Recent reviews by smartbadger

Finished the 'game' in 26 minutes. There is nothing here to recommend. I paid less than £4 for this, and that was too much.

An odd - and oddly addictive - little game. I can stop when ever I like, honest.

I wish I could give a neutral review, really. I paid £2.54 for this, and I do not grudge it at all - but I kinda regret the 58 minutes I spent completing the game (including stopping twice to do odd jobs while the game was running). The dev has put in effort, and can have my money - but if I could refund my time I probably would.
Honestly, the game has no real surprises, and doesn't really tell a good story; and all the menu switching feels like time wasting - honestly, this destroys immersion since any system designer who thought that any of this back and forth through menus to do simple tasks made sense would have been lynched by his engineers long before working on anything that made it production. There is the seed of a good game and good story here, but it goes no further than that.

I hope the dev keeps trying, and keeps improving.

Really, this is more of a Not Yet review, rather than not ever
As it stands now, Ships at Sea is fairly dull, empty, and more than a little unpolished and glitchy. It seems, to me, that it is hitting early access way too soon.

If you are a fan of the dev's previous games, and *really* want to just buy now because you just can't wait, then go ahead. But, if you (sensibly) want to spend your money on interesting, fun, and playable games, and not proof-of-concept demos, then wait until the game gets past the bare-bones.

'unfinished' is expected in an early access game, but playing what there is of Ships and Sea at the moment doesn't feel unfinished, it feels barely started. I have hopes that it will shape up well enough, but I can't recommend a game to anyone based on my hopes of what it might, eventually, be.

I love incremental games and idlers. Sadly, this is possibly the most boring example of the genre in existence. When there are so many great free idlers/incrementals, paying way over the odds for this is beyond a waste of your time and money. If you're considering buying, take a few moments to search for other incremental games, and pick *any* of them, and you'll likely have more fun.

The graphics are mediocre (at best), gameplay is virtually nonexistent (and not explained), the translation is very poor and incomplete, etc. etc.

All in all, a waste of time. The only reason I haven't refunded is that I got it for £0.50, and I figure that at least supporting the existence of mature choices on Steam is worth 50p

As games in this genre go, this one is not bad, but it's not great, either. It is mostly competent, and it runs smoothly and seems mostly bug free. But, as a fan of the genre, would I recommend it? No.

Renfield is disappointing and infuriating in equal measure because it so easily could have been a great game, but, for some reason, the devs took a look at the games they were 'drawing inspiration from' and thought "you know what we should do to set our game apart? Tons of pointless grind, and a complete lack of any feeling of achievement." Of course, the vast majority of the games in this niche have been developed by people who understand that the only thing that keeps you playing a rougelike bullet hell game is the feeling of progress and achievement - but not Mega Cat Studios!

Renfield *should* be a good game - but instead it is confusing (since nothing is explained), boring, and dull. It feels pointless to play. I'm almost 4 hours in, I've saved the cheerleader, I've beaten the first boss, and the game says "no just keep doing that, on the same map, with the same character, with the same pointless 'talents' that do nothing, and the same handfull of weapons with no synergies, and - eventually - you'll get another character" 🙄

Renfield is what happens if you take games like Vampire Survivor, Bio-prototype, and Brotato and remove all the things that make them fun and engaging to play. *Those* are the games I'd recommend, not this one.

Some games are excellent because of their mods - but fall flat without them. This is not one of those games. Rimworld *is* a brilliant platform for mods, and can be altered fairly significantly by them - by Tynan and his team have not just seen the modders working hard and thought "well, that's good enough" as so many other Devs have. Tynan and co have kept improving on the base game to keep it interesting and playable.

That said, I'm glad that some of the best modders in any community are here working away at making Rimworld more fun, more insane, more expansive, more detailed, and just *more*.

IMO Royalty is the weakest of the DLCs, but Ludeon Studio's plans to better integrate the DLCs might change that.

I so much wanted to love this. I've been eyeing the game for years - I knew it had issues, but was hoping that, one day, it'd get some love from the devs and become the game it should be.
Yesterday, I decided to risk it, and bought the game. Today I got a refund.

I'm sort of at a loss as to how the devs pulled off the mess they have managed to make here. Perhaps the best way to start explaining how oddly broken this game is is to point out that I get a steady 120 fps in most of the game - except when I don't, like at the blacksmiths, where I get 6 fps. Yup, 6 - for no discernible reason.

The graphics, on ultra, are bland and washed out. The sun is a simple off-white disc in the sky. Shadows pop in to existence about 10m from the character. There are huge areas of the map you can't walk on, for no good reason. The game stops dead for several seconds every 100m or so as you move around, to load - again, for no discernible reason. The default mouse sensitivity suggests that no-one involved in the development or testing of this game has ever heard of a gaming mouse - or any mouse with more than 50 dpi; moving my mouse an inch or two caused me to spin around more than 3 times before I turned the sensitivity *way* down. I usually turn the sensitivity *up* in games.

I could go on, but I won't. I'm so sad that this is the 'best' game we have in this niche - and I am sickened that the devs threw away such an opportunity with such clear incompetence. What a waste.

I know that PlayWay doesn't really care all that much about the quality of the games they produce, as long as the money keeps coming - but if I worked for them I'd be angry about this one. If I worked for Code Horizon, I'd likely deny it to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with this mess.

If you really really want a gold mining sim, save yourself the pain and just wait until someone makes one - this isn't it.

Damn fine work so far. I didn't hesitate to buy this after playing the dev's previous work (which I'd *really* like to see finished!), even though I'd normally steer clear of devs who start new projects before finishing old ones; in this case I understood completely the need for this project.
And I wasn't let down. This is off to a great start, with engaging characters and a nicely twisted plot. It might seem trite and formulaic at a glance ("the MC has amnesia, how original!") - but it is generally well written and doesn't suffer for it.

I'd recommend it if you genuinely enjoy reading decent stories, and fancy some nicely rendered illustrations and some smut as a bonus. If you just want to exercise your wrist, then you'll do better with google :)