★★★★☆ EverSpace is, what similar games (like EVE, SPAZ, FTL, and Elite Dangerous) pretend to be, space adventure! Not only is this an impressive space ace, and one of the best roguelikes, but probably the best game to ever come from Kickstarter.
Pros/Cons: + Lite story + Intuitive UI + Liter factions + Slick controls + Varied events + Deep mechanics + Equipment variety + Solid UE4 graphics + Eye wooing locales + Impressive voice acting + Immersive cockpit HUD + Rewarding long-term progression, especially for a roguelike. + Crosshair works as a digital joystick, and actually shoots where you aim. Intuitive.
+- Paint customization +- 1st & 3rd person cameras
- Zones look and play samey and arcadey - Lacking feature depth/variety (crew management, ground segments, diplomacy) - Sometimes things bug and spawn inside asteroids, even happened once with a story relevant NPC, who instantly exploded and was missing from the cutscene lol
* With some fleshed out world building, via gameplay features, this could be a 10/10 mastapea. * Got this on sale 70% off for $9. This game is so good that I even bought the DLC for it, at full price no less, a rare accomplishment indeed.
Garbage version of Battlefield. No content, no customization, no HUD, clunky controls and mechanics, weak graphics, far spawns, WW2 setting. Tested on a free weekend. No thanks.
You could get the entire Battlefield and Battlefront series for $1 via Game Pass. Not sure what kinda crackhead thinks paying $30 for this singular halfass knockoff is a good decision.
★☆☆☆☆ (★★☆☆☆ if you follow guides) Neither Elite nor Dangerous. Instead, infuriatingly disappointing. This is not a game, it's a glorified loading screen simulator.
Reasons to Buy: + If you want to pretend that your monitor is the space-cockpit equivalent of an 18wheeler, ED accomplishes that
Reasons to Bail: - Painfully unintuitive controls - Every single thing on the Steam page is false advertising. - You can't play this game effectively without using 3rd party websites - There is no gameplay. You select a type of loading screen from a text based menu. Then you watch that loading screen. Repeat... Sometimes you shoot rocks. Exciting!
Pros/Cons: - Can't leave the pilot seat - Gameplay is non-existent - 3rd party account required - Cash shop on a bad launcher - No Steam integration or achievements - Controls are a godawful disappointment - Do other players even exist in this "MMO"? - Can't change the holo-HUD color from ugly orange - New ships are borderline pointless vanity sidegrades - Can't customize your cockpit, the only thing you ever see - Misleading false advertising. Everything on the Steam page is lies - Aiming is impossible, as you try to drag your ship behind the crosshair - Quests have real world time limits, and are treated harshly when ignored - Attempted to play the combat focused TDM arena mode. Matchmaking for 10 minutes. Didn't find a match. - Combat is utter garbage, near non-existent, can't even be qualified as flightsim/dogfighting, and is decided entirely by stats. - Weekly cap on how much pay2win currency you can earn. You can earn 400 a week, a plant for your dashboard cost 6,450. GL - Quests are difficult to track, and straight up misdirect you if they have multiple steps. Having multiple quests at once gets even screwier - My real life car is somehow 10x smarter than this digital starship. Which probably doesn't even auto-lock the doors or have keyless entry, lel - You need 3rd party websites to do practically anything in this game. Finding places to land, finding ships/modules to buy, finding ways to make money... - Shields basically don't recharge when in combat, and diverting power to them only speeds up the process when they're completely down, which doesn't even recharge them to full - Auto-pilot doesn't steer, just auto-stops. Doesn't perform multiple jumps. Drops you inside the sun. Crashes. Can be unintentionally cancelled 101 different ways. And ETAs are always wrong - Graphics are mediocre at best, and have some serious flaws. No proper AA, no AF, there's a visual gap between your wrist and glove, space-night-vision looks more like matrix-vision, stations nonsensically LoD when they're literally the only thing in the scene. - The core lore behind this game is utter nonsense. We're on the verge of phasing out IRL truckers, but apparently the only job, 1,000 years in the space future, is space trucker, where you literally just push 3 buttons and /afk. There is absolutely no way an advanced space based civilization would be using human pilots for chores so half-automated and mundane.
