Recent reviews by Daniel

It's a bit like Don't Starve, but with a much more robust crafting system and a 'castaway' theme. In these respects, I like the game. However...

The inventory and controls are very unwieldy and take a long time to get used to. Information dispersal and interaction could be a whole lot better. It's not very fun to learn this game, and when you finally get the hang of it, there's not enough substance there to keep you playing through its clunky gameplay. Everything feels like such a hassle to accomplish, and not because it's difficult to do, but because the process to do anything is tedious and annoying because the interface and crafting just don't feel satisfying or intuitive with the way they're set up right now.

There's potential here, but a major reworking of the way the player interfaces with objects, crafting, and the world itself needs to occur.

Subnautica is a game best played without knowing anything about it. Don't watch any videos or read any guides. The point of the game is to explore and build your way up from nothing. You'll discover the clues you need to progress. Some things happen with time, other things become apparent only when you venture deep enough to discover them. The undersea world of Subnautica feels quite large, but it's not an insurmountable feat to explore it all.

The base building aspect is pretty solid. It can be finicky at times, but for the most part it all works. It's fun to build, but there's not much reason to get too elaborate with it. There's only so much you can do before you need to actually just get on with the game. Bases are really just a good way to store the plentiful resources you'll find, and to rest/recharge when you need it. You will most likely need to build more than one base due to the remote locations you'll be forced to travel to in order to complete the game. Bases built in different biomes present a variety of challenges, so it's fun to plan out the logistics of how to make it work each time you need to do it.

Voice acting, what little there is, gets the job done admirably. The story is presented in a mixture of recorded audio logs, live communication, and text files. The amount of detail you get just by scanning and studying objects and creatures in the game is pretty astounding. It almost feels like you're conducting a field research project for the glory of science... except that you're actually just trying to avoid being eaten.

The first time you travel to a deeper unknown part of the ocean, it's truly terrifying. You have no idea what's in store for you there, and there are THINGS below you in the darkness.

One thing I will say is this: There's a hardcore mode, but you should probably avoid it at this time. Death is permanent in hardcore, but there are a few reasons why this does and does not matter:

1. It's kind of hard to die unless you do it on purpose. Because of the way the game is designed, you can't really get to dangerous areas without having proper gear first, which means that when you get to them, you're already prepared for them. The game is pretty balanced in regards to progression. Warnings are very clear, and there aren't really any cheap ways to die. I think a lot of people probably drown early in their first time playing because they're reckless, but that's a lesson you learn very quickly and won't likely repeat.

2. The game has bugs. Some of them are lethal. The most infamous is that you can occasionally get shunted into the void (space below terrain) and fall infinitely. It happened to me probably 6 or 7 times total during my playthrough, and short of cheating with the console, there's no way to get out of that situation once you're in it. On normal you can just load your last save, but on Hardcore, you're screwed.

3. The game isn't random. Your initial starting location will be in one of a few different places in the shallows, but the map itself is always the same. So there's no challenge or replayability to dying and starting over. You already know where everything is because it's in the same place it was the last time.

4. There's no achievement for Hardcore. :(

Speaking of achievements, the final two in the game (which are both connected to the ending) are currently broken as of this writing. When you complete the story, you will not unlock them. It has been reported, but as of the current release, they don't work.

If a few little hiccups don't bother you too much, there's a fantastic world awaiting you in Subnautica. Give it a shot! You won't regret it. It took me over 80 hours to reach the game's conclusion, and it was worth every minute.

EDIT: Please note that this review was written before the game had a campaign mode, so some of its points may not apply to your experience.

They Are Billions is maddeningly difficult. It's also incredibly fun.

However, you should know that even on easy, you are probably going to lose repeatedly before you figure out how to play the game. There is no tutorial, so even the basic gameplay is something you'll just have to learn on your own.

Basically, the game boils down to meticulous micromanagement. You need to pause the game when you're building, thinking, or doing anything that doesn't absolutely require the game to be unpaused. The reason is because the hordes you face will grow with time. Spend too much time fiddling about and you'll find that you didn't quite have enough time to get things up and running for a later wave. It often seems like you have plenty of time because attacks only occur every certain number of days, but they become HUGE later, and the spawners (zombie cities) on the map start getting more and more aggressive between waves as well. The final wave is actually pretty ridiculous.

