Recent reviews by Vinrick

Great game with an excellent dev team and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ publisher, same as it ever was.

Millennia is a good Civ clone that takes it in enough new directions to make it not feel like a cheap Civ clone. Its current state and the current priorities of devs made me ultimately refund it.

Pros
+ Being proactive and using all your units is rewarded a bit more than in Civ. There are 'friendly village' equivalents and barbarian encampments, but rewards here for clearing those (and exploring the map) have more meaningful impact on game progress that's more in-depth than a single bolus of gold or faith for clearing a camp.
+ Supply chains add a logistical component that feels nice. For example, wheat and rice provide flat food bonuses, but these can instead be fed into a mill to produce flour worth even more food. It's a good system that adds more meaning to what you build in a city, and how you base those decisions on what resources are immediately available to you.
+ Your future eras are contingent on things that your empire does and what other empires do. This adds variability to how the game can progress, and has branches rather than a straight line as in Civ. It's a unique take on Eras that seems to work well.

Cons
- The game released in a fairly incomplete state. Multiplayer is busted and requires you to use VPNs to run a game and set up port forwarding as well.
- Day 2 reveal of DLCs when things are busted and the game released in a hard beta. I know what I'm getting into with Paradox, but this is hilariously tone-deaf even for them. Planned on holding onto the title, but seeing the announcement this morning changed that decision to a refund instead.
- Like the first point above, the graphics and UI also feel like they're from the early 2000s. Personally, I don't really care much, but it feels like this art direction/graphics were selected for due to cost/effort, not because they were going for nostalgia.
- An absolute dearth of customization options for games. Can't control speed or fine tune world settings, nor victory types nor turn limits. All you can change is the AI empires, their difficulty, and map type/size.


Neutral/Subjective
• Combat isn't very in-depth but isn't as barebones as Civ V-VI. Army stacking is prevalent and you throw stack at each other that then plays a small cutscene ala Fire Emblem. You don't have any control over which unit your units attack, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of prioritization.
• Tech trees are incredibly simple with 5 choices per era.

Game is good; it's a solid CRPG. If you've played an owlcat game before, you know exactly what you're getting into. It's their previous titles with a 40k coat of paint. Until the bugs get ironed out (if they ever do), it's a firm non-recommended. It's simply in too shoddy of a state as-is, which I should have anticipated given Owlcat's previous releases.

Good:
+ Story is interesting enough so far, but with a fairly predictable prologue. Getting attacked every single time you land on a new planet is getting a bit old though, in terms of being a way to start/move a narrative

+ Characters are fairly varied and enjoyable (if not a little two-dimensional), and about what you would expect given the setting.

+ Good attention to the lore, for the most part, and good breadth of areas to visit.

+ Once you get past Act 1, the game feels pretty open with a fair amount of stuff to do.


Bad
- Big bugs. I see Owlcat didn't learn anything from their previous release and it really isn't excusable at this point. This is 90% of my negative feelings towards the game, and why I wouldn't recommend picking it up until a few months/half a year from now. There's game-breaking bugs, nothing critical so far, but some combat bugs that will brick your game and cause you to have to reload, which can set you back a substantial amount of time given that you cannot save during combat.

- Little bugs. Aside from the gamebreaking ones, there's a myriad of small things that make the game feel very unpolished. Units standing/moving around without animations or T-posing, projectiles coming out of a gun at a 90 degree angle, servitors floating up stairs, all kinds of stuff.

- The AI is horrid and this is doubly so for allied but non-controllable units. Normally, not a big deal, they get themselves killed and no problem. However, I'd need more than two hands to count how many times I've been in an encounter where an allied unit repositions immediately behind one of mine, opens a burst fire towards that same unit at an enemy 100 feet away, thus almost killing/killing my unit. Super annoying.

- The sound design is barely okay. The voice acting is decent enough (some better than others), but everything else feels weak. Might just have been spoiled by Darktide, but you expect a certain sound from las weapons and bolters, and this ain't quite it.

- The art style is a too far to the cartoonish side. It worked alright for pathfinder, less so for wrath of the righteous, but certainly not ideal for 40k. Normally I'd throw this into the subjectives, but given how the content of the game itself and the story are clearly on the darker side, it doesn't mesh well with how things look. This is made a lot worse when gibbing enemies, because the art style just really doesn't mix with the violence.

