Recent reviews by Blue Monkey

When the time comes, I will revise my review, as I have done with some other games!

Besides some game breaking bugs (i.e. some of my oxes just got stuck indefinitely, all my sheeps completely disappeared at one point, can't export sheeps) and other annoying bugs (i.e. some stuff gets not built -> reload or delete & build again is a working workaround),
I don't like some of the current game design:

• Ofc, some of it is very unbalanced atm (pretty sure when the dev finally implements all the mechanics this will be balanced) - as of that mid game is pretty exhausting atm
  
• The restriction of development points is unrealistic and I hate it. I want to be able to unlock everything, even if it costs me 1000 currency to import said technology!
  
• An estimation of the available garden area for a house would be nice (so I can estimated its production and also when it is too big to efficiently sustain)
  
• An estimation of required workers per field would be nice, so I know how many farms/farm families I need
  
• Other meat sources, like slaughtering my own excess sheeps
  
• It is odd and imo bad decision to have ground fertility (which can be improved) to dictate farm fertility but have FIXED spawns for berries & wild animals (meat). Why not do berries & wild animals the same way???
  
• Please allow us to build some homeless shelter, as a temporary measure, when I tear down some of my settlement for a better build
  
• You conquer/unlock a region, it has to have its separate population etc. - WHY? so unnecessary. Let me have it as one big settlement, not separated by "region" lines [there is no technological reason to not be able to do this]
  
• In general I would say the map is way too small, the regions themselves are too small, subsequently the fields/pastures are unrealistically too small, while requiring way too many workers. For all the realism in the game, scale is very unrealistic not to mention leads to unsatisfying gameplay. There is no technological reason that this must be. This is surprising, given the historical details, the realism. Just why?

Some implementations needs rework:

• Pathfinding is inefficient and often lead through fields (instead of using roads) & building walls. Additionally, atm walking on the road seems not be faster than walking through a field!
  
• Market stalls: It fills up the markets in build order, instead of assigning stalls where it would best cover an area. Another issue is that the stalls would not dynamically switch to a better suited market dynamically.
  
• Market range is waaay too small. Cant be that 10 houses over and you are out of range of the market.
  
• There are too many families on the market!
  
• Work assignment is inefficient - let me explain, sometimes a family gets assigned that lives at the other end of your settlement, while several would be much closer - here I recommend a feature where the game uses an algo that calculates the optimal distribution and reassigns the family as a result, either on a per button press in admin or like every year once [this is an issue games like "Banished" also suffer from but there is no technological reason to not be able to do this]
  
• The resources that are left behind from destroying/dismantling buildings, 1st should not be 100%, 2nd should not lay around OR block the building area - I wait at times years until I can build there again!

Ofc, many expected features/content/consequences (i.e. being homeless in winter should mostly kill you) are missing. Since this is a game in late Alpha / early Beta, it is not part of my review atm.

Edit 1: Improved, added a few market related criticism and scaling issues!

I have about 50h on GOG, before I switched to the Steam version for convenience.

This is in essence a great game, with some good DLCs (some are overpriced though). The main gripe I have: It is overly complex. Most of us are here to enjoy ourselves after a hard day of work. While I think some complexity is welcome, this game massively overdoes it. Particularly when it gets to the challenge that is temperature, pressure and basically creating a self-sustainable colony.

This is different for something like Anno 1800, where there is depth, but it is not insanely complex and the base mechanics don't need 100+h or tons of guides to understand.
No, you cant just jump into Oxygen Not Included and piece by piece build up a self-sustainable colony - you actually have to study this game before doing so. Hence why most lovers have 100s of hours.

This the only game in my library that I have this particular gripe with. The other game that has a similar problem is Anno 1800, but there it is not too complex, but too much work if you get ALL the DLCs and want to play everything through (get the highest skyscrapers i.e.).

I commend the devs for keep fixing bugs, updating the game and creating new content for it. But for the aforementioned reasons, I can not recommend this game to >90% of the colony/city building gamers out there.

Note: This game went through a big controversy in May 2024 regarding mandatory PSN accounts. Sony was identified as a threat to liberty & freedom and as part of a major order, Helldivers united to cover the Steam store in negative reviews. In less than 72 hours, Helldivers defeated Sony! https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929

As always in Helldivers 2, victory might not be long lasting, so be vigilant and look out for enemies!

Positives:

• Graphics
  
• sounds
  
• voice lines
  
• lore, immersion (though I wish there was first person only mode, atm its kinda hybrid),
  
• HUD/UI
  
• hot join possible
  
• gameplay
  
• gameplay progression
  
• constant updates
  
• moderated larger story, constantly changing
  
• constant new content

Neutral:

• Microtransactions [price, content you get, grind it without paying real money]

Negatives:

• DRM/Anticheat - unnecessarily intrusive for a PVE game, not working well either
  
• PSN mandatory account controversy
  
• only 4 players per session
  
• small map sizes for many missions
  
• no color variations for equipment
  
• sentries do shoot at bugs, even if friendly is infront
  
• mission locations on the same planet look all the same - do the devs not know about biomes?
  
