Recent reviews by etimpa

Summerhouse delivers on what it promises.
A chill, boundless building experience with a stunning pixel style. (which you can disable).

It's warm and comforting, free and open. The art is gorgeous, and the little environments you can build in are shockingly expansive.

As a break from the world, it's a wonderfully perfect little toy. I can't wait to spend hours doodling away and creating little homes.

I desperately wanted to like it. I followed development, I watched streams of the beta weekends, and listened to all of the "performance improvements and big fixes" comments and felt like the full launch was the time to jump in.

I've got a hefty rig with an 11700k, 2080 Super and 64gb RAM and it still stuttered and hiccuped and would randomly lock up.

You need to click things multiple times sometimes til it registers, and the in game help leaves you needing a wiki to get the insight you need to actually survive and play.

It looks gorgeous when it's standing still and there's some amazing concepts in here. There's a super fun game buried under the issues and I hope they can find it. But this game isn't even close to ready for launch, or the team behind it isn't capable of fixing these issues. Fingers crossed it's the former and it will find itself turning into something amazing like No Mans Sky did.

But right now I've refunded it. There's thousands of other games to play that won't run like garbage.

No Man's Sky is one mans vision of the ultimate space exploration game. Explore a procedurally generated universe with quintillions of planets to explore.

The updates have been coming thick and fast with a couple of massive upgrades a year. We've got multiple vehicles you can build to run around on planets with, including hover bikes and giant mechs. You can build an epic base, a farm or even a little city. You can dig into the ground or forge pillars.

Get lost in a snow storm, hide from a fire tornado in a hole in the ground, or get blown away by a tornado.

You can build your own fleet of spaceships to choose from, and command a monstrous freighter with an armada of support ships. And yeah, you can build inside that too with a mobile base you drag with you from system to system.

Every planet is really planet sized. You can roam, drive, hop and fly from pole to pole or one side to the other. If you've got weeks to spare. Or leap into space and use your drive to zoom around to the other side and land again.

You can climb mountains and volcanoes, build an underwater base and your own submarine. Find an egg to craft a real living ship of your own, and find abandoned derelict freighters in space filled with horrific things waiting to kill you.

No Mans Sky is a massively open universe to roam around in. If you want the freedom to go anywhere and do whatever you want, you might just enjoy this. And it's cross play multiplayer. So instead of exploring alone you can jump into the Nexus at any time day or night and find a community waiting to go on a wild mission with you.

XCOM 2 brings back everything amazing and challenging about XCOM: EW and XCOM: EU and dials it up.
The opening missions are tougher than they ever were, but once you find your feet it's a strong strong game.

It continues the XCOM tradition of brutal punishment for poor choices, but lots of chances to recover. And it adds even more chances to customise your play style. You can build long range snipers, teams of rangers for up close combat or an army of psychics to tear aliens apart from far away.

Improves the series in every way. Well worth the price if you played EU and EW.

Bought Islanders on a whim in the steam sale and it's absolutely gorgeous. Nice graphics, loads fast and super easy to pick up. It's got an amazing balance between easy and difficult and it's a huge amount of fun.

It's nice and casual to start or you can go all min/max and try to really jam stuff in there to maximise it. We're having a blast learning what goes near what and the best order to build things in.

Easily one of the best indie games I've ever picked up and it's an instant add to my favourites list.
5/5

XCOM: EU is relentlessly unforgiving. From the very first moment I started playing multiplayer with a friend I had my skull caved in and plasma fired through my back. Again and again I was slaughtered mercilessly by my friend.
Then I played single player, and had tougher and more viscous enemies than my friend had ever been.
You will fail, suffer and tear your hair out.

This is one of the best games ever made.

The comedy is even better than the first and the new puzzle mechanics are incredible, it takes some very abstract thinking to get through these!