Recent reviews by Thea Vanherst

Finally! A lesbian guitar hero game!

I trust the devs with my life, AND my factory.

I pet the sheep, it go meep. 10/10

This ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ equipment system man, jesus christ.

Games like this make unreal engine look bad. I can't even start to express how incompetent the devs are when it comes to programming ANYTHING in this game.

The game has been out for a month already, and really obvious bugs and out-of-whack equations reared their head in the first few hours of playing and has consistent issues throughout the recent updates which just break everything else. But instead of fixing the obvious flaws in the game’s mathematics, they instead push out an update that makes water towers have a limited amount of water contained in them (An item you can just delete and replace because it’s free to place down) and an update that makes re-railing even worse.

Since release, it’s always been impossible to re-rail on corners because they don’t calculate the wheel rotation correctly. If a car derails and you try to re-rail it while it’s still moving, it keeps the speed so it instantly derails itself again. While re-railing a car, the latest update now has given you a 50/50 chance of it attaching to the bedding of the track, rather than the track itself.

Yes, to re-rail ONE car, it requires at least 2 attempts to real something on a straight if ANYTHING else is near it such as a signal. Speaking of which, is something that has had consistent problems on even being allowed. Re-railing cars is a really frequent occurrence if you do anything other than straight track everywhere or go insanely slow around corners. Simply turning on the breaks has a chance of derailing parts of the train, or going down a perfectly straight hill at a slightly high speed will ALWAYS fling the cars off the track because the train rattles. AND IT RATTLES A LOT, going anywhere on your layout at a speed above a snail’s pace will make your entire train rattle like hell, hence the constant problem with derailing.

However, the devs say things DO have weight in this game, despite the need the train has of flying off. But even with the tiny little starting train, you can literally pull 30 car loads with ease. What’s the point of any other train? If I go too fast I always derail and if that’s the case, why get any other train than for the speed?

Speaking of long trains, loading any length of train is absolutely a tedious mess. After spending the past 10-20 minutes re-railing your train because it pulled itself off the rail near a signal, loading every item onto your train is a MANUAL task. That’s right, to put wood on your train, you have to click between 3-6 times PER CAR. Wow, what a fun and enlightening experience.

And once you’ve got to your destination to drop off your load, it’s annoying and finicky to unload the damn thing. Every time you want to unload one car, you have to drag click, on a very tiny portion of EACH car. And that’s because everything in this game relies on mouse actions rather than key presses. Now, the problem with this being that if, for example, you want to turn the manual breaks on for one car; you click, drag the mouse right from where you clicked.

Now, (I’m assuming) the goal of this is “realism”, but generally what always ends up happening is you click on the item you want to turn like in this instance, going right with your mouse goes away from the thing you’re trying to drag on. And because there’s no “clicking” state / boolean to allow you just drag and hold, you have to constantly keep clicking, dragging about 1 inch on your screen, returning from where you started and repeating 100 times. It’s so needlessly tedious when you can just do something as simple as a clicking state. It’s literally a damn if statement and as simple as a bit-flip.

It's not even the process of having to do this is the problem I'm having, it's all of it. The DREADFUL UI, (or the lack-there of) and the inability to use simple bit-toggles in every aspect. Just trying to purchase cars for your train is a process of opening the ui, going to the locomotive screen, clicking through to the thing you want to buy, buying it, and then doing it again because the game keeps closing menus needlessly constantly! Why is everything so damn tedious.

I'll just quickly mention that one of the good elements of this game is laying track bedding. It's really good and the smoothing on corners is fantastic! It's just a real shame that the problem with laying track bedding is that you can't toggle between consistent grade or variable grades, you're instead forced to have to go in and out menus. And even then there's only a variable grade option on HALF the things! Why not just make a toggle for it? Bind it to the ctrl button and whenever you toggle it, it sets that as a local pin placement for the toggle. It's once again an instance of another couple lines of code on their end to do this, but they just don't think it through, or release a game in a way too early state.

And once again, another issue the game had until the latest update, is that sometimes placing tracks on slops would create a mirror image of the track. This was a bug since release for god sake! It's just literally just the case of flipping an XYZ value, and it took them a month! It's been impossible to lay tracks uphills since the release of this game.

On top of all that, good luck getting your train to work. Half the locomotives won't take fuel at the moment and that's IF you can pick up the fuel for it in the first place. You legit have to throw in twice, maybe three times as much as you should be in fuel because most the time it just doesn't register. Good luck if you've ran out of fuel in the middle of your layout. And the prices between locomotives are also completely out of wack and proportion of each-other. If you want another OP starter train, it's 3k, but the top tier train is only 5k. Surely you would want the massive, powerful high end trains to be an end goal, and the Porter to be low tier, cost effective and not very strong?

