Recent reviews by Liesmith

This game is a gem.

This is a game by the This is the Police people, which is a linear, preachy, and hamfisted story-first game (and a similarly linear and preachy sequel) with some decent gameplay hidden away under the hood. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood Animal is on track to be about the same. You've got some choices that make sense for around the 30s, you can support the Code Era or fight it and probably fail with identical outcomes, the depression and WW2 are on the horizon at the start of the game, stuff like that. Naturally there's not going to be a lot of impact on the wider world, but that's not really what you're here for.

Once you get past the creators' artistic pretensions, you've got the Hollywood Tycoon game. There's some fun here. I like designing movies, going through the production process. The random events that impact your employee's happiness, the quality of your film, etc. are neat, and it seems like the devs will be adding more of those since presumably they can slot right in. A few are repetitive right now but that's a fixable problem. I'm not going to comment on the bugs because they're getting fixed; today the issue with 9.9/10 movies costing billions of dollars got repaired, and I trust the developers to resolve such issues. Early Access means this stuff happens.

What I AM concerned about is the broader gameplay loops. At the moment, you've got a couple I want to talk about: Research, Employee Management, and Film Production.

Research has a couple of huge problems, the first of which is that the research you do feels glacial. It's actually timed about right, I think, in terms of mechanics, but because of WHAT you're researching it can be frustrating. Spending a year to discover how to give an employee a rolex is absurd. Spending multiple years learning how to buy a movie theater is insane. I've got money, the movie theater exists, what gives? Naturally what gives is making the game not give you all the tools of world domination at once, but there's got to be a better way to frame it. The worst issue, though, is research priority. If I am a new player, maybe I don't immediately research the building to do marketing. There are a lot of cool options! I'll get to that one next year. Except, whoops! I make three movies and now I no longer have access to marketing and can't get anyone to see my films. Crap. This is also the case with buying movie theaters: by the 30s, all the independent theaters have been bought, and if you didn't buy them, you're out of luck. Hope you only need 3000 showings a week, because that's now all you get. To be clear, this error alone justifies not recommending the game.

The solution to this, clearly, is to make it so that I either don't have to research vitally necessary mechanics, or I am guided to research the right ones. maybe you just get a marketing department, for free, when your initial 3 films finish? Maybe you outsource that at a higher cost, and building the building just makes it internal, the way sound, editing, etc. work? Maybe you just have to do that research first before things open up? This last is the least satisfying, while door number 2 seems best to me.

Employee Management is also an issue. There's no real way to keep your people happy except bribes. The bribes come in the form of tangible gifts, like a rolex or cigars or a car. There are a lot of other services you can give to negotiate down salaries; these are a trap, since at least currently money is cheap in this game, and giving someone an assistant or maid doesn't appear to make them happier or more loyal the way a bottle of scotch does. Sometimes you can make them happier by letting them go on a 2 month vacation, but it's never really under your control when that will happen. This is only mildly frustrating by the midgame, since you can just stock up on bribes pretty easily, but it feels underbaked.

The filmmaking process is interesting and well done. I really like it. It's a little easy to get movies that are simply Too Good, and your opponents will start pooping out 9.9/10 movies for both appeal and art on the regular, but this is a thing that may be tweakable over time and doesn't really hurt anything. It is also, as I said, the part of the game that seems easiest to improve, simply by adding more varied events than a guy kicking in a door too easily and then breaking his knee when you replace it. That happens practically every movie at the moment, but I bet by the end of May even it won't be an issue.

So, in summary: The game's story is going to be hamfisted and pretentious, because that's what these devs do, it's not a big deal. I'm just salty because I definitely got a half a million dollars with no corruption in This is the Police by gambling with the other cops, and the game didn't care. More important are the mechanics; mechanically they've screwed up research in terms of the way it feels and the way there are some bottlenecks that aren't well signposted, and employee management isn't well developed yet. The core mechanic of the game, though, making films, is a little too easy but otherwise excellent. I'm not going to tell you to buy it but I'm going to keep playing it.

I loved this game. Then they decided to make me download a patch that spies on me and explicitly gives them the right to sell my information on. Go to hell owlcat.

ive been playing this a bunch lately and i really like it. It's got a pretty familiar gameplay loop: you dive in the water twice, fishing and gathering resources, then you use the stuff you got int he water to run a sushi bar. you make money in the sushi bar, and use it to upgrade your equipment so you can dive longer and carry more stuff and kill bigger and badder fishes, which are worth more in the bar, etc. This is essentially like every crafting game ever, but there are a few nice details that extend the fun zone: you can upgrade your sushi with the fish you've got, so you'll have like 100 slices of cuttlefish and can spend 95 of them on upgrading your cuttlefish sushi and now you've only got 5 to sell, but they're worth more, so you're motivated to go out and hunt some cuttlefish. Fortunately there's also not an infinite number of cuttlefish in any given run, certainly not enough to fill up your storage completely, so you'll get a shark or something. now you've got all this shark meat lying around so you might as well upgrade, and now you want shark because your top tier fried shark head is worth a ton of money, etc. you keep needing money for stuff like hiring staff, and training them, for a pretty long time; I've only just started making more than 1k a night from my cuttlefish sushi and it'll cost about a million gold to fully upgrade the highest tier of server and cook and what have you.

