Recent reviews by vovuey

Bloons TD Battles 2 has microtransactions, some of which have minor pay to win effects. The main menu UI is overwhelming: it's overly bright, button and tabs are too large; poor UX.

Has in-game currency that can either be obtained very slowly through matches or instantaneously by purchasing it with real money, significantly incentivising micro-transactions over the alternative.

Doesn't feel intuitive.

*I haven't played this game in a while but I remember the game was overall lackluster

Summary: you start at a lobby level where you can select a level and mission type; gameplay is mostly puzzle solving time sensitive challenges: traversing through hazardous buildings to complete missions using pre-selected devices.

Pros:

• Dozens of levels to choose from that vary in size and architecture (suburbs, food shacks, commercial buildings, construction sites, etc.), most have puzzles and some with puzzles that can only be completed in multiplayer.
  
• More than several mission types, including putting out fires, arson, delivering take out, cleaning up trash using fire, recovering special items and an among-us-style game mode.
  
• A slight variety of devices: transporting people and objects, traversing buildings and even scaling some, landing safely, detection and removing or displacing hazards

Cons:

• Levels lack immersion: no small details, no cultural elements, nothing that tie together the game's setting, let alone a plot
  
• Minimal characteristics on character models
  
• Animation: No idle animations, victory and failure poses at the end of missions; existing animations are just adequate, but not special
  
• Damaged doors give off a low-poly look
  
• Lack of sound effects: barely any sounds emit from PCs and NPCs besides generic grunts, there isn't sound effects expressing anger, joy or excitement; no walking or running sound effects; sound effects after securing NPCs or objects; hazard sound are adequate
  
• Bad device balancing and device variety for specific uses e.g the grappling gun is superior to the ladder in almost every way
  
• Short-boring progression system: progression revolves around items and are unlocked using in-game money, which can be obtained by completing any mission. Most of the items can be obtained within 10 hours.
  
• Bad reward system: doesn't reward items or other unlockables for exploring maps, finding secrets or completing a mission for the first time (especially with a high rating)
  
• Boring lobby level: doesn't have any mini-games or activities for the player to do when waiting in matchmaking
  
• Developers stopped updating 3 months after release

Embr is an under-designed game that was abandoned by it's developers. 4/10

Pros:

• Serene music & environment
  
• vibrant and immersive aspects: An adjacent river that adds a third dimension to the environment and spearmen will occasionally catch fish from the river, creating interaction between the foreground and mid ground. This is one of the best and most immersive parts of the entire game.
  
• Useful items and unlockables hidden across forests, encouraging exploration

Cons:

• Lack of unit commands prevents manually moving units behind cover or removing them from archery posts, this is frustrating due to unit AI issues
  
• Unit AI Issues: unit AI response is prone to getting units attacked, builders will build outside of barricades during enemy invasions and on-foot units behind nearly breached barricades will retreat too late; units also don't collect player's coins when their coin bag overflows
  [*Units are too slow: if they are behind a barricade and it gets breached, enemies will instantly attack them before they can flee
  
• Many unconveyed game mechanics: basic game mechanics are explained but most aren't e.g. clearing forests allows for more hunting, it's not clear if building multiple wheat farms affects coin yield, special buyable objects don't explain there uses, seasonal events, etc.

The atmosphere is what makes the game fun at first, but overtime the general unintuitive gameplay mechanics and underdeveloped units quickly ruins campaigns and makes the game frustrating to play. 6/10

Played solo, hadn't played this game for over a year.

Gameplay loop was boring: find materials to craft oxygen poles to gather more materials to craft more objects.