But get this: NONE of the trains don't function properly other than the starter train. The Cookie works, but the tender won't couple, the Climax and the Heisler currently have a bug where they simply can't get traction, your train either doesn't have the force to move and ramping the power higher than 50% makes it so they ramp up to max speed and doesn't move anywhere because of wheel spin, both trains AND class 70 doesn't even have any breaks and due to the buggy physics system regardless of your perfectly flat rail, half your trains will just roll off. You can spend hours of your time earning money, only for my trains to either roll off, or your wagons couplings to randomly break while shunting or pulling, roll down the line and disappearing never to be seen again. I've lost well over 30 cars. When each delivery is worth 12$, that's 750 individual goods, GONE.

That leads me on to this; it turns out that loading and lining cars is also just as much of a hassle in this game and everything else. Lining up to the cranes that fill up your wagons is complete coin flip to tell which car the goods will be put into, especially with wood. You can literally line up a car exactly with a crane, and it'll put the goods in the car behind the one aligned with the crane! It makes absolutely no sense.

Conclusion:

The things I've listed, like every other review I've made, isn't fully representative to how many problems there are with this game. This game crashes CONSTANTLY. The devs need to get their ♥♥♥♥ together and do bug testing before releasing their updates, it's infuriating to see an update come out, only for a new feature to be included with more bugs to the ones they haven't already fixed that would be pretty obvious if they just played their own damn game.

It isn't 2010, this isn't acceptable when you have unreal engine that does half the work for you. Making a half arsed indie game with these kinds of problems just isn't acceptable when the amount of games out there doing a much better job with teams just as small. Being an indie game isn't an excuse anymore.

This game is DREADFUL in just about every gameplay element. This HAS potential, but please wait a year or two for them to fix the user interface, add DLC and balance this game. This review was originally 30k characters, issues listed are JUST a couple of major ones.

The entire game feels like everything has 100 background statistics, a major example of that is combat. It's awful. Whatever this game classifies as units which can or cannot be considered inside a battle has no visual indication and is such a mess, It just feels like a total diceroll for whatever's considered in a battle. Units can be a single tile away from another and not be considered a part of the battlefield, with no UI indication on why. Civilizations you don't expect to randomly attack you, will, and consistently snipe off your units, and civilization grievances can only result in you having a direct war with them. There's nothing for an AI to have some level of mistrust with eachother as a result of certain actions, though the whole point of the game is meant to be an implication of your actions having consequences; If you or other players being unreasonable, it never leads to anything other than future justification, it's like this game WANTS you to just end up having a domination victory, because the science victory is just so improbable to ever happen, and that's the only two victory conditions this game has. Another problem with the UI is that units have seemingly random defense bonuses, they're all considered as unimportant background statistics. In the case of manual battles, you have to sit and do literally nothing with your units in most elements of combat because defense is always the best strategy.

In seemly evenly matched fights you will more or often than not loose and it's frustrating because there's no numbers to indicate why. There's little to no UI elements to indicate any statistics of something as simple as movement or strength. Moving troops to attack and opposing troops instantly retreating has no feedback of said retreat whatsoever, and it's a VERY consistent problem with user input and feedback from it. There's not even a way to turn off slow movement, it's mandatory. The user interface for troops is oversized, I don't see any definitive numerical punishment for attacking up or down hills because there's no numbers to indicate it, it's always just bars that don't mean anything to me. UI elements overlap each other a bunch when you're messing around with troops. Encampments just don't have an icon above them all the time and I don't know why. There's no visual indication in which troops can and can't go into battles and there's very little user feedback for battles, and at the current time, moving down a hill will always take up more movement points than going up. The list goes on and on, and on. Everything just feels so unsatisfying and it's a constant problem for everything.

A little personal note for having war; If you forget to use a war justification, it doesn't matter how many battles you win as wars are auto resolved through a peace screen which you can only get access to if you win the war. The only way you win the war, is by getting your opponents war support down before yours does. Let's say... For example, you started a war 20-30 turns ago and just completely forgot to justify, they are basically pre-determined to win. So even if you win all the battles, they can demand most of your stuff from you just because you didn't fit a war justification that you forgot to go through 3 sets of UI to find.