You will also need to figure out what order is required to build certain structures and units, and how to efficiently build. There's very little room for error since the game is a bit of a time crunch. Expect to fail a whole bunch of times before you find a strategy that works.

The zombies are tough and can take a beating, especially early on, and if even ONE gets into your base and lands a few hits on one of your buildings, you are probably screwed. When zombies deplete the building's security health bar (which they can do in as little as 3-4 hits depending on the building), they take over that building and it then instantly spawns several more zombies, the number of which depends on the building. Residential buildings tend to spawn a lot and are quickly overrun. So this situation often becomes an epidemic that ends your game in a matter of seconds.

If you enjoy being challenged and you don't mind suffering repeated failures in order to learn, you can get a lot out of this game.

The Forest is a fun exploration/survival game with an interesting story and great progression -- just don't overstay your welcome.

The survival elements are great: You need to eat, drink, and sleep in order to have the energy to perform tasks like cutting down trees, building a settlement, hunting, gathering, running from cannibals, etc. Everything is interconnected in such a way that it truly feels like there is a survival economy that needs to be respected and maintained.

The cannibals are scary, and more importantly, they are potentially very dangerous. There is a bit of a hiccup, though. The aggression of the cannibals is linked to a few different factors. The most obvious one is that if you attack them and some of them escape, the tribe will become aware of you as a threat and start sending out heavier patrols. The more conflict you have with them, the worse it gets. In addition, if you have an impact on the environment such as cutting down trees, this will also raise aggression. Lastly, if you explore the caves and progress the story, the aggression will yet again rise.

It's really fun to run into new cannibal types and even mutants, but if you're not careful, it can get WAY out of control. No matter how strong your defenses are, at max aggression the conflict you have with the cannibals is an all out war that you can never truly win because cannibal spawns are infinite. There are a number of traps in the game, but you can't really make effective use of them outside of wooded areas. If you build a base on the beach or in a clearing, for example, your traps will be almost useless. Cannibals avoid traps unless they blend in with the environment at least somewhat. Most traps are made out of logs, so it makes sense that they're triggered much more often when you set them near trees. If you just put a trap on the ground out in the open, they'll run around it 100% of the time. They're clever like that. Also, they dodge a lot in melee and get behind you. Like, way more than you might expect. Fighting them takes practice. Very nimble, those cannibals.

Regardless, at high aggression levels, the cannibals will eventually launch constant attacks on your base with large numbers of fairly strong cannibals and mutants, even in broad daylight. At that point, they'll even attack your base when you're not there! Meanwhile, you don't really get any weaponry to deal with large scale assaults like that. You'll be forced to take potshots at them with a bow from your towers (which can quickly be knocked down by a mutant, might I add) or lob molotovs and kite while you slash at things who get too close to you. It's not impossible to fend them off, but it becomes a serious chore, especially if you're solo.

The point is, if you play the game as a survival sim and don't try to actually finish the story, you will get to a point where exploring the island is a huge hassle because the patrols and enemy strength eventually become ridiculous. This is what I meant by overstaying your welcome.

If you want to get the most enjoyment out of this game as a solo player or duo, I suggest keeping it simple and building a few tiny hunting camps around the peninsula. The small raft is probably one of the most useful things you can build, especially if you have camps near water. Avoid fighting cannibals on the surface, and concentrate on exploring the landscape. The less aggressive you get with them, the easier it'll be to get things done. Find the caves, go down into them, get scared senseless, and search thoroughly. 90% of the game's story and progression is a result of exploring the caves for clues and unique items needed to continue to areas you couldn't reach before.

I was a big fan of Zeboyd's previous titles before I'd even heard of this game, so when I finally picked it up, I was pretty excited. The first few hours of the game were really fun and you could tell that they had pulled out all the stops on this one to create something completely their own. The art has improved a lot since the BoD VII and CSTW days, which was the most obvious difference from the very start. The combat system is clearly influenced by Chrono Trigger, and it was nostalgic to come back to that system at first.

But it's not all good news. The most important aspect of any RPG, in my mind, is the story, the characters, and the setting. Well, the setting is certainly interesting. It's futuristic cyberpunk set on three different planets. You can't really go wrong there.

