Recent reviews by Atombath

This is a fun game for an evening, it is a few hours of content. I would recommend it if you can get it for less than a buck. The game play is fun and mindless, it quickly gets repetitive. Needs more settings, especially around audio. It's cheap and works, I would NOT recommend paying full price.

I had a great time with this early access version of Farthest Frontier. I would recommend it to any settlement builder fans.

The manufacturing chains are pretty simple to me but they clearly challenged many reviewers, balance changes might be needed of course. I thought the city planning was meaningful and when it came time to defend your settlement, things got really fun.

It is early access though, and it comes with the expected need for polish + more. I built a city against a mountain, it was great until it came time to build walls. These walls do not (yet?) integrate with the unbuildable mountain-space, so raiders would arrive from those holes. At current version endgame, it feels like there's more gameplay additions and corrections to come.

Overall it was a very fun game! I look forward to playing the final version.

Would I recommend you eat a $3 tub of mashed potatoes for dinner? No, but you might still really enjoy it.

I truly cannot think of any game with a worse ending, though some people might be interested in how terrible, ugly, mindless, and potentially triggering it is. The story we're given is nonsensical. Things happen to you, often with the game offering only a shallow attempt of offering plausibility. This occurs all the way to the "good" ending of the game which doesn't reflect on anything you accomplished prior.

Ultimately, I recommend Elder Scrolls Online(ESO) due to its overwhelming amount of fun content, especially if you're mostly interested in PvE. If you're a "completionist" type of player then playing a bit of PVP with your PVE is still pretty great. If you're predominately a PVP player then my recommendation quickly turns into a toss up.

All of the NPCs are animated w voiced dialogue and there are many well-written quests/stories, some are even heart-touching. When you're bored with quests, there are dozens of other neat elements of this game where you can spend your time. You could buy and decorate a house or you could creatively use those furnishings by building a house directly out of them. Crafting has been designed in a way that it is not only a useful but lucrative feature at every point of the game. Essentially, ESO is a successful MMO that has built so much content into the platform over the years that it is easy to feel overwhelmed with deciding what you want to do next.

If you are only interested in PvP, a recommendation becomes more challenging. The best part of PVP is that sets, skills, and attributes are fluid enough that there is a lot of freedom in making builds. The fundamental elements and additional mechanics offer you a great diversity of combinations to play around with and make your own. I've had a lot of fun in Cyrodiil where the alliance vs alliance vs alliance pvp occurs.

...That said, ESO has consistently had terrible server-side performance during prime time and I assure you it is more than frustrating. Not only does this affect your enjoyment when your skill or potion doesn't actually go off, probably causing calamity, but this also occurs for everyone else... so you get to deal with frustrated people in general, too! The broken functionality surrounding server capacity is so consistent that it has become a mechanic that people not only try to utilize... some try to cause failure state to occur so that they can utilize it.

To me, ESO feels like an "asset" that had a 5-year lifespan assigned to it by management and despite it's successful player population surge during 2020 they've stuck to that plan. I feel this way because ZOS's servers performed pretty well when PVP events were going on because ZOS set up more shards and servers. Without an event going on, it felt like servers were being taken offline in an effort to save on costs. I'd be shocked if the subject of server investment was ever publicly discussed by ZOS because the solutions they have offered/implemented were a severe compromise that have crippled some playstyles of the game. Group sizes were halved and you can no longer heal people outside your group. Even the randomness of probability-based effects(6% chance to cause x) were removed from every set in the game, with the intention to remove random-number-generator calculation costs(!!!). I mean... I salute their ingenuity but despite the changes, server performance remains bad enough to quit over.

Some players are hoping that Microsoft's acquisition of ZOS will result in proper hosting such as a switch of platform... well, it's just as possible that the current strategy remains unchanged and this asset will continue to be neglected. It's also possible that cutting the server bills happened because lower costs makes you look like a juicier acquisition target? Yeah, at this point I'm just making educated guesses. If you're reading this, though... can you find someone to turn the servers back on?

Then add to all of this that the scoring rules for the Cyrodiil campaign make success meaningless. Its meant to reward more money to people playing on a less-populated faction, which is good, however ESO also overcompensates the worst performing alliance with a huge score bonus. In a 1v1v1 month-long campaign this changes every social dynamic for the worse since it means that 1st place only needs to wreck their biggest rival... and so the weakest team often slides easily into 2nd place because they literally didn't log in so they received a 2x score bonus. The difference of rewards for 1st/2nd/3rd place aren't meaningful but these irrational rules for a competitive mode makes it all so... pointless.

The fact that nearly everyone in Cyrodiil is frustrated by the terrible performance causes general toxicity. Since there isn't any tangible reason for winning the campaign(or fighting against mechanics for 2nd place), your "allies" in Cyrodiil are often the most toxic people in the game and they will relish the opportunity to take a scroll or hammer you conquered and run it straight into the enemy, giving it back to them.