Landscape. It's almost the a good feature, but the current implementation is just... super tame. Even with ramped up chaotic settings with tough terrain, only TINY portions of the map may be like that. And, because of your civilization being based on adaptability to your landscape, there's no generation bias for where you spawn. Not that that is inherently a problem, but if you have an idea of a game you have in mind, or a civilization you kinda wanna strive for, there's nothing you can do to enforce the game to generate a world to your bias other than luck because the world generation bias is just straight up ignored most the time. There's no "restart", and the game shouldn't be as simplistic as "adapt" because every time the game always runs down to growth and science, because there's only two victory conditions; science and domination. If I want to make the game difficult or have a certain start, I should be given the choice rather than be forced in a corner of how I should HAVE to play the game.

There are "random" events, but in most instances you will just end up taking the same actions every time because they're all temporary buffs and don't have no domino effect like the game makes you believe. There's also very little means to actually spend money in the first place, because production is so easy to gain. Most of the buffs you get are "a small science debuff for 10 turns", which really doesn't mean much because of the means of spamming districts. And the only element to prevent you from spamming is that, in which you can get civics to prevent rebellions, or simply give you stability. And these civics are VERY EARLY GAME, and their counter proposition isn't even anything substantial to having way more resources.

The way how city settling works is REALLY bad, on world generation there's a predetermined county system, that's generated on map generation. You can't adjust it. You can only settle one encampment in each county. And as a result, you will always end up settling in the same or similar positions because there's always going to be an optimal spot of city bonuses and the land around it. With a county system you can't adjust, how on earth is this adaptable gameplay? All this is, is the illusion of choice on where to settle. You can settle one city in a predetermined area, in an area the UI hints to which would be the most optimal spot, in a county with a specific temperate regardless of whatever you do, in an area you can't adjust mountains or natural landscape and there's also no workers or builders. The only options you're given in the entire game is to micro manage your cities or micromanage your units.

Even things like the production menu are way too large, and turning the menu into a list makes it a 2 column grid. The UI is designed in such a way where there's not enough room to indicate how much you can buy these things for and to to counter that, there's toggle for purchases. But all this does is add another toggle for choosing between money and spending population to buy the building or district. What's the point of spending population? Why would I want to spend 7 population for a farm I can build in 3 turns because of tiny production costs? It's literally impossible to skim and read the UI because of the useless elements and dumb scaling. It's insanely consistent of a problem that I cannot find any information. There's literally no UI element for what the current science production is unless you go into the damn city view. Why? And Faith doesn't even have any numerical values anywhere other than the damn ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map view! The faith UI doesn't show religious pressure, and no numbers to indicate ANYTHING. There's literally room RIGHT BELOW my culture and gold income, use the damn space because nothing else uses it.

The most enjoyment to be had with this game is a world to take advantage of the unique terrain and to have a proportionate amount of cities to fight over and manage. And you NEED a large map for that. Insert a badly done county system, awful notification tab and a lack of a mini-map, there's never any immediate indication of anything ever happening. Anything bigger than a measly 8 county empire is a massive pain to manage. In a game that promotes expensive and quick adaptability, it's near impossible to do absolutely any of it.

Best game I've played this year. The general description of this game is a vastly more expansive, but yet simplistic, chineese Factorio. It's quite bountiful in things to but it manages to stay managable. Progress is always slow but the pacing is generally linear and satisfying.

However there are a few points of interest that I think need improvement. An example would be the splitters being mostly are pointless. Two level 2 sorters do the exact same thing on a level 1 belt, and they take up way more space, alongside not being able to seperate them based on fractions because there's no customisation for them other than filtering. PLEASE make the splitters smaller or make them to have more bountiful features other than the ability to split things exactly proportionally.

Another major issue for me is the accessability options. There's too many requires to HAVE to open up a menu to do something with a factory. Factorio really has mastered this field and I think there's a few games that this game should learn from, even something as simplistic as shift clicking with an ore in your hand to put it instantly in a factory would be a massive help for short term setups while working on new layouts. Just more things to make the game easier to control rather than the NEED of going through an interface would be great.

(Also please add a currently crafting UI at the top of the screen so you can preview the current thing you're crafting's progress)

This game is literally the exact opposite of the "satisfaction" I get from an actual game like Factorio. For a game that relies on 3 dimensions, you would think of the multiple more layers of accessibility in both features and form in comparison to a simplistic 2d factory game like factorio. But alas, it does not.

I've played this game for a total of 100 minutes, and every minute was a seething mess of emotions. The fact that a game with an extra dimension doesn't have something as simplistic as an alignment tool for god sake. Everything you do ends up being an unaligned mess for no reason what so ever. The devs took the time to add an alignment tool to BUILDINGS but nothing else. Why on earth is there a limitation for a basic principle of functionality.

