Recent reviews by Turtle

OUR WAY OF LIFE, GALAXY WIDE.

Jimbo is now my nemesis and I will not rest until he is brought to justice.

Does everything battlefield wanted to do, and so much more. Deserves a hearty thumbs-up.

Stormworks is a great case study in how losing sight of your original design document is disastrous for the artistic integrity of any long-term development project.

Without going through the entire history of this game, Geometa has thrown away the artistic vision they once had to shill poorly planned and horribly executed DLC's, while breaking core mechanics at every turn. For a game that was focused on SAR and Exploration, adding weapons was definitely a choice. The Space DLC went about as well as anyone with half a brain cell expected -- horribly -- breaking buoyancy of all things. Nevertheless, why these big-ticket items were (poorly) developed before sails or anything else the community has been begging for, is a question only Geometa can really answer.

Geometa claims that they tested this update extensively and just missed a few things before launch but it's clear that this update did not see any serious testing time by a competent QA department. If it did, either the project manager didn't care about the bugs and shipped it anyway, or the version the QA department got was so sanitized that it bore no resemblance to the product shipped. There is no way you can argue, with a straight face, that jet engines not working over ~200 feet ASL slipped through the cracks, or that ships sinking due to broken buoyancy values was just "missed."

Either way, these problems are endemic, and are not exclusive to the company's mind-boggling DLC choices. For a game that you can really only have fun with by building and testing vehicles (and the workshop that handily provides resources for both), I don't think Geometa has once asked themselves whether or not any arbitrary update they make breaks core concepts of they very game they're updating. There have been countless non-DLC updates that break every vehicle in the workshop, either by accidentally breaking established systems, or by randomly fixing long-broken systems whose dysfunction you could depend upon.

Workshop creation compatibility is obviously less important than core features working as intended, and this point is more to show that there is no sense of stability, consistency, or reliability when it comes to Geometa's scattershot and opaque approach to development. Why spend 40 hours handcrafting a ship when in 2 updates you'll have to start over from scratch? Why spend time coding a complex radar system when in 3 weeks the radar system is entirely overhauled with brand new components?

Additionally, physics are janky and have really only been getting worse since the hand-held item update. Hoses and ropes have constant "retraction" effects, dragging creations together slowly. Heavy aircraft slide around on the ground because wheels have no side-friction, flying is just generally impossible to do in a realistic manner, pressures can glitch inside sealed vessels at moderate speeds, crushing the player erroneously, etc. etc.

There have been several announcements in years past which, in dealing with the fallout of yet another botched update, Geometa snidely dismisses genuine criticism. As of this posting, the Space DLC hotfix announcement has them claiming that users conspired to review-bomb their products. Its not a review-bomb when its on topic and angry about changes -- it's a review -- which this most recent fallout largely has been. It's unprofessional and a bad approach to crisis management communication.

The whole thing reeks of inexperience -- inexperience in developing long-term projects and inexperience in dealing with an active community. Stormworks had some serious potential in its early stages of development, but that potential has been strained by this dev team. I genuinely hope Geometa goes on to making bigger and better games, but I'm calling it here, this one's a wash.

Edit: For some reason steam might not show formatting when this appears on the store page. Click into the review to see the formatting. It makes the review easier to read if this happens to you.

For the price, this game is ok.

This game's concept has some serious potential, and its focus on VR as a medium is great, as it allows for quick references to documents in the tower itself (without, say, another window opening and closing on a monitor somewhere) and information that is shown to the player on displays in the environment. It's actually already somewhat immersive, even if oversimplified.

The problems, however, are plentiful. Some are simply due to implementation, some are fundamental problems with the game's understanding of some concepts. They are also present within the first 20 minutes of play.

Implementation issues/surface level bugs:

• Aircraft animations need some serious work. Taxing aircraft have seemingly 2 speeds: stopped, and 40 knots. Landing aircraft pitch up and down violently. Seriously breaks immersion
  
• Aircraft can get stuck on the runway, ending your session.
  
• Numerous typos in the script cause words to be misstated or completely garbled by the AI. One that comes to mind is that clearance always says "as filled" rather than "as filed." It's mostly small stuff, but ya notice it and it breaks the immersion.
  
• No career mode or anything really of substance yet. I played through both tutorials and the test mission in about 30 minutes.

