Nylige anmeldelser av dudekazoo

I got to shoot Penn Jillette in the face.
10/10

A tough, fairly competent, but ultimately unpolished tactics game. My biggest problem is that the game is that in many situations it does not provide enough information to make satisfying decisions. For example your chance to hit an enemy is displayed, but only one or two of the dozens of behind the scenes factors affecting that chance are ever shown. There is an excessive amount of trial and error as the relative difficulty of the different types of enemies is never explicated. What's more difficult: four goblins, three skeletons, or six bandits? The only way to find out is to roll the dice on a battle. It feels like an unnecessarily punishing way to learn.

Nevertheless if you are searching for a new tactics game and love a challenge, or can forgive a fairly high degree of jankiness, Battle Brothers may very well be up your alley. I would give the game a very qualified recommendation.

I love Borderlands, I love the setting, the attitude, the art, the music, the characters, the dialogue, the environments. I love everything about Borderlands except playing it. I only tolerate playing it. Sometimes it can be genuinely enjoyable, and with other people it is often great fun. But I think a lot of us are going to be schlogging our way through umpteen samey hours of killing a million bullet sponge enemies to finally level up and get some crappy 1-5% bonus on a stat. Grinding and leveling is a huge chore and often detracts from the overall experience, however, and this is a huge caveat, the overall experience is so great that I will always come back from time to time just to be boots on the ground in Pandora.

For me RimWorld is more than a game, it's a compelling and ever unfolding set of stories. And this, I believe, is precisely its thesis statement, its goal, its raison d'etre. I cite for example the fact that you choose at the outset of any playthrough not just the game's difficulty but it's "storyteller", similar to Left 4 Dead's AI "director" but so much more.

There are two reasons RimWorld holds a unique and enduring place in my heart, and these reasons keep me playing for far more hours than I've owned it on steam (I know, naughty me). The first is a fantastic strategy/simulation game. Early on I felt like RimWorld merely scratched the SimCity itch I'd had since a child. But then I realized I kept playing RimWorld long after I would have abandonded a SimCity game. And that's because I need the hardship, I need the diseases to sweep arbitrarily through and tax my supportive care capacity. I need the blights to ruin crops and force me to find alternate food sources. I need raiders to try to pillage all I've built so I have to make the hard choices about whether to feed a prisoner, or bloody my hands with an execution.

So, the first extraordinary merit of RimWorld is thus: part city builder, part sim, part RTS, part tactics shooter, part really grim Harvest Moon, etc. And it aces them all.

The second extraordinary merit of RimWorld is the story creation. Aside from a sparse setting which admittedly borrows heavily from Firefly (no complaints here) every bit of story in RimWorld is procedural or internal to your own mind. The quirky traits, frenetic firefights, life or death struggles, finding of love between colonists, it all adds up to you following the little, pixelated lives of your characters. And as you do, you can fall in love too. At thirty years old I've grown accustomed to the fact that my parents and girlfriend don't give a hoot about the game I might be playing at the moment, but they'll occasionally give a wholehearted listen when I'm real fired up about it. RimWorld is different though. The stories come out so interesting, so varied, so lifelike, that they all love to listen. My mother will literally ask me over the phone about my RimWorld colony because she wants to hear cool stories about the zany things that may have happened in the game since last we spoke. To me that speaks of a procedural genius I will always appreciate.

Don't let the early access tag fool you, this game is beyond amazing. In over a decade of using steam it has prompted me to write my first legitimate review. I swear, I buy it again if I had someone to whom I could gift it, because it's a bargain at twice the price.