Recent reviews by DreadPirateRy

Ship of Fools is a fun, simple game with surprising depth and immense replayability. The element of randomness to the rewards you get means that once you unlock enough things, virtually all characters can be viable, even the ones with seemingly niche abilities. On top of this, the different ship types allow you to try different gameplay styles and pick the kind that you enjoy the most. And, crucially, you can play with a friend.

The core gameplay loop is simple - keep your ship alive while fighting through "stages" of enemy waves and slowly upgrading your ammunition, hp, abilities etc. You can choose a path through each of the three main areas (which end in a boss fight) and the path determines what kinds of rewards you get, e.g. ammunition, but it doesn't determine exactly which one. Defeat the boss to move to the next area and repeat the process until you fight the "final boss" in a climactic showdown. As you progress, and as a reward for defeating the last boss, you earn "tendrils" which are basically the unlock currency for new stuff.

As mentioned, there's a lot of replayability in the game. Aside from the random loot system, during a round you can unlock additional characters and ships to try on your next run. The game loop is short, usually taking about half an hour to win, which means you can try all sorts of combinations and upgrades quite quickly. It also means not having to commit too heavily to long gaming sessions to progress, which is always welcome. As you increase the difficulty you also unlock new features, keeping the game fresh and interesting as you go.

All in all, a very fun, casual experience with more than enough playtime to justify the price. I have some minor gripes with the game's mechanics, but these are likely to get ironed-out before the early access period is over and it's already a lot of fun as-is, even if it were abandoned right now. Strongly recommended.

My companion and I worked hard to meet our quota. We collected more than enough scrap, risking our lives in the process. It was the day of our quota target so we travelled to the Company to sell it all.

As we were selling our scrap, my companion got a little too close to the selling point while holding her scrap as the "buyer" came to collect.It then proceeded to devour her in a brutal fashion.
Shocked, but having sold all of our scrap, I returned to the ship and took off.

A pleasant message popped up on screen informing us that we were being fined fornot collecting her body, which had most DEFINITELY not been available for collection. The fine was enough money to put us under our quota.

We were then promptly ejected into space for not meeting our quota.

Buy this game.

Edit: They added some of the features I said would make the game better. New review coming when I check them out.

Valheim is a classic case of awful game design ruining an excellent opportunity. Years on in its development and the game remains a buggy mess where the gaps in content are filled by broken game mechanics that cause you to spend hours redoing tasks you already completed many hours ago. It's so promising as a game but the developers have let their greed for artificially-inflated playtime hours overcome good game design.

The core sin this game commits is wasting your time. A LOT of your time. It does so not by accident, or even by general design; it goes a step further and does it maliciously. Every potentially good or fun system that this game has is intentionally hobbled by awful game design decisions that waste your time and turn it into a frustrating and tedious experience.

Let me list a few:
Combat system - Due to awful hitbox design, enemies have the ability to hit you with attacks that should completely miss you. This is only the case for enemies; if an enemy is 2 inches higher or lower than you on a hill or platform they become completely immune to every melee attack you can use because the game just guesses where you're attacking. Enemy attacks are faster than yours, meaning they can attack AFTER you start swinging and hit you BEFORE your hit connects. Enemies do enough damage to basically kill you in one or two hits and stamina NEVER recovers fast enough to let you win a significant fight without having to spend some time running away or chugging potions to regain stamina.

Death system - You lose 10% of ALL SKILLS when you die, even if it wasn't a fair death. So if you spent 100 hours grinding levels, you will lose 10 hours of progress on death. There is literally no fun reason for them to do this - it's purely to waste your time. But that's not all. You also drop ALL of your items on death. Every last one. And the enemies camp your gravestone. Some biomes require special items or potions to access without dying or taking repeated damage. If you die in one of these biomes you may be unable to even get back to your body. If you didn't set a spawn point by making a house with a bed, you may have to cross entire continents to find your corpse. And if you do manage to get your stuff back you still have to kill all the enemies that are camping there. If you don't get your body back then say goodbye to that weapon and armor set you spent the last 8 hours making - the game isn't giving you back a single piece of it.