Here's how the game works: - Navigate textbox menus at space-place-A to pick quest(s) at space-place-B - Watch a loading screen of your ship auto-piloting itself out of space-place-A - Navigate textbox menus (via keyboard only) and select "warp to space-place-B" - Slowly, awkwardly, rotate your ship to point at the star that is space-place-B (probably the most gameplay intensive part of this entire game) - Watch a loading screen of your ship warping to space-place-B - Repeat the previous 3 steps to warp multiple sectors and/or move to your final destination within local space via slightly different loading screen - Navigate the same keyboard only textbox menu to select "dock at space-place-B" - Watch a loading screen of your ship docking at space-place-B - Navigate textbox menus to turn in quest(s) - Repeat - Ragequit Uninstall
Why can I not simply "look" around the cockpit and "touch" things? Why is that functionality instead offloaded onto obtuse keybinds, which only accomplish the same "look and touch" functionality, while being infinitely less immersive and intuitive?? 0/10
★★★★★ Remember when videogames were evolved movies? Instead of devolved eSport gambling addiction simulators?? Pepperidge FarmResident Evil 2 remembers.
Reasons to Buy:
+ Intuitive controls, immersive horror, solid graphics + What's that? Videogames have stories?? /mindblown + Sets the standard for remakes, and arguably for sequels
Reasons to Bail:
- 2spooky5me
Pros/Cons:
+ Puzzles + No HUD + Lickers OP + Battle damage + Legit cutscenes + Auto saves and unlimited ink ribbons + Improves upon every aspect of the original + Everything gets progressively more interesting + Metroidvanias that actually work are a rare breed + Super intuitive controls, the entire game is basically played with 2 buttons + Aside from taking over9,000 headshots to kill, this is one of the best takes on classic zombies + Items highlight from a sane distance, and on the map, so you don't have to slide your face along every wall + Impressive graphics, solid performance, and the best graphic options of all time, with previews of every setting + Does a much better job of teaching you to not-shoot every zombie you see. Survival horror via limited resources. Which I'm not sure was even intentional design in the original lol
+- Much gore +- Auto flashlight +- Counter knifing OP +- Passive collectibles +- Items don't stack in storage +- Visible weapons, but shared holsters +- Are the voice actors intentionally bad? +- Somewhere between horror and action +- Rare/lite weapon upgrades/attachments +- OP window shutters replaced by excess boards +- Some of the achievements are ridiculous challenges +- Most items have to be manually examined to update their description +- Ultra-lite stealth, if you can even consider it that. Its more like forced walking segments +- The destructible gore zombies are impressive visually, but aren't really gameplay relevant
- Audio levels are like 2x too low - Hardest boss is a shipping container... - Map crosshair works as a controller, even on mouse - Every menu pauses the game, really kills the tension - Some menu/puzzle interactions use keyboard only, instead of mouse - The map almost feels like cheating, and is rather unimmersive to use - Takes multiple headshots to kill a zombie, and even then they just get back up - Having to replay a section 20 times, because of 1shotQTEs, really kills the horror immersion - Doors aren't scurry 5 second loading screens anymore, and which ones block zombies is an unpredictable gimmick - The RE Engine does not handle reflections well. They look like static, worse in dark areas, and most reflective surfaces (like mirrors) don't even have reflections. - Gimmick zombies, basically respawning zombies, it feels like the game just randomly decides which ones are actually killable. Even more ridiculously, are zombies let in via window, who somehow get locked outside again if you board up the window and then re-enter the area.
* Got on sale 67% off for $20 * Review based on 1st clear as Leon. Will update if anything crazy happens as 2nd Claire. * On a semi-unrelated note; this is the standard that games like Stardew Valley should be held to. Instead of being praised for being a 1:1 clone of some decades old SNES game, which is actually pathetic by modern standards.
★★★☆☆ As the best healer in MMOs like WoW and FF14, I can confirm that Healer's Quest is 99.9% accurate.
Reasons to Buy:
+ Charm + Healer Simulator + Better ending than Game of Thrones
Reasons to Bail:
- Grindy
Pros/Cons:
+ Meme story + Most battles start with a bit of dialogue + Loading before the final boss allows for completion + Majority of loot provides unique bonuses, not just stat creep + Solid skill trees. Turn your abilities into passive smart heals, stronger direct heals, give them alternate functionality, etc.
+- There's an... art style +- Lite character creation +- Respecing could be more flexible +- Equipped weapons show in combat +- Only having 4 hotkeys encourages build variety, but makes most spells redundant.
- Random encounters - Menu at the start of every combat - Getting a perfect is rare, and mostly luck - The default healing spell is very... non-standard - Had a couple game breaking bugs related to dialogue, but managed to un-break them - Having to re-activate meditate after literally every spell is a bit ridiculous. Maybe it could be a toggle that halves your healing while active or something? - Lacking HUD. There are no numbers, in a game all about numbers. No de/buff icons with timers. Damage numbers show on the party member who dealt the damage, instead of the enemy. Strange. - Controls are backwards for a healing simulator. What should be click2target > use ability, is instead: select ability > click2cast. Seems like this would be easy to implement as an optional playstyle for the upcoming GOTY edition.