Player progression: 1) advanced items were in the list of early-game unlockables, which added to the overwhelming amount of options and made it more difficult to understand the crafting system and progress through it as searching for rare materials without knowing they were rare lead to confusion in how to find them. 2) The UI was poorly designed, it separated crafting information into multiple tabs and menus, most of which were displayed on a small in-game digital encyclopedia with low contrast between the text and background

Notes:
1) The crafting system should've organized it's unlockables into simpler tech trees the started with the simplest objects to build, the easiest materials to find and the most important for player progression

2) Astroneer's gameplay should've been much less sub-terrainian: Astroneer's space-exploration theme felt poorly done as gameplay was mostly mining underground in dark caves; it's concept would have worked better if it were either a horror game or something more like deep rock galactic
3) I didn't enjoy the game feel, especially the effects of items attaching to sockets, those felt like poor imitations of nintendo or lego games.

Gets repetitive: there are two modes of mission completion "loud" (combat) and "stealth." Gameplay significantly revolves around loud mode with stealth having far fewer skills, mechanics and incentives.

Stealth gameplay is mostly marking guards and sprinting between different locations to either pick up objects, get security codes or unlock doors. There are various tools for stealth but most are only useful for a few stealth levels, like the silent buzz saw or can only be accessed on certain levels, such as spy cameras. On some levels it's impossible to tell when it's safe to move around the level: besides some night-time missions where guards have flashlights NPCs don't convey there direction or distance to the player and some missions like day 2 of "Big Oil" have rooms that offer no vision into the walkways; these design flaws can ruin stealth as there is no indication on when to move or where to hide. Stealth also doesn't really have much incentive over loud besides some extra XP, which could easily be gained by playing a few "loud" missions

In "loud" there are few viable loadouts on higher difficulty which can make it repetitive.

There are a variety of customizable masks

The game can have at least 50 hours worth of fun, after that it's replayability flaws felt overwhelming

Best part is the hordes, gets gory, requires skill in tougher scenarios and can be epic at times. My least favorite part is that the gameplay and character customization doesn't effect how horde engagements as much as I want them to i.e. player choice isn't very relevant to hordes. Adding a few destructible environmental elements to gameplay would mix it up more and could serve as a hazard for both the horde and teammates.

Pros: Multiplayer can be occasionally silly; levels can be fun for players that like moderately difficult physics puzzles (or above moderately difficult easter egg achievements); level themes are varying; customizable avatars

Neutrals: Has physics that can range from pleasant to very frustrating (especially for the poorly designed player levels); online players can either be helpful or actively mess around, which mostly doesn't happen

Cons: Puzzle mechanics across some levels can feel repetitive; Their is no level or lobby builder tool; can't report players for inappropriate messages or avatar skins; can't block players from joining your lobby

Rainbow Six Siege contains some woke propaganda; it wasn't added because of fanbase demand and it definitely isn't relevant to the theme of the game.

This content includes Osa, Sens, Flores, Osa's gay pride skin and probably more.

Rainbow Six Siege's gameplay isn't the issue, it's actually quite fun and interesting for the most part and can have various interesting match scenarios with much to learn, match queue in quickplay was fast last time I played it and epic moments of fast last second reactions can happen all the time. Gameplay is centered around shooting while gadgets can serve to gather intel, breach destructible surfaces, trap enemies, protect players and counter these as well.

Whether it's the devs that support this content or Ubisoft forcing the devs to, I don't want to play this game anymore so long as it contains propaganda and the people running Rainbow Six Siege continue to manipulate it's players.

I've played this game for a few hours and its overall fun in multiplayer but boring and not worth playing in single player. It stands out most for being a 1st person shooter tower defense game.

Maps can vary in size and elevation with environments consisting of laboratories, the wilderness or urban areas; some of the maps have small details that make them slightly more enjoyable, but nothing that rewards achievements or can be interacted with; except for hidden explosive mines.

The variety in general is slightly bad: There are only 5 characters to pick from and most of their playstyles are limited. There are less than a dozen enemy types; excluding boss sub-types. Player customization, enemy types and towers could use more depth to them.

The game doesn't have a large active playerbase I'd recommend waiting for sanctum 3.

Can't handle High Definition graphics without crashing