Recent reviews by Detrian

It's pretty fun and a neat approach to WW2 games in that it includes both more hardcore and more arcade game modes. The graphics are ok, the AI is decent, the gameplay is fun; Unfortunately it has that Unity thing that makes it run very poorly on my CPU (ryzen 5 3600, it's pretty old now, but older Unity games have always run meh on it) and the road map is pretty long so I decided to refund for now and check it later.

I think Breakpoint is pretty good but it does have a serious bug and I'm going to tell you about it since the game is on sale.
If your game is crashing a lot, or you get massive framerate drops when you press ESC or check the map, it's because your GPU is running out of VRAM. You need to lower your in-game settings.

There's something ♥♥♥♥♥ with the game and it uses a whole lot more VRAM than it tells you. If you run out of VRAM, your game is either going to crash or get severe framerate drops (the latter often what happens on newer Nvidia GPUs with latest drivers.) I don't know if there is a fix.

To avoid this problem, you want to lower the settings enough so that you never go over the VRAM limit. In my case, with a RTX 3070 that has 8 gigs of VRAM, that means the in-game vram meter should say I'm using some 5.5 gigs of it. It's a lie, it actually uses like 7.5. Luckily the game still looks pretty good with the mixture of very high, high and mid settings used.

Core Keeper is fun but not THAAAAT fun. It looks great, plays decent, and the devs have clearly put effort into trying to make the experience enjoyable, like how they made decorative items so easy to craft, but at the same time there are a lot of QOL things and gaps in content that make the game feel unpolished. Off the top of my head:

- You need TONS of space to build a base due to the sheer amount of crafting tables and storage you need. The fact that crafting from storage is severely limited hurts a lot in this regard, as does the small amount of items chests can hold.
- Being underground means you need to constantly dig huge stretches of land both to build or just to get around. There are no "cave systems" like in Terraria or Minecraft with large, natural caverns connected by smaller tunnels. In Core Keeper all the natural caves are tiny, as are most of the premade structures and areas you find.
- Weird QOL things like how newer crafting benches and anvils replace the older ones but then there's no way to recycle the obsolete ones.
- Progression can be weird. In my game I spent ages trying to find large amounts of tin but kept finding iron and gold, the tier above that. Turns out tin spawns in the clay biome, which in my map is only found south (so far) instead of, for example, a circular area around the starting location.
- Ranching is borderline useless.
- Traps can hit you own livestock.
- Hunger goes down REALLY fast and you need a lot of food to bring it back up. It feels like the game wants you to eat 3 or so different meals every time so you get all sorts of buffs going, but in practice that takes up a ton of inventory space and feels more like a chore. Likewise, healing feels limited because not all meals provide healing.
- You fill your inventory really quickly albeit mostly with trash. Having to stop mid-exploration to trash mundane items is common.

All in all, I think Core Keeper is still worth trying but it's not amazing. If Steam had a "meh" rating I'd go for that but as it is, I don't think it's worth a not recommend. Just be warned that it won't blow your socks off either.

The last few news posts promised we'd be able to change gather rates but the update is already out and sadly that didn't happen. Without that, I feel the game is not really playable solo because the amount of resources you need to get is way too high - or more specifically, the amount of materials each tree/rock drops is way too low for the effort and time it takes to break them down. It makes the game feel very slow right from the start, far slower than any other game in either the survival or colony manager genre I've tried, and is very off putting considering this is the kind of game where production chains get exponentially slower.

Honestly not very fun? When you are at home there is nothing to do because there are no invasions, and being out in the wild is kind of boring too because the game is samey and easy. The lack of emergent events, the ease of fast travel, the static enemy locations, lack of a weather system, limited bag storage and the way the stamina system works all means that you'll be doing insipid, quick trips to get mundane loot and then warp right back home to craft boring things. Not even rare loot is very exciting because weapon movesets are very similar across the board and the "unique" stat bonuses each weapon can unlock only come after spending a lot of money on upgrades - something you will not want to do because finding another copy of the same weapon later on, when you are a higher level, will make your upgraded one obsolete and a huge waste of money.