Skill system - You start off very pathetic in all aspects and slowly gain competency as you level up in skills. This is perfectly fine - and then they ruin it by (as detailed above) imposing a massive skill penalty every time you die. This cannot be turned off like in most games. There's no cap on skill loss, meaning you can lose literally all of your hard work to unfair deaths. Remember - enemies can one or two-shot you so if you encounter more than one enemy at a time you have a real risk of death regardless of your combat skill. Oh and the poorly-implemented stamina system means you can run out of stamina and be unable to fight back, forcing you to die to enemies you could normally easily beat.

Travel system - They give you portals to travel the ENORMOUS world map early on and then ruin it completely by arbitrarily making the most important resources impossible to bring through portals. This forces you to rebuild your entire base progression of the game in every new biome you encounter, sometimes multiple times if the biomes don't have enough resources. This is hours or dozens of hours of work each time you reach a new biome as you have to scavenge for all the previous biome's resources and then hand-carry them to the new biome to rebuild your base just to make another set of armor/weapons and move on.

Building system - Resource costs are ridiculously high. You can mine an entire boulder of metal and only get enough to make a single pair of pants. You have limited radii with your crafting tables to build your constructions. Constructions that should be basic often require advanced crafting stations and resources to build. For example, you need to have iron tier technology to make a simple stone wall. And the machine which builds stone walls requires you to physically carry resources from the iron area to wherever you are building (which could be a 30+ minute trip). Because portals don't work for resource transfer, remember. Most crafting tables require a "roof" overhead regardless of their actual function.

Exploration - You gain the ability to build boats, which generally crawl at a speed slower than walking and take massive damage from bumping tiny things like underwater rocks or gently touching the shore. You can't repair boats without building a crafting station near them. The wind constantly changes to blow against wherever you are sailing, causing you to have to paddle your way between continents. This can take half an hour or more and there is nothing to do except pray the wind changes direction. Oh also there's enemies that can kill your boat (and thus you) at sea. Enemies can attack while swimming (which the player cannot do) and will target your boat as a priority, meaning they WILL try to destroy you in ways you can't defend against. If you fall in the water you will die because your character cannot swim more than a few metres before they drown. Good luck getting your items back then.

Multiplayer - The netcode is godawful, causing huge lag spikes and disconnects frequently. If enough players join a world at a time, the netcode itself can cause the server to overload and kick everyone out. Even if you do manage to play together, expect to get hit by enemy attacks that you didn't even see coming because the server hadn't told you yet that you were being attacked. Ironically this is also the most fun way to play the game, because people can do specific jobs individually and work towards a common goal. I think most of the positive reviews are from people who played with friends, which allowed them to somewhat ignore all the awful design decisions made by the developers.

As a reminder, every single one of the above issues could be EASILY fixed with simple changes. There's only one reason why they aren't fixed - because the developers want you to keep playing for as long as possible to cover up the utter lack of real content in the game. This is predatory and awful.

Things that would make the game actually fun to play:
- Allow people to change the death penalty so death isn't unfairly punishing
- Allow resources to be taken through portals so people don't need to farm resources and remake the same base a dozen times
- Make boats travel at a normal speed and not handle like shopping trolleys
- Make stamina regenerate at a decent rate so people don't run out of stamina after less than 5 seconds of combat
- Make enemies hit or miss fairly. Don't put giant hitboxes around tiny, awkward swings and call it good. Allow players to hit enemies that are slightly higher or lower than them or at least let us choose where we aim attacks!
- Make responding to attacks (i.e. rolling or parrying) CLIENT SIDE. Don't let a laggy server decide if you get hit by an attack even when you're responding to it perfectly
- Don't have random waves of enemies rush the players' precious bases just because it's funny. At least try and make the waves of enemies on par with the equipment level of the players instead of being comically overpowered and destroying everything.

Anyway the point is that these design decisions are not accidental - they are malicious choices made by developers who don't respect the time or effort that you put into the game. A developer like that doesn't deserve your money or support, and there's a billion better games out there that don't punish you for playing the game the way you'd prefer.

