Reseñas recientes de Selphos

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.

Expected Jak X and got Overwatch in cars

Honestly it's only right that the 1000th game I own on steam is a ps2 platformer I never originally finished

It's pretty fun. Deceptively short; each level is rather large, especially the water ones, but there's only 10 of them, and the last one has nothing to grab. I appreciate that everything in each level can be collected on its first pass and there's no need to revisit. However, this is one of those games where every not-coin has to be collected in the level for its respective reward, which can be frustrating to finish off in some levels.
One of my main complaints is that the various rangs you can get have extremely varying usefulness. The Multirang comes very early and makes short work of most of the game's limited variety of enemies, and anything it bounces off of can simply be bitten, so every other combat boomerang is pointless, and the elemental rangs are only good for the puzzles the game demands they solve. The ricochet and trajectory of the boomerangs isn't really part of their mechanics either, so honestly they could just be guns and be no different aside from contributing to the Australian flavor.
Which brings me to my next point - the Australian flavor is deliciously cheesy. TY has the cartoony spirit of its era and every character and locale has a distinct identity, reinforced constantly as our protagonist yells silly aussieisms like "bonza!" and "you ripper!" I especially like that the subtitles sometimes don't 1:1 represent what the characters speak due to ad-libs, like Maurie laughing at his own jokes and saying "haha, get it? right, ah... moving on." It's stupid. In a good way. I like stuff like this. Even the ending is dumb and cheesy as TY's rescued parents don't even speak and he just hugs them and does a little hop to a freezeframe.

End of the day, it's not a perfect game, but what is. It's a fun romp through a charming experience of a type of game nobody really makes anymore (and those who do aren't the same), and it's certainly better than a lot of its brethren. I'd recommend playing it, especially at the price it dips to on sale.

In this game you have 1 slashing attack and 1 thrusting attack, a roll with no iframes, and no defensive controls. Yes, enemies will stop your attack chain by blocking, but you cannot block. The only way to meaningfully deal with enemies is to stand just on the edge of their attack reach, take two steps back, and then wait for the lock-on to glow red, at which point hitting them will dramatically send the enemy flying and deal most of their health, if you do it right.
That's pretty much the gameplay.
Details? Everything is obscenely stiff, the limited mechanics crumble in the presence of multiple enemies, healing is limited to more or less a single pickup per segment that gives you a varying amount of charges, enemies hold the items you need to progress so the description suggesting avoiding them is simply a lie, ranged enemies simply continue firing at you while you stand in their face cutting them up, enemy vulnerabilities are often in the middle of a combo and if you don't hit them at the right time you just eat the rest of the attacks, NPC dialogue is immensely drawn out to tell you nothing at all, I honestly can't think of anything to say that's complimentary.
I know I got the game for three dollars and I'd be the first defender of "souls-likes" trying to do something different, but this isn't different, this is just lacking.

Remember: If a game has an extremely limited number of reviews, and most of them have reviewed almost no other games, they probably aren't remotely indicative of the game's actual quality.
It's nothing personal dude. Your game just isn't fun.

The best part of Feperd Games is you get a free game with the killer album

Oh yeah the game also rocks, I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥ zoomin'

Upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games, like having the entire platform and all its users' personal data compromised
Multiple times

Update: Alright cool now that we've proven bullying works against Sony, how about we use it on Arrowhead to stop them from balancing their game worse than Marvel vs Capcom