• certain weapons are basically useless - maybe longterm devs will find a decent balance, but constantly adding content doesn't help and at nearly all times the game has clear metas / is unbalanced

Edit: Updated + particularly added the whole Playstation account controversy

Positives:
Singleplayer is fun (though still miss the interviews from F1 2010), physics are okay (nowhere near simulation though), faithfully recreated graphics & gameplay

Negatives:
Performance is ♥♥♥♥ (Bahrain is one of the worst, particularly with Ray tracing), netcode is horrible (people teleporting, jittering dramatically), but the worst is the online multiplayer - basically expect to be rammed off the track, worsend by the horrible netcode.
Menus are badly designed, it takes me at least 3 min from clicking on the game to getting into a multiplayer races, not only because of the long loading everywhere (due to communicating with online services), but also because you need several clicks to get even to multiplayer [take an example from the horrible Forza Motorsport, it takes like 2,3 button presses to go to multiplayer].
F1 World is annoying gimmick.

I have 100s of hours in OW1 and over 50h in OW2 (Blizzard launcher).

At the time of writing and since about 2 years before launch, Overwatch has significant cheater issues. Particularly on Asian servers you will see tons of cheaters (about 1 per round, which equals to >10%). Devs in their infinite wisdom do not enough by a long shot. And I talk cheaters in the sense you can go to the replay and see it clearly, mostly wh/aimbot. Dont get me started on the cheaters that are more difficult to spot; >95% of players cant identify them from footage anyways, since they only know the obvious ragecheats.

The next issue is the political propaganda shoved down your throat, like pro feminist messages, pro black messages, pro LBGT+ messages. It is sad to see. I wanna play a game, aka relax, aka get off reality, not be indoctrinated.

Another issue is the microtransaction in this game. This has gone far worse since OW2. Like, skins behind paywalls everywhere. You easily spend >100 bucks to get the good looking skins in a reasonable time. It is an insane grind to get even decent skins. The whole game looks like a rainbow glitter box, aka a unicorn that puked all over the place at this point. It is overdone.
Not only skins are behind a paywall, but also heroes. Yes, at first you gotta buy the heroes, while they are obviously overpowered.

That leads to the next issue: Game balance.
OW devs focus on the top 1% of players, and that ruins the fun for everyone else. at 20-80% skill level, certain characters are entirely avoided cause they are too weak and you typically see about the same characters every round. And nearly always new characters are waaay too strong, to force you to buy them.

Furthermore, the player-base is in decline, you easily wait 2+min as support and/or damage to get into a quickplay match, during prime time.

The last point I was most disappointed about was that the devs promised big PVE campaign, they never fulfilled this promise. They actually abandoned it and everyone is pissed about it.

Final word: Just don't play it, at first you are intrigued, but after a max of 20h, you will find out that this game is just bad at this point, riddle with cheaters and dying.

While it is free, feels arcady and is quite unfinished.
Cheating is a problem currently, AI is rudimentary and updates are very rare.

The basics are there, it is a promising start, but atm I can not recommend it in its current state.

Automobilista 2 is a simulation based on the most in-depth racing engine for gamers, the Madness Engine. Reiza's (devs) expertise finally fixed the many flaws with it and corrected many unrealistic behaviors that have left a bad aftertaste in Project CARS 2. The potential was there, but only now is Reiza truly showing what this engine is capable of.

The continuous support is amazing. The DLCs are great and have a very fair price.

That said: There are still areas like Multiplayer where this needs a lot of work.

Since Paradox has taken over, heavily overpriced DLCs have become the norm, while at the least at release DLCs are unpolished & buggy.

Besides encountering classic Unreal Engine scaling bug, many of the very basics for a city builder are wrong (i.e. you can't put buildings back to back, always needs space in-between) and there is a clear political message (I want to play a game, not be indoctrinated).

Played sofar: Anno, Cities Skylines, Banished, Sim City and many many more (at least 20 000 hours during life time)

The resource & combat balance is horrible atm (i.e. killer whales too strong).
Feels like the game is a huge grind, with plenty of downtime.
The UI feels low effort - while not horrible, it is inconsistent, looks like something from 20 years ago and has bad scaling in many places.
Also the graphic style and general seriousness is questionable, it is like this game targets 6 years olds, which is odd given some of the messages and that Steam requires you to be 13 years old (target audience mismatch).

There is more to write, but I wont waste more time on this.

Edit: Spelling fix
Edit 2: Not even 1 hour later, I got a friend request by the developer, despite allowing comments for this review ... another red flag

V 1.0:
Singleplayer is now amazing, particularly because of the new AI!