I don't really see much to this game. I was impressed at first when I thought combat was more involved and how the building system copied Valheim's, except THAT game had a much more robust system that made you deal with structural support, smoke and base defense. Even Valheim's combat, which WAS a lot more clumsy, still had more nuance to it in the end because weapon types were a lot more varied, different types of shields had different weight, biomes were harder to deal with, etc...

I wouldn't really recommend Enshrouded right now, if at all. It's not terrible by any means but it's not particularly good at anything else either and while the idea of the shroud is cool, it doesn't make up for all the other barebones mechanics the game has. And since the world is not randomly generated, there's no point in playing right now instead of whenever the game comes out and hopefully stops being "We have Valheim at home."

I wouldn't recommend it right now. Even outside the lord limit which a lot of reviews have already touched upon, Norland is both too buggy and too opaque to pull off the robust management it wants to do. It's a game that wants to play with chains of production, economies and a lot of emphasis on character growth, but none of that works well when a bug makes your son's teacher (which you hired at great expense) stand in place, frozen, wasting precious hours instead of actually teaching.

It doesn't work well when you cannot see the tax cost of your warriors (misspelled warrioros in game, come on now) to decide which ones to dismiss and which ones to keep around because they have wildly different costs due to how powerful they were back when you hired them 10 hours ago.

It doesn't work well when you don't get to see the results of a bandit raid on one of your nearby villages, just the bandits in the world map vanish into thin air with no indication if they won or died or what.

It just does not work. It's no fun because it's a game that has a whole lot of things to manage and you never know when something is broken or not working as you expect or you simply don't get enough information about it. When you then consider that the game is also full of typos and questionable design decisions like the aforementioned lord limit, I feel like I'm being asked to invest way too much into a sloppy product.

Oh, and the constant mention of rutabaga in the gibberish voice acting is more distracting than funny.

It has a really indepth character creator and awesome monster designs but that's about it. It's a grindy "survival" game with dozens of "survivors" walking around, talking ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in global chat and killing enemies that pose no challenge whatsoever. The monsters are styled in a creepy way and would look right at home in a horror title, except it's hard to get any horror vibes when you are running around in your underwear and can put down an enemy several levels higher with just one hit. It has a cash shop, and a battlepass, and seasonal rewards too! All of them full of silly costumes and things that clash with the game's aesthetic even harder. The combat sucks because your character feels like it has lead feet, but finding new critters to capture is pretty neat.

The building, performance and graphics are all there but none of them are particularly impressive. It's also hilarious how the dialogue in cutscenes is timed for your character to speak up, except there's no voicework nor subtitles for them so every conversation in the game features one or two fully voiced NPCs taking turns watching a guy/girl pantomime what they are saying.

Yeah I dunno. It's not very good but I guess it will do if you are desperate for free games.

Icarus has some really good survival elements but loses my recommendation by being a confused, poorly structured mess. Having gone from a mission-based game to primarily a persistent open-world, Icarus is a game torn in halves and unfortunately both are flawed, grindy and never reach their full potential.

To explain, there are two main ways to play Icarus:
Missions: In which you are dropped onto a planet with only your "workshop" gear (I'm going to call it persistent gear to avoid confusion) and make temporary structures/tools to complete an specific goal within the allotted time. Victory earns you money to buy more persistent gear, but everything else you crafted/built during your stay on the planet is gone when you leave; This includes tools, resources, structures, etc...

Open world: A persistent, open-world version of the same planet with slower XP gain and the option to do some Missions for rewards. This is now considered to be the "main" game mode after the playerbase clamored for it.

Character progression, which consists of unlockable talents, tech blueprints and persistent gear, are shared between modes.

