Recent reviews by Zel

Shooting yourself in the face never felt better

Let me give you an idea on how this DLC was developed.

- Brainstorm ideas for the next game while initially using the currently existing game as the base.
- Accidentally stumble upon a mechanic that even though present, was never(?...or barely) utilized in the base game and/or the original.
- Get overly excited about your findings, "How come we've never used this before?! This is amazing!". Put the next game on hold, gotta focus all your resources on this.
- Go to your colleagues that were working on the DLC for this title, let them know of your finding and ask them to sprinkle said mechanic into the levels so that the whole wide world can enjoy it! Awesome!
- Be dissatisfied that your team has underutilized what you've offered them, demand they scrap most of what they've been doing and cram as much of said mechanic into the DLC as humanly possible.
- Disregard most of the new mechanics that you've introduced in the base game. (that everyone thought you'd expand upon in the DLC) and double down on your amazing laser cutting mechanic.
- End up with more than half of the levels using laser cutting mechanic.
(sadly gotta keep some of the work poor sods have put into the title before you came into the picture)
- Top it off with another obscure mechanic where laser connection points and distances come in to play (Chain level), totally missing the spirit of the game.

Still get overwhelmingly positive reviews.
Bravo.

Overwhelmingly positive? You've got to be joking.

Grindy, running & inventory management, tedium simulator.
Weak, uninteresting story, with 0 sense of mystery.

Literally the only reason you feel compelled to continue playing this is to see how the world will change as you terraform the planet.

Throughout the game you're always going to be missing materials to continue your progress.
The issue is, by the time you get to the mechanics that are supposed to permanently solve this issue drones/teleporters you'll be bored out of your mind.
Thanks to having to manually carry items from your drillers => to the base => to the other drillers with other materials => and back to base again... Using your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ little (32 or so) slot backpack.

And that's it, running, the game.

Oh, and also waiting, lots of waiting (sometimes you realize that maybe instead of improving your heat/pressure generation by 10% you're just better off waiting an extra 5 minutes to get to the next terraforming stage and unlocks).



I want to be terraforming the planet, not doing manual labor.
It's as if developers had a brilliant idea of making a terraforming game, but had no idea how to execute on it. So they've picked up the most generic mechanics out of every average open world survival crafting game, mashed them all together, aaand, voila! This is what we got.
Hmmm let's just slap planet crafter name on it, that'll sell better

As unlocks and terraforming slows down, you'll just start asking yourself...."...Why am i doing this? Do i really hate myself so much?"

Unless you're at a stage of life where your time is infinite, skip this and play subnautica or satisfactory instead. Satisfy your terraforming ASMR needs using AI generated videos or something.

TL:DR
Was kind of expecting subnautica on land. Got your average "open world" crafting survival game

P.S
What's even the point of an oxygen mechanic, if i can just drop and empty living compartment made from like 4 materials, with no electricity or anything, anywhere on the map, and regen my oxygen right away?

Very addictive but plagued with ridiculous amounts of RNG.
You barely have any control over what's happening. There is no way to force any joker/effect that is even adjacent to what you're trying to build, you're just forced to go with the "flow". And it doesn’t get easier with more runs.. it gets harder because the pool of available jokers just keeps growing.

The core idea? Interesting. But it feels like the devs just kept adding jokers and "booster cards" only for the sake of having lots of ♥♥♥♥ in the game, even though many of them literally bring nothing to the table.
It's as if they literally couldn't bear to cut any ideas that they came up with during a brainstorming session.
Wasted effort?! Never.

To me, the only "truly reliable" way to consistently win seems to be something like this:

• Play around pairs
  
• Restart until you get a good reward for skipping first blind
  
• Get a good joker that will carry you through the early game
  
• Get your economy going
  
• Use the $$ to juice up your pairs with something like
  x2 + chip
  x1-x2 + mult
  x1-x2 x mult
  jokers

Missing the multiplicative mult on a high difficulty run? Well, you're SOL.

(Also as you could guess, playing like this is not very interesting, it is too formulaic)

Anything else is going to be problematic because you're starting off with a 52 card deck (without a quick way to reduce your deck size) and can't force cards that you want, even with all the available discards.
Ooor.. i guess..you kind of can... until.. that one time it doesn't work... when you need it to work.... and you x.x

Compare this to Slay The Spire and you'll understand the problem right away.

And even if you build a great deck, your run can easily be cut short by a "boss level" effect which you have no knowledge off until 2 rounds beforehand, when it's usually too late to play around it.

Gambling the game (duh).
The appeal is obvious and understandable, but skip it if you like having some semblance of control over your playthrough.
God gamers, spare me the lessons.

What a gem. And, it's free.
Leaves you wanting more.

Okay let's do the opposite of what the game does here and get straight to the point.

Relaxing and enjoyable at the start, the game initially sets a great tone.
However as you progress it gets increasingly tedious. More and more shallow mechanics get thrown at you, so that about 10 hours in you start feeling as if you're playing some weird amalgamation of a flashy mobile game and mmo fetch quest fiesta and start thinking what are you doing with your time? ...Fish farming? Crop farming? Each day becomes a maaassive chore.

With other games of this "type" the realization comes to you right away, while this one tricks you and sucks 10-20hours off you before it shows it's nature.

It ain't bad per say but gets more praise than what it's worth.

Solid but not quite on par with its predecessor (which is a lot to expect given it was a masterpiece).

The narrative just isn't able to match the original (despite clear efforts).
It lacks a powerful sense of wonder and mystery this time around. There is a mystery to be solved here too, but it just feels off...probably because of NPCs who can't shut up and let you explore on your own, always telling you what you (as a team) are up to next, how to feel, what to think.... The fact that there was nobody to "talk" to in TP1 was probably it's strength.

