Recent reviews by Grean

In short - This game has so much to offer in it's current state - get it now and support these guys so they can work on making this even more brilliant that it already is!

The exploration, mining, automation, optimising your factory, new power sources.. The progression and the unlocks with each level are so well designed, introducing you to new mechanics at just about the perfect pace. And the main premise of the game - pumping all your acquired resources into building starships of increased size and complexity with additional requirements is amazing!

I do love Factorio but just to compare the goal and motivation of the original game, I can tell you sending away like a 100 military fighters or a bunch of some heavy cruisers, the ones that you just constructed, fueled up and armed and then seeing seeing them jump to hyperspace beats the hell out of seeing a rocket go zoom out of the top of the screen ;]

On the downside.. Will you experience performance issues when you grow your factory to a monster? Sure.. But this is being actively worked on and by the time you have this problem, it probably won't bother you that much... The logistics system might seem odd at first and needs a little bit of getting used to but once you set it up properly with filters and understand the limitations of outgoing flow, it works great!

Complexity wise, I'd say it's like Factorio light so it might not be everyone's cup of tea but it sure does make up for that with style. The game mechanics are just fun to experience and the game looks pretty damn impressive. The environments, the factory pieces and all the starship design is beautiful, you can see the pieces you delivered on the military ships and it's just makes me so happy when they fly away :D From the cloud miners that you get very early on to the more advanced current endgame pieces - you can see the attention to detail every step of the way. The overall design and feel of the game just makes the game play extra satisfying. I'm sure this comes at a price in terms of performance but I am hopeful it will get better over time.

This game just scratches all the right itches for me! Space exploration, mining, factory building, starship construction, a little bit of combat.. with the seamless jumps between different zones from anywhere it just never gets stale as you progress through the levels (such a good idea to make the teleport so easily available). And if that wasn't enough you can do it all in co-op with a friend - I couldn't have asked for more!

To top it all up, the developers seem to take extra care of their baby. They reply to comments and posts. Day 1 patch already addressed an issue that bothered several people like 4h after release and the patch that followed a few days later was like they were reading our minds of the things that needed a little TLC..

The game is hours upon hours of great fun as it is and I think it will only get better with time. The current road map not only looks pretty great not only content wise but also priority wise, I can't wait to get more of this!

Thank you so much for this gem of a game! Amazing work!

Project Zomboid comparisons are obvious here but for me the first PZ experience was not that great. Not sure if it was the graphics or the complexity but I found myself much more at home with HZ and I enjoyed it immensely from the first minute in its vanilla Early Access state. After 125h however, exploring the entire map, grabbing all the cars there were, getting every weapon in the game I found myself wanting something more so in the end the game turned out to be a gateway drug to a fully modded PZ experience.. Don't get me wrong, HZ is awesome and I'm not going to say one is better then the other. They are simply different and I will definitely be coming back for more!

TLDR: One of my favorite games now on Steam in a convenient package that also includes the latest DLC! By far my favorite zombie game and In my opinion, way more fun than B4B. Highly recommended!

The negative reviews are definitely caused by misconceptions that some people had and are not fully deserved.

The sentence "the next evolution of the original hit WWZ" might indeed be misleading I guess. To be absolutely clear - World War Z: Aftermath is a DLC for the original game. The difference is that it is now free from being an Epic exclusive and it came to steam as a completely new package. Would you rather see the base game for 20-30 E and the expansion for 20 E on the Steam store? It's just conveniently packed up at a good price. On top of that, there are several free updates coming soon!

People complaining that it is a full price game? The expansion is pretty great and has tons of new content, on it's own it's still 20E on Epic to do the upgrade. Basically, if you're getting it on Steam, for the extra 10E you're actually getting the full GOTY edition of the base game (which was worth 40E) + the expansion on top of it.

About matchmaking. Can't be sure how it actually is in places like Australia but in Europe the game has been very much alive. Even over the past month I had no issues finding a full party for insane and extreme runs, right now it seems even better with full super easy crossplay capabilities. Lobbies match you automatically with PS, XBOX and Epic and if you just want to play with your buddies from a different platform it's as easy as sharing a code. I'm really struggling to find another game where it's so easy to play in a cross platform party. We even managed to find people to play PvP which has been completely dead for quite some time.

In comparison, I tried B4B in the beta and it just felt so stiff... The zombies are just meh and feel really pale in comparison to the swarming hordes in WWZ. The gunplay in B4B felt off as well. I loved L4D back in the days so maybe that's why the addition of the ADS and guns taking half of my screen feels odd. Whenever I shot the zombies in B4B I felt there's fake blood spraying all over the place and that was it. Don't even get me started on how disappointing a pipe bomb explosion was but maybe there was just something wrong with the ragdolls. It just feels so damn good when the horde is rushing and there are body parts and zombie bodies flying all over the place. You can shoot half a zombie's head off or just it's hand.. it looks and feels great and the weapons feel just right. The progression system in feels a lot better too in WWZ. At it's current state, in my opinion WWZ is vastly superior and just simply more fun.

About the launcher... EGS is just inconvenient so I was looking forward to the steam release where the social overlay is not utter garbage. I also like to have all my things in one place. I was willing to start the progression from scratch but as a cherry on top the savegames are very easy to transfer from Epic. Hell.. I even just dumped all the EGS WWZ files into my steam folder and could play straight away saving me time on the 30GB download.

To sum it all up. WWZ is just a game that I love coming back to and I'm super chuffed to see more content for it. For some reason, hitting a dozen zombies in the head one after another and/or playing a medic and helping out the team just makes me happy :D

I believe someone already said somewhere that uFactory feels like what we would get after Factory and BigPharma had a baby. As much as I enjoyed both of those games, uFactory feels like it hits the sweet spot for me in many ways. With the limited space and funds, maximising every level is super satisfying and with the products of your factory being so different every time, it feels fresh and it doesn't get boring at all (awesome way to prevent having to do the same thing at the start over and over again).

Sure, it has some bugs and issues (e.g. in a huge factory, the arms sometimes struggle to pick up fast moving objects on maximum speed) but to be honest, it adds to the fun. Working around some of the things that are only there because it's Early Access adds to the fun for me (had the same fun in early stages of Space Engineers and Factory Town - quality of life improvements are great but sometimes they reduce the challenge too much).

About the learning curve.. If you played any other factory game, you will feel at home here and with every level you will come up with new ways to optimise your production lines even more which gives the game a lot of replayability value just for the sake of getting that S+++ rating (completing the main objectives is fairly straightforward). Leaderboards would be great, I'm sure they're coming at some point.

By far, the best aspect for me is figuring out how to max the level. Sure, it's sometimes more difficult to figure out the exact times of production (like in Big Pharma you have cycles, it's a bit more fluid here) but planning everything ahead on a piece of paper based on the instructions in the sketch book is extremely fun. When you combine it with the space limitations, the money and time available, it becomes an awesome multi layer puzzle and when it comes together, it's just so satisfying to see everything in motion!

So far I actually found the first level to be the hardest - played it through several times with different optimisation strategies, spending every penny as it comes in, selling raw materials to get some additional cash, buying single machines, making them work solo on all steps and then arranging them in a series as soon as I had enough money... still can't get the S+++ rating... Licence plates is a completely different beast.. space.. so much space... So many hours.. but you can make it SO beautiful!! :D

I have enjoyed immensely every single of the 100 hours I've sank into this game and I'm looking forward to future updates and new products! Highly recommended! Keep up the good work!

One of the best platformers I have ever played, tons of fun in couch co-op.