Recent reviews by Digital_Cake_

Assassin's Creed 3 is the second AC game I've played, and boy were my hopes dashed. I'll mention here I completed the whole story, every side quest I could, and got 91% completion on the game. I won't mention the uPlay launcher issues, as that's expected in every Ubisoft game.

- Guard AI. The AI seems to be quite a bit smarter with guards compared to AC2, actually being able to hurt you from further away, mainly because of guns, but more enemies will climb up to you as well, making roof tops far more dangerous compared to AC2.
- Naval combat! My favorite part of this game, the introduction of ships and naval missions. Firing cannons can be a little janky at times, but the missions feel fresh and a nice change of pace to break up the main story line. Add upgrades to your ship and you've got a great gameplay loop in a vacuum.
- Side Characters. Achilles and many of the other side characters that get included in your homestead missions are people you can actually get invested in. You meet most in a dynamic way, in the middle of their lives falling apart, similar to Connors life. You give them a better life, hopes, and dreams of the future in conversations that make you care about them. It'd be even better if Connor wasn't a brick wall of a conversation maker.

- Connor. He's about as plain as a cardboard box. His comments are few and add little to anything he's apart of. He's an annoying character despite that. I somewhat understand why they've done this, but even contrasting with Haythem, who can be witty but serious as the same time, it's a massive downgrade compared Ezio in AC2.
- Level design. Despite the worlds being larger compared to AC2, it feels more empty due to less shops and buildings you can go into. Shops are all in one general stores now, instead of separate weapon, art, doctors, and clothing stores. There's no brothels or thieves guilds either which helped break up the skyline. They counteract this with minigames, which are quite common, but lack any flavor or real reason to play them. No story tid-bits, gossip, and terrible rewards when offered.
- Crafting system. Just like AC2, you get a "city" to be in charge of. This time being a homestead, where via quests you can gain new people to offer new materials to craft with and trade for profit. Worry not though, we'll make it as painful as possible to use. Everything costs money, which your fellow homesteaders don't produce at all compared to AC2. Plenty of weapons are locked behind crafting requires that I feel most players will ignore entirely. The highest level of crafting also isn't unlocked until the very end of the game, Sequence 11-12.
- Restrictive tools. The game teaches you to use ranged weapons like muskets, pistols, and your bow to deal with enemies from afar. Of course to enforce this extension of your range, they include lots of chase missions where you kill the person upon catching, but aren't allowed to use said ranged weapons. As an example, during one of the missions several of the templars you are sworn to kill are easily within range of your weapons, but if your ranged weapons are just fully restricted instead of proper level design. The game picks and chooses when you're allowed to use the tools you're provided, which just causes frustration.
- The Story. It's quite predictable, switching between Real world and Connor missions. In the RW it's a man with daddy issues and a team of characters that do nothing but complain during a 2012 end of the world event. In Connors case, it's a naive man trying to kill people who are targeting his people, and get this, more daddy issues.

AC3 lacks a compelling story, main character, and environment. City development took a major step back, ranged weapons are heavily restricted, and the crafting system is tedious and outdated to use. I wouldn't recommend it, as AC2 is a far better game, and AC4 has better ship play if that's what you're looking for.

A fun game that I tentatively recommend, that lacks polish, has repetitive gameplay, a bad UI, but overall satisfying gameplay.

The game play loop consists of juggling production for products, researching new technologies, and expanding your world market. You do all these things with sites, which allow you to build in nearly every country with different benefits depending. For example, you want to research in richer countries and produce your computers in poorer countries. After you're done doing that you design new computers and use managers to get bonuses on all of the above.

Designing new computers can be very fun but it gets repetitive after the first 20 times. Currently quite a few technologies that you can add to designs are broken, either not working correctly or just not even showing up. Most of those do see to be reported and acknowledged as bugs, but I'll come back to this later. You're mainly balancing cost of production, getting the highest stats, and selling it for cheaper than your AI rivals. Almost every computer type is the same, minus a handful of technology that are exclusives. These include power adapters and batteries for laptops and phones.

Dealing with the AI rivals can seem challenging in the beginning for new players, but just like managing production, it gets really easy after about 10-15 years. At least on the normal difficulty, the AI doesn't research new technology nearly as fast as I'd expect. They never seem to invest into designs outside of Home Computers and Laptops. My main gripe with the AI comes with the fact that you start with 8 competitors and never get any more. Once they go bankrupt, that's it. They also don't seem to try and consolidate their position when heading towards financial ruin. They stay in every market, and continue producing a new design every year at over market average prices, which makes it nearly impossible for the AI to escape a death spiral. You also can't interact with them but the next update seems to fix that.

The last bit of gameplay I want to touch on is managers. As far as I'm concerned, you can run the whole game without them. It could even be detrimental of you try to use them without understanding them. Each manager has a set of skills from 0-100 and a monthly salary. You start with 2, yourself and a co-founder. Really the only important skills are loyalty and research or manufacturing. The monthly salary is where the problems start. Your CEO starts at 100K, and never increases. Your co-founder and future managers however take more money every year, to an insane degree. My co-founder, at 60 loyalty, was nearly doubling his salary every few years. This wouldn't be a problem if the game would tell you about it and let you fire/kick out everyone except yourself but it doesn't. So eventually you get managers that have bad skills unless you micromanage them and sucking away large amounts of your money. They can provide good bonuses towards nearly everything but overall I think are implemented poorly where returning players don't use the system and new players don't understand it.


