Senaste recensioner av cannonInspector

An incredible game with an incredible soundtrack. If you haven't played this, you should.

Boring, repetitive and shallow.

Development on this game is currently stopped. All hub areas are deserted. Even while in active development, the key gameplay loop was very shallow, centered around mining with the expectation that players would generate the content in the gaps. This, unfortunately, did not happen, as there was few reasons for players to do anything besides mine, build ships that mine, or get bored and stop playing.

Game is desolate, without players, to such an extent that the developers had to add AI modules that shoot your guns for you. While fun, and in some respects, very interesting, the limited variety of missions, mission content, enemy types and shallow forms of progression lead to a very empty experience worth a good 20 hours of playtime but little more.

This game could have been quite great, quite popular, and quite big. I'm still hoping it gets to that point, but at the current time, it is an empty box with very cool cover art. Its early access status shows, and this would be a negative review if I didn't feel as if I would, some day, be changing it back to a positive one.

I will wait for that day, very patiently.

I'd buy this at a discount, only based on the fact that Act 3 is not very good. Going through the first two acts, I commented to myself that the game was writing some very big checks it would need to cash in the immediate future. Unfortunately, those checks bounced in Act 3.

In truth, it's not a terrible game. The real problem I have with BG3 is the drop in quality once you reach the latter half of the game.

Both Acts 1 & 2 are fairly linear stories with a lot of time and passion in them, including many hidden nooks, tiny details and a good handful of interesting character interactions, as well as a surprising amount of attention paid to character details like race-specific responses for the MC. They have decent storytelling, pacing and direction and you generally always know what your immediate goal is, even if you don't have the tools to make it happen in just that moment.

Fights and zones feel like they were meticulously planned, and crafted by a large team, to the point that the transition from each fairly fight is smooth, despite the gnawing reminder that your resources in each fight are finite. Going back to play through them a second time, I found myself hesitating to do the "evil" action, despite having commited to an evil playthrough.

However, the thing that made me want to start a 2nd playthrough wasn't the fact that I had completed the game: It was Act 3. Act 3 departs from the quality and linear direction of the previous two acts, feeling like a sandtrap with limited direction and limited depth. It was bad enough to the point that I felt as if I would have more fun starting from the beginning.

The antagonists in the 3rd act are boring and uncompelling, some of their evil actions being nonsensical to the point of comedic. The city itself has some considerable performance issues and a few oddities with its pathing, as well as a somewhat uncomfortable layout. And worst of all, the city itself doesn't feel cohesive in any way, very much at odds with the previous acts.

Many people have brought up the fact that Lariat was forced to cut an area known as the "Upper City", and it shows. Much of that content seems to have been aggressively jammed into the available parts of the lower city, to a point where certain mechanics are broken, certain events don't trigger and much of the narrative feels disjointed.

On the whole, the city itself feels like an assembled tapestry of parts of other stories that were never really meant to be joined together except with the most roughshod of efforts.

Strangely, however, Act 3 was the first time I saw class-specific responses for my character. At the outset of act 3, I started seeing lots of Wizard-specific replies as a wizard. Beforehand I had only seen the aforementioned class-specific replies, so the sudden relevance of my wizarding ways was ... weird.

Buyer beware, I suppose. I played this godforsaken game for almost 60 hours before its flaws became painfully obvious. For relevance, I played the whole game on Tactician and it is fairly easy.

A charming antihorror game with a well-crafted world, a silky-smooth jazz score that I could never get enough of and a bit of wasted potential. While the game's fairly fun, it is relatively short, perhaps rationalizing the 20-something dollar price tag. The game seems to expect you to replay it multiple times to extract that value, so a solid choice for Acheivement-addicts. One of my many complaints is that different difficulties change little within the game, other than resource spawning, and a few of the sudden sparkles I saw in the game unexpectedly faded away.

Please be aware, this game is not scary. You shoot puppets with a typewriter gun, and the demo was some of the most laughter-inducing gameplay I've had. Each section of the game has its own motiff and some areas intermingle in creative ways.

Unfortunately, some of the content I enjoyed out of the demo failed to star in the rest of the game. The story is at different times an acid trip an homage to Sesame Street childhoods and a well-crafted suspense story. There are psychological horror moments, when you mutter to yourself "Wait, that wasn't there before."

In conclusion: There are worse ways to spend $20, but I wouldn't put this on the top of my list. Expect about 8 hours of gameplay in a single playthrough at the base difficulty, with higher ones taking longer.

bad

Dwarf fortress for casuals.

Edit2 (8/29/24) : ...Okay they promised to update the game more after release... Let's see how it goes.

Edit: On 9/9/23, the Dev decided to announce that they were planning to push the game out the door with a 1.0 release and then cease development. Honestly this is so disappointing, I had a lot of hope in this game but apparently the Dev did not.

Quite fun little colony builder. Early Access status definitely shows. The story isn't finished, and there's some weird little interactions when building passageways. The start of the game, with your limited population, is majorly challenging. Once you manage to churn out more colonists, it becomes a lot more engaging.

My suggestion to the dev is to make it possible to request more personnel from the surface, at a cost, and allow for auto-cycling of cloning to maintain population. Cloning early-on can be a very tough balancing act, and while it isn't un-fun, it can detract from the overall experience when you're constantly neurotic about replacing your expiring clone population.

Positive review scheduled to release in Fall 2023