Recent reviews by Illiou

Incredible multiplayer shooter with unique atmosphere and sound design, with fights that favor the creative.

This game is a masterpiece. A mind-blowing, stunning, genius masterpiece.

This game is a cheap and shallow Subnautica clone without any of the magic but lots of idle game mechanics. All you do is run around and grab stuff from the barren ground, to place buildings that increase a number which lets you build buildings that increase the numbers faster. Once in a while you get the obligatory equipment upgrade which affects another number, at least ones that make a difference to the gameplay (oxygen time, inventory size etc.).

All the things by which Subnautica fascinates are absent or only superficially represented, i.e. exciting exploration of new areas, beautiful places and creatures, an intruiging story, worldbuilding, meaningful technology upgrades etc. Instead you get a bland and repetitive world without any detail or integration, which literally consists of just cheaply textured ground with a few of the same objects here and there. The interface could be described by the same attributes.

It feels like a minimal project to demo a new gameplay idea, where good execution is secondary. Except that it's a clone.

The number of positive reviews make me think the reviewing people are content with any idle game loop, no matter the presentation.

This is the most boring and shallow building game I have ever played.

It gets off to a bad start with a tutorial that takes 90 minutes to teach you stuff like ressources can be collected from the ground, buildings need electricity connections and domes house people in houses. In other words it teaches you only the obvious things and lets you just sit around and wait for minutes between every bit of information.

Unfortunately it doesn't get better in the normal game. The pacing of this game atrocious. It plays like a mobile game without timers but the same waiting. You build some ressource collection and electricity and then you wait. As soon as you can, you build a dome and wait for the people. After they arrive you have to wait again, basically as long as the game has already taken, to get more people. And what do you do during all this waiting? Nothing. You wait for research to finish.

The research though... In contrast to other building games, for example Factorio, where every research seems better than the last and you can't decide which one to research first because all sound very useful, here every research just seems more useless than the last. 10% here, 20% there, while waiting, what do I care? It's not like the game gives you challenges where this would have a direct impact either.

Maybe the game gets better after a while, but why would I sit through hours of waiting for that?

More things:
- The music is super meh and gets annoying quickly
- It's playable on ultrawide monitors, but there is zero optimizations for it

Pros:
- Some good humor
- Good ultrawide support

Cons:
- Boring as hell: you only ever have solid connections and cables to work with, which means there is zero variation or challenge in actually building the bridges after looking at the best practices suggestions. The game tries to add challenge by obscuring the path and introducing new level elements, which are only ever interesting during the first minute as you are figuring out what they do. Which is also true for the portals. So every level consists of just looking at it for a minute as you try to find the intended path, and then becomes the tedium of just placing the same bridges everywhere along it. They let you run multiple cars over it afterwards, but in order to pass that you usually just add more connections whereever it breaks - in other words, even more tedium. There isn't even anything to optimize for; it shows you how much money was spend afterwards, but that value is completely meaningless.
- Annoying, fiddly, unintuitive and overly basic controls which get in your way for every tedious boring bridge
- Insulting physics

If you want a good puzzle game get a Zachtronics game.

Only played the included Solitaire variation so far... can recommend wholeheartedly!

Unfortunately I cannot recommend the game, as it is unplayable for me for the following reasons:
1. The side scrolling speed is so slow it's basically not moving at all. And the option in the settings barely changes anything at all. It seems to be somehow dependent on the resolution, the lower the faster. Which is silly of course.
2. The specified system requirements are useless, as they are very unspecific and far too low. My laptop easily satisfies them, yet the game runs at a maximum of 15 fps at the lowest settings, making it unplayable for me.

It's like a secret direct link into the reward system of your brain.

Came back to this game after one year and to get back into it I looked at some of my old solutions - it was the most satisfying moment of my life just to watch how perfectly and smoothly those complex structures I once built myself put all the blocks together... So fkn good!

(Not to mention all the other reasons why this game is incredible, of course)

A super unique, fantastic and beautifully enchanting game - in my childhood and still today. It's what my dreams were filled with when I was young (and also just a nice game with a fresh concept).

They didn't fix it to make it work with new graphics drivers but it doesn't matter, since there is this fantastic tool which fixes everything from glitches to resolution to input lag:
dgVoodoo 2[dege.freeweb.hu]
To make it work you basically just need to copy the files from the "MS/x86" folder to the game folder "ZanZarah/System" and then the game works perfectly! :)

(If your anti virus goes off, ignore it. To make it work it has to intervene on a fairly low level of another application (the game) which anti virus programs obviously find suspicious)

You may want to change the resolution and turn off the watermark in the settings (dgVoodooCpl) under DirectX and maybe make it proper widescreen by looking for the appropriately modified files online.