Recent reviews by Pyreaus

A really good metroidvania in the style of Order of Ecclesia and a bit of Souls. Also the music bops.

The game suffers from performance issues which the devs have already acknowledged and stated they are working on. The microtransactions are dumb, but they also literally only provide items you can easily get in game other than the DD1 sound pack. This stuff is bad.

However, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'd guess the majority of people giving it a thumbs down are playing it too. It's very much inherited the spirit and vision of DD1 and that is all I could ask for. I hope they can get some performance fixes out soon but I don't plan to stop playing even if my FPS drops in towns.

EDIT:
This is one of those times I wish I could give a 'mixed' recommendation. I think there are a lot of good aspects to DD2, I think it improves on DD1 in many areas, but it's also managed to retain a lot of DD1's issues. Poor plot pacing being one of them. It also really badly lacks variety in enemy types. I still like the game on the whole, but if you were expecting it to be 'DD1 but more complete' you should temper your expectations. Its more like 'DD1 but less janky and with a better world design', retaining all the positive and negative weirdness associated with that title. And to clarify I mean DD1 without Dark Arisen. Maybe a Dark Arisen type expansion for DD2 will do for this game what it did for DD1 but right now this is like DD1 without those fixes.

It good. It real good.

I bought Hardspace: Shipbreaker when it first launched into early access, and I still heartily recommend /that/ game. Unfortunately throughout the early access process, Shipbreaker has not only failed to live up to its potential but it's actually degraded in quality. The gameplay itself has been padded with additional grinds in order to facilitate the '30 hour story' that has been hyped up as 1.0 's release and game breaking bugs continue to be prevalent, which is the one area I was most hopeful they'd improved.

Don't get me wrong, the core gameplay is still fun, even if the lack of new mechanics and ship layouts means it can get repetitive fairly quickly. However, when you spend about five minutes setting things up to take a ship apart perfectly and then proceed to get large chunks of salvage clipped into the wall between furnace and processor from which they can't be removed, well, suffice it to say it detracts from the experience. New hazards are often solved in the same ways as old ones. The effects they have when you make mistakes can be different, but for example, carrying a reactor out and a radiation filter out of a ship are the same process: Just be careful with them and make an exit path. The only mechanic I've seen that requires a new solving method after the initial introduction of fuel lines is generators, which require you to take fuses out with proper timing before removing them.

The story has been lambasted by plenty of other reviews, and appropriately so. Having unskippable dialogue-only cutscenes forced on you while you stand in what is essentially the game's main menu screen is obnoxious. The writing is poor. The story itself is noninteractive, and most of the characters have no depth to them whatsoever.

When this game originally launched into early access I was sold on the promise of it. The original two ship models were pretty basic in design, but that was fine, I expected more as the game progressed. We end up with 4 hulls that each have a few variants affecting their cargo and what's stuck to the outside hull, but that's about it. This is a 30 hour puzzle game with only a few puzzles to solve. If you're going to buy it, do it when it's heavily discounted. Otherwise, pass on this game and its wasted potential. Maybe another dev will take inspiration and we'll get a proper iteration of this style of gameplay in the future.

It's a damn shame how this turned out.

Feels like an actual game instead of a VR tech demo. Could use with a broader arsenal than just 3 guns, but the upgrade system is a nice addition. I'd like there to be upgrades for damage/recoil as well as sights and mode changes, though.

It's best played on the official persistent servers. Lots of good ideas, though the gameplay is very slow paced. Plays more like a mobile strategy game, just without all the pay to win BS.

In summary: Sunless Skies is a disappointment. If that opinion upsets you or you have some misplaced loyalty to FBG that requires you to defend them I'd suggest moving on before I tear apart every glaring flaw in this game.

I'm going to start by saying I love Sunless Sea. This game is disappointing specifically because it fails at understanding what made Sunless Seas great.

EXPLORATION: Sunless Sea used a grid based system to place its randomized locations within certain rules. Certain ports were always north east of London but their specific arrangement varied. Every grid square in Seas had at least one thing in it, either a landmark or a port. It was one large map but it never felt empty to me when I explored it and it never felt tedious to travel when I had mapped everything out.

Sunless Skies by comparison uses circular maps with three sections. The middle of each circle is the local hub port. There is an inner ring and an outer ring. All ports are placed on their relevant ring in some random direction along with the 'landscapes'. The problem with this system is that finding ports on the inner rings is very fast and the outer rings would take ages to circumnavigate so you just sort of spam your scout. Once you find the ports there's no real reason to actually explore anymore. Finding new landmarks doesn't give you much more than minor XP and there aren't interesting monsters in most areas or resources to find. It's largely a waste of fuel and resources that gets you little in return. Exploration thus doesn't feel especially rewarding or necessary, especially since the new trading system can give you directions to many of the ports and thus it negates the need to explore in the first place.

