Recent reviews by [PHC-MC]Septic

I played this game on release and like everyone else, didn't have the best experience. Criticisms of the launch and the DLC model aside, Payday 3 in October 2024 is exactly what it should have been from the start. So far, no Nebula Server Errors (my biggest gripe at launch), no falling out of the map, no invisible Cloakers (though I hear they exist still perhaps?) and no more weird XP progression that's tied to challenges. This is exactly what the game should have been upon release and for anyone who put Payday 3 aside to let it cook for a bit, that time is now - it's still a little thin on content after you hit lvl 100+, though that's mostly due to having spent the past year fixing the problems the game had at launch but the content that is there now is fast and fun - we got the 4 DLC heists, which outside of 'Syntax Error' >:( are all awesome, 'Fear & Greed' in particular. The side hustles have brought over 2 legacy heists, 'Cook Off' and 'Murky Station' with the last one being a brand new heist, which plays like a mix of '4 Stores' and the 'Diamond Store'. Lastly, the 7 story heists are also pretty decent for those not looking to purchase the DLC's - playing on vanilla will give you enough stuff to do for a while. Crossplay also seems to work really well too, I've heisted a lot with PS and Xbox players and there seems to be no detriment to their users running a controller vs keyboard and mouse.

Overall, it's a great game right now - I've had a lot of fun just dipping into quick-play, playing solo to learn maps, experimenting with builds to see which ones are viable on harder levels or stealth and pulling my hair out over Shade insisting on reading Bain's original notes from 'Cook Off' when she calls the ingredients.

It's far from a perfect game but me and a buddy played the ever living ♥♥♥♥ out of it nonetheless. I have nothing but good memories with this, so thanks to the developer and I hope one day they get a chance to come back to it.

Right, so it's not terrible but it is about 25% of a game, stretched out to look like a full one. The narrative ends on a cliff-hanger of some really unresolved issues, gameplay loop is broad until about a third of the way in when it just devolves into a matter of how many units you can put on a map and the performance (AMD 7800X3D/4080 etc) consistently tanks, with the final mission hitting 14fps constantly on 1440p resolution. Gets a little better naturally if you kill all graphics settings but like it'll look like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, so those are your choices.

It's got a lot of great little details with things, like dude - the tanks, they don't turn on the spot to get to a close-by location, like Starcraft - they reverse and pivot the turret instead, like ooh. A simple thing but it looks and plays so good. However then the rest of it comes into focus and your happiness evaporates; say for example, I want to send 5 units to one location, they'll all go via usually, vastly different routes and suddenly I have to go around catching units, corralling them together and then move them to the location I need them at incrementally. You also can't get units to escort other units (say, get a tank to follow an APC for example) and the AI is very basic so if you're distracted on other parts of the map (which is a lot in later missions), then your units will die because their auto-targeting isn't great, they kind of forget to fire sometimes, even on 'Sword Mode' (aggro mode) and their self-preservation is also not great. In the games defense, soldiers will drop to the ground to lower their visibility which is the same for all RTS' but there's not really anything you can apply to vehicles so they'll just explode. The UI doesn't do a great job of telling you what's going on either, maybe a popup just above the mini-map, meaning if you get overwhelmed by lots of things going on at once, along with needing to deal with things as quickly as possible (which is always), you're not going to have a good time because you will constantly be clicking your little green dots on the mini-map like crazy to progress the game with at least some units left.

It has some potential, but I feel somewhat annoyed that this will likely be addressed by DLC because that's been a staple of Slytherine for a while and that's really a shame. The game has expanded on the Dark Fate Timeline somewhat, enough to get me to care but then fails to go anywhere with it. On the patch side, I'd like the performance patch, obviously and it'd be nice to have more customisation over your units, instead of "add gun". I know there's a Terminator campaign or mode coming, that'd be cool but they do need to address that ending and I'm concerned that we're going to have to pay to get that, which sucks. On the wishlist side for me personally, a homebase - I love that ♥♥♥♥, let me build and customise that in parallel to the story. Also more units and more unit variety is honestly a requirement, not a request along with more ways to approach a mission - just more in general; it's content light at the moment and honestly, had they released this as Early Access, my review would be positive; a great start but it's full price at release and it's an RTS you can finish in less than 20 hours which is wild.

Ah, this sucks to write - a 'meh' would be a better rating, because it has some really good qualities and the story feels like it was taken from some of Sci-Fi's best & brightest writers but the *balancing*, oh my good Gods, it's awful; it turns what should be a real treat to play, something that can be up there with some of the greats like 'Homeworld' and 'Frostpunk', into this frustrating and frantic scramble for resources and research points.

I want to play this more and I want to get lost in its narrative, but in the state it's in right now? I don't want to wait 6 hours to finally have 100 alloy in a stockpile, which probably won't happen anyway because the rate at which resources are used up in just day-to-day upkeep is insane and can't be matched by early game resource collection, which also means I can't develop anything and the pacing just crawls forward.

There is a good game here, undoubtedly and I hope that one day I can delete this review and put in a new one, absolutely praising the direction the game took post-release but right now it's just too grindy, long and frustrating to play.

Right now, the game's as wide as the ocean but deep as a pond. Stairway Games however have made a very nice pond and are being very transparent about their current progress and their future plans in their public Discord (they post near daily updates in their Dev. diary channel) about turning said pond, into an ocean.