So clearly, unfortunately, recommending my favorite part of this game isn't possible. You can have tons of fun with PvP but you need patience or friends to suffer through it with.



I've said enough on the game but with an MMO it's important to also review the community.

ZOS managed a good community. There are many guilds filled with people trying to make the best out of the game, making schedules for their preferred content. You can use the guild finder to easily filter guilds based on content. And you can join/trial as many as you need, as long as you need up to 5 ;). There are community-written mods which we all rely on to make this an enjoyable game. The people who play ESO are usually really cool but we're also dealing with a game lore with race wars so obviously it's good you can report/block conventional trolls and racists.

However the toxic elements of the community really stick out because you can't help when a glass cannon queues into your group as a fake tank(well, you can try to kick them but you're still left waiting for a tank.) You can't help it when someone charges through the entire dungeon in front of you, dragging all the mobs with them and skipping all the content. You can't do anything when your friend spent 15 minutes setting an ambush so they could steal an enemy hammer and massacre them... just so someone on your alliance could watch you like a hawk in order to grab the hammer when it eventually drops, so they can deliberately run it into a lava pit. You can't do anything if you attempt to buy crowns with gold and they defraud you(technically ZOS will repay you ONE TIME if you get scammed this way, their stated position is 'buyer beware')... never mind that this is a scam caused by ZOS's determination to never add crown trading to the trade window. These failings really stick out like a sore thumb.

Regency Solitaire is well made and full of charm. It is fairly short but everything is very pleasant!

Listen, it's solitaire...

The gameplay revolves around cards stacking on top of each other, which is why it is annoying that none of the game's card styles include numbers on opposite corners. Cards occasionally stack without depth, too. There were many crashes and the winning outro bugged.

It's solitaire with solid bonus mechanics and occasionally pretty art. There are better solitaire games to treat yourself to.

Above all things, Bloodstained is visually wonderful and it makes the entire experience very refreshing and joyful.

I laughed so much at Trover's variety and quality of humor. The main draw is obviously the effort of Justin Roiland who is a very funny guy and he doesn't disappoint. However, its clear that every person involved in this game put a proud(and some not so proud, but amazing 😂) effort into it. For not being the focus of this game, the action/platforming are pretty good and puzzles were surprisingly well integrated and never too aggravating.

tl;dr: 10/10 adventure game that has had charisma and comedy poured into it by many talented people.

In its current state(v1.0.3), you're paying for about ~12-20 hours of really great fun. Fair warning, this is another "full release" that feels like it is early access(with dev roadmap/etc) and while I actively try to ignore the "potential" of games, it is important to mention that Forager could dramatically change for better or worse after a few big patches.

There's a great deal of charm and creativity to enjoy, however there is not much in terms of replay ability and many of the game mechanics lack proper scaling. This is bad and good, while Forager's scaling issues make combat a pushover bore around mid-game, the same generous power-scaling to resource gathering mechanics(the aoe bonus for lighthouses multiplicity stack) give this game enjoyment and longevity for players who like to build a neat machine/base within a game.

While some elements of Forager are half-baked the game as a whole is authentic, charming and marvelous.

Astroneer is a great exploration and base-building game that I can easily recommend to anyone who isn't a FPS junkie. I've only played the full release. Review written @ 53 hours.

Adding an element of survival games, you must constantly concern yourself with having breathable air, which is treated as an important danger mechanic instead of a hassle. The only risk of death is that you will need to re-track where you died in order to get your things back, this system primarily:
(1) makes the game kid friendly (no cost/risk other than time loss)
(2) the death penalty scales very fairly/directly from early to late game
(3) breathable air makes the player deal with the risk/reward of scouting areas on an oxygen tank vs slowly building out an air network

Astroneer feels intuitive enough to me that I could play it in a foreign language while relying on symbols/colors/shapes for identifying everything in the game. This is one of those good-with-bad situations, since text is not utilized beyond item names and the help page(F1) this is one of those games that expect the player to have fun figuring things out.

In my experience with a higher end pc, Astroneer has been very stable but a little buggy. Stability is remarkably important for a game that has sandbox elements, where I'll keep it open for an entire day while taking breaks for real life... and Astroneer hasn't crashed once for me. It isn't perfect though, I have run into bugs that have added moments of unfair distress. It has happened twice where my travel speed going down a tunnel that I had previously burrowed actually threw me into a cave layer _above_ my tunnel... and without having any idea where I came from, it immediately became a nightmare emergency with the countdown of a depleting oxygen tank. Since I expect minor-annoyance bugs from any game that lets you deform/reform the environment... and since these heart attack events were rare... I'm ultimately really impressed with the quality of Astroneer.

I'll be buying this for the younger gamers in my family. Great game.