TL;DR - The game forces a million limitations on you and then doesn't play by its own rules. Every enemy you meet will be higher level, better equipped, and more numerous than you. Your characters will get 1-2 attacks per turn - their characters will have 3-5. Your hit chance will be on average 20% per attack. Their hit chance is at least 50%. Your characters will do about 10% of an enemy's HP per hit. Their characters will do anything from 1/3 to ALL of your characters' HP in a single attack. They get free weapons and armor worth thousands of gold... you will lose all of your mercenaries because you can't afford to feed them. Get the idea? In summary: This game isn't hard; it's just unfair. And it's not worth $40AUD.

TL;DR over. Begin rant.

You know how in XCOM there's that one enemy with a 2% chance to hit your dude and they take a shot and - surprise! - they not only nail it but also get a super-crit and you watch in horror as the splattered bits of your favourite soldier run down the nearest wall? Well someone made an entire game out of that specific scenario! Welcome to Battle Brothers.

So you've started a new game? Let me put on my fortune telling hat for you.
Ah. You're going to lose. Here's how:
- Your mercenaries will get one-shotted from full health while all of their strongest defensive buffs are enabled
- They will whiff every single attack they make (except the ones which do a negligible amount of damage)
- They will run screaming from an enemy despite knowing that trying to run in the face of said enemies will literally give them free attacks on you, which will hit you 100% of the time
- They will get a paper cut that somehow opens an artery in the neck, causing them to bleed out, while their dudes will just shrug off losing a limb
- You'll start killing ghouls only for them to eat each other and become super-powered, then they will eat you instead
- You'll receive a 1-skull (easiest) quest which turns out to be an entire encampment of fully-geared bandits who end your ♥♥♥♥ immediately

This is just a small sample of the immense cesspool of bs that Battle Brothers has to draw from while ruining what could otherwise be an actually fun game. I honestly can't think of a single system they didn't ruin with nonsense. No really. Check this out.

PART 1 - THE TUTORIAL
You can lose the tutorial. That's right, the first (scripted!) fight. It's supposed to help you learn the game.
All it takes is some bad RNG rolls and your three starter characters can simply die off IN THE TUTORIAL. They don't even explain how to properly use your characters. They just hope you get lucky enough to survive the combat system without any useful explanation of tactics.

Then, assuming you survive that, they just kinda force you to go to a town and hire several nobodies who are actually worse at fighting than some random dude you could find off the street irl. After draining all of your money buying them weapons to brandish and food to eat, you're told to go get revenge for that scripted fight where you nearly (or may actually have) died. And that battle will probably cause you to lose 2/3 of your team, if not die outright. And that's it. That's the tutorial. You now know everything! (That was obviously sarcasm - they teach you nothing and then just expect you to play until you figure out the game mechanics)

You know how a tutorial is supposed to, like, explain the core game mechanics? None of that happens here. You just get shown how to do things like hire more mercenaries and buy food. There's zero depth around how combat works, what strategies work better than others, how to use the weapons effectively etc. It just throws you off a cliff and then when you die it's like "I told you this game was challenging!".

PART 2 - THE GAMEPLAY LOOP
The core gameplay loop is supposed to like this:
1 - Visit a town and find a quest
2 - Accept said quest
3 - Gear up and do quest
4 - Return and get reward; progress slightly

What ACTUALLY happens:
1 - Visit a town. The town has a locked quest because ??? and so you have to waste time and money travelling to another town
2 - Visit another town. They have precisely one quest you can do. They offer barely enough money to cover travel expenses but you accept because you're gonna starve otherwise.
3 - You travel to the quest target. It turns out to be 8 brigands better armed than most city militias (and higher level than you)
4 - You die horribly.

5 - Start over. This time the new town you find asks you to deliver a package
6 - You deliver the package and get paid
7 - You realise you're on the other side of the map now and that rep you just gained means nothing
8 - The quest in this town is locked. Go to 1.

Alternative: You complete 3-4 quests successfully and then orcs start appearing and kill you.