The characters, on the other hand, are pretty one-dimensional. You get a few interesting lines when you first meet them, and then there's not much else. The occasional quip pops up, but you never really feel like you get to know these people or that they develop meaningfully. They each have a sidequest, but it's not enough to flesh them out.

The story is pretty bland. It's the same sort of rebels vs. the empire retread we've seen a thousand times before, but it's particularly lacking in depth. I had a really hard time getting into it, and I was trying my best.

The combat feels strategic, but even on the normal difficulty, it's a bit of a slog.

You can fight the same battles again if you want to (for leveling purposes) but battles take a really long time to fight, so grinding isn't a very effective use of your time. The amount of power you gain when you level up is also pretty insignificant, and no matter what you do, you always feel like you're just about even with the monsters in terms of power.

What this means is that even though the system doesn't reward grinding, you really don't need to grind at all. Everything's pretty balanced. The exception to this is the hardest difficulty setting, which is so unbalanced that you get an achievement simply for beating the first fight in the game (which is harder than it sounds).

If you like retro RPGs, you'll probably enjoy Cosmic Star Heroine. I did, at least to a point. I still think it's a very flawed game, but it marks a significant improvement on the part of the developer, and I support that. Here's hoping their next game will be even better.

I'm leaving a positive review, because I did get some enjoyment out of the game, but I really wish I could give it a neutral rating. I'll explain.

I bought the game and sunk about 50 hours into it so far. I really liked the gameplay at first, and things seemed challenging but reasonable.

Getting to the end of the game is just research, so it's really just automating all the material components to make the 'science vials' of a particular color to pump into labs en masse. Of course, each new color of "science" requires an increasingly convoluted setup to automate.

Once I got over the learning curve of automation efficiency (and how to design for future needs) I started to feel like I was a rabbit in a lab chasing carrots on sticks. Good job getting the red carrot, now jump through these hoops and get a greeeen one. Oooh. I got to the point where I was producing red, green, blue, black and purple. Just one more carrot away from the end... but I couldn't force myself to continue.

I was burnt out once I got that purple drank. The very thought of extending a new production chain for the yellow vial just annoyed me to no end. I started to wander around putting it off, wondering if there was something fun I could do instead.

The aliens in the game serve as unwitting antagonists in your industrial adventure, but they were barely in the back of my mind for the entire playthrough. Every so often, the aliens will get closer and closer to your base by building small bases of their own. It happens constantly -- to a point. They'll never build one directly in 'aggro' range of your structures, but the assumption is that you'll be polluting enough that your pollution cloud will reach their bases (which are often pretty close) and thus aggravate them and cause them to evolve and become stronger with passing time.

However...

My base generated very low pollution -- I had a solar field the size of a small country, so the aliens had very little interest in my main compound or any of its satellite facilities. If you don't produce much pollution, the game is almost entirely uneventful. Despite the fact that I was completely surrounded by countless alien spawners, they rarely ever attacked me. Over the course of the game, I probably shot a total of around 50 aliens with turrets. I personally only witnessed it happening twice. I was always miles away with my conveyor belts. Fiddling. There was only one alien camp close enough to get slightly tickled by my fumes, and I never had a need to go out and personally shoot them myself.

So I decided I'd procrastinate from crafting the final yellow research vial and go see what these aliens were about. What if they were behind everything this whole time!? What a twist, I thought. The aliens made me build a VERY implausible factory for no reason, didn't they? I marched out onto the battlefield with my gun in hand. I'd get some answers, I thought. They didn't want to talk, so I resorted to some assault rifle diplomacy.

Either way, I shot up one of their little bases and felt a slight sense of accomplishment. My radar network informed me that there were like 8000 more on the map, though, and I wondered if there was any reason to even go outside my walls. I had plenty of resources in safe areas, and my wandering outside didn't reveal anything of interest. There was nothing to discover, no events, no interesting scenery, lore, or anything that I could justify exploring for. Soon, I would produce the yellow vial and with it, rocket off this planet never to return.

Best to just stay at home and craft that yellow vial....

Yup..

I sure will...