TRADING: The new prospects system for trading sounded great at first glance. In reality it is awful. To clarify: A prospect is essentially a single stage quest to bring <x> of a certain resource to a certain port. The idea isn't bad by itself but you can only take four such quests at a time, each quest directs you to the port to deliver it to (robbing you of exploring to find it yourself) and moreover the use of these prospects has changed the structure of trading.

In Sunless Skies you can only sell trade goods at the hub port for an area, and only buy trade goods at the other ports. This means, apart from doing prospects, any trade route would just be a straight line from the hub, to the port you buy the goods at, then back. This is drastically different than Sunless Sea where every port bought and sold different things. Players would naturally come up with their own trade route in Sunless Sea that let them make a profit from trade while collecting port reports and doing storylets. In Skies because the hub port is the only port that purchases things the only reason to take a resource anywhere else is for a prospect, but you only get 2 randomly generated prospects at a time and you have no control over the resources demanded. For example almost every Prospect I got in the reach was for verdant seeds which are a very low value trade good.

In addendum: Both Exploration and Trading suffer massively from the slow travel speed of your engine. There's no way to upgrade your move speed leading to many players of sunless skies using cheat engine to increase the game's tick speed when travelling because of how monotonous it is. The game has been made easier, even on Legacy mode, in terms of managing Horror and supplies so there's no need to make stops at intermediary ports when going to long distance locations from the hub port of the region. This means there's nothing to stop players from using direct routes and the direct routes are boring. By contrast in Sunless Sea you needed to stick close to land and chain from port to port to manage horror and make money efficiently (as well as to complete storylets)

NARRATIVE: Arguably the biggest selling point of this game. I'll be frank, I don't like it. The world is less established because they can't call back on Fallen London's existing lore for reference, at least not to the same extent. They reuse monsters from the Zee like Scorn Flukes as narrative elements. There are 'horrors' in the world like the Fallen Earth or the Grave of the Silent Saint but they're just pretty things to look at that have no background lore explained. The setting fails to captivate my interest. There's a lot of beautiful art work, sure, but that beautiful artwork doesn't tell a story besides 'generic Lovecraftian horror'

This is made worse by the overabundance of political plots in the game. Starting out in the Reach you aren't told stories about why the sky is full of awful monsters and eldritch horrors you're told about how the colonies want independence from London and are fighting a war with the London loyalists. Most things you encounter are marauder vessels or insane captains. The world doesn't feel hostile to humanity or like something we would be better off not exploring, it feels more lived in than the Unterzee does and that humanity is the only real thing to worry about. Even bigger monsters like Curators are easy to deal with and don't have the same sense of dread associated with dealing with them as the larger monsters of the Zee. There /are/ more monsters in other areas...but you shouldn't have to play through more than half the game to see something to inspire dread and wonder, if it even managed to do that.

Dread and wonder is the entire point of the story and setting. It seems like Failbetter forgot that part though and instead wants to drill everyone about the 'horror' of victorian age industrialism and imperialism run amok. It's just a lot less interesting and fails to do much to make itself seem interesting or grab your attention. Maybe FBG thought the art alone would be enough to leave you wondering about things and maybe for some people it is but the storylets are really lacking compared to Sunless Sea.

QUESTS/STORYLETS: I kind of hate them. There's so many you collect in the game that are basically just fetch quests bouncing from port to port to do stuff you can only do when you have the quest. Sunless Sea did not have this issue, most of the storylets can be resolved in the port they're started in if you have the resources required to do them along with being able to make the skill checks. I've run into very few storylets in Skies like this, most of them require you to go through several checkpoints at other ports in addition to bringing several different resources you can only buy at certain places. If you couple this with the fact the map is split up into multiple areas you need to use 'warp gates' to get to it means there's a LOT of travel time and the travel is, as mentioned above, monotonous and boring.

Because I end up with ~20-30 ongoing storylets I lose track of the narrative and they become a big blurry mess of plot that I really stopped caring about by the time I was doing the umpteenth quest where I needed to check 3 different ports to find a thing to bring back to a guy who'd inevitably send me somewhere else. The officer quests are just as bad, if not moreso, for this type of issue.

CONCLUSION: I like Sunless Sea and I like (or liked, at least, I haven't played in a while) Fallen London's narrative and setting. It is a really good basis to build on. I wish I liked Sunless Skies to any similar level but I really don't. It has good points. The combat is better, for one, the UI is cleaner, the art is wonderful. I enjoy the new level up system though I wish it was used more to affect storylets than it currently is.

