Recent reviews by ThatGuyFuryan

Stellaris is a great game, in contains a lot of content (and can be expanded with the numerous DLCs) and has an indepth moding community that add so much more (whether balanced or unbalanced).

Look forward to sitting down at your computer and then realising half a day passes before you know it.

First impression? For a game made by students, it already puts a lot of survival titles made by big studios or small ex-triple A developers to shame. I look forward to seeing this develop more.

Kingdoms and Castles is a interesting little kingdom builder management game, having quite a relaxing atmosphere from the surprisingly good musical score to the minimalist art style, which provides a very pleasant visual experience.

At the moment, there isn't much in the way of depth than that experienced in other similar genre games, however the game is being updated with new things (AI kingdoms are being added soon, for example). For a team of 2, it's a good enjoyable game to relax into. As with all things, there are areas that could be improved but nothing that really hinders the experience.

I'm looking forward to seeing what becomes of this game as updates continues.

**Release update**
Game is now 'released' and abandoned by the developer and it attempting to gaslight his paying EA members for unrealistic expectations the community put on him. Brian really needs to understand that people know how to use the internet and can quote him from interviews, ex-publisher information and his own store page.

In future avoid anything from Fenix Fire or Brian McRae--he is literally the Amber Heard of the gaming industry.



This game has gone from one of Good Faith and community optimism to now being considered a scam by the vast majority.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2048309938

On paper Osiris: New Dawn invoked a lot of community interest and originally surged to the top of the steam charts, carried on the backs of expectations and desires for what it then (and in the future) represented: a solid space survival experience. However, failures of both project and team management has led to this games downfall--turning the community from hopeful, optimistic and taking the developer in Good Faith to now questioning if this is all just a big scam by someone who claims himself as a 20 year veteran of game development.

Over the years the developer Fenix Fire, especially--if not solely--their CEO, one Brian McRae, has said a lot. Numerous updates being in the works. Several 1.0 expected release times (originally it was supposed to be 1 year till 1.0, so 2017, then 2019, now its 2020). For a developer who has often said that there is no set timeframe, if you are to look back through their own comments posted you see that there a lot of times when things are said to have been coming. The more recent and infamous was the alleged update to be coming out "any day now", that if you look through the Events section has been advertised for months; going from internal testing, to testing with their publishers and then into closed beta testing.

As someone who has been involved with most (if not all) testing of Osiris, my name has popped up a couple of times in official posts thanking me for my help, I can tell you that there never was an update and it took Mr McRae quite some time before he came out and admitted that to his community; admitted in a way that appealed to his mindset only. The thing with Mr McRae is that he has a very disjointed idea of what both game development is like and how community should respond to him; a few times now I've found him bewildered by the negativity he created within his own community by not following through with things he said were coming. An example would be this recent "update", the one his community manager was telling people were just around the corner (which she has since removed but you'll still see people quoting her and posting the original links). Mr McRae allowed the community to believe that an update was coming, it wasn't, he had (in his mind at least) completed the tasks to build the update and we beta testers found a very broken 'demo' of ideas already explored during the previous open betas, this time just having additional Unity store assets (creatures and weapons) through into the mix.

I'm not a developer, if anything I tinker with modding and like to reach out to the developers of games I follow, but in my time doing that I've been able to talk with many developers, from small to big and the commonality of advice or comments from them was that 'if anyone tells you anything is easy, they are either a fool who doesn't understand what he's doing, or a complete liar' and that would very much encompass Mr McRae, who would often say something is easy--"an easy fix"--but was never able to actually fix it; never be able to actually fix bugs we found during various tests and would often become aggressive or passive aggressive and blame testers for things he is solely responsible for. Or become annoyed when you could, I don't know, take your characters space helmet off, something easily done since 2019 betas.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1809603895
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2048309938

As some of you may know, I was banned from the community, Fenix Fire believing I was "embellishing their struggles", which is an odd thing to say as the developer never said they had struggles, in fact what people considered struggles they themselves came out and said were the best things for them and actually allowed them to work faster, harder and better. But, I suppose they were actually struggles and parroting all the things they've said they're doing when someone asks must be hard to read--all those things you said you were doing via posts and you couldn't actually achieve. Though your ability to ban people for repeating what you've said is pretty scammy.

My warning to the community: be very mindful when reading what this developer says, they often share non-committal posts that they can't follow through with and don't like the negativity that comes from that. For example: they're now abandoning their most recent advertised update and are moving towards 1.0 instead but haven't said in that post what 1.0 is. If you look, this is what they're saying is coming:

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“The full version will include six playable planetary maps, power system, utility panel system, compass system, map system, two factions and six classes.”

Who advertises "we have a compass"?, honestly. Plus 'six playable planetary maps', but what does that actually mean? Maps as in entire worlds, or maps as in what maps are now (seeing as Proteus 2, as an example as 2 maps).

By very cautious with this developer, there is so much more I could say but Steam doesn't seem to like my level of detail.

An enjoyable game, got more than my moneys worth out of it. My only hope is that, in the near future, the game updates the survival and challenge aspects of the game. Without mods the game lacks challenging AI, environmental challenges to overcome and the likes.

All in all Space Engineers is what it says on the box.