Recent reviews by Selphos

What exactly is the point of a picross game that gives you the name and shape of the subject of the puzzle before you even start it

In the words of the buddy I was playing with before we opted to refund this game, this game is kinda like FEAR... without the fun. Or the fear.
The controls are irksome, stuff doesn't work sometimes, and there's a comical bloat of things that don't matter because surely this particular dystopian tech future is more interesting than the others. The tutorial isn't very good and only explains things once. Sometimes areas get cut off without a way to continue exploring them with the only conclusion being that because you were able to move on clearly nothing else in them mattered. Voice acting is miserable, and the enunciation is so inhumanly bizarre it has to be generated, but there's no AI content disclaimer on the store page. That's not a big deal to me but it didn't help my already low opinion.

I don't have a good impression of the developers and their view towards the players. The first puzzle my friend and I got stuck at, we looked on the forums for help and the dev's response felt contemptuous, like they were quietly seething about players being too dumb to understand their vision. Their vision being... an intentionally unclear and incomplete answer, where even knowing the solution doesn't mean you have any indication of what the format they intend for you to answer it is.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1886070/discussions/0/3470612993469280472/#c4032475487622975128
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1886070/discussions/0/3959288052808853435/

All these things in mind, I wasn't interested in seeing it through. But apparently it's an open ending with no follow-up planned anyway, so who cares. Nobody is playing this game enough to make the 2 hour video essay about what it all means that it seems to be going for.

Edit: I got a friend request from one of the devs after this. If you have something to say you can say it in the open.

This weekend Strinova is running an event where you can play any character you like without having to unlock them, giving you a glimpse into a world where this game is actually the competitive environment it pretends to be and not one where it takes literally 25 weeks bare minimum over 450 gameplay hours to fill out the current cast and will get exponentially worse every time they add a new character because it scales infinitely.

Game's ok though. It'd be better if I could set a secretary that isn't celestia.

Dreadfully boring video game. In the 4 and a half cups I finished with the default character and default loadout within the refund window, I only lost a race one time at the end to AIs that cut straight through offroad corners losing zero speed, which was exciting. Didn't help that they tried that on another course but the rival straight up got stuck on a wall and didn't know how to free himself for 2 laps - something that also happened to me during one of the damn tutorial replays. I probably could have gotten to the 6th cup or beyond if it weren't for those needless tutorials, the mind-numbing dialogue spouted between races and if I had stopped doing the totally pointless objective-based side-events sooner.

Yeah sure the visuals are pretty but that doesn't make it distinct or memorable. I don't remember any of the courses already aside from the last one I did where I repeatedly fell off the sides during turns and got teleported back on top of the road because I guess I was "close enough." It's all just the same plain roads and boardwalks with the same big arrows you barely read at your speed, just with varying scenery. Speaking of arrows, the actual rally events where a co-driver yells pace notes at you? Totally meaningless. "Easy" "medium" "hard" are vague and inconsistent categories and they usually don't even come out in time before the turn.

I had a buddy come up with the term "artist game (derogatory)" recently, to describe when a game's visuals are such a priority to the developer that they come at the expense of the gameplay. I'd call this game that, but then I read about how this was originally a kickstarter game where the courses were supposed to be made of sprites like the arcade game Power Drift, and they couldn't even pull that off and made them 3D instead, which I think is very funny and further evidence of how this game's nostalgia bait is skin deep. Many such cases!

Why don't you put a demo back up so people can save themselves the trouble seeing how dull the gameplay is without having to pay for it and refund it like this? You clearly have enough people who see retro thing and immediately call it goty even without their help.

Unsurprisingly an esports-oriented game with an entire aesthetic revolving around hypebeast streamer lingo ends up being really annoying to listen to and the game isn't fun. Eternal Return does this "moba BR" union better and I don't even like that game.

Never trust a game that shows off its microtransactions the first thing when you log in

I'm so tired, man.
I've been following this game since launch and had great enthusiasm at that time but the devs were extremely eager to curb it and never stopped doing so even as they kept saying they were making things better. This is going to get long, because I always write long when I'm invested.

I'm sure you can see in the other reviews how many early supporters of Techtonica felt confused or even betrayed by the 1.0 release. But this is hardly the first time they've made an eyebrow-raising decision. This game's development history had, in total, 2 qol hotfixes, 1 content update, a cosmetics update, a bigger qol update, an update for optional game modes (which were then rendered unusable in 1.0), and another update for "fun" side-content. Then 0.6, which was supposed to be the "biggest" content update yet, got turned directly into 1.0, which was a surprise for a lot of us. That was quite a pace for a game that was in early access for right around 1 year, and a rather lopsided balance in terms of what was actually added to the game before then.

And the result? The game we had played before had been sliced up into 11 vertical zones linearly connected by a new form of progression that literally amounted to filling a meter until it was done, with the expectation of using one central hub to transport items between floors. Multiple aspects of the game had clearly not been adequately adjusted for this: dialogue now references things that never happened or that happened long before when they come up; the edges of areas that had formerly been connected are now lazily blocked off by the equivalent of minecraft bedrock floor-to-ceiling; building fragments are sometimes now located in areas disconnected from their logical purpose; some areas don't even serve a purpose beyond providing the player free pieces of concrete structures if they're willing to stand around scanning them for an hour. Using the elevator as a main bus is hardly even done in a sensible way; items can only be sent to a specific floor rather than just pulling anything off the bus as needed, and despite Filter Inserters being required to do this in a meaningful fashion, anything better than the 30-per-minute version of them is far, far up near the end of the tech tree.
All this was done with the stated purpose of taking away exploratory freedom (???) and optimizing performance, but from the reports of some players, performance isn't improved at all and in fact is sometimes worse, with the seeming reason that despite being separated the regions are not actually unloaded from each other and the game's spherical rendering distance means you can still be affected by floors you're not on. But hey apparently it was good enough to allow them to release the game on Xbox.

