Recent reviews by Defrosted

Simply amazing to the point of being must-have if you had similar gripes as me with the base game. I never managed to finish a save before Space Age, as usually right before reaching the final stages before launching a rocket, I just lost interest. Building only on Nauvis just got too repetitive and didn't introduce fresh ideas frequently enough to keep my interest in the game after reaching early late-game.

Space Age fixes all the issues I had, and I was just hooked after starting with my first space platform. Each planet offers a new challenge and new mechanics to keep the game fresh and forcing you to shift the way you think when building a factory there. Not to mention the unique challenges space platforms/ships introduce, and how you'll just keep re-engineering them whenever you unlock better technologies for them.

I wholeheartedly recommend Space Age to any fellow Factorio engineer. It's genuinely a major expansion in the full meaning of the word. The factory must grow.

I played the beta, and most of the issues that I found there persist at least at the time of release. There are certainly a lot of balancing issues as well. My hopes is that they fix and improve the issues, especially diplomacy, through updates and expansions.

TL;DR It's a fun game, and I do want to recommend it. However, it's quite flawed and a bit buggy as of now, so waiting for updates & expansions might be worth it. Maybe grab it when it goes on sale?

I want to remind that regardless of me focusing on the negative things, the game is really fun to play, and I will definitely be playing it more in the future. It brings a completely new look on the Civilization type game genre, although it's far from being perfect as it is. It's pretty much a mix of Civilization and Endless Legend. The point of this review is to point out the things I currently have issue with (after one game + beta), as they surely are a deal breaker to some players. I'm sure there are other reviews also pointing out the good things for balance.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the poor communication of information. The UI doesn't do a very good job of communicating information, and expect that you'll need to play a few saves to learn the mechanics. There are some very obvious things you should tell in your UI, but at times are just left out, like what kind of units can move over what kind of terrain, why you can't move a particular unit where you want it to, or why the unit has no line of sight (especially horse units with garrisons). There are no information available on some of the core systems and mechanics of the game, and if there's info on the in-game encyclopedia, it's incomplete at times. For example, it's not explained anywhere how you can change your civilization's state religion to another. The list is long, and you'll no doubt come in contact with it during your play.

There are also some odd design decisions, like horse units not being able to move into or interact with any units inside garrisons. I understand the logic in some ways, but why can't my ranged mounted units attack from outside the garrison when their unmounted counterparts can? The war system is a bit odd too. I get that it's not fun that in Civilization you're able to crush your opponent during a single war, but the current system is just way too forgiving. If I conquer almost all of the cities of my enemy, it's pretty annoying to have to give most of them back and be able to keep only one or two when the game forces the enemy to surrender and end the war. For some reason I wasn't allowed to make the AI players to become my vassal state after any of the multiple wars I won against them, as it would've required double the amount of the demand points I was given during the negotiations, even though I totally steamrolled over them (while they still managed to amass tons of Fame points). I honestly don't know how on earth you're supposed to be able to win through conquer, as the game continuously prevents you from doing that.

There are also some oddities which I would consider as bugs, because they aren't explained in any shape or form. For example, at one point in the game I lost the ability to build any siege units during a siege. In the previous era I had trebuchets, but once I moved into the next era and started a siege I wasn't allowed to build any siege units (did my civ just forget how to build the trebuchets?). Also, when you're forcing a surrender some of your demands might be invalid at the time e.g. the surrendering party already made peace with my ally and therefore are greyed out, so why are they still counted towards the amount demands I'm allowed to make during the peace negotiation as the winning party?

The diplomacy options are a bit lacking. If I'm allied with someone, and they go to war, I'm often unable to help them unless I have the war support to join them, or declare surprise war and suffer the consequences. The diplomacy is also lacking the options of being able to trade or gift regions and units to other players, and take those into account during peace negotiation. For example, if I was in a war alongside my ally and I end up winning it, I'm unable to give back the regions to my ally that were conquered by the enemy civilization.

The game is also pretty unbalanced, although I probably played on a bit too easy difficulty (the default) in my first save. Once your civ gets ahead, the snowball just keeps rolling and you'll pretty much just run over everyone. The amount of resources your cities produce will creep up really fast once you're ahead in the Era system, as the bonuses you get from progressing to the next era are pretty huge. I was able to conquer cities within one turn, and the AI didn't really care about being conquered at all. At the same time the same AI did the exact same thing to a third civilization in the game. While I was beating the AI to a pulp, they were at the same time amassing fame points like crazy with a fraction of their empire left in their control, and climbing to the top of the scoreboard. Also, once you look at the AI's cities, it's pretty clear that the AI is designed to be "hard" by blatantly cheating in numbers on all areas.

Don't recommend unless you've got a powerful PC. I had big performance issues on GTX 1080 running 2.5K resolution, with frame rates dipping to ~15 fps on the most taxing scenes with medium graphics. You probably will have to settle to 60 fps at best even on the most powerful GPU available today, depending on your resolution.

