Скорошни рецензии на A bucket of flies

Can't believe I haven't reviewed this game yet. I bought it back in 2017 on Factorio's own website -- before nuclear power even existed. Ever since then it's been one of my all-time favorite games. Over the years the devs have improved it and refined it with more diligence than I've ever seen before, as if the game itself was their own factory.

The base game is already incredible, yet Space Age somehow managed to engross me more than ever before. I have sunk hundreds of hours into building cool spaceships.

This game was great! If you're coming here from XCOM, know that this game is less about dealing raw damage to people, and more about figuring out how to shuffle them around the room and through a nearby window. I find this puzzle-y approach to be very fun. Planning out your turns is quite satisfying, mostly thanks to the story-contextualized undo button (you're a time wizard who can see the future, which is just plain cool). It works quickly and flawlessly, so you can easily try different tactics until you get something you like. You can pull off some absolutely insane moves that defeat 6 enemies in a single turn, and that really tickles my brain.

But what I really didn't expect to fall in love with was the story. I love the characters and the worldbuilding so much. The dialogue is all at once silly, witty, meta, and powerful. The hunt-and-chase nature of the story combined with the stringboard minigame really kept me engaged. It also has multiple significant twists and turns, with my favorites being when Zan didn't actually save the target, and every button on the UI is changed to something about failure and that Rion is actually a dog. The creativity of everyday objects being crudely mashed together with fantasy artifacts is amazing. My wife says she wants to cosplay every character. The art style is very stylish and appealing. I really can't sing the praises of this game's aesthetic enough.

Back to gameplay, I would say the it leans pretty heavily on the side of being too easy most of the time, but that's not inherently a bad thing. The Confidence bonus objectives do help spice up the challenge. Even though the campaign is finite and there are no procedurally-generated missions, the levels are actually quite replayable because they feel like puzzles with multiple ways to approach them. Plus there are some "endless" missions where you get to see how long you can survive for.

I highly recommend this. It's one of my favorite games I've played this year.

It reminded me of my honeymoon earlier this year, walking around a cruise ship at midnight. Dark waves lapped up at the side of the boat and white lights buzzed throughout the empty steel walkways. A pocket of artificial safety amidst an infinite void of chaos. It reminded me of getting out of the pool and going to the changing rooms as a kid, the smell of chlorine filling the air and the ceramic tiles subtly warping the lights. It reminded me of a hotel, long corridors lined with rooms of people, yet oddly quiet and still.

This game really intrigued the explorer part of me. I felt compelled to push forward, yet comfortable not seeing absolutely everything. There were rooms where I stopped to imagine myself really inhabiting them, and sweltering claustrophobic rooms that I wanted to get out of as soon as possible. Above all (and I can't really explain why) it made me crave real experiences.

If I had one criticism, it might be that I wish some of the levels were less linear. I love the sprawling maze levels you can get totally lost in, but in others there aren't very many alternate paths.

Oh you're so predictable. Look, I wrote down the recommendation I knew you were going to give.

YES

I love games where you get to make a plan and execute it, and this game makes it immensely satisfying do just that. You basically get to design your own RPG skills that get their power from numbers and differently colored wires. You can make a skill thats shoots an enemy, which creates a battery, which allows you to do even more damage next turn. You can damage yourself to heal all your allies at once. You can merge the output of three generators together to shoot nukes each turn. I really can't convey how creative and satisfying it is. It has all the strategic appeal of XCOM or a deckbuilding roguelike with none of the frustrating randomness. And it's very smart, it always processes your modules in the most generous way possible. It's very easy to play and it's very enjoyable, a total steal at this price.

It's a little short right now (3-4 hours) and a little buggy (some text tags are missing and I had to restart the game twice when I couldn't progress, but I never lost more than 2 minutes of progress). However, it has a very strong sense of personality. The world is fun and absurd, and the spell-building mechanics are very fresh. You can really tell that this game was made by a creative person. I'm excited to see what it'll become someday.

It's chaotic, ridiculous, sometimes frustrating, but very fun. Magicka is one of my all-time favorite games and it's been fun watching how they've taken the best parts of that game and iterated on them. Just beware of more stupid decisions from Sony in the future.

There's so much room for cleverness, creativity, and optimization. If you like coming up with a compact solution in Factorio or a Zachtronics game, or if you like theorycrafting builds to break the game in roguelikes, this game is for you.

I have 30 hours of playtime in the demo alone. Compared to the demo, the full version has twice the number of classes, subclasses, items, AND crafting recipes. I think I'm gonna be playing this for a long time!

You can't build more than 5 or 6 of the production buildings due to excessively harsh cost scaling. You also have to click on every building every 5 minutes or else it stops producing completely. It's just... completely antithetical to BOTH the idle game and automation genres. It's perplexing.

The fix is pretty simple: Make the factory work FASTER when I am there paying attention. Machines should work all the time, but you can click on them to speed them up. And let me build more machines for when I don't feel like clicking. Don't completely halt my progress for having the audacity to do something else for half an hour.

I love it already. It really infects your brain like no other game I've played. My wife handed me her phone and asked me what I wanted for dinner from Doordash, and I found myself questioning which chicken entree contained a mimic.