And on that point. In a dev response to the feedback on the map, the devs very specifically stated that the primary motivator of making such drastic changes to 1.0 was expressly to make them distinct from the factory game giants that had just released major updates themselves to remain competitive, and to fish for a new audience on consoles, because their playerbase had dwindled. None of these reasons make any sense to me. First of all, of course the playerbase of your single player game dwindled over time, especially during gaps between content additions, doubly so when most of the updates didn't... actually add any content. Trying to compete with their forefathers in the genre is insane. You're just not going to "WoW killer" Factorio; some people may not realize this, but players can in fact play multiple games, and you should recognize that many of your players came in the first place on the prospect of playing something that's "like Factorio but." Finally, chasing console audiences. Techtonica is more or less unique insofar as most automation-centric games don't have console releases; who are you competing with? You can just give them the game you already had and there would be no Factorio to hold it against in the first place. It also is written with an air of giving up on their PC players because those console players have new money they haven't spent yet and significantly less avenues of feedback, and it doesn't matter if that's what they meant or not, it only worsened the opinion of the players who had already felt like the devs didn't care what they wanted. Shockingly the devs then doubled down on this by telling every player who said they preferred the old map they can play the obsolete and unsupported 0.5 instead of getting to finish the game.

You know what's weird? One of the other reasons the game was changed in this way was apparently to encourage scaling up production in areas other than the one where you started. But they didn't actually accomplish that at all - Terminal Victor still has everything you need, it's inconvenient to transport things, and building up anything in other areas requires even more groundwork-laying because of the poorly divided space. Moreover, there's no reason at all to build at scale in the first place, because the mere story progression gives you nearly everything you need for free in chests and such.
Until floor 12, when the first part of the content that's new to 1.0 begins. Suddenly entirely new mechanics that don't interact with the previous ones at all are introduced, where not even your power grid from the other floors is allowed to be used. New mechanics are introduced that require completely unprecedented production, but it's all production of one thing: fuel. Fuel to feed pumps to attempt to offset a permanent, endless "rising water level" (it's sand but whatever) mechanic. Fuel that isn't exactly easy to make, either. I haven't gotten any farther but reportedly this rapidly accelerates to insane levels and I'm not interested in proving that for myself. What's really funny to me is that the custom game sliders don't seem to have been updated for this new content so there's no way to make this better even if you're basically playing on creative mode. Despite a week passing since feedback on this new content started pouring in, no devs have voiced even a word about their plans regarding its balance or really anything else.

So sand pump simulator aside, I'm gonna be honest: Techtonica is a walking sim wearing a factory skinsuit. Experiencing the story, which contains no conflict and most-if-not-all consists of just walking to whatever point of interest and having talking cubes rattle lore at you like a park attraction, is clearly the first and foremost objective, making pretty structures (out of steel, concrete, plants, and neon lights) is the second, and actually manufacturing product feels practically tacked-on, perhaps even resentfully at this point. But if the story is that important, is it good?
Eh. It's nothing special. Maybe if you've never seen any of the Alien movies - or watched any sci-fi from the past 50 years at all, really - "humans go to alien world and the xenos make things go south" is interesting, but to me it just felt formulaic. It's got even less for you if you aren't the type to open the Codex:tm: and read whatever snippets of background text the game provides for everything you discover, which in this game are mostly presented as business correspondence and I found wildly uninteresting. I'm considering looking up how it ends on Youtube later, dependent on anyone actually uploading it, since it's not like this game is getting a huge following.

Oh yeah, and then I got permanently banned on their forums for "rude inappropriate language" by a dev because I told a guy, and I quote, "Download Foundry and shut up." First offense. Like dude, Club Penguin would need more to ban you than that. Is it because I recommended a game I thought was better? Because I stand by that, I do advise anybody on the fence about Techtonica to look into Foundry instead. It has less content right now, but they aren't rushing it out the door either.

Don't buy.

I always thought this game looked like a boring puzzle where nothing happens until you die but today the homies wanted to play it so I gave it a shot anyway. I was right.

Phasmo literally isn't even Fun With Friends:tm:, it's only fun to watch streamers lose at it. It's not even interesting to watch people win at this game, which I personally find damning.

Shadow is the coolest.
That's just a fact, and Sega were happy to demonstrate.

Can't say what I wanted from Snowrunner was to play it in a Super Mario Sunshine format, to be quite honest.

Also, the lack of any real roads makes the incredibly grating automatic transmission problems Snowrunner had even worse.

And it's weirdly buggy. I'm sure those have been covered a lot, but it kind of pissed me off constantly having to reach over to press the L hotkey for my headlights because the controller input for them didn't do anything and there's no longer a menu setting for them.

Somewhere around like turn 12 of fighting summoned summons and encounter 4 of fighting 9 things that weaken you on deathrattle I decided I'm really not having fun. Enemy density is ridiculous with shockingly few options of dealing with it and turns take ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ forever.

Thanks for the free weekend. Game sucks.