Recent reviews by astrocom

It still has a ways to go before it's really ready for prime time, but this is shaping up to be a great game.

Until I bought this controller during a sale I didn't really believe that a touch surface could ever work well to replace an analog stick, and I was happily proved wrong. For really accurate aiming I still find myself using a mouse, but I easily have thousands of times more experience aiming with a mouse than anything else. The back paddles are fantastic, though I do find myself wishing that they were consistently assigned to a and b. Unlike with literally every other controller out there, navigating my desktop is not only possible with the steam controller, but easy, which makes me wish steam had better compatibility with it outside of big picture. Something the product page doesn't mention is that if you connect the controller directly to your computer (or steam link) with the provided microUSB cable, it works without batteries and the dongle. The HD haptics don't do a great job of reproducing the rumble feel I'm used to from other controllers, but they actually do provide useful feedback for using the track pads which is a tradeoff I'm happy with. I find the controller's ergonomics to be fantastic; I have big hands and have experienced cramping with every other controller I've ever used, and I'm confident that I've used the steam controller enough to call its ergonomics superior.

Space Engineers is, by far, my favorite game. Since I purchased it in 2015 I've put in nearly 4x as many hours as I have my second most played game. I'm generally a space opera / sci-fi fan, and something about this game has just wormed into my brain to the point where spending time with any other kind of sci-fi just makes me want to play this game. Taking a look at the workshop, it seems that I'm not alone, since various players have designed and shared ships from every sci-fi property I've ever heard of. This is the game I wish I could find more friends to play it with.

Reviewing DLC's & Mods for recommendations

There's a bunch of stuff online about how this game isn't as good as it's predecessor, Red Faction Guerilla. From my perspective, that simply isn't true. I admittedly have a somewhat unusual point of view, since I played Armageddon first, but the improvements to the central mechanics of this series mean there's really no going back. In Guerilla, you can destroy just about anything in a variety of interesting ways based on the actual structure of whatever it is you're destroying. In Armageddon, this degree of endlessly entertaining destruction is maintained, but it's just as easy to REPAIR those items, even if they're damaged the first time you see them. Guerilla is also an open world game, whereas Armageddon is quite linear, but while I usually appreciate open world games, I guess Guerilla is old enough now that it just seems...empty, outdated, and boring. It took me about 12 hours to finish the main campaign of Armageddon, and while it's a much shorter game than Guerilla, I wasn't bored at any point. It left me wanting more, which led to the relative disappointment that was Guerilla.

note: This review was originally written to warn new buyers that the games save system had been broken by an update from valve (the game stopped being able to create new save files and crashed when trying to do so, immediately after a steam update, and the last update to the game itself had been some time beforehand). This issue has since been fixed, so I deleted my rant from the beginning of the review.

Don't bother with the demo. I'm not sure what the real game is like, but the demo only has about 10 minutes of gameplay in it. you can't craft, you can't make bases, you can't repair anything, and you can only use the most basic components, but you can encounter enemies with much better components that will quickly kill you, and if you do defeat them, their components explode immediately after dropping.