★☆☆☆☆ Plays a bit like BOTW, if BOTW was made by people who had never made or played a videogame before.
What does Bohemia do with the infinite funding they got from causing a gaming apocalypse with DayZ? Make a trash-tier Minecraft wannabe, with Runescape graphics, set on a pathetically small island. Oh, and its loaded with micro-transactions. yLands is either a bad joke, or an intentional scam, but either way, it would be nice if Steam did some Quality Control.
Reasons to Buy:
- Under no circumstances
Reasons to Bail:
- Crafting is frustrating - Combat is ragequit worthy - Inventory management is tedious - Disgusting business model, from a company that already has more money than god
Pro/Con Feature Nags:
+ Build/Place items + The occasional music is nice
+- Digable terrain +- Runescape graphics, at least they run well
- Derpy fall damage - Roll instead of sprint - Starving every 5 minutes - Can't merge stacks in chests - Items don't have descriptions - Have to create a 3rd party account - The worst combat system, of all time - Crap netcode and a weird server system - Can't set your respawn bed in multiplayer - Early Access, micro-transactions, Unity engine - Tiny chests and tedious inventory management - Hairstyles & beards are limited to specific preset heads - Can't change chat channels, every message defaults to local - Sailing between islands might as well be a 5 minute loading screen - Hotkeys aren't extra inventory slots, just an awkward duplicate shortcut - DCs, bugs, and crashes, which can delete your items or even your entire save - The first hotkey is locked empty, and separate from the others, which is disorienting - The entire world is just 5 pathetically small, meaningless islands, with a long sail between - Generally poor 3rd person camera design, without a crosshair, makes all interactions awkward - Nothing to do. No goals, no loot, no exploration, no quests, no progression/leveling. Just keep your hunger bar full - Unintuitive crafting. Doesn't smart-craft lower tier components, doesn't pull mats from storage, overflows your inventory, 99% of recipes being hidden by default is nonsense. - The core gameplay involves mindlessly constantly spamming the right mouse button. This has to be a test of how obnoxiously bad a game can be before players rebel, right?
* No mod support * Got this from a friend, who got it on sale for $1.50. Not worth.
★★☆☆☆ Don't Starve Together lives up to its name, the only thing to do is run from carrot to carrot in an attempt to keep your hunger bar full. The lack of goals and content is somewhat fixable with mods, but even then (with literally 50 mods) its still lackluster, and I see no reason to play this over Minecraft or Ark, Rimworld and Factorio are also different but better.
Reasons to Buy:
+ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reasons to Bail:
- Scummy new player experience & business model - There is absolutely nothing to do, and no reason to do it, besides "Don't Starve"
Pro/Con Feature Nags:
+ Character voice noises
+- Coop, only saves for the host +- Spacebar-to-everything is clunky by default (and straight up broken on controller), but can be quite nice if you upgrade it with the Auto Actions mod.
- Night - No Music - No tutorial - $130+ DLC - No progression - No base building - No achievements - No smart-crafting - Random disconnects - Twitch.tv related loot - Disgusting cash shop - Durability & Expiration - Poorly managed armor - Enemies chase forever - Meters drain way too fast - Get lootboxes for AFKing? - No effective travel methods - Have to create a 3rd party account - Caves are entirely different servers?? - Perks are locked to premade characters - Chat overlaps the UI (in controller mode) - Interact and movement controls fight eachother - Can't play online if you opt out of data collection - Stack size makes inventory management extra annoying - Daily login lootboxes, in whats basically a singleplayer game - Can't bind Enter for chat. Well, you can, but it instantly closes the input - Dusk lasts for like half the day, instead of being a short warning before night - Even though they have multiple cash grab scams, the base game still isn't free2play - There has never been a good hunger system in any game ever. This entire game is a hunger simulator. - Controller support is abysmal. Everything is clunky at best, and half of the menus are straight up broken. How does this game have a console edition??
- We put 3 hours into this game, had basically 100%d it, yet had nothing to show for it. Starting over to add a ton of mods was an easy decision. But even after putting 10 more hours into a heavily modded version, our newly 100%d base only consists of a campfire, 2 upgrade stations, and a few chests... but at least now there's a leveling system and achievements to work towards.
★☆☆☆☆ This relaunch of Destiny 2 starts you multiple xpacs into a tripleA sequel, 5 years in the making, but still manages to feel like an Early Access mess. The entire game plays like the endings of Mass Effect 3 - instagram color filters over minimal unfinished copy/paste.
