Recent reviews by Crime

I really liked this game and would recommend it to anyone. I think that it is best appreciated over multiple playthroughs to experience all the attention to detail put into the different endings and hitchhikers. The gameplay of planning-out your trip in game and then executing is quite good; I would frequently find myself stopping at all the shops to ensure that I was stocked up on food, medicine, energy, and my favourite glovebox items. The music and graphics were both amazing and fit the theme this game is going for perfectly.

The "deckbuilding" aspect is perhaps a bit weak; I think that the abilities in the Driving tree (+ the ability Adapt) are far stronger than all other abilities, and should be used at all times. My first playthrough I assumed that the in-game timers were strict and I tried to minimize resting, but on repeated playthroughs going for the different endings I realized that frequently resting to refresh your ability uses has no real punishment (you can very easily get a sleeping bag to avoid the Cold debuff), and so instead of swapping out abilities as I believe was intended, I just rest whenever I need to. Completely skipping the event is also a great way to save ability uses and a shockingly viable strategy once you upgrade the car to start combat encounters with armor. While you miss out on hitchhiker XP when skipping, the hitchhiker abilities are usually quite underwhelming, some of them even getting more annoying/worse at higher levels. That having been said, I think that the combat has the right amount of depth for the intended gameplay experience. Despite the game's name, the journey does have to end eventually.

I did experience a few bugs during my playthroughs, but I see that the devs are actively patching the game to fix those bugs, and none of the bugs I experienced were completely gamebreaking (I missed getting an achievement that I had met the requirements for.) Overall, I would recommend this game to anyone. It doesn't have the same longevity that would keep you coming back like Slay the Spire, but its absolutely worth the cost of entry and will last for somewhere around 40 hrs if you want to experience all the endings and hitchhikers.

Shallow game play from fake indie game Dave the Diver.

I really enjoyed my first few hours with the game, but as I kept playing I began to notice its many flaws. One interesting thing about Dave is that it offers several different game play styles, including diving, sushi tycoon, puzzles, farming, and a collection of other mini games. These styles feel familiar, like they are paying homage to other titles (for example, the farming has been designed to look and feel exactly like Stardew Valley).

Unfortunately, each form of game play is rather 'undercooked' and does not have much going on under the surface. I spent a lot of time upgrading my sushi recipes at the beginning of the game, and it ended up being a waste of time because the upgraded sushi makes way less than sushi made from non-upgraded fish caught later in the game; I should have just kept progressing the story. The game presents a weapon creation/customization system, but there are not many choices or ways to customize your weapon, and you just run out of ammo after a few shots anyway.

One issue I take with this game is that it is being marketed as an 'Indie' game, even though it was created by Nexon, the corporate giant that I recall from games like Maple Story many years ago. To me, an indie game is a game created by an indie dev, not a game created by an enormous studio with millions of dollars in resources. I think calling this game an 'indie' game is nothing more than a marketing play, and Dave should have been a much better experience considering that this is not actually an Indie game.

The game's combat is extremely disappointing; due to Dave's lack of mobility, it is not possible to dodge most of the attacks from sharks and other hostile creatures. Dave does have the ability to unlock a 'dash' move, but there are no iFrames and the speed you move at is the same as holding shift to swim quickly. Every shark type enemy in the game uses the EXACT same AI, so even though you are fighting a shark with a different design, in essence you are just fighting the exact same enemy all game with a different paintjob.

Overall, Dave is not a bad game for the price, but it could have been so much more if more time was put into refining the core mechanics of diving. It seems to me that rather than making the diving part of the game fun, too much development time was put into the cheap play-it-once-then-forget-it mini games that the game is littered with. I would give Dave a 6/10.