Problems with systems entirely:

• Flight strips are good! They just need to be in separate columns or otherwise organized. As of right now, no matter what stage a flight is in, the flight strip is one of many in a single list. I think a good way to fix this would be to give at least a couple different categories (either a simple "Departing and Arriving", or a full "clearance, ground, tower, approach, and departure" stack with handoffs between them)
  
• Radios really need to be split between each phase of the flight. Especially if the devs have any intention of expanding the airport or adding additional airports. I think players are going to find increased rates of traffic troublesome simply due to how long clearance takes to process.
  
• The approach display is basically unreadable. A better style would probably keep the airport centered, and map the LOC and/or GS for the active. I actually found myself relying on physically spotting aircraft in the pattern vs. using the display because it wasn't giving useful information.

This game has some potential, and I hope the devs take some time to flesh this out a bit. I also think it's possible to add some more complexity/organization to the game without overcomplicating it for new players.

As of right now, the game's only $4, so it's worth it. Just beware that it's a diamond in the rough.

I recommend this game. Its an enjoyable little management puzzler. It's one of those games where you go into it thinking you'll mess around for 30 minutes and actually spend 6 hours managing a tiny clinic.

That said, it has its quirks. The game absolutely does not hold your hand. If you're running out of staff, patients will die. If you run out of offices, patients will die. If you forget to move the Trauma Center victim to general surgery, they will repeatedly collapse, and eventually die. The game will only say "hey you've done {x} wrong" when its already an active problem, if it tells you anything at all.

The game also has no real prioritization mechanics. Someone in the HDU about to collapse due to their surgery taking forever? Sucks to be them, because until they get moved to ICU, they're at the bottom of the list, no matter the triage.

It basically means you have to be well acquainted with the systems of the game and that you have to be actively looking for problems. I don't think that this is necessarily a negative, I think that minor paperwork flaws should result in dire consequences, but it's maybe not conducive to the the casual experience someone might be looking for, hence why it's included in this review.

Not up to the same quality as something like Syria, with the same performance hits. Down close one might notice that textures are a little lower resolution than they honestly should be. Terrain has issues where textures denote a significant cliff face but the model stays relatively flat and level, etc.

It's just not worth the price imo. Syria is so much better for the money. I might come back to this in a few years simply because it's early access. I wanted to see this map succeed for Razbam but this probably should have been delayed a while longer.

It's fine.

UPDATE: it's still fine.

This is easily one of those games that you can sink 20 or 30 hours into without realizing. At the time of review, I've got 66.

While hard to start (as there's quite alot to learn), RimWorld is absolutely worthwhile. Incredibly customizable and moddable, development is timely and active, and the soundtrack is one of the best I've heard in a while.

It's also important to realize beforehand that while RimWorld looks like a colony management/survival game, and while it has elements of that, the main goal is to make a good story. It doesn't matter if 99% of your civilization dies off due to some unforseen mechanoid raid. What matters is the new chapter in your story.

A strange purchase?

Gonna go with a TL;DR version of my experience, as I could write a novel on this game and my experience with it.

The story is terrible. If you're looking for a game with a decent story and a coherent plot that doesn't rely on stale cliche constantly, then this game is definitely not for you. That said:

This iteration of the Far Cry series isn't like the others. It's gameplay and progression are more based upon surviving waves upon waves of enemies rather than taking over the map one outpost at a time. Traveling is more fun, in my opinion, than taking over bases/outposts. This would be great if the story wasn't the ever-looming dread to each player -- the caveat that kills a refreshed take on the franchise. Having played through the majority of this game twice (not by choice mind you, at 80% completion my save was destroyed by the wondrous Uplay launcher), I've grown accustomed to being ripped out of travel to an outpost simply because that area's main character wants to monologue at me for 10 minutes. The only reason I'm not recommending this game is because it's story is so bad that it legitimately ruins the rest.

It honestly feels like they had a legitimate narrative written about intellectual corruption and misinformation taking place in a volatile powder keg section of the US, and canned it last minute in favour of a "drugs and religion are ruining their minds" narrative that simply doesn't fit.

TL;DR of the TL;DR: If you want a shootem up in a Far Cry world, go for it, get it while it's cheap. If you want a story, you're better off elsewhere.