On top of all that bad, what little does exist seems like it was designed for anti-fun. Collect exotic effects? Can only equip 1. Collect vanity gear? There's no vanity system. Want to dye your gear? Single use pay2dye. Want to play specific content? Grind to unlock it first. Want to do that endgame dungeon? No matchmaking...
Reasons to Buy:
+ Its free now so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reasons to Bail:
- PVP - Stat creep - Grinding gated by grinding - Worst quest tracker, of all time - All you do is collect vanity gear, that you can't transmog - Early Access Quality; bad UI, bad controls, lacks features and content - Between the way iLvl progression works, and the way bounties work, the game basically forces you to use intentionally bad play-styles and gear.
Pro/Con Feature Nags:
+ Coop exists + Swap builds on the fly + Solid steam integration + Name-brand voice actors + Tanks handle surprisingly well + Zones look like good concept art + Multiple versions of dialogue for dungeons + Minor enemy/dungeon layout randomization
+- Dinky weapon attachments/mods +- Graphics look and run good enough +- Ships make for fancy but uninformative loading screens, with no actual ship gameplay +- Competitive coop is a new idea, but needs major tweaks, mainly the removal of invasions, and dropping motes on death, and not being stat based, and removal of the unintuitive puddle mechanic
- No transmog - Currency caps - Console port UI - ADS is punished - Dead end sectors - No party list/HUD - Bugs and Crashes - Silent protagonist - No proper AA setting - Hold button to interact - Can't double jump in town - Single use cash shop dyes - "Town as a menu" is unintuitive - Long loading times, even on SSD - Exotic unique effects are pathetic - Every class plays exactly the same - Floaty double jumping, fall damage - Enemies are generic bullet sponges - The map moves as you try to aim at it - Open world zones are small and empty - Objective marker constantly disappears - Stat customization has almost no impact - Smoke walls block obvious spawn rooms - Melts your computer if you don't cap FPS - No AI companions makes coop mandatory - Half the content doesn't have matchmaking - Clans are managed in some companion app? - You can only have 1 slot of exotic equipment - Can't see party member outlines through walls - Strike scoreboards should include damage dealt - Limited quest log, and bounties count towards it - 1st or 3rd person is locked, based on attack types - Having to manually manage daily quests is nonsense - Half of the seasonal rewards are stolen after the season - No graphic options at the title screen, and defaults to low - Complete an ingame raid, for a code to buy a jacket IRL?? - Class locked gear/vanity (that you can't transmog anyway) - Coop is a disorganized mess, even with friends, no less randoms - Weak character customization, that can't be edited after creation - Usually coop rez is a good thing, but its a janky infinite annoyance here - Highlight on new items has a delay, making it a waiting game to spot them - Equipping a secondary weapon confusingly swaps their positions on the HUD - Seasonal gear's iLvL is based on your equipped iLvl when you claim it (same for drops) - Even though they removed the entire leveling process, the game is still a stat creep simulator - Arguable if this game is even free2play, majority of the worthwhile content is in paid expansions - Cheap deaths because of CoD style HP regen, instead of a Halo style shield over meaningful HP - Any gun that doesn't use primary ammo is basically worthless, because you'll never have ammo for it - Quest list spammed to infinity, and it seems the only reason to do those quests is to get them out of the list - Campaign missions could be treated as dungeons, instead their discarded optional side quests, with no option to replay - Instead of having these nearly identical premade classes, should just let us pick whatever we want in each slot. Same goes for weapon slots - Transition of old characters into this new endgame-only meta is janky, if not straight up broken, you're likely better off making a new one - Controls negate each other (Double jump cancels shooting, shooting while double jumping cancels the double jump. Reloading cancels ADS. Holding shift doesn't maintain sprint. Navigation pulse derps everything. Overall clunk as such etc) - 99% of quests don't have objective markers. 99% of quest objectives amount to generic grinding "Kill 1,000 Enemies with a Bow in Gambit". Majority of those amount to "play the game wrong". The tracker can track up to 3 quests at a time, only 3, but isn't actually capable of tracking more than 1 at a time, not that any of them have proper tracking to begin with. - PVP is cancer, insanely unbalanced, and lacks the most basic of features, like a killcam or proper scoreboard. Oh, and it gives 4x the rewards of any other mode, so you're basically forced to play it.
* I played the beta, that was awful. I played on Blizzard, that was slightly better. This version is yet another improvement. At this rate, it will only take them another decade to make a game that's actually worth playing. Maybe, if they spent some of their billion dollar budget on game development, instead of marketing...
