flippers feel a little laggy somehow

The pros kind of speak for themselves. You don't have to play the game to appreciate the art style they were going for. It captures this pseudo 90's arcade style vibe really well.

The cons need a little explaining though.

The ball can be very hard to follow. It is a light blue/white in a sea of bright neon effects that fill the board. You can kind of see in some of the screenshots how bad it can get on the Arcade board. Hitting certain parts of the board can trigger a bullet hell like scenario except your ship(s) are the same shape as a bullet and similar bright color. Every particle in those pictures is moving in a different direction, usually spreading out, pulsing with light to try and grab your attention.

There are also multiple mechanics on the board that will cause the ball to have physics disabled and instead follow a scripted path for a few seconds before re-enabling physics sometime during that flight. I get the feeling that if I played the board for several hours I could memorize the paths they take, sometimes counter clockwise circles, sometimes clockwise circles, sometimes zig zags, but these scripted behaviors add this sort of unintuitive learning curve. Like Pinball is built on following the laws of the physics in fun creative ways. Scripting the ball to zig zag into the upper left of the board goes against that simplicity. I appreciate the idea, though, which is taking advantage of this being a video game and not a real pinball machine.

The camera is really, really bad. You would think the camera would focus on centering the ball because that's where your focus would be, but it's always lagging behind the ball or adjusting upwards to show more above the ball than below. It's another part of the design that is sort of fighting with you to keep your eyes off of the ball. Like imagine the board has a grid with coordinates (x, y). You're tracking the ball at (9, 7) and you just know the trajectory of it means it's going down to (9, 8). The camera shifts while you're tracking the ball. The ball is now at (10,7) instead of at (9,8) and you have to adjust your eyes to the new spot. This subconscious battle against the camera happens throughout play. Thankfully, this is fixable by resorting to lower zoom levels. By showing more of the board, it'll jostle the camera around a lot less.

Last one that's really worth talking about is the flippers. There is just something slightly laggy about them? I don't know how to put it exactly. I tried keyboard and I also tried controller, and both of them felt a little bit off, like there was some almost half second delay to inputs. It's so small it's difficult to measure, but it's not insignificant. Like with the scripted ball interactions, I feel like this is something that could be compensated with by multiple hours of playing.

And that's it. Despite all the cons vs pros and how I can't recommend this game, I'm not going to refund. I got it on sale and I want to support these devs and see if they nail the next one.

It's not a bad game. It's just not a good game either.

Honestly, I just got my gf to watch Star Wars for the first time and we were hype to play this together and then immediately hit multiple pay walls that turned us off of it.

It has a ton of good story and dialogue ruined by a clunky combat system and an impenetrable shield of microtransactions. If you want to try this out as free to play before you buy it, you will quickly run into the micro transactions.

For example, hiding your helmet, adding action bars on your UI, and inventory space are all behind microtransactions. Some things are unlocked through the subscription, but not all. It is a labyrinthine mess of F2P, premium member, subscription member, cartel coin, etc. unlocking methods for nearly everything in the game.

To further complicate this, it makes an Origin account when you make a swtor account but if you have an Origjn account you have to get customer service involved to link them. You also don't get a benefit from this, even with EA Plus because the SWTOR sub, coins, etc. are an independent system.

It's just a mess. Which is sad because the expansions and story look amazing, but it's ruined by horrible monetization strats. Maybe EA will take another pass at this in the future and simplify the monetization to not drive new players away.

Do not get this game except on an extreme discount and then only if you really like Warhammer and turn based rogue lite strategy games. And even if you do like all of that, keep in mind that you will fail constantly in ways that are completely outside of your control (e.g. start the mission with less units than the enemy, less levels than the enemy, and all of your people scattered around the map). And then once you get to a point where the roguelite progression is kicking into high gear, you will most likely discover it is no longer frustrating, but still boring. There is a lot of promise here, so hoping for a sequel, some day, that addresses the issues.

