Recent reviews by Fearless Son

Here's the thing: this is by most measures, a good game, but subjectively it's not one I enjoyed as much as I hoped I would.

The graphics are amazing, the soundtrack, great, it nails the mood of the setting it's going for. But there are some design decisions that confound me and make it feel less fun than I was hoping. The health bar feels less like a resource to be expended and replenished and more like a barometer for how much the game will punish failure. It only regenerates when using expendable items or when respawning (or a little bit when using a limit break) so you're almost better off letting yourself die to start the next encounter fresh. There's a limited "lives" system for how many times you can be revived, which feels like an archaic leftover from an earlier era of game design. You have A.I. companions accompanying you, but they don't seem to contribute much to the overall combat, which is particularly bad when some encounters seem designed to require a whole team coordinating their efforts. These factors combined don't make progression feel any more challenging, but they do make it feel more frustrating. I'm sure that there are some reasons why these design decisions were made, but I can't understand what those reasons are (I would love to read the design docs for this game.)

So while I can see that a lot of people might enjoy this game, it's not a game for me and not a game that I can really recommend.

Do you want a really hardcore golf game? Do you want to play one done entirely in an engine made for 2D RPGs? Do you have the patience to play through something that won't hold your hand at any point in the process? If you answered "Yes" to each of these... you're someone with very strangely specific tastes. Fortunately, this game will satisfy those tastes.

First of all, ignore the nearly sixty hours I've put into this game on Steam. I've put hundreds more into it before it came to Steam. Secondly, I whole-hardheartedly endorse this game, but with one big caveat: It has an extremely steep learning curve.

Dwarf Fortress is a game where you will fail many times before you succeed. It does not hold your hand and does not do tutorials. You will be thrown in the deep end and it can seem overwhelming. However, with persistence, the Dwarf Fortress wiki, and some guidance from the wider Dwarf Fortress community (see r/DwarfFortress or the Bay 12 forums) a player will find themselves slowly mastering the many layers of interlocking systems that make up this game.

Once you do start to have a handle on it though, you'll find that Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex and rewarding colony-simulation games out there. You have to make your own fun, but it's such a wide sandbox with so many things to explore and exploit that you'll never run out of options. If you can tolerate pushing past the learning curve, you're going to love this game.

And hey, if you're not sure if it'll be worth the price to try out, the non-Steam version is always free. :)

Aliens: Dark Descent manages to both ask and answer the question, "How do you make a horror game tactical?"

The answer to that question is that you subject the player to a constantly escalating sense of tension, where the need to retreat is balanced against the need to push forward, and success and failure tests on a knife's edge of needing to use your resources effectively under the constraints you're placed in. After many games that treat them as cannon fodder, this game manages to pull off the trick of making xenos still feel dangerous even as you gun hundreds of them down.

However, there are some caveats that I must mention which can drag on the experience. First, while the voice acting is generally good, a limited pool of lines and actors to deliver them leads to the moment-to-moment voice lines feeling too frequent and repetitive. More concerning though is that there are several script errors that remain in the game at launch time that can soft-lock your progress until you revert to a prior save or even restart the mission entirely. These will certainly frustrate you at some point.

However, even with that I recommend the game, provided you can stomach a little glitchiness. If you can push through a bit of jank, the experience is worth it.

It is with a heavy heart that I have to revise my prior review from Recommend to Not Recommend.

I previously recommended KSP2 despite the jankiness in it because I had seen the developers make substantial improvements during the early access period and it made me confident in their ability to eventually deliver a product that would be an improvement over the original. Unfortunately, I didn't account for the publisher laying off the entire development team. I still believe that, if the developers had been given the proper support, they would have been able to deliver. Instead, an executive decision above their heads lead to the project getting it's plug pulled.

At this stage, I can no longer say with confidence that this game will EVER be completed, and that makes me very sad.

You know how sometimes people say of an armament, "[X] is not a weapon, [X] is a weapons system"? Well, in that same spirit, Arma 3 is not a game, it is a games system.