The game has awful collision, so I'm assuming they didn't play test the few first starter items you get to play with at the beginning of the game, considering this was a half arsed mess on release that barely featured anything. The first thing I attempted to do was to jump on top of the player base, only to fall through said base just... because? It's literally THE first item you build and half of it doesn't have collision. Nor does any of the random crashed ships, and nor does have the conveyor belts, as the first thing I did was accidentally place an electric pole through a conveyor belt. And of course, you can just place down electric poles as you please without any consideration of buildings, with the same kind of connection system as Factorio but without the ease of use features such as "Hold down the mouse and drag to automatically place the damn things down". Instead, you have to manually place the pole along the long ass line of conveyor belts you just placed, go back to where you started, and connect each pole INDIVIDUALLY. After 5 years of development your first thought to one of the BASIC features of your game wasn't to make a simple drag system?

The game is a pretty blatant rip off of factorio, even things as simple as crafting speeds and amounts of items you get from crafting things. It's the same basic functionality but even more jank because good luck looking for something as simple as an ore vein, because they are literally impossible to find and you WILL end up spending 20 minutes looking around for them. What the hell are you thinking to not include a simple piece of equipment you can build to help you find ore veins at the beginning of the game, surely if you're to copy something like a game such as Factorio you would consider... I don't know, the extra dimension? Especially when it's a selling point for god sake.

I have no idea why the crafting bench OR the armour bench exist other than to fulfil the purpose of what your inventory crafting should do in most other games, but the difference is that for some reason you can spawn these massive buildings out of the blue, but not a portable miner. Portable is IN the name, I get it's an item, but the fact you have to actively keep messing around going back to these massive work benches for the same thing your inventory can fulfil, then why have the extra step inwhich the massive factory you have generate and sprawl out isn't treated the same way, when I can just use a regular miner. It's annoying and isn't intuitive. Don't make the workstation an entity you can just literally click on, make separate tables and enforce a reason to actively have these different stations, other than just having two for two different arbitrary reasons.

Scrap the factorio comparisons. Minecraft Feed the Beast is a mod pack made by generally anyone who feels like making a mod, on a engine running on Java of all things, in their own time, not IN a studio and developed by ACTUAL game developers. And I will be far enjoy and love playing that more than I enjoy playing this, simply because it isn't a clone, it isn't jank and lazy game design. And, most importantly, it doesn't have the most rail-road factory building systems that rely on the most bog standard tier systems known to man.

The conclusion of my experience is this; this is a lazy, half arsed rip off of a clearly superior game, maybe not in overall features, but DEFINITELY in play-ability and ease of playing the damn game. 100 minutes and the only thing I've learned that this is a over-remembered mess of a game that constantly trips over itself because the devs don't check their own spelling mistakes in their exam. It's a joke. Go back to the basic elements of your game and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fix them, because it's an awful first time experience that feels slow, unimaginative and clunky to play. Play Minecraft FTB or play Factorio, two vastly superior games. Thanks for the refund.

I bought don't starve 7 years ago and I can safely say this is identical to the game I purchased 7 years ago. Well done to whichever one person in the Klei Entertainment group to actually keep this thing bug free, but yeah the game hasn't changed and the progression is still just as stilted as it was back then.

The modding community has done an equally awful job on keeping the game interesting and the DLC only gives you the opinion of "which handle on the knife that kills you do you want? The red one? Maybe this fancy pink one?" which doesn't solve the problem of the lack progression the game makes you feel and the sense of direction is none existent. Playing a game simply to go around finding the same 3 different types of enemies to kill isn't how a game should be done.

This game essentially allows you to do the "Mine" and "Craft" elements of Minecraft despite the fact the crafting is limited, you can mine 2 different types of rocks. And the main selling point of Minecraft being building isn't very feasible within the scope of this game, so what on earth is the point other than to give yourself cookie points? The fact it took until the very end of last year to even fix farming to the current state it is, is beyond a joke alongside the lack of ease of use features up until recently. Inventory management is absolute garbage and the past 7 years of development has done nothing to help it.

Regardless, very disappointed the game is still completely directionless but I'm gonna give credit on the consistency on the few bits of art direction they've had the chance to put in since the conception of this awful game. Well done lads.

This is so bad on so many levels, I'm not even gonna bother to write a review. The only actual difference between you starting the DLC and ending it, is one old obsessed paedophile dies and no one learns anything. ...at all. This genuinely is the worse pile of I've trash I've played on an even bigger pile of trash game. I hate it and I completely hated the experience for wasting my time.

Even though I only paid in the grand scheme of things around 50 pence for this DLC because of the summer sale, I still want my money back. At least then, I could buy two freddos and probably enjoy the process of purchasing it more than I enjoyed this DLC.