- While we're on the topic, they should've been ok with throwing in the occasional low-poly ♥♥♥♥ and tits. Feels really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ weird seeing a pile of mutilated corpses in a chaos ritual, but they all have their unsoiled/perfectly white boxer-briefs on.

Subjectives
Θ Combat is turn-based/XCOM-lite and can drag on a bit. I don't really mind the combat speed (barring the bugs acting as a hidden timer to finish up as quickly as possible), but I can see how some people wouldn't like it.

Θ There's a morality system, and the third branch - Iconoclast - is gonna be a matter of taste. Rather than just there being the puritanical/heretical axis, it's dogmatic/heretical/iconoclast (with iconoclast and heretical being considered "fanatic" and dogmatic being "puritanical"). Dogmatic is a no-mercy, no-exceptions kind of adherency to the Imperial Cult and doctrine, and heretical is largely self explanatory (though perhaps comes too close to "just being a ♥♥♥♥" a lot of times). Iconoclast is still considered a radical path, but is centered around ignoring laws, doctrine, and tradition in attempts to 'do good,' such as pardoning executions over minor mistakes, cavorting with xenos, or hesitancy in using lives as a means to an end. I was a little worried this setup indicated they were going to boil the Imperium and Dogmatic path down to "it's just space nazis," but they've done a good job of showing how the unwavering iron-fisted approach of the Imperium is often warranted by the threat of Chaos.

Θ Not a lot of room for character development/conversation. Most of the chatting is to move the narrative forward, there's not a whole lot of talking with your party members.

::Minor spoilers ahead::

Bethesda delivers in Starfield what it did with Skyrim and Fallout 4: an interesting enough foundation that requires modders to shoulder the burden of improving on their "good" game to make it "great." After being nudged to keep playing by the "it gets good after 20 hours" crowd, I can safely say that's true to a certain degree (though the bar is set very low by the first 2-3 hours), but not enough to warrant paying $70. This is a game that I wish I had waited to purchase, both in terms of price and as well as to provide enough time for the modding community to polish and improve the game.

There's several improvements to the formula that Bethesda has made that are welcome, but frustratingly they failed to adopt what "worked" in their previous games while keeping a lot of things that didn't work.

Pros:
+ The game itself looks nice. This isn't restricted to graphics, but the art direction as well (though, admittedly, it is uncomfortably close to what you'd expect if someone said "let's mash up NASA aesthetics with fallout 4" and feels somewhat lazy in that regard). Man-made environments are lush with detail and lots of props that really make them feel lived in.
+ The cities and high-pop areas actually feel like they're cities. Lots of unnamed "citizens" walking around help maintain a sense that you're actually in a city instead of walking through the "city" of Whiterun with 30 denizens.
+ The factions are diverse, and so are their missions. Ultimately, the side quests I've played are much more interesting than the main quest line.
+ Ship building is cool when it works.
+ There's a lot of space tropes that they nail pretty well with different areas. Neon City feels like what it says on the tin, a grungy place to live where it's all flash and no substance. Akila City (and the Freestar Rangers) nail the "Wild-West-but-it's-in-Space vibe." New Atlantis feels like a quasi-utopian city with lots of gloss and tech.
+ Dialog choices and player agency are much improved from what we saw in Skyrim and especially Fallout 4. It's nothing to write home about, but is noticeably improved from what we're used to seeing from Bethesda.
+ Eschewing a procedurally generated approach to designing alien fauna a la No Man's Sky, the animals that are on the different planets clearly exhibit the fact that human thought was put into their design.
+ New Game+ is a nice addition here.