The game has just has failed to captivate me in any capacity. There are some minor other gripes like the lack of Engine variety but they're fairly inconsequential compared to the core gameplay mechanics mentioned above. It makes me worry that Sunless Sea was a fluke and that FBG can't make another game like it successfully. A lot of people seem to like it, though, so maybe it's just me.

I have been thinking about my feelings on Starbound a lot since 1.0 came out. I only played Starbound once during the very first beta (as I had backed the game waaaaaay back in the day.) and then held off till release. I regularly read about ideas and features that were planned for the game, like race-specific techs ( I think the Avian were supposed to have some sort of glide tech?) and stuff like that. Playing the 'finished' game it...well, doesn't really feel finished.

I tried to think of why that is, since, mechanically, there's a lot more /in/ Starbound than, say, Terraria. Just in terms of outfits, the races, gear types, environment diversity, story, characters, etc, it has more content. But...it's just not as fun.

Being fun is sort of the most important thing in a game. To me it feels like the devs for Starbound made this environment the player can play around in and sort of forgot the 'game' part of that, even cutting back more 'gamey' elements. The progression the main story quest urges you to do is irrelevant, given you cna find racial villages on pretty much any world type. Even trying to follow it as I did was frustrating, because I'd have found, say, an Apex village ages ago and despite scanning everything there I now need to find a new one and scan stuff I already scanned to progress.

Mining is...boring. Partly because the matter manipulator can become so powerful, but partly because there's no real unique rewards to doing it. Mining for ore alone in Terraria would get stale but finding chests and (to a lesser extent) hearts was exciting. The chest items, even near the surface, were unique and useful, especially when they added the tinkerer combination items.

By contrast most chests you'd find in Starbound will have a green weapon in them. Most of which I don't even use because I use spears and I can barely ever find any that I like. And I can't even craft a solarium one...because reasons?

I know there's mods for this, but that's not really the point. Despite making an ostensibly better combat system (in terms of weapons having interesting and varied special abilities, the ability to block, etc) the actual combat is kind of boring because weapon and enemy hitboxes are janky and most enemies are absurdly easy to kill.

The progression exemplifies this. Terraria has a smooth progression, from mining better materials tofighting bosses. After the Hard Mode patch it got a little janky in terms of sudden difficulty spikes, but overall it's still good. Starbound's...is weird. You have to mine to the core of the starter planet to get core fragments (or hope you get enough in the mine full of them.) Then you get to do the first story dungeon which is admittedly interesting. Those story dungeons are my favourite part of the game. Finally you cna freely explore the galaxy! Your next task? To go to a world with florans and scan their stuff. You don't actually have to mine for this, but if you want to progress gear, you're basically just going to dig down about halfway, since that's as far as you need to go. And then you'll do that again for each race.

It's a game of half-measures. The actual crafted story dungeons are cool in my book. If there was more of that, if the entire story progression was just doing those? It'd be fine by me. The scannin ♥♥♥♥ just slows down progression by a large margin and makes the pacing of the game really janky.

But you can't really just go off explore and mine either because there's not really enough interesting stuff to reward that kind of gameplay. You can't just build colonies or farm either, despite alternate modes of progression by doing that being a stated goal at one point. So you're left with a game that's sort-of story focused but sort of not, without enough depth put in either end.

Ultimately the /world/ is there, and the mechanics are there, for a great game. They just forgot the game part. Despite that, I'd still recommend picking the game up. It's not particularly expensive, there's lots of mods that help with some of the problems I've stated, and I do hope the devs will improve on it. I just wish that the development hadn't gone this way and hadn't been so troubled since that early beta.

While the game is very nice to look at, has good music, and the combat mechanics have some cool ideas, I think this game suffers from a lack of good implementation of it's ideas. The story isn't well communicated to the player, and there's zero emotional connection to the characters because there's no lead up into anything. You're just suddenly in the middle of a story that ends in a couple of hours and the only character who has any personality is the unnamed guy in the Transistor. Even then we know nothing about him. Thus, any scene intended to evoke emotion falls flat, because the player has no connection to the characters. (And text profiles aren't really good enough for you to make a connection.)

The combat has interesting ideas, but I feel it has poor implementation in some ways as well. There are a lot of ideas presented but a relatively short time to explore them, as there are only about 30-40 battles in the main game. Many of the abilities seem poorly balanced as well.

Overall I feel they would have done better staying more grounded. The story, characters, and setting make it seem as if it's trying to be an art piece first and a game second.

Don't buy this. It is awful, pretentious bullcrap with a terrible artsy excuse for a story and gameplay that consists of a walking around simulator. And not even a GOOD walking around simulator.