Recent reviews by Dahak

So far, a great game. It's Early Access, and it definitely has its issues and bugs. There are a lot of things that need work, but nothing that gets in the way of a fun experience.
I'm playing multiplayer with my wife, and we've been having a blast exploring the initial realms, clearing the first 'dungeon' and getting into the Antiquarian realms. We could have rushed it, but we're taking our time and enjoying the world.

• Game looks awesome. The aesthetics are just glorious.
  
• Character Creator is great! The default faces are bloody awful, but the sliders and ancestry system let you make some good looking characters, or incredibly ugly ones (whatever floats your zeplin)
  
• Building system is great. You can plan out an entire structure in blueprint, and then deliver materials to any part (including finished parts) to build it.
  
• Crafting system is really neat. Materials have stats, the end result of your crafting is changed by what stats you use.
  
• Realm generation is a neat idea. Very gaslight-Stargate.
  
• Arachnophobia mode replaces the spiders with other models (ants for the small ones). My wife is not a fan of spiders, so this is great for her.

• Building system is great as mentioned, but is also VERY limited so far. No wedge foundations, some missing roof elements (at least at current tier), feels like an area that needs a lot of love, but the underlying system is solid.
  
• Farming system is 100% worthless. Gather 5 blueberries. Process them into 1 seed. Plant seed, water seed, wait for it to grow, harvest... 1 blueberry, one time per seed.
  
• Elements of the game are not particularly intuitive. There are several augments you can make for benches that "enable new recipes" but these appear to require that you know the recipes first. Not a big deal, and there is an in-game section of info you can check for details.
  
• Your NPC hirelings can and will chop trees down near your house if equipped with an axe. The only way to stop this is to uequip their axe or replace it with something else. Why is this a big deal? Because falling trees can demolish your base. And have. Twice. Until I took away the axe and told them they'd only get it back once we'd deforested and rebuilt.

The game’s fun. It’s built on the City of Heroes engine, and seems to run on code that’s basically spaghetti. It’s full of bugs, and every blog post release has typos and errors in it, including sale dates and percentages always being wrong. It leans heavily into FOMO, and the lockbox gambling is predatory as hell.
BUT
Aside from that, it’s a very fun game, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had. Lockbox ships can be bought off the market place for in-game currency (lots and lots of it), regular annual events let you get them for doing stuff in game, too. The stories are fun, and a lot of them feature actual Star Trek actors.
The endgame is Space Barbie. And it is awesome.

Wow. Well, some time ago, I posted a positive review for the game. In the intervening years, gaijin has doubled down on a development style akin to holding players by their ankles and shaking them until every last coin is released. On top of that, they admitted the free player grind is geared to make sure free players constantly lose in-game currency, to ensure they play.
And then they had the audacity, when people showed their dislike in reviews, to tell the players that it was the people who are upset who are wrong, not them!

Just avoid the game. Don't get suckered into playing.

I started writing this review, about how great this game is, and how addicting. Then I got distracted starting another game of it, and

A good friend, and fellow long-time Ultima Online player bought this for me. We had every hope of it being good, but it seems to be a slow develoment interspaced with epic begathons to raise even more money, while at the same time looking horribly dated.

There may be gameplay in there somewhere. We were unable to find it. Perhaps it will be released as a $1500 add-on.

This is a silly, fun little open world game. You explore, you collect things, and you play a bear. Simple, effective, and fun.

In case it wasn't obvious, warning! This game is to PC gaming what Game of Thrones is to the softcore porn industry.

Pros:
Fun version of match-3. It's like Candy Crush - only instead of having to pester your friends/microtransaction your way past arbitrary caps, you get past them by flirting.
Some fairly amusing dalogue, voice-acted in English.
VERY fanservice heavy. Seriously, so many anime boobs.

Cons:
Instead of irritatingly high-pitched annoying voices in Japanese, you have irritatingly high-pitched annoying voices in English. So this is, at least, traditional.
VERY fanservice heavy. My wife is silently judging me when I play - and by "silently" I mean "amusedly" and "Judging" I mean "laughing."

To preface this review: I play ED:Horizons in VR on the Rift (DK2) under windows 10.

This is, quite simply, THE most immersive VR experience I’ve tried. Nothing beats popping on the headset to be greeted by the holographic UI of my ship, flying around space and engaging in dogfights with the ship and galaxy all around me.

There’s a lot to do in game, despite the reviews that call it empty. Like any game of this type, sticking to just one thing and doing it over and over will get boring – so it’s good that there’s a variety. Horizons initially adds planetary exploration on atmosphere-free planets – finding shipwrecks and smuggler’s caches in a little rover buggy, transferring them back to your ship, or doing surface combat missions. There’s a lot more to come though.

I’ve been playing since May, and due to having fun instead of grinding, I’m not yet in a giant ship. Every milestone feels like an achievement I’m proud of, and absolutely nothing beats the thrill of escaping from an interdiction with 30% hull, then trying to sneak that damaged ship into a port at top speed to avoid being scanned with a cargo of multiple millions worth of smuggled goods.

I would give this game a solid 9/10. It has some bugs (never, ever do the kidnapping missions, seriously) but they are constantly improving on and fixing them. I would give the VR experience a full 10/10 for comfort and immersion.

Completely re-writing my review with the changes to Odyssey. Most of my time has been spent playing in VR through Oculus home. This is, by far, my favourite VR space game. All my major complaints re: the game seemingly being abandoned have gone away. 2020 has shown a resurgence of love from the team. While Odyssey still is going to launch without VR legs, at least they added the new planet type flying to VR, and will launch with a 2d-in-vr version of space legs. Not perfect, but a huge improbement!

Saw the game trailer. Thought it looked cool. Bought the game immediately it was released. Didn't get a chance to play it until this weekend. Have played it solidly all day... it's that good. Started the server to find our little island was surrounded by 4 spinosaurs. Devs bugfixed that overnight.

I'd rate it 9/10, in its current Early Access state. If the optimization gets fixed soon, I'll make that 10/10.

Pros:
- Dinosaurs!
- Has PVE servers and PVP servers, both official and custom. I'm hosting a custom, and it's been smooth sailing to set up.
- Devs are hugely active, and fast to fix glitches if they can. Each update (usually daily, or every other day) includes bug fixes and new content.
- Beautifully detailed models.

Cons:
- Currently the optimization is poor. The devs have openly acknowledged this, and it's a key point they're working on. This means there are times the game is a little laggy. It's totally playable at 30fps on Epic settings with a GTX 970, and on lower settings works fine on older cards at roughly the same level of performance. Of course, you can turn the graphics down to get higher fps on high-end cards, but...