★☆☆☆☆ ♪ Anything you can do, Dauntless does better, Dauntless does everything better than you ♪ (and is free)
Monster Hunter World drops the bar in every category, lets sum things up with this example: - How a slider works: Move to slider, activate slider, move slider, deactivate slider, don't deactivate too hard or you'll get a popup asking if you want to reset the entire menu, move to confirm button, activate confirm button. + How it should work: Move to slider, move slider, BE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DONE.
Now apply that level of nonsensically bad game design to everything. Want to coop story with a friend? Nope, can't do that. Want to upgrade your gear? That's a waste of time/mats, since every new boss is a straight upgrade, and progression is story gated, and the vanity/event gear is OP. Want to loot and/or use that life saving item? Clunk your weapon away first. Want graphics that don't lag into the ground? Good luck!
Reasons to Buy:
+ No
Reasons to Bail:
- Bad performance - Broken progression - Dauntless is better, and free - Multiplayer effectively doesn't exist - Painfully slow/unresponsive weapons/combat - The UI puts up a bigger fight than the monsters - Pay $5 every time you want to change your face, in a full price singleplayer game, and even with that DLC ticket, you can't change your cat or names
Pro/Con Feature Nags:
+ Swingy vines + No fall damage + Slide down hills + Cats in liferafts in water + Proper cutscenes, sometimes + Weapon types provide different play-styles + Room upgrades (as part of story progression) + Keep a small captured animal in your room as a pet
+- Weapon sharpening +- Lockon, when it works +- Sparkly quest trail, when it works +- Cat companion, borderline vanity pet +- Stamina doesn't run out in combat, but sprinting +- Thematically unique weapons, but it doesn't really translate into gameplay +- Passive missions progress by completing quests, instead of being based on some AFK time-gate, but are rather pointless +- Radial menu to customize hotkeys, unresponsive and awkward to activate, and while it technically provides twice as many slots, they could simply swap d-pad pages like Nioh
- Can't jump - No transmog - Melee ricochet - Can't coop story - Silent protagonist - That Poogie bit me - Can't replay quests - Worst UI, of all time - Daily login "rewards" - Shared lives in coop - Lobbies inside lobbies - Story gated progression - Hilarious climbing animation - Worst lip syncing, of all time - Confirmation to exit tutorials - Dodging doesn't give iframes - Barely gets 30 FPS on a 1070 - Dying sends you back to camp - Can't pause a single-player game - Camera control regularly hijacked - Meaningless stat creep progression - Manually advance voiced text boxes - Severe input lag at higher gfx settings - NPCs repeat dialogue 100x per quest - Overall audio level is like 50% too low - Missable auto-text messages on the side - Joining coop in progress gives no rewards - Corpses despawn before you can loot them - Can't interact with loot if stock is already full - Small circular zones that you replay 10x over - Weapons are slow and can't animation cancel - Timer after you kill your target, so you can't loot it - Alt+Tabbing out of the game disconnects everyone - Coop with more than 2 people will banish your cats - Friendly fire doesn't deal damage, but can interrupt - Hard toggle between combat and explore/loot mode - Voice acting randomly decides when it wants to exist - Lowest graphic preset needed to hit 60 FPS on a 1070 - Preview equipment... leaves you hidden behind the menu - Game has to completely restart to update graphic options - Lockon, and then fire your gun in the wrong direction, smert - Controls are wrong, and can't be fixed (on controller, at least) - Final Fantasy Cactaur that 1shots bosses for you. What even? - Get 1shotted by bosses that aren't even the boss you're fighting - Perks are locked to equipment pieces, and aren't even set bonuses - Worst fur effects, of all time, and entire main character(s) based on it - Quest rewards look like meaningless spam, because items don't stack - Multiplayer might as well not exist, I've had 1 person join me in 6 hours - Character creation only applies to the face, and lacks appealing options - Game starts with an escort quest, where you don't even have a weapon - Can only join players on coop missions that you've both already completed - Deaths never feel fair, and failing a mission because PUG#3 died is even worse - That grappling hook featured in cutscenes and screenshots isn't a relevant thing - Pay real money to (re)customize your character, in a full price single-player game - On top of being bullet sponges, monsters waste an hour of your time making you chase them back and forth across the map - Instead of equipment sets being sidegrades, useful in different situations, each new monster is a straight upgrade, making every craft and upgrade a huge waste - The "monsters" in this game are essentially just wildlife/animals, that you wander around brutally murdering for the sake of being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, at least they got the "hunter" part right. Might as well call this game Dog Beating Simulator.
* Played with controller * Got on sale 50% off for $30