Cons:
- The main story is like watching paint dry. As others have lamented, the prologue doesn't make a lot of sense, is written terribly, and it feels like Bethesda gave up on trying to create a quality narrative that kicked the story off. Additionally, 80% of the quests in the main chain are the same fetch quest repeated on different planets, doubly so when you get to the part where you start visiting temples that look the exact same and have the exact same "puzzle" you're required to do to complete them.
- You don't get enough meaningful encounters or time with companions to feel any sort of attachment, and they're pretty two-dimensional. It makes it feel all the more shallow when Bethesda tries to pluck at your heartstrings with the fates of some of them.
- Space combat is very arcade-y. It's point in the general direction, and hold down all your weapon buttons.
- Ship building is an exercise in frustration. You can only rotate parts on one axis, and getting things to go where you want them is a huge pain in the ass.
- Given the de-emphasis of space travel and minimal time in space, I'm convinced the only reason they've included ship building and combat is so you have a mandatory credit sink if you want to explore other systems where enemy ships will destroy you in a heartbeat if you aren't keeping up with costly upgrades.
- The perks are so mind-numbingly boring and typical of what AAA devs have simplified skill trees down to these days. It is absolutely rife with "This perk unlocks 10% more X when doing Y" whether that's damage, resource consumption, or pools of health/O2.
- They cranked the bullet-sponginess of enemies up to 11. Fallout 4 was notorious for this, and they've only made it worse here. If the AI was smarter than a pile of bricks this would make the game difficult, but since they aren't, it just makes it very tedious.
- There's still a lot of "Bethesda Jank," which there supposedly wasn't this time around. This is particularly evident in NPC behavior.
- They rip the shout system from Skyrim and simplify it. Half of the associated powers are useful, the rest just seem like filler.
- No ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ vehicles. How the hell can you have a game set across all kinds of different planets and not include at least some simple rover to go zipping around in. I'd understand it if the individual map tiles (more on that in the subjectives) were small and filled with content, but they're actually quite large with points of interest spread out. And to the point of "well you have jetpacks just use those," they provide VERTICAL MOBILITY, not lateral - they don't get you to your location any faster than what you're able to get just sprinting. Never understood why people use that argument for why there's a lack of vehicles.
- While the man-made environments are nice, the natural environments are very cookie-cutter and copy & paste. There's not a lot of variation in geography, just a different color of paint on the ground, and a bunch of "I'm pretty sure I saw that plant on the last moon I visited" kind of plants. Nice skyboxes though.

Subjectives:
◘ If the graphics were a little worse, I'd be 100% convinced that this game was a very well done overhaul mod for Fallout 4. The whole time I'm playing it, it feels like there's this skeleton of Fallout 4 (particularly the institute-esque aesthetics) underneath everything, which I personally don't like. Feels lazy.
◘ Level scaling is OUT. For me, this is a huge plus and I'm glad they went against the grain in this regard. Different areas of space have different level ranges, and it's up to you to decide when you feel strong enough to tackle that content.
◘ Space travel is super gimmicky, and locations are sequestered from one another in separate instances. It's all cutscenes and loading screens. I'm leaving this in "subjective" as apparently some people like that the game is chopped up into a bunch of different instances and maps instead of being a cohesive whole (like NMS or - and I hate to be in the position of praising it in any context - Star Citizen). This destroys immersion for me, where instead of being truly Open World, the game feels much more walled off by having all of your content contained in various tiles. As others have mentioned, it's like if the wilderness in Skyrim was removed, and you just had instances that you fast traveled to in order to navigate the game.
◘ The plot ultimately becomes very hand-wavy and spiritual. This isn't my cup of tea, as with lots of other things here, it comes off as being super lazy.
◘ They went for an M rating while filling the game with T content. No real meaningful gore or blood, no adult themes (not talking about nudity; rather adult situations beyond cartoon villain violence/banditry), nothing really "mature" other than drug use. In this setting, I think this is a particular con. In a game like Skyrim, given the setting, you can avoid these sorts of tropes or territories as it doesn't necessarily mesh well. But in this game, where there are supposed to be these darker elements to humanity, the lack of more mature themes is immediately noticeable. The "drug den" in Neon City looks more like what I'd expect a 6 year old child's rendition of a rave would be like.

Ultimately it's a solid 7/10 that I know will improve when Bethesda releases the creation kit for the modders to graciously create a great game worth playing. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend it as-is for anything more than $50.

The RTS/shooter hybrid genre is one that's very small and marred by unsuccessful games. They're intriguing on paper, but tend to be poorly executed; some of this may be due to having to "herd the cats" as a commander and getting players to cooperate as intended. Silica seems to have struck a very solid balance in this respect, where most of the force agency is retained with the commander, and a much smaller proportion of units occupied by players. Other issues, such as most of the player unit's time being spent walking from A to B, will be harder to fix - this is perfectly fine in an RTS where you order a unit to walk across the map while you micromanage other things, but not particularly entertaining when you're the one that has to do the walking. Additionally, the shooter component feels exceptionally arcade-y, very much akin to classic Battlefront without any of the customization options. They may expand on that in the future, but as of now, it's very bare-bones.