That's right, even doing the quests is RNG based. Some quests are trivial and pay handsomely. Most quests pay a pittance and are extremely hard to complete. The difficulty system is completely inaccurate. The battle maps are randomised - reloading a fight will put you into a different map entirely each time. Reloading a quest (i.e. you save before you click accept) will randomise the enemies. You might barely lose to 3 dire wolves only to load back, accept the quest again, and suddenly it's a dozen ghouls. Oh and the bartering system to get paid better for quests is... also RNG. Sometimes they pay more, sometimes they don't. No rhyme or reason to it.

PART 3 - TACTICS
There's so many tactics you can try in this game! You can use elevation to shoot further or defend your melee guys better. You can have a shield wall with spears poking over it! You can send a guy with a two-handed axe in solo and whirlwind around! You can have a dozen archers peppering the enemy with arrows!

Now I know what you're thinking. "Hey that sounds pretty fun! What's the problem?" Oh nothing major. Just that NONE OF THOSE TACTICS CHANGE A THING. Wanna know what your chances are of hitting someone with an arrow? 5-20%. You can shoot two arrows per turn. Wanna know how much damage they do? Basically zero. Most turns in combat involve you thinking up a bunch of awesome tactics, putting them into action, and watching helplessly as the RNG dismisses every single one of them and then the AI one-shots your strongest fighter. I've been playing on "veteran" and most fights are basically my mercenaries missing 90% of their attacks while the enemy slowly closes in, then the enemy hitting 3-4 attacks in a row and my dudes dying. Super fun.

Spears have this cool ability where you can kinda go into overwatch mode and if someone comes close they get poked away! It's really awesome - until spear dude (inevitably) misses on the first swing and then the ability deactivates. Now you can't use it anymore while an enemy is in melee range. Cool. Arrows and crossbows? If someone gets in melee range with you that's game over. You can't shoot anymore. And yes of course they are faster than you are. Big dude with heavy axe running out on his own? He'll get ganged-up on and minced in two turns flat. And that cool axe whirlwind has a 30% chance of hitting each person. That's less than 1 in 3 attacks hitting.

Summary: Your tactics mean NOTHING. You can put a dude with a shield down and turtle up and they'll still one-shot him right through that shield. What's the point? It's literally just a numbers game - whoever has the stronger dudes (and the blessing of RNGesus) wins.

And you know what? That's the biggest reason I gave this a thumbs-down. How dare a game claim to be a "challenging" tactical RPG when in reality it's entirely stats and RNG-based and zero polish? All the wonky systems and shoddy game design can be forgiven if a game is fun. But this game isn't even the genre it pretends to be. It's a rage game masquerading as a properly-balanced tactical experience. They could EASILY fix most of these issues and they choose not to!

Would refund if I could.

Overall: 7/10 - Strongly Recommend.
Kinda like playing murder sudoku. TL;DR at bottom.

I was gifted this game and wanted to write a review for it because Return of the Obra Dinn really struck me with how interesting and unique it was. It's been a long while since a game mechanic like this really grabbed me and kept me interested for so long. Without any further ado, let's get into it.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a puzzle game that at first I assumed was just a really convoluted interactive movie wherein your job is to witness a bunch of death scenes and piece together a tragic story from them. I wasn't even that mad about it because it's a really neat mechanic and the story alone is enough to hold your interest. But there's more.

Your goal in Return of the Obra Dinn is to find out exactly what fates befell each of the ship's 60 passengers, along with who was who. (You are given a list of names and faces, but no detail as to which name matches which face - the gameplay mostly revolves around figuring that part out.) Armed with nothing more than a magical pocketwatch and a huge journal, you must traverse the ship, observing death after death and paying attention to tiny details in order to puzzle out the identity of the ship's many occupants, and sometimes, their fates. The pocketwatch shows you the last 10 seconds or so of a person's life and then freezes frame at the moment of their death, allowing you to walk around a time-frozen scene and take in all the detail of the scene at your own pace. It's a hugely interesting mechanic and so much fun to use. Once you think you know who a person is and exactly how they died, you can record it in your journal. Once you get three people's details right, the game will lock those details in for you, thereby affirming your guesswork. Using this method, you will work your way through the crew manifest, ticking off person by person until you've either solved everything or managed to brute-force guess your way to completion.

