Recent reviews by lumifox

Short and suffers too hard from numbers go up too fast (none of the upgrades matter/prestige matters, numbers go from 1 per second to 342345e20 in under a hour) Style and graphics are very charming but i didn't feel like clicking even mattered past the all boulders area as my upgrades let me get every space easily and prestige constantly which was a shame because i was "be lucky chose the right square" feeling. A lot more could have been done with this game and it would have been simple to make it last longer and be more fleshed out.

They fly now? They fly now

For me it suffers a little bit from "numbers going up too fast" which is another reason i couldn't get into the gnorp apologue either. Games where in the first 5 minutes you've gone from earning 4 per second to 4k per second make your decisions feel a bit pointless and just boils down to "click whatever is currently not greyed out to purchase and that will increase your progress". All the wording in the upgrades and prestige don't even need to be read and i don't feel like my choices are mattering because everything goes up so fast. Never did i feel like choosing one thing over the other hindered my progress.
I guess the theming was making me hope for something closer to "Magic Research" progress scale. Visuals look great though!

Really neat and visually charming game with lots of mystery discovering new areas and mechanics. I just wish the trailer didn't give away a large amount of it.. Really ruined my enjoyment basically having puzzles already solved and areas already seen because I watched the trailer to decide if I wanted the game.

Game has so many cheaters in it that it makes you really apathetic to play, even if the other player is outright just better than you, the cheating protection is so awful theres absolutly no reason to belive they're not hacking.

Now that’s out of the way, onto the review

Since this game has reached a fanbase tier of "this game is godly and can do no wrong" so even the negative reviews that make valid points get lost in a sea of positive reviews and instantly attacked by fans (Took under 24 hours for this review to hit a ratio of 1 of 70 found helpful, do you people have nothing better to do than wait to defend this game). Indie games seem to get some kind of "criticism immunity" because we have to always root for the underdog or something , so while the game has some fun points, it is in no way deserving of its "overwhelmingly positive" status. Because of that there’s no real point to making a negative review, but here it is anyways.

At its core Stardew Valley is a farming sim game. It has other elements such as combat, but they're not strong enough or fleshed out to warrant calling it anything else but a farm sim. I've never played harvest moon or animal crossing so i'm not influenced by nostalgia either, and i get the feeling nostalgia goggles help this game tenfold.

Controls are generally all round unintuitive and clunky, and the combat is just a case of rapidly click the mouse and hope you don’t die, there’s a blocking element, but hitting a enemy stun locks them so spam clicking is superior in every way which is sad because once you get your farm "automated" combat is really the only thing you can go do.

A small but still annoying issue is that the red square option to show the square you're working on doesn’t work half the time and you'll end up digging/tilling/watering up the wrong square wasting time and valuable energy.

Since the saves work in a day by day system any form of crashing or error will completely destroy your progress, which is annoying when days can last anywhere between 10 mins to 1 hour depending on what you're doing. Crashes can and will happen, as well as glitches like "getting stuck with your sword forced out and stuck in a building". It can be a very painful experience having to start again especially when you have the task of watering or harvesting everything again.

Saves would be much better done as a constant, it would stop save scumming and keep your save for the inevitable crashes as well as keeping the "learn from your mistakes" theme the game is clearly trying to force on you working properly. But maybe that’s what the game wants you to do, test things and reload the game.

Which brings me to my next point, I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t have a history with this type of game or what, but everything in this game punishes you, and punishes you hard, don’t know that all your plants will die the next season? Too bad. Other reviews have pointed out more extensively that the game ONLY teaches you through punishments, like the gifting system for example, am I just supposed to give random items to people over and over till they like them? And I can’t even do that because it locks after 1 gift a day and 2 gifts a week, the only person that likes me right now is George because it was hinted that he liked leeks in the dialog, which was a clever way of introducing their likes, but beyond George I haven’t had any other hints to likes. Maybe I’m just not trying hard enough, or just being too logical, like Demetrius for example, he made helped make a mushroom farm, so i thought a nice thing to do would be give him one of the first crops, he hated it. Since he seems to like researching i gave him a spare dinosaur bone I found, hated it, turns out his likes are a random assortment of foods, but I only knew this after checking the wiki.