Let me unpack that a bit.

Arma is a military sandbox simulator, which is primarily focused on (but hardly exclusive to) infantry simulation. It's a very large sandbox with a lot of things which can be placed in it and played around with. It has an official campaign as well as some shorter campaigns that come with downloadable content, but those are essentially scenarios connected (sometimes more loosely and sometimes more tightly) by individual storylines in a shared setting that serve to show off what the sandbox can do. They can be enjoyable enough (if occasionally frustrating as you try to figure out the design-intended path through them) on their own as single player experiences, but they're not really where the core of Arma lies and if all you do is play those you're leaving a great deal of what Arma has to offer on the table.

Where Arma really shines is playing multiplayer scenarios with a large group of other people, usually with someone in the role of managing the experience ("Zeus" in Arma's parlance.) These can be player-versus-player but more often than not they're player-versus-environment, usually with a large focus on inter-player coordination. These almost feel like a raid in a massive-multiplayer online game, except the scenarios aren't necessarily memorizable so it often falls to how well the player group can coordinate and how well they're trained to respond as a unit. These can be extremely enjoyable affairs, where even the "boring" stretches of them can be tense because you literally never know exactly what's going to happen. The easy ability to modify Arma and add workshop content means you'll never run out of ways to remix that experience too.

Admittedly, much of what I described above requires that you go outside of Arma itself to make it happen. Go to Bohemia Interactive's forums or some other website where groups can gather, recruit, and organize. That can be a little intimidating, but it's also where you're going to find the best part of the Arma experience waiting for you. If that sounds like the kind of thing you'll enjoy, then Arma is an easy recommend. If that's not the kind of thing you'd enjoy, then maybe give it a pass.

Have you ever watched the YouTube channel "Primitive Technology"? Green Hell is pretty much "Primitive Technology: The Game".

To elaborate, it's a survival crafting game, and has the typical tropes of that genre. However, I do find that it's actually quite a bit more involved and interesting than most examples of the genre I have played. For example, it's not simply enough to find food to avoid starvation, you need to consume a regular variety of food to remain healthy, keeping a balance of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and hydration. You won't starve to death eating just one thing, but you will find yourself running out of energy faster and having a worse maximum health. Since each of those categories requires you to do different things to secure access to them, it keeps the moment-to-moment gameplay of trying to survive more varied and more interesting than is typical. Since very few consumables can last and the amount the player character can carry is limited, stockpiling isn't a good option, so you can never make that aspect of gameplay "obsolete", you just need to get good at being aware of your surroundings.

It has a pretty robust crafting and construction mechanic too, generally leaning on the more plausible side. Narrow logs (harvested with a sharpened stone embedded in a stick) to drive into the ground, long sticks balanced between them, vines used to tie them together, palm fronds laid over them, etc. This is also a system that must be engaged with, as building beds will be necessary for rest and building shelters are necessary for protecting campfires from the rain. The game offers some more "advanced" building options, like making mud huts, but they're not really necessary unless you're trying to challenge yourself.

This isn't really much of a combat game, focusing as it does mostly on exploration and survival. Which isn't to say that there isn't some element of that. Dangerous predators are a rare but deadly encounter where running might be more dangerous than standing your ground with a bow or spear. There are some natives as well who don't take kindly to strangers in their territory and are also rare and even deadlier than the predators, but they're also entirely avoidable: you can hear them coming and are better served by slinking away through the underbrush until they pass than you are trying to take them on. The environment itself is the real danger here.

It has an open-ended survival mode, but I played through the story mode primarily. It took about 50 hours, and was pretty entertaining for that time. It took me a few attempts restarting at the beginning of the game before I got the hang of the survival mechanics and didn't end up putting myself into a death spiral. If you're starting out, I recommend you take a few days in-game around the starting area getting a feel for it and developing a good routine. Also, coconuts. Look at the trees, throw some rocks to knock a few down, get those early. Trust me, they'll be your best friend in the early game.

