Recent reviews by goat

Still holds up, 12 years after its release.

There's also a thriving modding community, even in 2024.

10/10

Game had a pretty rocky launch; but server issues are mostly fixed now. Use caution if you have a 7000-series AMD card.

Lot of outstanding problems still, such as random crashes, invasive anti-cheat, live-service monetization / grinds , ridiculous bugs (haha, get it?), and their peer-to-peer multiplayer has huge desync issues if a single person in your party doesn't have great internet.

Additionally, Arrowhead really need to test their games, their crash-to-desktops were "cute" when it was Magicka but there is clearly a fundamental problem with that company, this is not their first game, they have 100 employees, they have no excuse for zero QA at this point.

There will also never be mod support, because of the aforementioned live-service & anticheat, which really sucks, this is an industry trend for the worse. It would be fun to have 8-player helldives, or cool modded weapons etc.

On the plus side;

When it is playable, it's fun.
The new content is fun if you're happy to pay for it every month (the excuse "you can get the currency in game" shouldn't fool anyone in 2024)
The updates are regular, new modes/enemies have been added consistently

It is very rare that I go to the effort of 100%ing a game, but this one was worth it. It is fantastically whimsical. If you enjoyed the Portal series, you'll enjoy this. New mechanics never outstay their welcome, puzzles continue to be interesting until the end, and the game is immensely charming throughout.

There are only two negatives:

1. I think the story felt a little rushed, though the gameplay itself was paced very well. I would have liked to explore the story's core themes a little more.
2. Some puzzles were a little too simple once you understood what you had to do; often times I would complete a puzzle with spare "resources" available to me, and allowed me to be a little clumsier or less precise.

The game has a target audience for difficulty, and has "optional" levels, which I really enjoyed, but those were probably optional due to being more difficult than the main storyline. I would love to have seen this expanded upon more. I often got tricked by them, and there were several "aha!" moments.

Mechanically, everything was very satisfying, and one of the most satisfying of them is a "rewind" mechanic, which all puzzle games could benefit from, -- because of this the game NEVER once felt remotely frustrating; all you would lose is a few seconds of work, which is unique in the genre.

Overall, as a final endorsement, if there was DLC or a sequel, I would immediately buy it, no questions asked.

I can't wait to watch this game being speedrun.

Good Battlefield Clone

Fantastic singleplayer game, great improvements over ck2

Multiplayer? -- forget it, this patch anyway, all you're going to see is

OUT OF SYNCH
My Gamestate differs from that of the host due to some miscalculation done by the game.
These players games are out of synch:

7 decades to leave early access

Tl;dr "Fun with friends." Not worth anywhere near full price, hence negative review but at 75% off? Go for it, It's fun.

Very questionable game design decisions. E.g. Water bottles are entirely consumed. Including the glass jar. Crunch crunch. Delicious glass. The hardest part of drinking water is finding the non renewable glass jars. Why? "To make the game not trivial"

You can instead trivialize water (the only actual way) by simply never gathering it or the glass jars required for it and just setting up a water collector instead, and come home to glass jars every day (you don't put them in, they just magically appear from the air, filled with clean water)

Oh, and again, the game released in 2013, it's now 2023. The game is still in ALPHA, not just in early access.

best patch in a long time
10/10

Losing is Fun!

literally the same game as their early access release
basically nothing has changed
seriously it feels as if only one patch has passed since I bought the game in 2020, that's how little has changed; some quality of life and some bugfixes (I say "some" because I have noticed bugs that are still present SINCE 2020)

it's fun? but basically abandonware they have the gall to claim it's "released"