The awesome mechanic of the moment-of-death panorama that the pocketwatch creates is used by the developers to full effect in this game. Not only do they tell a complex and detailed story with just a handful of sound-effects and scenes without animation, they have created a very fun way of gathering clues. Very often the developers cleverly hide clues in the background of a scene, like a crew member taking refuge in a specific room, or a unique item or feature which helps identify a person later on down the track. At first, I was really annoyed to have to revisit the same scenes over and over, but that annoyance faded when I realised just how much detail they hid in each scene that I had completely missed the first few times I'd viewed it. Sometimes, you even need to walk away from the focal point of the scene onto a different deck or into another room to catch parts of other stories that happen to be occurring at the same time. It becomes very satisfying to revisit a scene and have an "aha!" moment when you notice that clue that unlocks another identity for you.

I would be remiss to not mention the art style as well. They've gone for a very unique, grainy-CRT-monitor look as though you're playing the game on a computer or TV from the 80s/90s. This creates a very interesting aesthetic that lends itself well to the atmosphere of the game. The art style also allows the developers to use lower-res models with limited or no textures without it seeming out of place. Despite this, it still manages to deliver all of the detail necessary to allow you to pick up key visual clues (mostly - more on that later). Only in a few circumstances did I find myself having to really squint to figure out what I was looking at.

There are a few negatives to this experience, of course. My chief complaint would be that although the game requires you to revisit memories over and over, it doesn't allow you to "quick-jump" to them, meaning you often have to walk all over the ship multiple times just to review several scenes to look for all the instances of a different character. This can get really annoying and tiresome, particularly when you don't know where that one crucial clue will be for a character with 14+ different scenes to look at. Another complaint is that some details are really hard to make out visually with the grainy art style. One character has a particular feature that is shown clearly in one scene and never again with that level of detail in any other scene. You know you need to look for that feature, but thanks to the art style you're stuck with squinting at every similar character wondering if you're looking at the wrong character or if you just can't see the detail because of the graininess. Lastly, the game could really use a sort of hint system for the characters whose identity can't be deduced directly. Several characters in the game require you to eliminate the other possibilities of who they could be rather than use any specific clues. It's not really possible to know who they are until you hit a dead-end with them it's very frustrating to have your time wasted because of it. This is doubly annoying because there are some characters who you CAN deduce the identity of directly of, but have cleverly-hidden clues about themselves. You cannot determine which is which without a huge amount of time investment, which actually detracts from the pacing of the (really intriguing) story.

Oh, and one more semi-spoilery-complaint is that three of the hidden achievements involve beating the entire game in a slightly different way - meaning 2 hours of grinding through "cutscenes" and then making some different journal choices at the end. In my opinion that's is just way too much padding for a game that shouldn't need it. A good game doesn't need to be 60 hours long - padding it out just ruins a perfectly good experience.

All in all, Return of the Obra Dinn is a very worthwhile experience. It reminds me of those "art" games which are more "interactive experience" than game, except the developers here chose to actually have decent gameplay as well, so you get the best of both worlds. I thoroughly enjoyed the vast majority of the game and spent several hours after I finished playing just digesting all the stuff I'd experienced while playing, which in my books is a sign of a very engaging game. If you're looking for a new and engaging experience and don't mind it being slow-paced, I highly recommend this game.

TL;DR: Very unique "whodunnit" game with a huge amount of care and thought put into the mysteries, atmosphere and storytelling. Some mildly infuriating time-gating but nothing so bad as to make the experience not worthwhile. If you've got 8 hours to kill and like to think then give this game a shot.

Echo Grotto is a great example of a unique experience that only VR can provide. It's fun and immersive and definitely leaves you wanting more afterwards. It offers a few hours of quality entertainment, which is a pretty good deal for its price. I would strongly recommend it for people wanting new and interesting experiences to have in VR.