Having completely the story mode, I think I might jump back in and try survival, experiment a little. It was fun. :)

Let's get this out of the way first, "Civilization: Beyond Earth" is "Civilization on an Alien World". This is not a cricism, just an observation. I happen to enjoy playing Civilization and I happen to enjoy speculative fiction, so this is a happy blend for me and if you enjoy those things this may be a happy blend for you too.

It does diverge from more traditional Civilization games in a few ways that make it an interesting experience though. The tech tree is replaced with a "tech web", which gives a lot more freedom in what order a given player unlocks new technology. This also means that two colonies toward the end of the game can have vastly different approaches and abilities, even assuming their science production was equivelant, due to the kinds of things they chose to unlock. It creates an interesting asymetric balance that other Civilization titles tend not to have as much of.

The affinity system intersects with this tech web and is also really interesting. Affinitiy levels are gained from unlocking certain technologies, those affinity levels come with helpful buffs, hitting tiers in them upgrades your units in ways that let you customize their perks, and you can gain the benefit of multiple affinities at once so you aren't too "locked-in" to any one of them early. However, they do have an effect on diplomacy: colonies tend to trust and align themselves with other colonies that take similar approaches to the challenges of the new world as they do, while distrusting and alienating from other colonies that diverge too greatly from their approach. This produces a balancing act where players have to decide what kind of victory condition they want to go for as well as who they want to align with while trying to both boost their affinity levels but not boost them in the "wrong" way at the wrong time. It makes for an interesting strategic challenge.

Finally, there is the way that players interact with the new planet itself that provides much to challenge. The native lifeforms are not inherently hostile, but they can become so when antagonized, and they don't distinguish between different factions of humans. Trying to clear them out might provoke a response, but also antagonize other colonies as they have to deal with aggressive indigneous lifeforms too. Leaving them alone, at least for a while, might provide an early buffer that keeps other colonies from getting too confident in their ability to make war. It also means that even the most peaceful colony needs to keep at least a few units on hand to keep their own territory secure. Some zones on the planet are especially wild, filled with toxic miasma and territorial creatures, but also lots of good resources. This means that the initial "land grab" phase of the game tends to be drawn out into the mid-game since those zones need strong military and technological resources to clear out and exploit.

All in all, it is a fine addition to the Civilization series that gets to add a few new twists onto a familiar formula. If you are a fan of Civilization and you keep your expectations tempered, you might find this is an enjoyable time.

If you ever had a Sega Genesis as a kid (or hung out with your cousin who did in my case) Sonic Mania is a perfect blend of nostalgia and novelty. It plays like a classic sonic game (Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, specifically,) even recycling levels from those games, but just as you really get back into your grove it throws something new at you and reminds you it is not simply a re-release. Unlike a lot of recent Sonic titles, this feels like a beloved fan game that somehow got a greenlight. Well worth your time and money.

I recommend this game with a condition: use a twin-stick USB controller.

Most people will be familiar with Dark Souls' reputation, so I will not repeat it here (professional reviews should be easy to find.) But the PC version was the first such port that From Software has done, and while they have done an admirable job of adding content, unfortunately they did not optimize the control scheme well for a mouse and keyboard. Further, all the in-game button prompts assume an Xbox controller, whether or not one is using it. Suffice to say, it is almost unplayable unless using a controller similar to that it was originally intended to be played on.

But, if one can forgive that porting hitch and has an appropriate controller, than one will find Dark Souls to be an excellent challenge game, where players need to learn to be patient, observent, and develope careful timing to survive. It will give you hours of tough-but-fair entertainment if you give it a chance. There are some occasional performance issues even on high-end hardware (poor platform optimization, like I said From Software's first porting attempt) and the game is poor at explaining itself, but if you can deal with a little hitch in the giddyup and not having your hand held, you will find Dark Souls worth it.