Recent reviews by EmberQuill

Shapez 2 is what you get when you boil down the factory-building genre to its core essence. You don't have to worry about resource costs, survival, combat, crafting, or anything other than building your factory. There are resource nodes that never run out, infrastructure for transporting, modifying, and combining resources, and a destination for those resources (the vortex). With no resource costs you're encouraged to tear down infrastructure you're no longer using and replace it with something new as needed. You can freely move, copy, and save parts of your infrastructure as blueprints, encouraging you to create "modules" that you can assemble like building blocks.

There's a smooth progression, too. Delivering enough shapes to complete a task grants a certain number of research points, which can be used to unlock throughput upgrades, optional machines that allow more compact building, and more. There are also milestones, which gate the primary progression line. Completing a milestone unlocks a new major feature, such as the ability to construct new platforms and chain them together, fluid extraction and painting of shapes, trains (high-throughput transportation), multiple levels to allow for more compact builds, and more. This results in a fairly smooth transition from micro to macro as you unlock milestones, with the big one being the introduction of platforms, allowing you to build modules to be reused for large-scale processing.

The sole focus on factory-building really works in this game's favor. Building and rebuilding your factory becomes an almost zen-like experience and it's easy to lose track of time. And it's very well-optimized for an Early Access game. I absolutely recommend it to any fans of the factory-building genre.

This is easily my favorite ARPG. Smooth character progression, interesting skill trees, dual-classing, good loot, etc. And since it's not a "live-service" kind of game there's no microtransactions or anything. Just two relatively beefy expansions that are absolutely worth the price (with a third one coming in 2024). You don't even need to be online if you're playing singleplayer.

Overall, it's just plain fun.

This was not meant to be a rant but it sort of became one.

I can deal with the Bethesda jank. Even if it's all the same bugs that have been in every game since they started using the Gamebryo engine back in ye olden days, that just means I'm used to it and I can deal with it. I probably shouldn't give a game a chance when it's as broken as a typical Bethesda release, but I can't help it because their open-world games are so immersive and entertaining, with... admittedly, mediocre main quests but at least the side content is usually good.

Not so for Starfield.

The biggest problem I have with Starfield has nothing to do with the bugs (which are as ridiculous and common as usual for a Bethesda game). It's the story. Not just the main story, but all of the story. The side quests. The worldbuilding. The characters. All of it. Starfield has what might be the most boring sci-fi setting I've ever seen. I played this game for forty hours and I barely remember any of it because it was so dull. It kept me thinking it was just about to get interesting, only to fumble the landing and remain incredibly dull.

It's a game of wasted potential. A game about exploration of a place that's already been thoroughly mapped (and mostly settled by pirates). A game about crafting and base-building and ship-building that wants you to periodically wipe away all of your stuff to start fresh with NG+. A game that decided Bethesda's greatest strength (environmental storytelling in handcrafted environments) was less important than having loads of planets so they procedurally-generated the environment and dropped a few points of interest per planet, many of which are completely identical right down to the enemies and loot they contain.

This game is what happens when you have a whole team of people responsible for designing individual pieces of a game and nobody is coordinating their efforts. It never feels like anything you do actually matters, because other parts of the game are set up to make it so that it doesn't matter. Hijacking ships isn't profitable. Base building has no real incentives as it's easier to get materials by just buying them from a store. Having multiple ships or frequently modifying your own ship constantly resets the interior and dumps all your decorations and clutter into the cargo hold (and causes a duplication bug but that's just Bethesda's usual problem). Weight limits on everything including stationary storage on your bases, in a game where you need to carry hundreds of kg of crafting materials between planets just to build a base. Merchants with hardly any money so you can't sell your ill-gotten gains without repeatedly waiting for their inventory to restock. Joining the Space Pirate faction hilariously "breaks" the game by making most of the enemy NPCs friendly, trivializing other missions. The persuasion minigame is more like a Jedi Mind Trick because you can repeatedly convince people to forget you murdered innocents in front of them. Most of the important NPCs are essential, the usual Bethesda problem, but this is a game where nothing you do matters because you can reset the universe so why actually make them essential in the first place? Companions give you gifts if you raise their affection enough but it's almost not worth doing because their gifts are just more junk filling your inventory. Fallout 4 had a system to break down some items into crafting materials, making looting worth it even when collecting junk like duct tape. Starfield doesn't have that so all the junk you looted is useless except for decoration.

I actually have to stop myself from going on because there are so many elements of this game that just don't make sense and don't fit together at all.

Fun, relaxing, and satisfying. For a game with such a simple premise (blast dirty things with water until they're clean), it still manages to keep me entertained for hours on end. If you have ADHD like I do, be prepared to completely lose track of time.

A fun game that takes you from building basic logic gates out of NANDs to building a CPU. My only real complaint is that it's rather short; I got through all the challenges in about 4 hours. Not a lot of replay value either, other than maybe going back and trying to optimize some of your solutions to use fewer gates.

Still, I feel like it was worth it. A short but ultimately enjoyable experience.

If you liked Freelancer, you'll probably like this game. Since Freelancer is my favorite space sim of all time, I consider that to be very high praise.

