Recent reviews by That Moogle

Upfront disclosure: I was sent a Staxel key by the developers. This however does not affect my review in any way.
Additional disclosure: I am a big fan of both voxel and farming games, so I am naturally biased in Staxel's favor. I will, however, attempt to be fair.

First things first: Does Staxel feel like an early-access game? Of course - as with any early-access game, it's a little rough around the edges, and you might encounter a bug here and there.

Does its edge-roughness affect my enjoyment of it in any way? No. No, it doesn't. In fact, despite a few bumps in the road, my gameplay experience thus far has rivaled that of many full, non-early-access games. Already, Staxel has robust support for modding, an astonishing array of props, items, and furniture, an incredibly deep crafting and cooking system, and a visual style that manages to at once be both voxel-based and finely detailed.

I was initially pointed in Staxel's direction by a couple of people on Twitter, when I mentioned that I had had a dream involving a game with the ocean-deep town-oriented farming gameplay of Stardew Valley combined with the first-person 3D voxel world of Minecraft. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Staxel manages to be even better than my dream, which is something that I've never been able to say about a game before.

The villagers are adorable. The animals are adorable. The insects, well, they're not all adorable per se, but they have a consistent and pleasant voxel design style. You can even construct new houses for villagers to move into, for that added little nod to Animal Crossing. I'm 3/4 of the way through my first year in Staxel, and so far I haven't lacked for things to do at any point.

The developers themselves are absolutely golden as well. For every issue that I've found thus far, they've responded quickly and had fixes within a remarkably efficient time frame.

In general, if you're a fan of Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Animal Crossing, then Staxel is already a must-buy, and I'm downright excited to see where the game goes from here.

Was expecting Space Minecraft. Got Mass Effect 3 ending.

An hour into the game and I can already see it overtaking Monopoly as the king of games for which victory is sweeter than wine, and friendships are almost assured to be ruined.

If you have good communication skills and can iron out a strict set of rules for communicating the relevant information about the bomb with whomever is reading the manual, then your life is going to be just fine. My boyfriend and I have breezed through the first ten stages or so, and are quite honestly flabbergasted at how stupid some of the manual-readers are in the various YouTube videos we've watched.

More than anything, it's important to keep a cool head. If your manual-reader or manual-readers screw up and you end up getting a strike, it's not going to do you any good to get angry with them - if anything, it will just make them more nervous and more likely to screw up a second or third time during the same run.

That having been said, the game also has various ways in which it likes to give you a swift kick in the stones when it comes to rattling your nerves: There's a desk clock sitting next to you, and from time to time it likes to set off its alarm mid-mission. If you happen to be spectacularly unlucky, the game will cut power to the lights for a few seconds, leaving you in the darkness. No, don't turn up the brightness on your monitor to compensate. That's cheating.

Overall, I have to say that the game is great fun, and I'd love to play even more of it, but my boyfriend is boycotting his role as manual-reader for the rest of the evening due to his nerves being completely wrecked. Hopefully I can get a group together this weekend to play it some more.

To be perfectly honest, this is the first voxel-based open-world game that's grabbed my attention since Minecraft - and as a former developer at Mojang, that says a lot.

The graphics are magnificent, the audio is the perfect blend of realistic and creepy, and the crafting is something that other games shoudl take note of. I'm enthusiastic enough about 7 Days To Die that I run my own server for my friends. Overall, the only negative worth mentioning is that the updates are few and far between, and it doesn't seem like The Fine Pimps concentrate on bug fixing, which can make things awkward at times.