Recent reviews by Arzen

It's still dwarf fortress, but now you can click on stuff.

Royal court doesn't add a huge amount of mechanical complexity to the game, but it does add an enormous amount of flavor and make-your-own-fun storytelling capability, which is where this series really shines in the first place. is a sold base for a first expansion, and hopefully they will continue to build on it.

I enjoyed Yakuza 0 for the first half but found myself falling off halfway through due to the small maps and repetitive combat, and the Kiwami remakes were fun, but very much the same combat, same mini-games etc quickly turned me off even though I could tell they'd be good if I could just get into them.

Picked up Like a Dragon when it came out and it's been the most fun I've had with a game in ages, the main character is so goofy and fun and the side missions are [a complete blast](https://i.imgur.com/afgp3Oi.jpg), and the central premise of re-imagining the world as a JRPG is done so thoroughly well both within the fiction and just mechanically as a game that it's astonishing.

It's so incredibly rare that a long running franchise like this bothers to re-imagine what their game could be instead of just re-making the same basic game-play and premise over and over again, and even more rare that they do it almost entirely without ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anything up (looking at you, Ubisoft and EA). This year was a pretty good year for games but this one's gettting in my top three for sure for this reason alone.

I'm blown away by how good an implementation of 5E D&D rules they have, even for things that RPGs typically ♥♥♥♥ up or don't bother with, like stealth. The graphics and voice acting are nothing to write home about and they obviously have a smaller budget than something like BG, so don't expect the same production value, but the interface and UI and use of map and level design are fantastic.

Utterly delightful.

t's beautiful, but it's still MSFS, so it's very much "make your own fun and look at the pretty scenery," don't expect to be running your own airline or anything. You get in an an airplane, take off, fly somewhere, and land. There's a couple landing challenges and some pre-set bush tours, but that's about it, the rest is just "make your own fun flying around."

It looks amazing, which is easy to tell from any video of it, and the map is very accurate - I was able to find my apartment, my parents house, and the bay I grew up in in the florida keys without issue. Most things aren't handcrafted, but the stuff that are is very pretty and the stuff that isn't is still the best looking "derived from satellite imagery" type 3D map I've ever seen, even if the AI likes to jam in a lot of trees when it's not sure what else is down there. The weather effects are also gorgeous and The synthesized ground control voices are also quite impressive, apparently we're getting to the point where text to speech is almost, if not human, than at least not obviously robotic.

It runs OK on my upper middle class PC. I've had some crashes but it hasn't been anything too terrible for me. There still a lot of things they should and are planning to add, like co-piloting, VR support, etc. There's a very basic tutorial but not enough to cover things like navigation or communication or even the more difficult planes. The plane interiors are kind of hit and miss - they all look amazing but there are some that they clearly spent a great deal of time on and absolutely everything is amazingly rendered and functional, and others that they clearly just went "eh, good enough" and still have lots of inoperable buttons or blurry textures and so on.

Launch impressions: This game is neat, but it's what I think of as a "polished early access." What's included is good: the core gameplay seems to be mostly there with a large number of craftables and materials, and the visuals and art are very nice, but there basically is no story at this time (half characters don't even seem to have any dialog recorded yet) and it has a fair number of bugs and balance issues and could use some work on interface. The survival aspects of the game are fairly light on medium difficulty, with food and water being pretty much everywhere and the only death penalty being a dropped inventory which you can run back to and pick up. Basically right now you can explore the map and build a nice base, but have no particular gameplay reason or story motivation given to do so.

I don't have any reason not to recommend it with the caveat that the $30 price tag is pretty high for what's on offer right now. That said, it seems about right for what I'd expect the game to become when it's nearer to completion, so be aware that if you're not going to wait for a sale or the game to be ready then you're basically paying extra to get an early look.

Did the first couple planets. The story's OK, it's basically stealing the plot of either KOTOR - jedi dude leaves mysterious important secret ♥♥♥♥ hidden and you have to follow an exhaustively long trail of breadcrumbs to find it before the bad guys - but the biggest problem I have with it is that it feels like it's a game that doesn't know what it wants to be. It has the bones of a soulsborne, but unlike, say, Nioh, which is a fantastic example of taking that concept and iterating on it, it just imitates it without understanding why it's good.

The combat and physics of the game just aren't there to support that kind of gameplay. Enemies frequently hit you even when you're dodging or blocking in a way that feels more buggy than precise, and you miss enemies in the same way. It's hard to articulate, but here's an example: in the good soulsborne games, if you're getting swarmed by a bunch of guys, you can do a big, wide attack and feel confidant that anything your weapon touches will take damage or block and interrupt. That's not how it works in this - more often than not only the main thing you have targeted takes damage and your light-saber will just clip through everything else. The soulsborne games feel like they built an incredible damage/physics system and them modeled all the moves and animations to fit into it, and this game feels like they modeled all the moves and animations first and then worked out the physics of how things interact afterwards.

There's fun puzzles, and very gorgeous visuals and intense action sequences, and enough exploration if you like lots of collectibles, (they're all cosmetic or rather uninteresting lore stuff - no loot or real upgrades to your character that aren't gated by the metroidvania style progression, including even the skill tree/xp based stuff). The result is something that tries to be more non-linear and exploration based than a tightly focused narrative experience, but sacrifices that focus while still lacking the freedom and choices and skill based gameplay of the games it's trying to emulate. It's not bad - it's perfectly functional, but there's no joy in it, and it's a shame, because there's some neat fusions there for platforming and level design and story. It feels like a game that someone wanted to be a lot more and someone else said "hold on slow your roll, we need to get this out in eighteen months and it's star wars so it'll sell about the same either way."

I can't recommend it overall for full price, because ultimately, it seems like it's failing at what it's trying to do more often than it succeeds, but I really wish I could. Pick it up on a sale and enjoy it for what it is.

Simple but compelling resource-based city builder with a slower burn than other games. The slow burn is good, because replayability is pretty limited. Unlike other city builders, game-over like failure states in which all your colonists die is the main challenge of the game, and it's compelling throughout the long early stages of the game and provides satisfaction once you reach the relatively shorter middle and end stage.

A+ graphics, gameplay, simulation, and accessibility

C- fremium content and frustrating balance.