Recent reviews by Xeon

There's a real sense of doom when you feel like you're trapped in a place that never seems to end, and all traces of the outside world are blocked from you. There's no real signs of an exit, or any other living thing around. You ask yourself who built this place, and why? Is this hell perhaps? This isn't a game in the traditional sense, but I did enjoy exploring it. I hope if they build a sequel or add on to this that they add more puzzle elements.

After you beat the main quests, the faction quests and the companion quests there's really nothing left to do. With the exception of the Vanguard quest, I was bored and dissatisfied with the writing and story line of every other quest.

Almost all of the quests are very linear, with no real consequences to speak of. Every single NPC involved with a quest of some kind is marked as essential because Bethesda couldn't be bothered to make any branching paths off of the sacred timeline. This also makes NG+ pointless because the outcome of the quests will be the same no matter how many times you play them.

Your constellation companions will constantly be judging your every move, and if you do anything wrong they will scold you for it because once again, you can't deviate from Bethesda sacred timeline.

Ship building was fun, but ultimately pointless since the space combat is not very challenging. Outpost building was also equally pointless and unsatisfying unless you just want to XP farm.

Almost every mechanic in this game has been designed to waste your time and inflate the game play hours. This includes the horrible skill tree, which forces you to complete challenges for each skill, as well as unlocking useless skills for each tier before you can unlock the skills you actually want. The challenges are not retroactively counted either, so if you for instance already scanned 200 creatures, it won't count towards the higher tiers until you've unlocked them first. Bethesda also locked many game play aspects behind this awful skill tree such as piloting, ship building, weapons and armor crafting. Like every other Bethesda title, all shops including the trade authority (a large interstellar corporation) have a laughable amount of credits, leaving you nowhere to sell all of your loot quickly; this is also to inflate game play hours and restricts your ability to earn money. Its like they were designing an awful mobile game when they built the mechanics for starfield.

There is no exploration because everything is procedural generated with the same handful of dungeons on every single empty planet. The "cities" are actually small towns, and there are no local maps. There's also no land vehicles to explore the barren empty planets, probably because they don't want you to hit the invisible wall and realize how small the maps actually are. This is where Bethesda really messed up, because one of the main reasons for playing a open world Bethesda game is exploration of unique dungeons, unique locations, and unique lore. Also after about 30 planets you very quickly realize the same sets of animals and plants repeat on all of the inhabited planets.

The space magic from the temples was pretty pointless, I very rarely if ever used my powers and collecting them seemed like another massive chore designed to inflate gameplay hours. After I collected the first tier of every power, I didn't bother trying to upgrade them further.

Then there's the load screens, it's ridiculous in 2023 to have so many load screens. The Creation Engine 2 aka Creation Engine aka Gamebryo engine was never meant to build a space sim, and it's painfully obvious. Even for an RPG the engine is outdated, and it's limited map sizes and inability to load interior buildings dynamically WITHOUT a loading screen make it obsolete. It's completely immersion breaking to be met with non-stop loading screens between every step of exploration. I really have low expectations for ES6 if they decide to build it using this same engine or some other reincarnation of the same engine with minor upgrades.

Although I had a few fun moments, and really tried to find the good in this game, I can't recommend it.

They've definitely improved on some mechanics, however some feel as though they've regressed. Overall I'd recommend it though.

My list of random thoughts:

• I was excited that I could finally extend houses, however the process is tedious, and I wasn't even sure I was doing it the right way.
  
• The roof tool is extremely clunky, and attempting to integrate with an existing house was a jarring experience.
  
• I think they also took out the mechanics where the type of rooms you have factor into the value of the house, now it's just based on the furniture and renovation costs.
  
• There's no carpet in this game, aside from decorative rugs and I have no idea why. I think it might be a limitation of the game engine.
  
• All houses are made of brick, the floor, the walls, the roof, everything is a brick object. There's no wood framed houses in this game.
  
• The painting portion of this game is awful, it's insanely difficult to control and time consuming.
  
• Paint colors are severely lacking
  
• The pre-made houses have wallpaper and paint that can't be found with the scanner tool, so if you accidently demolish a wall, good luck restoring it.
  
• You can't sell the roof objects on the pre-made houses
  
• The outside feels like a dead world, there's no wind, tree movement or activity of any kind.

I had a lot of fun with this game. I enjoyed the humor, writing, graphics design, and most of the level design. There were a few things that irritated me. Some of the levels seemed too long and tedious to explore, even with all of the abilities unlocked which made finding some of the collectibles a challenge. The story also isn't that long, so I only got like 12 hours of actual gameplay. A lot of Gatlians seemed kinda underpowered, even with the upgrades. I ended up preferring to use Creature the most once I acquired him. I would recommend this game, and I hope they come out with an even bigger sequel.

It was a fun game, the combat and the missions were fun and the story was interesting and engaging. Some of the writing could have used some work, it seemed very inorganic and awkward at times. I wish there was a way to sell potions and ingredients because they piled up. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

This wasn't a particularly difficult game, and many of the puzzles were pretty easy. However where this game really shines is it's immersive breathtaking environments, characters, lore, and artistic value. My only criticism is that I wish it was longer, i got the impression that the final parts of the game were cut or rushed in interest of time. Overall though, I really enjoyed this game and would highly recommend it. My cat also enjoyed watching me play this game.

It was pretty fun up until a point, and then it became a slow grind and somewhat of a buggy mess. After you get above 3 floors, the path finding algorithm for the staff seems to break down. I tried assigning staff to individual floors, but sometimes they would ignore the floor assignment and stand waiting on the first floor doing nothing, or serve floors they weren't assigned to. It really doesn't make sense for a 4th floor bartender to be making a drink for someone on the first floor, but I saw it happen. To get around the path finding I just hired an excessive amount of transient wait staff on top of the floor assigned wait staff, however i'm still getting 1 or 2 angry customers randomly. Bugs aside though, I had fun playing it. I look forward to improvements in the future.

This is a fantastic chill game to play when you just want to zen out. It can get frustrating at time when you've tried like 20 different designs and none of them work, but then you start thinking outside the box to build things and get a rush from finally coming up with a working design, and then slowly improving upon that.

As someone who used to love the game Gearhead Garage back in the day, this is most definitely a modern version of that. I love fixing up the cars, it's a good way to relieve stress. There's enough complexity to where I feel like I'm at least learning a bit about real cars.

I do wish they had more wiring and hosing, it's kind of odd that no cars have these things. Computers are also mysteriously missing, as well as fuse boxes, and torque settings. I wish they'd make a hardcore mode with even more nitty gritty details of mechanic work.

I also wish they would add some UI improvements, especially when buying parts in bulk, and actually showing the tire sizes and rim sizes on the parts note lists. It would also be nice if you could just buy the double wishbone shock assemblies as a single part, since you can do that in real life.

Overall though, good game.

I really liked this game. The game is a little hard to get the hang of, and even after reading over the wiki on how to tweak the research values to get a good outcome I still found that the results would be unpredictable. A few things bothered me, for one I wish there was a way to downsize the company to a smaller office if you happen to fall on poor financial straights. When you progress towards making AAA games and you train each employee in a special field I wish there was another 2 employees because you come up short and I don't think you can train 1 employee in more than one specialty. Issues aside, I had fun playing the game and hope they decide to improve it some more.