<_<

>_>

The core strategy, once learned, is used in the exact same way for every level of the game. Levels can either be really short or go on for a really long time as you grind away on the push to the end, and there's nothing new or fun thrown into the mix for different islands. Each island is just the same as the last for the most part, with the various unlocks adding a way to make things easier, but otherwise add little to the gameplay.

Once you defeat the final island, the game just starts over. There's not really any story or ending, it's just a big loop. I didn't find such simplistic and repetitive gameplay to be very fun in Classic, and New Lands doesn't add enough to keep me interested beyond the novelty of trying out something that wasn't in the first version of the game. On top of that, the AI is still really unintelligent at times, running around between areas and wasting time -- this often causes catastrophic resource losses that take forever to recover from (if you even can, depending on the stage of the invasion).

Overall, if you're not too concerned with depth of strategy and you like really repetitive gameplay, this might be for you. It wasn't for me.

This game sucks. I mean, it's good, but it sucks. It teaches you that sometimes, no matter what you say or do, you can't save people from themselves. Relationships are complicated and things don't always work out the way you hoped they would. Most people play games to escape reality, but this game crushes you with it.

Disclaimer: I played this game on PS4, but messed around a bit with the Steam version during a Free Weekend, which prompted me to write this review.

The gameplay outside of combat is very similar to GTA, Borderlands, and Saint's Row, among others. The mission-based sandbox gameplay is very familiar territory. You'll run from one waypoint to the next to fulfill your objectives and gain a bit of loot and cash upon doing so. Some of the side missions have a little bit of dialog to them, but are otherwise not particularly noteworthy. The game's story campaign isn't much to write home about, but it gets the job done. There's a loot system that allows you to incremenally replace/upgrade every piece of your equipment, and in this aspect it is especially similar to Borderlands. There's lots of loot, but you'll scrap most of it.

Co-op gameplay is one of the selling points of this game, and you can be matched up with randoms if you don't have any available friends. I found that random players just got in my way most of the time, and didn't communicate with me at all. Thankfully, most missions are so simple that no communication or cooperation is really required. My solo playing experience was much better, and I found that other players were not actually necessary to complete the game's story.

The combat is stop-and-pop third-person over the shoulder cover-based shooting. Duck behind cover, shoot dudes when they come out from cover, repeat. Enemies are bullet sponges -- you can shoot a guy in the head multiple times and he'll be totally fine, though headshots do increased damage. Having enemies who can take a lot of shots seems to be intended to mitigate the fact that their AI is absolutely horrible. They regularly stroll out of cover to shoot at you while either standing still or slowly walking towards your position. Melee opponents just zerg you for the most part. Combat gets a bit repetitive over time.

There's some base-building that you can do in order to upgrade your main hub, but it's mostly just grinding materials by doing the repeatable events which appear on the map. This is required in order to unlock skills in the skill tree, so ignoring it isn't really an option. Crafting is accomplished in a similar fashion. The objectives for materials are typically the same based on the type of mission it is, and the only thing that changes is the location. If you've played games like this before, you already know how these types of missions go.

Overall, I found that the game was pretty mediocre, but it has everything you'd expect for the type of game that it is. If you like this sort of gameplay, you'll probably enjoy this game. I suggest playing with friends, but if you'd rather not, solo play is perfectly viable to experience the storyline.

It's repetitive, linear, grindy, and there's no exploration or story at all.

Think of it as a twin-stick arena. Each stage is a small area full of randomized traps and breakables. Several waves of enemies appear at the entrances on the sides of the map and you kill them. Sometimes there are other random oddities, dungeons (side areas with loot), treasure chests, or zelda-style shops on the map that mix it up. A boss spawns after the last wave, and a big boss spawns its own private arena at the end of each act. As you might expect, each stage has slightly stronger enemies than the last. This formula repeats for the whole game and then you win!

You can level up, pick up tons of (mostly useless) loot, and dump lots of points into whatever stats you choose. In this sense, it feels a bit like Diablo or any number of its contemporaries or clones. There's a hardcore mode for people who like permadeath, and several difficulty levels which just kinda make the game take longer to beat (i.e. they're not very hard, just time consuming).

If you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this game.

One thing that may annoy you is that half the classes in the game are locked behind DLC.