Which is a big example of how this game treats you, you'll either be on the wiki a lot or just missing out on gameplay because you don’t want to ruin the game using the wiki. A few points in the game I’ve had to wiki things for a solution, and it usually had me thinking "how the hell was i supposed to figure that out". Stuff like figuring out where fish are caught, or going back through the tunnel, or hidden forest path will only be found by those willing to try (and fail) absolutely everything. Maybe it’s trying to capture that nostalgia feel of discussing games with friends and figuring it out together, but now they’re just using the wiki too. And i can wager most of you have had to use a wiki at some point too. Even when it DOES try to explain things to you it can be vauge or worded poorly

Another thing is the tediousness of the gameplay, I’m at year 2 and walking from location to location EVERY DAY is incredibly boring, i think over half of my game hours alone were spent walking between locations and waiting for shops to open. You can make teleportation items to get around but they get consumed during the teleport,so it isnt worth it for a resource based game when you can take 1 min to boringly walk to the location. You can get a horse later on but that only slightly improves the in-between time between areas.

Once you have sprinklers set up there’s even less to do, you can explore the mines, wait till you have enough money to explore the desert mines or clear your farm. Once the farm is clear you only have the mines, which with the sloppy combat, gets old fast. This is made even more annoying because shops don’t open right away so if you need seeds you're waiting around even more. Early on tackling the next day is full of opportunity, but early mid game starts to be doing things simply for the sake of not feeling like you're wasting the day.After year 1 it just loops again and you start going through the paces, ironically the days have become more mundane and repeditive as the office job your character craved to leave.

Eventually you're supposed to customise your farm but you're usually stuck in a cycle of >buying seeds>growing>selling>buying more seeds , so for the most part of the game you're either broke or preparing to be broke, Customising feels more like a "rolling in cash" end game thing because of stuff like fence decay, I've found no reason to stray from the small plot of land in front of your house to build.

Animals REALLY needs to be buffed massivly, you get a quest early on to make a chicken coop and in no way is it anywhere close to worth it,it bankrupts you and ruins your motivation to try livestock further, the low returns and fence deteriation make cattle basically fed cosmetic items.

The characters aren’t really fleshed out too well and are mostly clichés ,poor trailer chick, mean girl, jock,cooperate fatcat. Dialog repeats a lot too so bothering to talk to people becomes pointless after you've done it a few time.Maybe people flesh out more after meeting their likes but like i said before i cant begin to find their likes for one person let alone all of them. I'm also dreading the impending "marry and have a kid" storyline, it doesn’t feel like it belongs in a game like this, but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be anything else to do endgame.

There’s lots more to say but most of it has been said in other reviews, or will simply fall on deaf ears. If you haven’t played a game like this before you might not like it. It’s fun to play in a "zone out mindless" kind of way, The thought of the next payout/upgrade keeping you going but at the core thats all there is,waiting for payout.

Stardew Valley has so so much potentional but its gameplay falls short of being something lasting, maybe multiplayer would help but in its current state it would just be the same issues but with friends. It blew its content too early and simply feels like an early access game.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this game, not that it matters, because if you like this sort of game you're probably already playing it.

Fallout 4 - Its like skyrim with guns. IGN 11/10

Pros
+Good sountrack
+Unique Gameplay
+Colourblind support
+Low price

Personal Con
-Time and move counters on the puzzles being stressfull
-Not calming to play

Cons
-Loud game vocals and poor audio choices
-Poor eyestraining colour pallet
-Wasted screen space
-Smartport port feel
-Bulky interface
-No tutorial


Firstly I’ll say that so far I’m enjoying the game, it’s a great concept with a pseudo rubix cube feel where you rotate hexagon clusters to form set colour patterns by setting mixed colours into the correct position based on what colours are mixed

The music is nice and calming and the gameplay is good but so far i've got some gripes with some of the game audio and interface.