You explore gaves by throwing a "teleporter" around, which also creates a series of waypoints which you can warp back to if you hit a dead end or go the wrong way. You get glowsticks which you can use to light the cave around you, thus helping keep track of where you've been. As you explore, you find crystals and better gear for moving around and seeing, such as a head light, a belt with more "pockets", or my favourite, the grappling hook.

Personally I really enjoyed the experience. Everywhere you go gives you that sort of "wow, look at this" feeling as you light it up and search for gear or crystals. The caves are very pretty and the art style is perfect for it. You also start to become very completionist, quickly wanting to search every nook and cranny of the cave until the whole place is lit up with glowsticks. The addition of gear like the snorkel means there are some areas which you'll have to backtrack to in order to fully explore them, which adds a sort of progression feel to the game.

There are some downsides, however. First of all, throwing your teleporter to move is an incredibly frustrating experience at first, as it tends to kind of dribble out of your hands instead of travel any useful distance. This is partially because they designed it so that you press the grip button to release objects instead of holding it down and releasing at the height of the throw. Secondly, glowsticks are unlimited but you have to relight them every single time you throw them. While this isn't a huge issue, if you forget to light it and throw it you've just lost your entire stock of glowsticks and have to go pick one up again. You eventually get skilled enough not to worry about these issues, but it does take a lot of practice.

Furthermore, although the caves are "procedurally generated", it quickly becomes obvious that it's not the cave "rooms" which are procedurally generated, but the locations of the rooms instead. Because of this you will soon start to recognize (and get bored of) certain features from previous cave runs, which heavily reduces replayability. Also a lot of the items you can find are kind of pointless (why would I use an old flame lantern when glowsticks have more light and are in unlimited supply?), and have to be purchased at the start of every new cave with gems you collected in previous runs.

Anyway, despite my complaints I found the game to be thoroughly entertaining and well worth the money. I hope maybe in the future they'll expand on this game and release more types of caves, items etc. It could be the start of something amazing.

TL; DR - Hell Dimension is fun, but poorly balanced and buggy, and also missing some much-needed polish. The game just falls short of being worth the money spent.

Hell Dimension VR is a "wave shooter" with a horror theme that might cause the more jittery folks to get a few good screams out of it, but didn't really make my pulse pound. There's a decent variety of creatures, each with their own attack patterns and "weaknesses", that come at you from random points in all directions. Each level has up to 10 waves of monsters, and as you survive the waves you earn points to buy better weapons and heal yourself. Each round you have to re-buy everything as weapons don't carry over from the previous round, meaning that you need to time your purchases right in order to be able to afford enough to survive the higher level waves. The game has only a handful of levels, but boasts a "challenge" mode to make up for its lackluster storyline.

There are several large bugs in the game which can be annoying, but nothing game-breaking that makes you want to quit playing forever.

Pros
- Nice graphics
- Interesting variety of monsters
- The purchase system lets you customize your playstyle, which would be great in multiplayer if there were ever any games to play
- Cleavage I guess?

Cons
- Lacks polish in many areas: dialogue, monster AI, companion AI(!), weapon balance etc
- Story is a joke
- Difficulty is all over the place
- Have to "re buy" guns you already own, making expensive guns almost useless except for on the final waves
- Melee weapons are brokenly powerful, allowing you to completely clear all enemies within reach just by flailing your arm wildly
- AI companion is completely useless as anything other than a meat shield
- Currently it's impossible to get into a multiplayer match as there's no player base, and no direct IP connection or obvious hosting capability
- Can't pause, can't set options from within game
- Monsters make almost no sound on approach (even the massive ones!), making it very hard to tell where you need to be shooting at

Basically, as mentioned, the game lacks polish. The storyline has no dialogue except for in the tutorial, random levels are marked as "cleared" before you've even played them, the AI companion is a huge waste of money, and the game throws so many monsters at you at once that only certain weapon combinations even have a chance of allowing you to survive. Also the multiplayer option only lets you select "Join game" and so far I've yet to actually manage to find any online games.