My main gripes for this game are really nothing fundamental, as I do believe this game has a good basis to be among the best in this genre. I'll try to be detailed and offer solutions as I know the developer is very active at taking ideas and reading complaints.

1. The UI. They say never judge a book by it's cover, but a bad UI can ruin a game. It's very unpolished and lacks creature comforts that allow it to work with the player instead of against it. First you get notifications in the upper left that tell you what's wrong, that's great. The terrible part is clicking on them does nothing, it just tells you where to go to fix them. An example is a manger finishing a task, but instead of just clicking on it and it showing you the manager in question or allowing you to give them a new task you have to open up the manager UI, select the manager, pick a task, and then close it to go back to the world map. It works against instead of with the player. The piercing white everywhere makes everything feel very samey and makes it difficult to play later at night. It screams unfinished in my opinion, instead of just bad. It also seems to scale weirdly where sometimes it's low resolution and other times it scales properly to all resolutions. Easy ways to make the UI nicer is make things two toned, a main color and an accent border. It'd help make things feel less bare bones/cobbled together and more unified. Things like the Hardware Designer flirts with, but doesn't go far enough.

2. Map inaccuracies/failing to adapt. The normal map is terrible. Not only do country borders sometimes break up from solid lines, but there's straight up inaccuracies at the start of the game. South Sudan for example didn't become it's own country until 2011, despite being in the 1970 historical start date. Countries breaking up seems to lag the game massively and isn't 100% accurate. The Soviet Union collapses over time but then Russia stays the USSR for a whole year afterwards? Countries have two kinds of markets, closed communist markets and open liberal markets. For some reason North Korea and Iran, two of the most sanctioned countries in the world, are both marked as open liberal? Countries also never get better in terms of wealth. A lot of countries that start developing and getting better in real life never translate into being better in game. South Korea and Taiwan for example stay in poor/poverty the whole game, despite both being quite wealthy countries during the exact time this game takes place. It really helps make the map feel very static, with markets that never change or get richer.

3. Pacing. Research feels very slow and fast at the same time. Early on it's easy to stay ahead, but with the cost of research sites being insane, your competitors never really being that focused on it (at least on normal difficulty), and the compounding costs per tech, I always find myself behind real life. I invested pretty decently into research one game, and didn't unlock phones until 2022. Not a single competitor had even done it yet, despite how late it was. Most of the techs you can completely ignore and won't suffer from it. That causes the player to try to micro and prioritize certain things over others, which is great. The bad part is you get punished for researching the non-important techs with minuscule rewards, poor new product options, and increased costs. A good example is unlocking better hard drives/Solid state drives. Historically, HDD's got significantly higher in density and lower in cost as time went on. The opposite is true here, with the costs only going up, never being affected by other cost reducing techs, and capacities never needing to be boosted very high. The best computer the AI created had a mere 500 MB's in 2019. There is no benefit to it. A solution I see is adding more techs that could benefit or accelerate research and reduce costs on certain components, while also making the costs of running research sites lower.

4. Updates. Currently it's been nearly a year since the last update, November 22nd, 2022. The developer seems to focus on big updates infrequently instead of smaller more often updates. I don't like it personally, as it makes the game not feel very lively. I understand there's only one person working on it, but I know there are community members that want to help. Helping in easy ways like offering to write technology tooltips or other languages. The latter being saved for the final release, which I don't think is a good idea. He could do like Factorio did, outsourcing it to the community as dedicated fans have offered to do. Bug fixes just aren't common, despite a long list. A lot of the minor issues I have could get solved in small updates done more frequently to bring back old players and show new ones it's still being worked on.

A breath of fresh air in an overused genre, Project Zomboid is among the best Zombie games I've ever played. This game managed to evoke feelings that I felt when 7 Days To Die, another Zombie game released around the same time, was still new and full of hope. And just like 7DTD, PZ has had a rocky development past that I truly believe are behind them unlike 7DTD. Where 7DTD fails, mainly being uninteresting after a few hours, terrible heat mapping, and overall odd emphasis on PVP, Project Zomboid excels in. There's rarely a dull moment, with no heat maps designed solely to drag zombies to your location for X or Y reason because game impact, and PvP seems to take an overall backseat in a game that has wonderful potential.

Overall, I'd recommend it highly for anyone who likes survival games as a whole, but dislikes the genres general pull towards extremely basic systems and emphasis on PvP. Mind you, PvP is also fun in this game, but it takes a backseat which is great to see in the survival genre.

This game is alright. Not good, not bad.

Well it's a game about space.

Honestly a really wholesome game that has a good message behind it. You can get a good half hour from it but I find myself coming back for longer than that. It's free so I didn't ask for much from the start, but it surprised me at almost every corner. The only problem I have with it is the inclusion of a bong, condom and vibrator, which all seem so out of place in the otherwise child friendly and wholesome feel. I'd give it a solid 7 out of 10, it'd be closer to an 8 out of 10 without those items, but still worth the download.

Still a good game that you can still find plenty of players for.

This is a wonderful game that has aged well.

This game supports pollution of the environment, and the slaying of natural animals.... Need I say more? 11/10 EPA say's "Great example to the kids!"

I love it. I fell in love with the art in just seconds, a must have and will probably be all over YouTube.