Even at a $19.99 price point, the current amount of content really isn't worth it. It's really just enough content for a free demo. Silica is an interesting game, and it seems they've got a good baseline, but given the sordid history of early access games it's meaningless to try and predict how well it'll be developed going forward. As such, rating it as-is, it's currently not recommended.

I'm recommending this if you really enjoyed Vermintide or have an appreciation for 40k in general.

People not within that category (which I'm willing to bet are the majority of readers as the former group has already purchased this game) might want to hold off for a few months, see if Fatshark walks the walk, and fixes a lot of stuff currently busted.

The core gameplay is excellent - It's everything else they included (or more accurate to say: didn't include) that range from annoying to downright infuriating.

Pros ----
+ Combat is Fun. Capital F. Somehow feels even better and meatier than Vermintide 2.
+ Art style and graphics are phenomenal. Haven't seen a game do the 40k franchise justice like this title does.
+ Sound design is even better than the art. You hear the weight behind guns and melee combat. Soundtrack is phenomenal.
+ The maps themselves feel fairly different (admittedly feels like a step down from VT2, but still good)
+ Classes play quite a bit differently, which is nice when you start to feel the grind (and you will).

Cons ----
- Stability is horrid. CTDs, disconnects galore. Absolutely maddening when you're 2 minutes from completing the mission, disconnect, and lose all rewards/progress. Note: this has been getting better as the beta has gone forward.
- Performance is rough. I'm at 1080p on high on a 3080, most of the time getting ~40 FPS and drops to ~20 FPS in certain random areas.
- Progression is SLOW. Took about 20 hours of playtime to get to max level on one operative (Ogryn). Granted, this was playing about 50% on difficulty 2 and 50% on difficulty 3 - given the mission rewards are "all or nothing" it's risky playing 4+ difficulty especially with randoms.
- The mission types are all very same-y. Hit this button, wait here, grab this thing and jam it in this other thing. The assassination missions stand out a smidge as there's a boss for the end-level event, but all the other types blend together.
- The droprate of gear is quite low, but was balanced out with the low variety of weapons (again, from the perspective of Ogryn). Both should be increased.
- Everyone looks the same. There's 4 outfits you will progress through per class, with a bunch of recolorings available for purchase with in game currency. But in terms of armor models, it's scant. There are some additional ones that you can get through achievements (not a bad system), but the majority of these hard-to-get achievements that come with the nice cosmetics are horridly counterproductive to teamwork (bad system).
- Class feats are awarded every 5 ranks, pick one of three. The majority of these are either worthless, or more frequently, there's one obvious one of the 3 you can pick that is the winner regardless of build. Leads to cookie cutter builds quickly.
- Weapon stats are reported as bars. No actual numerical data reported other than item level.
- Comparing weapon stats just brings them up side by side. There's no color or overlay or what have you to show you how they actually differ, you just have to eyeball it.
- Many instances of black boxes. This weapon has these 3 icons in the display, this other weapon has these 3. What do they mean? Who knows!
- Many other instances where Quality of Life is nonexistent that are too minor/plentiful to list here.

There's a lot of things to fix, and they're mostly "minor" but I can see this being a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario. Just so many little (and not so little) things that are wrong. But, the actual gameplay itself is so damn enjoyable. With any luck, Fatshark will make the improvements they've said they'll make and this will be an absolute diamond of a game.

Server nightmares and major bugs galore (deleting characters, resetting story progress to the very beginning). Server stuff is relatively understandable since they weren't expecting this many people buying it, but the bugs really aren't excusable. Was clearly not ready for release from EA.

That being said, the game is a perfectly serviceable ARPG, if not wholly uninspired as a mixture of 80% Diablo 3 and 20% PoE with a storyline taken right out of a high school creative writing course. Fix the gamebreaking bugs and server issues and you'll have something worth a purchase as a decent 7/10 game.

Barring the issues of difficulty (which I agree can be a bit insane, even on normal difficulty, but the difficulty sliders are there for a reason), the choice of "real time with pause" instead of a fully turn-based system, and that the term "Quality of Life" doesn't exist in Owlcat Game's vocabulary, the biggest drawback to Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the bugs and lack of polish.