The weapon purchase system is good, except the differences between many of the weapons is mostly just price, and the really fun weapons are locked away behind enormous price tags. Not to mention that you have to buy the same weapons all over again each wave - even the weakest ones! As mentioned, the weapons are unbalanced too - you can clear a dozen swarming enemies with one baseball bat and a furious masturbation motion, while your handgun runs out of ammo before you even take down a single foe half the time.

At the end of each wave, you get graded and then awarded virtually nothing in terms of currency to buy weapons. It seems to be mostly based on the enemies you faced, so overspending early is a good way to lose later on by virtue of not being able to afford decent stuff. At the same time, if you try to win every wave with dual handguns you'll game over faster than you can say "monster swarm". So it's kind of a catch 22.

And then there are the bugs. When enemies get close they are incredibly hard to hit with a gun. Shooting them at point blank range sometimes causes bullets to go right through them instead of hitting them and all the while they're chipping away at your HP. I had one game where all of the enemies suddenly vanished, and my AI companion continued shooting at a wall for 5 minutes straight until I got bored and quit. I couldn't restart (no pause menu) so I had to quit the game and do that entire level over again. I was on wave 10! Also, handling the two-handed guns isn't as easy as it sounds. At times, it won't register your hand placement and you'll be shooting the gun one-handed (or unable to shoot) because it doesn't register that you've done the hand thing to enable two-hand weapon use.

So in short, the game is kinda fun and has charm, but also really needed that extra week or two of development and TLC where they ironed out all the bad interface choices, upped the dialogue and maybe checked their weapon balance issues. As it is now, there's probably a ton of better wave shooters out there, so go buy those instead.

=Review as of August 22, 2017=

If you asked me to define it in a single phrase, "Broad but shallow", is how I'd describe the gameplay of Planet Explorers. It's a game with an enormous amount of content, yet that content all turns out, disappointingly, to be only surface deep. That said, the game remains fun and interesting to play... especially with friends.

Planet Explorers is a survive-collect-fight-build style RPG, where you play a stranded astronaut who must struggle to survive after crashlanding on a strange alien planet. The game follows the usual trope of slowly building up a base while fending off local wildlife, mining and exploring the area. Players will slowly build their way from wooden axes and shovels to drills, energy weapons, ships and flying AI companions. During this time, they will also build and improve their own colony and fill it with NPCs whom they will recruit from settlements all across the planet.

-Things I liked-
+The game is very pretty to look at and leads to a lot of "Ooooh" moments
+Fast travel system makes exploring a little less onerous
+The replicator (crafting) system is very neat and easy to use. I think it's extremely well done
+Creating a colony feels like making your own town, and you easily become invested in making it perfect and managing your colonists
+Large variety of interesting creatures and plants to discover and murder
+Money is handled really well and you never end up being super rich and wondering what to do with it all until you've completed every other aspect of the game possible
+You can design your own vehicles, aircraft, boats, guns, weapons, armour, drones, turrets etc
+Story is very engaging in story mode and well-paced
+You don't CONSTANTLY have to eat and drink; something that most survival games seem to implement

-Things that need improving-
- Adventure mode progression is terrible and all over the place. This sometimes leads to hours of grinding just to get that next tiny thing needed to unlock more technology
- Tech tiers make no sense: You possess a replicator capable of building anything and yet it gives you shovels to dig with and swords to fight with. Shouldn't it produce laser mining tools or something?
- Everything is shallow. That is to say, every single system in the game exists almost like a placeholder for more content. For example, towns will provide a bunch of fetch quests but will ignore you forever afterward once you complete them. Dungeons are fun at first but become a very samey grind very quickly and lack variety. Vehicles are fun but reserved only for players with huge amounts of resources, by which point you might as well build a battlecruiser instead of a car. Colonies are exciting to build but ultimately possess no depth as to how they are run. You assign colonists to work, and they basically reduce timers or provide resources every so often. Diplomacy doesn't exist, even though they tell you that you can make peace with the locals. You can't place your own fast travel points. The map has like 5 biomes which constantly repeat. There are only a handful of character weapon archetypes (sword, spear, dagger, gun, laser gun) and all weapons are just those with varying levels of damage. Monorails are end-game tech but why build a train when you can literally teleport to any town you've visited? Towns also have very little variety and mostly consist of a premade template which repeats over and over.
- For some reason after you send a chat message you have to press enter twice or it thinks you're still typing which almost always leads to getting into issues later

