Recent reviews by Fate

I like BT. He's charming and fun.

di ff eren t

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I initially reviewed this game and called it counterincentivized. I've since put some more time into it and learned something important:

The game is not demanding perfection. It's demanding that you comply with the work order in as efficient a way as possible. This is not a problem, as long as you stick to the WO tasks first and then do extra things you need to do to complete your own goals for furthering your certifications. I was entering the game with the mindset of someone taking apart a firearm - Expecting to return a service-ready system again. I should not have been. This game is about *dismantling* spacecraft at their EOL.

It's good. The physics is polished, the destruction mechanics are in, and once you've put down a few boats it flows much smoother even without upgrades. Free Play is there to *practice* until you feel confident in your dismantling task list.

Additional: I'm still looking forward to control editing and variable timers, but I'm enjoying the game much more since I've learned what it expects from me.

You know that dumb thing where most building games want you to do everything manually? It's all labor-intensive and such. For "gameplay reasons" or to "increase player engagement". That's garbage.

Garbage!

My kind of player engagement is standing atop my fifteen-story factory tower sipping from my FICSIT INC mug as my autotrucks deliver parts and my machines grind the world to fine powder beneath my bootheel.

High-Fantasy Football.

Bungie makes, hands-down, the best core gameplay loop in the industry. Id claims to have invented the first-person shooter (they didn't, that's Midimaze). Bethesda claims to have invented the FPS/RPG hybrid (they didn't, that's Bungie's Pathways into Darkness). There are no shoots anywhere else that are as good as these shoots.

That's how I started my initial review, with over six hundred hours in the series over four years. That was almost four years ago. Now I've put an additional 1400 hours in, and it's still true. Couple that with a compelling story, profound lore, and putting paid to plot beats which you'd swear were random nonsense from D1 Year 1, and you've got a hell of a package.

Add the best map design the game's ever had in Europa and the Throne World, combine with deep character customization provided by Light 3.0, and now you're talking the single best live-service game out there.

oh my god how did this get here

Come with me, friend, and I will tell you a tale of planning, disaster, and hitting a man in the chest so hard he flew down the corridor and out the window, into the cold uncaring vacuum of space, there to wriggle and die like bait on a hook.

The aesthetics of this game are on point, well beyond what they should be given the effort that went into the story, controls, gameplay execution, and incidental writing.

The long and the short of it is that the creative writing team on this game forgot the "creative" part of their job description. They seem to think that unanswered questions are the same thing as mysteries, and that's not the way that works. Additionally, before you begin the game you NEED to understand a full two years of backstory between the end of DX Human Revolution, the game before this one, and this game. Instead of telling you that backstory in an interesting way, it's infodumped in a condescending voice. The conversation in which that infodump takes place is *noninteractive*, *seven minutes long*, and tremendously boring to sit through. It's like a real-world tactical briefing, only you don't get to commit murder when you're done.

Also: the controls are clanky and irritating, even when compared to the original Deus Ex from the '90s.

But, it's pretty. So you can at least get lectured and handheld while looking at pretty pictures.

If you like text adventures, choose-your-own adventure games, robots, subways, or any combination of the above, you should play this game. It's by the lead designer of Thomas Was Alone and carries much of the same charm.