+ One of the first recent Warhammer games to include Skaven, before TW and such
+ Some novel ideas that take advantage of the setting material
- Mission balance is wonky
- Follows the tabletop too closely
- UI is atrocious and full of word salad and bad design
- Engine is extremely unstable
- AI will "rope" you on every turn, even when you can't see them
- Blue screened my computer

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The menus are extremely cumbersome to navigate, as if they put them together without thinking about how someone would use them, but also contain some flashes of inspiration. The Warcamp screen and Campaign map are pretty and well done, but literally every other menu looks terrible. Contextual information is seemingly randomly placed around the screen, icons are extremely low grade, and color schemes for customizations are noticeably missing color names (e.g. white with black trim would be called something like "Style 15"). For example, tooltips don't exist on the character screen for stats until you level up the character, and then only when you can level up that particular state. This reeks of controller first design. This is particularly noticeable during gameplay.

When a character is hit with an effect, he information presented in game is the result of a roll + the name of the effect. If you're lucky, it's a buff or debuff on a unit you control, which will appear in the bottom left corner. However, this usually just means trial and error. For example, one of my characters was hit with an effect called Demoralize, each time they were hit by a specific enemy. I had no real indication of what this was doing when the effect was applied. I later found the effect in the horrendous skill management system after the match completely by accident.

Usability issues aside, it presents information like a college student trying to write their essay an hour before class. Whenever it needs to tell you how something works, usually via a popup, it is written a massive, laborious, word salad of text. I love reading in game lore and about abilities. However, the combination of the font they chose and the writing style are just an eye sore. It's like receiving 500 words on what Warband Management means, and then you click an action in Warband Management, and it gives you another 500 words. Most of the information could be easily condensed, but whoever wrote it decided to add some padding to the superfluous verbiage.


Freedom of movement is nice, and once you get past learning every ability and creature in the game, etc. then this could be a really good game. Since I just covered several paragraphs on how the designers made that extremely difficult and cumbersome to do, you can imagine how gameplay generally goes. The game continues its tradition of making it as difficult as possible access necessary information to make decision. On your turn, you see from third person perspective behind a unit, which is useful for the freeform movement mentioned. However, you are given no indicators or allies, enemies, wyrdstone deposits, etc. So often you will start a mission and try to figure out where the rest of your characters are. The "easy" way to do this is by opening the map, which is default bound to middle mouse button for some reason. The map takes a second to load and presents all information from an overhead perspective and using icons and flat renders of the map. Sounds okay, until you get back out of the map and have to orient yourself, open the map, move, orient, open the map, move, etc. Or worse, the map is a 2D render, so it misses out on 3D details. You may move toward a side of a building that looks like it has an open pathway through the bottom, but really it's showing the second floor layout and you have no idea what the bottom floor layout is until you get there with your character and discover you have to walk around the entire block. I could go on about a lot more issues with the gameplay, but I'm going to hit the word limit. Just know that it's extremely frustrating and extremely boring until you find the enemy...

...who most likely have higher level characters, and better gear, and also just literally more henchman than you're arbitrarily allowed to start with, so you might as well have just voluntarily routed yourself as soon as you entered the mission in order to not lose half your gear and injure half your warriors and gain 0 resources and have to pay upkeep costs. BTW, this is a game where it gets easier the more time you put into it, not because of getting better at the game, but because that's how you unlock the basics you need to be on a level playing field with the AI (e.g. same number of units, similar levels, gear, etc.) There are a lot of games that do this better, like XCOM. Mission difficulty starts off semi challenging in XCOM, and then ramps up, but you also progress by unlocking new units, gear, crafting, mission types, etc. This game doesn't have any of that. You unlock +2% to hit or -2 GP upkeep on your units or +1 to accuracy which equals +2% to hit. Woo...

It's extremely buggy. Units will vanish based on the camera angle. This is the first game in years to actually cause my computer to blue screen.

Played through the game multiple times. I recommend it if you like Werewolf the Apocalypse, but some basic visual novel functionality is missing that makes it difficult to replay and the ending can be a bit unsatisfying.

:: PROS
* Amazing art
* (Most) choices matter
* Character sheet helps track decisions

:: CONS
* Willpower cost is too frequently used
* No fast forward
* No saves
* Final two chapters feel out of place

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The visuals are amazing, and really fit the source material. They also change in minor ways based on choices you make, which is pretty nice. For instance, when someone comes with you, they will be represented in the scene, but if they didn't, then they won't. Also, all of the werewolf forms change your character in the scene.