I really hate that I can't recommend this game at the moment, because I think it'll eventually be something excellent. The content itself is great, but there's a lot of techincal issues that could've really benefitted from another month or two of development. Some quests are wonky, others just plain don't work. In terms of gameplay, some feats and other mechanics are bugged; some of these put your character at a serious disadvantage and are difficult to determine if they're working or not, especially given the sometimes limited information reported to the player. The devs have been fairly quick on the draw thus far, but there's still a lot of bugs to iron out. Had I not exceeded the time limit on returns, I would've refunded this to return a few months later and see what they'll have fixed in the update logs.

Avorion is a game I'd immediately recommend for anyone who likes games along the lines of X3 or Freelancer (X3 especially). It's a lot of fun, and the building system adds a fresh twist on things. It's like a mix between StarMade and Minecraft for anyone who's played those; for anyone who hasn't, it's along the lines of making ships with LEGOs, but you can change the shape of the bricks however you want. It's a nice system that's robust enough to give you the opportunity to make ships that look sleek, but without requiring you to spend your entire time building them. Ship weapons and tools are ran MechWarrior/Starsector style, with customized toggleable weapon groups so you aren't just blowing everything you've got with a click of the mouse.

In terms of ship design, the system is set up well enough to reward the player for basic intelligence when making a ship (e.g., I should probably put armor around my engine cores), but unfortunately isn't immune to cheesing your way through design. It's one of the few complaints about this game that I have.

As for "what the hell do you even do," it's pretty open ended. The obvious and basic goal is to go further and further to the galactic core, and there's a few story elements that drive you that way. But that's really just an option among many; you're free to find a sector to set up shop in and make your own space stations and cozy up to your stellar neighbors (or also wage war against them, if that's more your thing). Maybe make a few ships and lead a salvage crew that goes sector to sector, stripping decrepit space hulks left over from massive battles. Maybe make a few combat ships and smash in the faces of your neighborhood pirates, or join them! Hell, run a stellar delivery service with your one-eyed friend and sassy-yet-lovable robot, it's up to you.

The more static ways of playing (like picking a home sector to build stations in) are kind of at odds with the progression system; there's a resource system that more-or-less equates to tiers of ships (some resources have a "specialization" over other materials, but honestly, it's mostly a flat upgrade when you go up to the next resource), and the rarer resources are found closer to the galactic core. This isn't such a bad thing though, as there are several ways to make this more convenient, like the right wormholes or upgraded warp drives.

It's a really fun as it is, but perhaps most importantly as to why I recommend this game, it's clear that the developers actually give a ♥♥♥♥ about the game and furthermore have shown on multiple occasions that they are actually competent. They're good at logically planning what to work on next, and great at taking a balanced stance on player input where concerns and comments are noted and taken into consideration, but not to the point where players run the show and the game gets stuck in development hell. I'm not sure what the average experience with early access games is, but mine has more or less been "you'd probably get more fun out of lighting $30 on fire and watching it go up in smoke." I would not need more than one hand to count how many Early Access games I've purchased and felt good about doing so, but I'd require a lengthy excel spreadsheet to plot out every Early Access game I've gotten burned on (you might be saying, "then stop buying them you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiot," but alas I am not a smart man). Watch a few videos, and jump on in if you like what you see (especially at the modest price of $18). It's a rare thing indeed when an Early Access game is cheap, has a good team behind it, and is actually fun.

What can I say about Project Zomboid that hasn't been said already?

I've been playing since Kate and Baldspot made their debut, and it's just been a cluster. The most common counterargument for continued support of this game is "but it has so much potential!" Does the game have potential? Sure it does, but like the vast majority of indie games (especially with the now infamous taglines of "Early Access Open World Survival game") out there, having a lot of potential doesn't make you special anymore. Too many games have come through with "great potential" and ended up as vaporware or just broken messes in development hell. Having potential shouldn't be the metric with which games are recommended, because it apparently doesn't mean ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Furthermore, don't let the PZ updates fool you; the devs are in constant communication with their weekly mondoids, but it's a whole bunch of nothing. Feel free to peruse some of the posts from a year or two or three or four ago that mention NPC progress, those are the best ones.

So taking an attitude of "how is the game at this very moment, without any future updates taken into consideration," can I recommend the game in it's current state for $15? No, not really. It's fun for a while, until you realize the gameplay really isn't that complex at the moment and there's not too much to do, and unlike other games that can be described as "mile wide and an inch deep," PZ isn't even that wide. Maybe 20m wide and an inch deep, not a mile though.

I'd love to be proven wrong and get the chance to flip the thumb right-side up, but at this rate there's a good chance I'll have died of old age by then.