The flight controls are very easy to learn. Even on mouse and keyboard, it only took a couple of minutes before I felt very comfortable with the movement controls and I was able to start dodging weapons fire, weaving through debris, and flying through narrow gaps. Movement is very arcade-y compared to realistic space sims, and inertia damping is on by default (although I believe you can set a hotkey to toggle it) so you come to a complete stop when none of your thrusters are engaged.

The early part of the game (first hour or two) is focused on the main story narrative, but it opens up fairly quickly after that, allowing you to explore and find side missions, enemies, loot, and all sorts of other things. There are also some puzzles to solve. Early in the game, on one of the first few main story missions, you have to reassemble an antenna that's missing two pieces. You get an indicator of the trajectory those pieces took when the antenna was damaged, and you have to fly that direction and find them, grab them with your tractor beam, and drag them back to the antenna. It was a fun little diversion, broken up with a couple of dogfights as enemies got close enough to detect me.

Combat is fun as well. Weapon variety is nice, and the high maneuverability mixed with dense debris fields in some areas makes it a lot more interesting.

Overall, I'm really enjoying Everspace 2, and it's one of the most polished Early Access games I've ever played.

Update:

I barely played at all after the Steam release because my former group stopped playing and I couldn't get any of my newer friends into it (the new player experience is pretty bad, just throwing tons of group content at you without any sort of introduction or steady progression). Now that they're outright deleting the content that originally got me into the game, and sunsetting the gear I worked hard to get, I really don't see a reason to ever play it again. In my original review I said it was maybe worth playing, especially if you have friends who play. Now I can't give it anything other than a firm thumbs-down.

Original Review:

If you have friends who play the game, you'll probably have a great time joining them for strikes or crucible matches or whatever you want to do. If you don't have friends who play, the new player experience post-F2P is so bad that you are likely to just give up after an hour or two of confusion and boredom. There used to be an immersive story campaign that served as an introduction to the rest of the game. As you progressed through it, you'd unlock new abilities, new types of content, and new locations over time. By the end of the campaign, the whole game would would be open to you and you'd have a fair understanding of the different kinds of content available.

After New Light (the name of the update that coincided with the migration to Steam and the F2P launch), the campaign is now optional and hidden away at an NPC vendor that most new players will probably miss. Instead, new players are treated to a short tutorial that introduces their basic abilities, then they're dropped in the main social hub of the game with no explanation of what's going on. Players who find the story campaign and play it might have a slightly better experience, but all the progression in abilities and content is gone since it's all available from the start, and there's no real reward for completing it. No more slow and steady introduction to the different mechanics of the game. You're just thrown straight into the deep end.

I wish there was an option to say "maybe" instead of just yes or no. Because I conditionally recommend this game. It's fun to play and there's a lot of different kinds of content available, from PvE strikes and raids to events to survival/escalation events to PvP matches and more... and although I haven't played much since the Steam launch, I had a lot more hours in the game on Battle.Net. But getting into the game as a solo new player is challenging and will not feel very rewarding at first. But since people who have friends already playing the game probably won't bother looking at reviews, I'm gonna say I can't recommend this game for new players in its current state.

I've played a lot of hacking games (everything from the venerable Uplink to newer titles like Hacknet), but I think this might be my favorite one yet. NITE Team 4 has more real-life hacking techniques than most other games in the genre (sometimes you crack passwords, but more often than not you exploit vulnerabilities or even use social engineering).

The military "setting" is also an interesting twist, as instead of playing as a cyber-criminal, you're working for a paramilitary group. Instead of hacking a bank to steal all their money, or stealing data from corporations to sell to their competitors, I was tracking down criminals, tracing the source of infected software used to create a botnet, and even on one occasion calling in a drone strike after pinpointing a hacker's location.

It's a nice, fresh take on the genre and I'm still enjoying it immensely.

I honestly can't remember how I found this game originally. All I know is that I bought it on a whim back in 2016, played it for a little bit, but never finished it due to some other game coming out that I wanted to play. Fast forward a year and a half, and I spotted it in my Steam Library again and decided to reinstall it.

And I'm so glad I did.

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is probably about as weird of a game as it sounds. You play as Jill, who is (you guessed it) a bartender living in a dystopian Cyberpunk future. The government is big brother, the law enforcement is corrupt, corporations run everything, and your job is... to mix drinks and talk to people.

And you will meet all sorts of interesting people, with all sorts of interesting things to say. If you are the kind of person who gets invested in the characters of games you play, you'll absolutely want to pick this up. If you're a visual novel fan, you should play it immediately. Even if you're not, it might be worth giving it a try, as it's not really your standard visual novel.

I was a little unsure about this game since it was only $2 and I've had bad experiences with cheap Steam games, but the revews were good so I gave it a try.

And then I played for nearly two hours straight. "Oh... Sir!" is ridiculously fun and worth more than the asking price. I would have happily paid $5 or more for this game. Not to mention the fact that insulting someone, even if it's just an NPC (though there is multiplayer too), is incredibly cathartic.

So if you've ever wanted to tell someone that their mother poses nude for their husband, or their father secretly adores the Nazis, or something else similarly vulgar, get this game. You won't regret it.

"Your wife plays hidden object games and never watched Star Wars, you tottering fool-born hedge-pig!"
"Your face is vile and has a steaming romp with defenseless young men!"