The losing challenge audio for failed timetrial/move count and the victory vocals audio are very loud compared to the game audio and very jarring especially since they never stop until you go to the next level, which stops them awkwardly with an instant cut. None of the trailers or gameplay videos i could find showed this feature so be warned that it can not be turned off without having no volume at all, which is sad because the game music is really charming but is ruined by this.

The large interface and menus can be a little clunky, giving it a smartphone port feel (Is it?) , Menu icons can sometimes be unclear without text and i can imagine some people deleting their saves out of curiostiy due to the vage textless settings. The puzzles also feel a little large and in your face which combined with the very intense fluro colours everywhere become a strain on the eyes.

I've never really been a fan of timed/move counters on puzzels like this, especially when being judged on both at once.I prefer to think about every move, so if you're looking for a calming puzzler this may not appeal to you either. Otherwise so far i think that feature is just personal prefrence and the puzzels are still able to be done without rushing or worrying about move counters. But you still receive a lower star rating at the end of the level, which is still kinda disheartening

Overall with a bit of polish this game could become a very great puzzler, but i'd find it hard to reccomend it in it's current state unless you like this style of puzzler

So far i'm loving this game, i picked it up during the steam sales for like 2 bucks but its worth so much more than that.

The gameplay is a interesting mix of towerdefence\survival\rts similar to infested planet but controlling structures instead of a moving team, if you enjoyed infested planet i'd highly recommend this. The approaching doom of the creeper goo gives you a survival feeling i haven’t seen many games be able to recreate.

While i'm a firm advocate of "gameplay before graphics", i can’t help but feel that this game deserves better graphics, not to say that the gameplay is effected, but the gameplay is so nicely polished it would be great to see graphics that match the high level of gameplay, Its ovbious that the creator is probbly more comfortable with programming (I'm sorry if you're not!) which isnt nessisarily a bad thing because the gameplay makes up for it massivly, but the graphics in their current state are kind of plain and the looming doom of the creeper sludge or whatever it is, isn’t quite captured as well in its current opaque single colour state. Regardless I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the game

Lastly, i would love to see more types of items to defend with, aside from using the anticreeper goo turrets and the jets, i found the game mostly revolved around the standard turrets and mortars, with some specialty units thrown in that are only situational, they're fun but more variation would be nice. Also the block building thing is overpowered as hell, really needs some sorta finite resorce to stop you from just cheezing it and building a 10 high bridge all the way to the spawners, i'd like to see it cost more or be limited somehow because it makes defending way too easy, maybe combine it with the ore production so it costs a bit more, I’m a bit of a turtle style builder but this gives you way too much control.

But yeah buy this game!!

A fun vehicle building simulator thats free to play but not pay to win, more pay to advance faster than everyone else. Overall the gameplay is pretty good, but a bit grindy, you verse people your level till you get put into the next catagroy above you, which keeps people with higher teir gear from tearing you up but because of this you never really feel like you're getting more powerful, your better weapons wont be able to break their better armor, so the leveling system feels really redundant, the levels dont really change the scale of the battles at all and it can get tedious fighting the same thing over and over again.

I was a little dissapointed to find that you can only use one weapon class per vehicle, which makes combat specialised and some layout combos better than others, you'll probbly find yourself sticking to one type and be reluctant to try another class.

The way you unlock better gear is by defeating other players in battle, or at the very least getting a decient amount of hits on them to count as a assist. Going to go ahead and say that kills are everything, people wont play the objective because the only real way to progress in the game is to get kills, which makes the game about kill stealing or going off on your own to get them as you get very little points for assists which makes the game very compeditive, playing the game with friends is the only way you can get backup or work together.

overall great free to play game very reminiscent of banjo kazooie nuts and bolts