The story was nice and the game is really beautiful, and those two are definitely the best things this game has to offer. The graphical style and atmosphere is really unique and creepy. The idea with splitting between two realities is really interesting and allows for interesting interactions (definitely drawing inspiration from Stranger Things and the like).

Gameplay-wise the movement is clunky most of the time, mostly thanks to the cinematic camera. It's frustrating when you're moving one way, the camera angle jumps 90 degrees, and you have to switch the direction of your inputs while your character is still moving. It isn't always clear where you should go or what you should do, and the unclear camera angles make it even worse at times. For puzzles it's obviously okay having to figure these things out, but the issue persists for pretty much the entire game. They introduced a system to help you navigate, but it's not "on" all the time.

The puzzles aren't overall very interesting, except for a couple in the latter half of the game, but even then they don't bring a lot of new ideas to the table. The game wasn't very scary for me after the early scares, you get used to the atmosphere quickly. There's only one "jump scare" that I recall, so the game gets full score from me in that aspect, as I don't like that kind of cheap horror.

Not a very long game, it took about 8 hours for me. Overall, it was an interesting experience that I do recommend, despite the issues.

I hope this will point the future of VR

Basically, it's abortion simulator 2020

All jokes aside, here's what I think; it's definitely not The Dark Descent, but still worth playing through. The graphics aren't up to what you'd expect in 2020, but they're still an upgrade when comparing to the previous games. It's beautiful at times, but you can definitely see the game engine is getting a bit dated (I'm guessing that it's just an upgraded version of the engine from the previous games). The upside of that is that the game didn't seem to be that demanding even on the highest graphical settings.

Story-wise I liked Rebirth quite a bit. It kept me coming up with different theories on where it will go next while I was playing, and had me enthralled all the way through. Although I could often theorize correctly on what turn the story would eventually take, it's still a pretty well executed journey that I don't regret playing through. There wasn't a moment where the game got dull or made you want to quit (other than being scared about continuing).

To sum it up, I don't think Rebirth is as good as The Dark Descent, but I don't think that it fell very short by itself either. Overall I find it a bit difficult to compare the two. I think that's partially because there has been so much time in between the two releases, and well... Rebirth is just different as a whole. It definitely still feels like a Frictional game, and you can notice similarities with the previous games, or some of their "trademark elements", to put it that way. It's worth noting that SOMA was developed in between the two Amnesia games, and you can definitely see some influences/ideas from it live on in this one as well, which I personally liked.

Bädäbää

If you liked Ori and the Blind Forest, you'll definitely like this one. The visuals, music and gameplay are amazing and at least on the same level if not higher as in the first one. To keep the game fresh they changed around the core mechanics and abilities and introduced an effect system where you can equip different kinds of effects to Ori as you unlock them. They also changed the basic system so that you can equip different abilities and change the button bindings/slots around through a selection wheel that might be familiar from other games.

The game didn't feel like it was the original one just copied over but yet managed to still offer a similar kind of an experience. You do notice some similarities story-wise, and the plot is following a pattern that's very similar to the first one. That was the only thing that felt like fell a bit short. It's a rather simple fairy tale plot as someone else mentioned in their review. Also, they could've made the quest/map system a bit more clear, as a couple of times I got kind of stuck for a moment figuring out where I was supposed to go. The quest system showed the overall direction, but I initially found a route to the quest marker that was blocked half-way. Searching the map over I found the small passage you were supposed to get into the area, and the first way I tried was unlocked from inside. I also feel like they underutilized the inventory system they introduced and it was paid no attention whatsoever for 99% of the game. It had potential for more than that.

I encountered a couple of bugs but nothing game breaking. To be expected when the game has been out for less than a week.

Overall I do strongly recommend this game if you like story driven action platformers with puzzles and boss battles in between. The game is truly an audiovisual masterpiece just like the Blind Forest was. Definitely makes it into my favourites.

GOTY 2018. I definitely recommend this game, the story is awesome, visuals are awesome and there's not much handholding. A true open-world survival sandbox. Even though the game can be a bit grindy for materials, you never get bored of it because the visuals are just so great and the world is so immersive. This game gets border-line horror sometimes, definitely not leaving you out cold. The only problem with that though is that after the initial scare you pick up the simple AI's behaviour pretty quickly, knowing how they work and how to avoid them. That definitely takes the horror away for a while at least, until you confront the new monstrosity the game has to offer.

I can't think of any reasons why you wouldn't get or already own Terraria. It's one of the best games I own that I keep returning to from time to time. After you've played enough of vanilla there are a bunch of mods you can install to take replayability even further (though there's a bunch to begin with). Not to mention it's very cheap and often on sale. Best when played with friends! ;)