And what an ocean it's looking to be; for starters there's a very highbrow plot that involves big oil, Gods, a Mer-Kingdom, all whilst working to save & rejuvenate the Island and running your farm. Then there's the NPC's. So far, there's 70+ NPC in the adjacent town alone, each with their own unique identity, that already has some great depth and character development. There's a Museum, which already seems to far outshine the one in 'Animal Crossing' by leaps and bounds, there's diving off the coast to find rare loot and even more mysteries under the sea, there's the island itself, with the current explorable area being massive, with several more, equally huge areas teased already in game. The soundtrack is delightful and despite the previously mentioned highbrow story planned, the game happily lets you run at your own pace, with next-to-no stress.

I personally love it and cannot recommend it enough, however it is also in early access so as of October 2022, there's no controller support, a few pacing issues with various content still not implemented, either fully or at all, some minor bugs (I had some stuttering music after a few hours for some reason - quit & restart fixes it though), some texture assets left at default and very (*very*) basic combat. That said, all of these points have been highlighted by the devs and are looking to be addressed in one of the planned 8 major updates before the current ETA of v1.0 in Q3/Q4 2023.

Lastly, the comparisons between this and 'Stardew Valley' are there for sure, but we all had the same discussions about 'Stardew Valley' and 'Harvest Moon' too back in the day. "Inheriting A Farm From Your Dead Grandfather" is now a game genre and honestly anyone who's played either this, 'Stardew Valley', 'Harvest Moon' even 'Animal Crossing' knows that it's not the similarities that matter, it's what's done with those similarities that's important. Putting your own unique spin on something by itself, makes it unique and that's exactly what this game is; bonded by the similarities of its peers and unique in its own way. I cannot wait to see what we end up getting with this game when v1.0 comes around.

Ultimately, this is mostly the same as its predecessor, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 with some streamlining of the gameplay and a polish of the graphics.

Is this bad though? Absolutely not - the foundation of the series is rock solid; it plays on the satisfaction of you, the player taking something broken, dirty & messed up and making it look brand new once again. Picking up scrapheap finds, be it cars, engine parts or body panels, then setting about to fix what you can, replace what you can't and admire your work after a good hour of screwing and unscrewing bolts, really does feel satisfying.

There's some stuff that doesn't quite hit home, namely the 3 star quality rating some parts have now, with the premise that instead of selling the un-salvageable, you recycle it for scrap points instead, which you can then apply to parts to increase their overall value and performance (? I may be wrong on the latter part). This feels like a bit of a grind and to be honest, by the time you've enough scrap points to apply it to all the parts on a car to make it the *most* valuable it can be, you've probably made all the money you'll ever need in the game anyway, so it becomes redundant almost.

There's still a few things missing with the game, like upholstery repair/customisation and the placement of certain parts looks out-of-place (the car battery still hangs in the engine bay, in mid-air), along with some variation of parts (all cars have the same brake salvo for instance) but ultimately, I've sunk 100ish hours into this game and haven't regretted a minute.

I'd like to see more QoL development in the game, like full body character design, so that when I'm driving, it doesn't look like a Ghost has control of the wheel, some more custom body and interior work and engine bays and undercarriges that make aesthetic sense.

In summary, it's a great time-sink, it's very chill, very satisfying and all-round value for money, so this is a definite buy if you're on the fence about getting it.

My whole playthrough so far has been me shouting, 'please rain, please rain, please ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rain' at ever increasing volume.

Unlike its predecessor, it's gone down this annoying route of making it challenging on a micro scale - for instance, my last playthrough, I had gathered 50+ food, dug out 4 floors, had 20+ fuel, all my survivors were lvl5+ for each skillset, but I lost because it hadn't rained for 10 days and the temperatures were now 30 degrees or higher over 4 days. No water means dehydration and then my survivors started to piss everywhere, because the bucket they call a toilet needs running water apparently, so whilst they're pissing all over the place and being dehydrated, they're also getting heat-stroke and "food poisoning" from all the piss fumes seemingly, which also made them vomit.

And then they died.

"Easy mode" is there, but it only really sets how long it takes for your neighbors to come knocking on your front door with Kalashnikovs & Machetes, and how many tins of baked beans you own at the start.

NB: I know you can transfer water bottles to water storage, but after 10hrs or so, I had a grand total of 3 bottles. Also water filtration filters one unit of dirty water a minute and stores something like 20ish units total - I lost patience with the game and couldn't be bothered to do anything with upgrades after that.

Challenges are fun when they're a single instance that you come out victorious over and have the time to appreciate the victory before moving onto the next one - that's the thrill of a challenge; persistently being in the same collective one for hours, isn't fun whatsoever.

So, this game is good.

Whatever it may have been when it was originally released on the PS4, it's now a solid, well-rounded and fun to play game. My only gripes were some not-very-well thought out dialogue options, but honestly that's just window dressing at this point.

My buddy Underdrill has a far more in-depth review which pretty much mirrors my own feelings on the game; if you're after a more detailed look at the game, the review can be found here:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/Underdrill/recommended/1259420/

This feels like a labor of love; the audio and visual detail is breathtaking, with a near-perfect aesthetic.
The story is perspective and exists entirely in the setting of the game, but I certainly felt tones of loss, love and forgiveness throughout.
An incredibly short game and something which can be beaten in an afternoon, however the outstanding music (OST by 'The Berlinist' - worth listening to just by itself) combined with the overwhelming beauty of the game means that your time is in no way lost.
In summary; this game is an experience, set at whatever pace you wish to progress at, back-dropped by some of the most visually striking artwork and emotionally reflective music I've witnessed in a long time.

I'm just here for the Summer-Sale thing.

The game's good though, you should play it.