What's the problem, then? The problem is that each game mode is flawed in some way. More Goldilocks than Icarus, the game tries different things but they are never quite right:

- Missions get repetitive because they are both simplistic, the map is not randomly generated, and you are required to craft the bulk of your tools from nothing. Persistent gear is supposed to help you get a headstart on this but not only is it expensive to build/maintain, it has limited durability and cannot be repaired during a mission. You have to play efficiently, else you'll end up using primitive tools no matter what, which involves re-building all of the infrastructure needed over and over.

- Open world is barebones, FAR too grindy and not even a real, long-lasting mode because resources don't respawn on their own. The tool/structure needed to respawn ores is locked behind Tier 4, end-game tools, so until that happens you'll have to deal with moving base or walking progressively further away just to get resources. Another issue is that missions are presented in a very basic way, with all of the voiced dialogue from the original Missions mode missing; It makes open-world feel even more lifeless than it already is. Worse still, you have to play and reach level 10 to even unlock the ability to do missions, while the real Missions mode starts from level 0 with a TUTORIAL YOU OTHERWISE DON'T GET IN OPEN WORLD. It's really stupid.

- Progression is abysmally slow, especially in open world. XP gain is very low and you'll find yourself having to do random chores around the house just to level up and get more blueprints to craft. Exploration does not award XP (unless you are in a mission for it), so going out of your way to discover the map gets you nothing in return other than a long walk home. Leveling is so slow that choosing the wrong blueprints or even choosing inefficiently becomes a punishment, and you might delay your own progression for hours if you decide to do something like researching both cloth and bone armor, something than in any other game would be natural progression but in Icarus earns you a few more hours of grinding. This also means that it's entirely possible you'll want to play a large chunk of the game without spending blueprints researching more niche or vanity technology like specific types of medicine or house decor.

- Lastly, and on a personal nitpick, the persistent gear screen always opens to a tech tree showing you the "First Cohort Envirosuit", a cosmetic item awarded only to preorder players and now unobtainable for everyone else. Like a permanent middle-finger from the devs, right in your face, for daring to learn about the game now and not back when it came out. ♥♥♥♥ you too, devs; Sorry for not being an omniscient God that knows about all the games I might ever want to play.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend Icarus, least not right now. The weather system is great, it looks good, the survival elements are a little more involved than usual, but actually playing the game leaves a lot to be desired and it seems like it's going to take a long time for devs to do what they want to do... if ever. I'd refund it if I could but unfortunately this is one of those games that look promising at first.

Soulmask seems promising but it is very rough in its current state. Some parts of the game are robust, like the tribe management, and others are weirdly barebones, like most other things. There's a lot of tedium, a lot of bugs, a lot of grind and a slow progression that can be summed up as "doing chores while waiting for things to happen", so you are going to have to fiddle with sliders to tailor your experience. It also suffers from the usual problem with multiplayer-focused survival games of the map being enormous but filled with repetitive locations so as to let everyone do the content no matter where they set up base; All the "special" ruins in the starting area for example activate the same "Control" power for your mask, so once you clear up one of those areas (ie kill like 4 guys), you've seen them all.

The biggest issue right now I would say is a serious lack of QOL features. There's no crafting from storage, moving bases is a huge pain in the ass and practically necessary since travel is so tedious, a not insignificant amount of text is poorly translated gibberish, repairing items is laborious, there are very few scheduled crafting options and the UI in general is kind of a mess.

All in all I think the game is alright but I don't really see a reason to play it now rather than later. I wish I could give it a neutral review but since Steam doesn't allow that, but honestly more since there's now a permanently unobtainable mask cosmetic that was only given to demo players, it gets a negative instead. I hate when devs do that.

Practically all the negative reviews about this game speak about nonexistent issues at this point. The game has offline mode now, the AI is the best in the franchise, all the talk about it being "arcade" is stupid nonsense from people who have no idea what they are talking about too. In fact, I can guarantee that if I open the comments in this review, no one will even be able to point out what is so "arcade" about it.

It's by far the best MoW in the franchise. Only one with decent skirmish AI, good soldier Ai, a modern engine that doesn't explode with higher player counts, good netcode, planes, etc...

That's just facts, sorry.