At it's core this one is more mechanically complex. Each zone introduces a new mechanic, but sadly...it doesn't ...lead to anything?
New toys you get to play with seem kind of disconnected from one another, they're used in their respective zones..then barely reappear.
Which prevents the levels from ever reaching the difficulty that i'd desire.

You do catch a glimpse of how difficult the game could be in the "secret" levels. Hmm..idk maybe we'll see them mix the mechanics in a dlc or something, similar to Road To Gehenna..so i won't dwell on this much.

The biggest disappointment by far would be the star puzzles. The original had unique "secret star" puzzles tailored to each zone, but here, they're split into a few mind numbingly boring and repetitive categories, lacking the depth of the original.

Also, gone are the Serious Sam and other random easter eggs which are a staple of Croteams design in their other titles. Finding those felt like a puzzle in and of itself. There were dozens of them in TP1.

On paper, it is more mechanically complex with a larger story, but it just doesn't hit the heights set by TP1. It is weighed down by lack of wonder/mystery, easy levels, weak star puzzles and easter eggs which were cooler than anything else in the previous title. Play the original instead..can't really downvote this but...a meh option would be great..

P.S
The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ upscaling....You can't turn it off, and it leads to weird, blurry effects in most levels, especially in forest settings.

Amazing.

Takes out all the chores out of a standard RTS game and keeps a super simple yet addictive gameplay loop, while retaining enough complexity to be fun in a non brain dead manner.
Very simple controls.
Very pleasing to the eye.
Allows you to customize your difficulty as much as your heart desires. From brain numbingly easy to ungodly difficult.
Fairly priced.

What's not to love, really.

TL:DR Dishonored (but worse, watered down) + Prey Mooncrash.
Also, it runs like ass and crashes a lot (i crashed once every 2 hours)


Not even close to either Prey or Dishonored in terms of quality.
Feels way more like an action game than an immersive sim game.


Main reasons for that:

There's only one way to beat the loop, this game could've been the perfect playground for hitman like gameplay, where you could solve your assassination objective in multitude of ways, both lethal and non lethal.... a totally missed opportunity.

The stealth mechanics, (even though the game mentions them as an option) they are barebones and there's next to 0 reason to use them.
1. Less abilities revolving around stealth (compared to predecessors)
2. 1 Stealth weapon (the nail gun)
3. Why stealth if you can easily take on a dozen enemies and live (braindead AI + only 1 type of enemy)

So yeah, meaningless or non existent player choice.

Looter shooter-like item drops, loot is way too abundant and is usually trash (hello shadow warrior 2).
It's small character bonuses which you've probably seen on the previous loop and/or same guns you already had but of slightly higher quality/ with a small modifier. Both picking these up and equipping/selling them between maps is tedious and it takes "you out of the game". At least if the loot was exciting/necessary to beat the game, then it'd be cool, but you can easily beat the game with things you pick up on your 1st/2nd loop.


Okay...what else

Gameplay "arsenal"

5 spells to play with
3/5 recycled from dishonored, 4th basically recycled/expanded (wind blast) from dishonored, 5th...a temporary damage+defense buff...?
To make things worse, you are restricted to using 2/5, per map of the loop, pigeonholing you even more into a certain playstyle. Oh yeah, i'm sorry, you're basically restricted to 1/4 because there's no way you won't be taking the blink spell.

Bunch of different guns, but it doesn't really matter which you use, headshots are 1 shots, enemies are cannon fodder.


Story

Dishonored struggled properly introducing it's main mission targets and this game doesn't improve on it one bit.
No introduction of main antagonists through dialogue/cutscenes, your only contact with them is through books/audio logs and the absolute worst format imaginable, "chat room discussions"...which are extremely boring to read and follow.


Could go further with this but let's wrap it up, others have covered all of this more extensively.

Apart from the cool visuals/art style/60s vibe (kudos for changing the environments based on the time of day you arrive) the only other thing this game has which is an actual cool addition is the PVP invasion mechanic.
It's actually really fun invading other players and setting up ambushes, most fun i've had in this game. Sadly since it's p2p it often lags quite a bit for the invading player, so it kinda ruins the experience.


This PVP mechanic actually makes me wonder if it is the actual reason for the watered down mechanics/game design and the braindead AI. They probably couldn't have made more enemy types/make harder AI, because they couldn't account for how skilled the invading player would be, so things had to stay simple. Same probably goes for main objective complexity/length.

And it is also probably the reason why when you enter each map there's these two "weird" doors (they are like 20 meters apart from each other) which you can choose to get started on a map. At first i thought they're there to give you two completely different starting points, but they're probably there to prevent the invader griefing the player by camping 1 of the doors.

So in the end, the multiplayer mechanic might've ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the original game idea.

Is it all bad? No not at all, but taking the cool ♥♥♥♥ Arkane has released into consideration, this is a step down in almost every aspect that made their previous games special. What we got is a streamlined "immersive sim" with a pvp system glued to it.

It's obvious that the developers tried to make this experience unique in respect to the original game but imo it just wasn't fun.

The story was just as intriguing, but when it came to exploration, while the first part of the dlc was pretty good, the second part was just pure tedium.
It was so bad i couldn't even get myself to finish the dlc, i just wanted to google how the story ends. It was like a longer and more boring version of dark bramble with even less visibility and no 3d movement .
The key mechanic that this section of the dlc revolved around was horrible, totally felt like i was playing a completely different game.

This dlc was a much better addition to the base game than let's say something like subnautica below zero was to subnautica.
But the main game set the bar so high, that even though this wasn't terrible, it just didn't hold up, for me.