There are tons of choices that subtly change later events in the game. They do a pretty good job indicating what affects what, and you aren't often forced to pick an option that doesn't make sense (which is hard to find in games like this). The character sheet also helps track progress and can be useful, when you know a bit about Werewolf, to figure out which path you want to go down for that character.

This system would be great, except that there are far too many choices in the game that cost willpower but basically do nothing. For example, if you're not Friendly with certain characters, then there is a point where you have the option to talk to them, but it costs a willpower. And what they will tell you is essentially flavor text with no impact on the story. This doesn't mesh with the tabletop or MET systems for how Willpower is used, so feels like a wasted opportunity that causes more frustration than it does cause thoughtful decision making. One thing that does stay true is how you regain Willpower by following your goals. This happens usually at the end of scene related to your goal. So you can imagine how it must feel to have a pointless conversation with someone that cost you a very expensive and hard to come by resource.

Choose your own adventure games like this one are built for replay value. The story does a admirable job of setting up multiple endings and variations of scenes, with only a few issues in the final two chapters. However, the lack of a save system and the lack of a fast forward option for scenes you've already seen is noticeably missing. Those are features that are present on a lot of other similar games and really make it easier to go through and see what you could have done differently after your first play through. As it stands, I have played through the game multiple times and set the text and paragraph speed to the fastest it can go, but it's still too slow for this purpose. For example, if you play for an hour and find a choice with two options you are interested in, you will have to play through the game exactly the same up to that point a second time, another hour, in order to try that option. I have no doubt that will turn a lot of people away from multiple play throughs ultimately lowering the average amount of time that people spend playing the game.

The final two chapters seem like they were written by someone other than the person who wrote the other chapters. They seem less polished, and the choices are a bit more "disorganized". For example, there is a ton more exposition going on, third person narrative stuff, jumps between scenes, choices that don't have an indicator for what impact they will have on you, but when you select them they will lead to a choice with a single option that does have an impact, so the first option really should have just said so before railroading you into that. It also doesn't feel like a satisfying conclusion. The main arc of the story climaxes right before those two chapters and then it just kinda rolls over without much consideration for whether you're done with the story or not.

** SPOILERS **
There is a scene before the final chapters where you are back on the bus. It's really interesting and cool, but it seems completely out of place. On all of my play throughs, I haven't found a single connecting thread to that scene. There is like a single maybe answer to it that I'm going to check out, but it that is the case then I don't understand why it is shown for every play through. It's also a bit jarring because of how it's just inserted almost like an intermission.

A true story driven adventure game. The gameplay involves exploring the life of an 18 year old girl who has returned to her home town to enroll in a prestigious school. The player enters Max's life about two weeks into her classes, when she's still shy and hasn't met anyone. She hasn't even contacted her best friend that she left behind when she originally moved to Oregon. After a life changing event, Max finds out she has the power to reverse time and uses it to save the life of a mysterious punk rock girl. From that point on, the story enters a branching path where the player learns to master Max's newfound ability, while being teased about several mysteries around her old town. Some of the mysteries are grande, like what happened to Rachel and who keeps posting missing flyers everywhere? Some of the mysteries are more personal, like what is going to happen when Max figures out that Warren is so obviously crushing on her? The story is full of characters with mysteries that the player will want so desperately to unravel or save in the most optimal way through rewind, they may realize another layer to the story. Everytime the little butterfly appears in the top left and the game explains "There will be consequences for this action", should you rewind?

+ Amazing story (so far) with a logical break for the end of the episode (cliffhanger ofc, but it's a good stopping point)
+ Stylish artistic direction that makes for some really brilliant scenes
+ Relaxing indie soundtrack
+ Short (about 4 hours), but will leave a lasting impression (well worth the $4.99 USD price tag)
+ World and Friends leaderboards for the decisions, so after the story you can see how many people were scumbags or did the right thing
+ Full of references to obscure pop culture, nerd culture, and photography
+ Squirrels
- Minor graphics bugs with some textures, lighting, and lip sync (this review was written the day after release; played it with an old ATI Radeon 4650 HD, but looks like other people have the same lip sync bugs)

An amazing and emotional peek into the lives of professional gamers that heartfully illustrates how real and deep their struggles are.