Recent reviews by Live Ma I

So, this game has been out for. . . a week? It's still pretty rough around the edges, but I'd say I enjoy the experience. There are plenty of bugs, and it probably should have been delayed again, but I can definitely see this growing into a solid game over the next 6 months or so.

Fortunately, I haven't run into too many issues that can't be solved with saving/reloading or loading a previous save. Quick-saving often with F5 is a must while it's in this state, and has saved me from bugs a few times.

The gameplay can be pretty challenging on the higher difficulties. In most games you see, "hard" difficulty isn't that hard, but it definitely makes the game challenging here. Lots of people I know have complained about the driving, and I'd agree mostly, but a lot of that can also be attributed to the starting vehicle being garbage.

Item prices should probably be balanced a bit more, since many upgrades are pricey. The best way of grinding money I've found is to just do the open world police missions, but grinding for hours at a time on those can get boring, so I hope regular quest rewards are adjusted up a bit at some point.

I kind of wish there was a new game plus mode, and still have hope there will be one in the future. I'm also looking forward to expansions once the base game becomes stable.

Hades is fantastic. If you're a fan of Bastion (or Darren Korb), it's absolutely worth it at full price.

I can't really recommend Ghostrunner. I found several things I didn't like about the platforming and combat mechanics:

After getting my first upgrade in the Cybervoid, the platforming section that followed took a good 15 minutes to run through the first time. The wall running mechanics were really not that intuitive to me, and it wasn't until I realized that the wall run happens automatically that I was able to even get past this section. Maybe I'm too used to the Overwatch wall riding mechanics, but I feel like these could have been better explained. I encountered this feeling again when obtaining the blink ability. Simply highlighting the enemies and pressing the attack button was not the correct way to use the ability. The enemies need to be lined up with each other, which isn't mentioned in the ability tutorial.

On the combat side, it appears that you die in one shot to any enemy, making the sections with multiple machine gun enemies very frustrating. Even more so if you need to first hunt down shield generators while being shot at. When you get blink, it takes a minute or more to use it after the first use, even with all other ability slots empty, so this skill seems pretty useless when you get it. Not sure if this is this is the case after further upgrades.

After about two hours of playing, it just felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I can see it's possible to get really good at this game, but I don't think the amount of dying and frustration necessary to get there is worth it.

I didn't recommend this. I was in weapons shooting asteroids.

So, what can I say about Factorio? I've been playing this game since the multiplayer release in 2014. It's not something I've played super consistently, but over that time (prior to the Steam release) I've sunk about 300-400 hours into it. For me, the game fits somewhere between Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, and modded Minecraft, and I've found it to be incredibly enjoyable so far. At the point in the game where you start setting up trains to haul resources from your mining outposts to your factories, things start getting really fun. Trains take a while to figure out, but there are plenty of friendly people in the community on the official forum, Reddit, and YouTube who are always willing to help you out with your designs (the community of the game is another thing I love about the game).

I strongly suggest trying out the demo on the developer's site if you're unsure about buying the game. After the Steam release, the devs will focus on version 0.13 which will be bringing long-awaited features to trains and (hopefully) upgrades to the logistic bot behavior.

An excellent successor to Galactic Civilizations II. My only issue so far has been that the game will slow down to a crawl on very large maps after 500 or so turns, often taking 10 minutes or more for the AI to finish a single turn. UPDATE: slowdown is no longer a huge issue. It turns out that the bottleneck was my hard drive, so switching to a solid state drive sped up the game significantly. Still no idea why there's so much disk I/O between turns, though.