There's also a plot, which is thankfully pretty thin: you're a fat guy who dives and every so often you run into a mermaid or a character who wants a specific fish or something and you help them out. gradually you get to dive deeper, into areas with new and interesting fishes, which feeds the earlier gameplay loop.

Obvious comparisons to Subnautica are fair enough, but I like that it's not 3d. I also like the characters; the gun dealer owns, as does the dude who does all the sushi making, and both get funny little animations when they do their thing. A lot of work went into this and it shows.

Not a huge fan. Felt soulless once you got past the art, and I think the devs and I have very different ideas of what is fun to do. There's obviously a lot of love put into mechanics that I find completely dull and needlessly complicated. The whole game screams passion project with completely misplaced focus based on what the devs wanted to play rather than what most people would think is fun. Nothing wrong with that, but it means I'd never recommend this game to anyone who didn't have exactly the same weird enthusiasms.

This game is great if you have a time machine to go back to before they completely ruined it with a plot, annoying characters, and UNSKIPPABLE cutscenes. If you're forced to play it anytime after Covid started it's a different story, unfortunately.

EDIT: Just saw the dev's response. Their own description of freeplay: "If you want to simply relax, hone your technique or just enjoy the calming, meditative nature of high-stakes salvage, play on any ship with no limits in the Freeplay game mode."

So, if you want any kind of stakes, progression, pressure, or limits, my review stands. This wasn't rocket science, guys. All we wanted was more spaceships, maybe mod tools so people could put in a tie fighter or something. No one wanted to download a bunch of voice files, bloating the game size and adding nothing of value to the experience. No one wanted to hear the annoying characters you made up and added to a game that already had enough of a story with the initial setting and the actual game mechanics. Less was more, and because you didn't realize that now the game is bad.

I love this game.

OK, this recommendation is a yes but only in terms of, is it worth playing. Not value for money. It's absolutely not worth 25 bucks at the moment.

Very early days but I like it. It's like Stronghold meets They Are Billions, which is interesting. The art style isn't bad, the gameplay is pretty straightforward (build an economy, build walls and troops, survive waves of enemies) but rewards good play and brutally punishes bad play.

Right now there's two campaign levels, although I imagine we'll see more rapidly. The difficulty is tuned fairly high; when you make mistakes you'll suffer. At the same time, I was able to recover from fairly disastrous waves quickly without a cascade of failures which isn't the case in many similar games.

Like I said, at the moment it is absolutely 100% not worth paying 25 dollars for, at all. Like I said, two campaign levels. That said I think there's real potential and I'll play it again in a few months, so I don't regret buying it.

Fun little game. worth every penny of the 3 dollars I spent on it. simple game, not a steep learning curve, but the numbers go up feel is real nice.

There's a great game in here, but the unlocks ruin it. The devs play tricks that usually are used to hide bad mechanics by pretending you're gaining skills when actually you're unlocking things; this is bizarre in this instance, because the mechanics here, at their core, are extremely good. They have said that they chose this unlock thing to help new players figure out the game because it's initially overwhelming. This is not the best way to go about it, in my opinion.

The problem here is that you play the game for the first time and you get maybe 3 levels in. You unlock some stuff, play again, now you're 4 levels in. an hour later, you get to level 5 in a run. You've unlocked a bunch of stuff and learned the game, cool. You unlock more stuff, die, unlock more, beat level 5 (it's kind of a threshold for difficulty) and die on 6. then the ugly part starts: levels 1 and 2 and 3 are all timewasters now; there's no threat, no difficulty. so the first 'real' level is 4. you can now consistently get there without effort or skill, and the treadmill is revealed: there are only ever 3 hard levels, but the game gives you cheap earlier levels to make you feel like you're progressing. The problem is, this shows no respect whatsoever for your time, and also it doesn't represent any actual increase in your skill level. You've just got new weapons, maybe 2 or even 3 times as many action points as when you started, and your group has ballooned from 3 to 4, 5, 6 guys. this is what I'd call the real game. You gradually unlock more and more stuff, pushing forward, and now it takes you longer every run to reach the real game.

The solution is to make the whole game the real game. Make a tutorial, sure. That's fine. But after the tutorial, give the player all the stuff you'd need to unlock and make the levels harder. If you want to have the same unlock feel, introduce a mechanic like the gods in Crawl, where you gain their favor for conducts and they bless you with whatever thing you want the player to have. You'd have the same feel but players wouldn't be hampered by metaprogression and you wouldn't have to cheat the player for fear that they wouldn't keep playing.

There's a few other grindy philosophy moves I'd also revisit. The gold mine is too optimal; it is boring. If you just increase the gold reward from nights, you've got that gold mine built in from the start and suddenly there's interesting choices to make. The choice of items from item generating buildings is also almost always just 'which one is worth the most gold' if you've built enough of them that you already have your guys kitted out. It becomes a chore to clean out your production stuff by level 10. I think that part of the game can be improved dramatically.

The game is good enough once you've unlocked everything to keep people coming back. Remove the grind, it's miserable and alienating and completely unnecessary. You've got a gem in here and your reviews reflect that. Trust that people will keep coming back.