Recent reviews by viirinsoftworks

I guess I'm becoming my own cliche, but I really really like the plant biology in this game. Some grow upwards, some downwards, some breathe oxygen, some breathe other gasses. Then they exhale different gasses too, and require or produce different types of liquid.

I barely pay attention to the other technologies, and there are a lot. A good challenge of a game, but it can also be played rather casually once you get set up. Will probably take you a few saves to figure out optimums.

Luckily, there doesn't seem to be material loss from destroying and rebuilding stuff, so don't worry about that right away.

That's a tremendous amount of money the game company spent on a non-interactive video that's so slow it's actually really useful as a sleep aid.

I'm going to go fishing in Warframe so I can have some excitement to get me to wake up again.

FYI: CTRL is how you move down. SPACE is how you move up. WASD for the other directions. Game isn't balanced, don't bother playing it. If you were hoping like Subnautica or Raft but in space, this isn't those.

You need to monitor your food generation, water generation, and other stuff. However, if you do, you'll notice that your amounts change rather drastically and for seemingly no reason. It's only by pure random chance that your people can survive at all.

TL;DR

It's way overcomplicated for how simple it is.

I really enjoy survival games, but Green Hell does one of the cardinal sins of the genre: the game mechanics heavily impact the game's lore. No internal consistency.

Absolutely emotionally and intellectually compelling, with a billion percent replay value.

I've played it for a few minutes now, and I'm no where near done with the game. Why not? Because they come out with new DLC that isn't just blah crap, but actually has some gameplay mechanics. Some of the parts of those DLCs are part of free updates at the same time, so you're not entirely out of the loop when a new DLC comes out.

If you love strategy games, and 4x even more, then definitely get this. You won't regret it. Worth every penny I put in so far, and I'm on an extremely low fixed income. Very very worth my time. If you need to, wait awhile to get new DLCs cuz they get cheaper over time. Personally, I bought everything before day 1, but I'm me and you're you. Do what you feel is right. The game says the same thing- be friendly and help everyone, or galaxy-wide genocide. Whatever you wanna do.

Like seriously, the game's great that way. Even with two nations with the exact same ideologies, they won't behave the same. Maybe you're an overlord because you want to protect the citizens of small nations. Maybe you're an overlord because you want to absorb their territory. Maybe you're an overlord because you want to make your minions fight for you. Maybe you're an overlord because you just wanna abuse your vassals for resources. That's just being an overlord, without the Overlord DLC! Get. The. Game.

It's really too bad that they never bothered to balance the game. If it was just its narrative and strategy and resource management, then it would be really fun and engaging for a couple hours until you notice most of the issues.

1. After the tutorial, your ship hull is destroying itself constantly, and even after replacing the engine, the damage is still severe and neverending. You'd think that repairing it enough would replace the parts causing the continued damage, but it doesn't. You'd think that replacing the engine would repair the engine damage since it's a brand new one, but it doesn't.

2. You only have so many crew, and they really enjoy having accidents that costs them their lives. At one point the game does say that there's no time for the human reproductive cycle, you need cryopods, so don't go thinking breeding is a thing. People can get injured and die anywhere, even on buildings that have been deactivated. Even in a cricket farm somehow. So many Darwin Award winners.

3. The cryopods have people in them- who knows whether they're workers or not. I actually like this. However, since some of the game does pay attention to the emotions of the characters, and a ruin says that you and your crew are the enemies of humanity, and it's been hundreds of years since then... there should be SOMETHING focusing on the fact that those cryopod people were raised thinking you're an irredeemable monster and now they're on your ship. There's nothing.

4. The game just plain isn't balanced. Wanna know how to get your ship destroyed and everyone killed? Go park in space away from everything (in RL, there are reasons our starships and space stations get wrecked, and no small part of that is because of orbital debris. So go park somewhere there isn't any) and then go AFK. How's this make sense? It's a game mechanic- the entire game is on a timer, but there's no visible timer present. The mechanics all point at it though, in the code.

5. Speaking of code, even if you do hack the game like I did, to make it playable, you have to edit the files so much that you'd be better off playing a better game or coding something from scratch instead of fixing their errors. When I say errors, what I mean is that the ideas behind the game's design are flawed. Bad choices were made, and the mechanics were all based on them.

6. Is the game worth its price? Not even close. I've played free games that I got more enjoyment out of.

TL;DR
Overpriced piece of ♥♥♥♥ that's not fun and doesn't follow its own logic.

What is No Man's Sky?

It procedurally generates animals. The art isn't bad.

It's like SPORE, but with less than 1% of its gameplay.

That's right.

It's a screenshot generator.

I enjoy parts of the game, and it could be really great, but it shouldn't be considered a full game yet. It's clearly still in Early Access, and should say that.

Be aware: The game is clunky as all get-out, and rather obnoxious to try to do much of anything. Some of the tutorials are helpful and explain stuff more-or-less, but some don't give any guidance at all. Luckily they do retroactively complete, so if you figure some stuff out on your own, then do a tutorial quest, the next few quests might already be done.

Building is cool and fun, but also the controls for it are awful. Your cursor will disappear and things will be unable to be clicked or at all, unless you use the ~ key. This is the case for all the times you try to click stuff but instead pan the camera around.

There is a really fun chimera pet mechanic, but not all pets can get parts from everything, and there's nothing saying this. Like if you have a horse, you can have it Devour a beetle and get its wings, giving you a pegasus of sorts. But you can't have it Devour a crab to get its claws, even though nothing anywhere says that. What animals can get what parts? You'll just have to figure that out over time on your own, and hope you remember.

The plants are excellent, though you'll constantly need new seeds. There are multiple ways to get them, but you can't reliably get seeds from each plant, effectively making it possible to turn 1 rare seed into 30 over a long time. That's just not a thing. I mean, I've seen large gardens with one crop type but I assume the player farmed the heck out of that wild plant (no difference between wild and farmed) in order to do it. Or bought them on the market. I prefer to hunt stuff in the wild, to immerse myself in the game's ecology and farming, but that's probably the hardest route.

The cooking mechanic is wonderful. Experiment with stuff! Who knows what'll happen. Either way, your discovered recipes will show up on your recipe tab of the cooking pot, and if you cook from the recipes then your character will be inspired and more recipes will show up. Cook those dishes enough, and you'll go from 50% success to 70% success to 100% success. Some of your failures might unlock new recipes too! I just wish it worked that way for plant harvesting for seed acquisition.