All in all the game is a lot of fun to play with friends, but lacks the depth needed to really hook players for the long run. Perhaps with time it will gain this depth, but for now, expect to play it once and put it down.

THIS is the game that I would recommend to first time VR users. It more or less provides the complete VR introductory experience and really shows you what it's capable of doing... which is ironic given that it's a game about standing around in an office cubicle.

I won't spoil what happens, but definitely give it a try. You will be impressed.

I recommend this game with a warning: It's not balanced yet and far from finished. That said, it's enjoyable if you can look past the fact that most of the systems are in their infancy and desperately in need of upgrades.

Most of this game revolves around designing or building your own ships. Everything you do is essentially a way to gain more resources to build bigger ships to gain more resources etc. This is made somewhat more difficult by the fact that bigger ships burn through fuel faster and thus cost more money to run. However, despite the obvious design issues, creating ships with this game's ship editor is FUN. The editor s also more fully-featured than anything else I've seen on Steam.

As mentioned, all of the game's systems are there, though most are barely functional. Mining/Refining/Assembling is the most complete, with many stations having a free mining bay built in where you can literally just harvest whatever materials are nearby in infinite amounts until you have enough to build a ship with. The mining and refining process is pretty fun and reasonably well-balanced in terms of time costs, so it doesn't feel too grindy. The other systems, however, are less finished.

From what I can tell from the complete lack of explanation the game provides, trading requires you to spend enormous amounts of money on goods, fill up a cargo bay, and then go =somewhere= that will pay more for it than the buying price. I assume this somewhere is another galaxy because everywhere in a system seems to offer the same prices wherever I go. However, unlike mining, there's no easy way to know where you can make profit from a trade, meaning that you will burn through fuel quite fast while trying to sell your stuff. At this point it's really best left alone.

Combat is something that I haven't bothered to try yet, due to how much it favors multiplayer. Ships can have stationary guns or turrets, but the turrets require a player to man them, and the ships handle like drunken shopping trolleys, so aiming at others seems to be a rather frustrating and focus-intensive affair. You can also hack other players' ships and defend against hacks, which is really neat but you have to do it at a hacking console instead of from your cockpit. Again, need more people in your crew for that. You also need someone to manually reload the guns when they are out of ammo. That's not a greatly advisable idea for a lonesome pilot who's currently locked in a space dogfight!

In the end though, all of the above are just ways of getting more money and resources for building your own ships (and stations!), and to be honest, I think that's all you really need in order to enjoy this game. The ship builder is hugely featured and really fun to use once you get the hang of it you'll happily spend hours trying to design the perfect ship for you and your crew. Then you'll realize that it was terribly designed and start over, but you'll want to keep building anyway.

I also want to point out that the game seems to be heavily based on co-op multiplayer. Sure, you CAN fly the universe solo, but things are 10x more exciting with other players in the ship helping to mine resources, navigate, and engage in physical and cyber warfare. So if you can get 3-4 friends to come play this game with you, you'll have an insane amount of fun. If you're playing solo, there's still a lot of galaxy to explore and things to do, but you may not enjoy the game for what it's really meant to be.

There's a dozen minor annoyances in the game which I haven't touched on, such as how terribly ships handle, navigation being relegated to squinting at tiny icons on a holotable, the fact that missions grossly underpay you, PVP being considered ok anywhere (thus griefing happens a lot) or that you can circumvent most of the game's costs by building a very light and efficient shuttle to get around in. But these things are kind of to be expected in an alpha. Honestly I think that if the game continues to grow as it is then it will become truly epic and it's also worth buying right now... even if just for the insanely fun ship builder.