Recent reviews by emmy swiff

Beautiful, engaging, love the characters, setting, and queer narrative. Excellent work from a small team who deserve to go places.

it's uh, rough

gamers are amazing, yall will ♥♥♥♥♥ about a misaligned texture or send death threats about a delayed release, and then bend over and take actual gambling and ripped out content sold back to you in an in-game gacha machine.

it's CS Source with slightly better gunplay and lootboxes. there ya go.

Controller support is completely broken. New Steam install on a new laptop, with a new XBox controller. As bog standard as you can get. Literally won't accept any control inputs. No support available. Common issue, reported back as far as 2017. Devs uninterested as they moved on to working on another game.

Disregard the backlash from 2016, this game is awesome. Real redemption story. Scratches some very strong itches, so much stuff to do, very rewarding gameplay loops, and some very interesting themes in the story. Consistent updates (for free!), relatively few technical issues considering the scope and nature of the game.

My main criticisms are only things that are specific to me (cos I'm a frickin nerd), as well as a few things I'd like to be able to do. Sometimes the interface is a little confusing, but it's not at all bad. Space combat is OK but could be better. Minor issues that don't spoil a game with a metric tonne of content and very (positively) addictive gameplay.

One of very, very few games I've played where discovering things feels legit.

Well worth the price of admission, highly recommended!

(Now imagine what could happen with this game now that the new developments in AI content generation are coming online...)

No, having a bad interface does not make a game difficult, it just makes it suck.

Dovetail Games has done it again, releasing the same content as a new game.

Same control issues. Brakes and power handles with notches still have the same weird behaviour where they fidget between states if you're using a keyboard to control the game. This has been an issue since MSTS - 22 years! This issue has been in the game for 22 years!!! The result of this problem is that you can often accidentally apply the wrong amount of brakes, either too much or too little, often accidentally hitting the emergency brake (which costs you!).

Unreal Engine 4 has a certain crap look to it, too, and the game suffers. Textures are blurry. FXAA is pointless and TXAA leaves visual artefacts. UE4 looks ugly in all of these simulation games.

The UK selection of routes is very London-centric and quite boring. There are lots of very interesting bits of railway in this country, but Dovetail only seems to like London in a generic-modern era. The two main UK routes you get are not very interesting, at least one of them is from TSW1.

Oh and yeah, they have the balls to try and advertise at you in-game and sell this as a "feature" rather than yet another money grab.

Overall, Dovetail has pushed the train simulation genre along by barely a millimetre since they took over in the 2000s. The lack of competition is really the only reason this is here, what little competition there is, is made up of extremely low budget German simulator games - they have all the exact same problems, but worse.

Not a good way to experience Half Life.

Where they ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up is they tried to improve on the original, and the improvements are just worse.

There are more dead ends, the player gets stuck on level geometry, the movement isn't as smooth, combat feels worse, and the new puzzles are just the same two puzzles over and over again - which are themselves just the same two puzzles that Half Life 2 did, but when Half Life 2 did it, it was new. Keep in mind that HL2 is now going on 20 years old.

While the mod shines when it's just doing HL1-but-prettier, what is left is a game that has very outdated design decisions (outdated as in, "this was new and interesting in 2004") and a lack of polish. A very overrated game that would have benefited from less development. A good example of why "less is more."

Exceptional work of art. A tiny number of bugs do not detract from the overall presentation. The writing is fantastic, and the story and environment complement each other to create a great sense of weight and history, as though its world were a real place.

The game, being ftp, manipulates you into spending money. That alone is an instant 0/10. All FTP games are the worst games.
Awful grindfest with bad UI and frustrating gameplay.