Recent reviews by h0ax

You know, once, I found myself wondering what my life was missing. Companionship? Love? A deeper understanding of all things metaphysical? Meaningful human interaction? The answer eluded me.

Then, I found out I could have Ashley Johnson narrate my life while I chase a giant naked Taliesin Jaffe across the Carribean, accompanied by Matt Mercer as a redneck, Matt Mercer as an elf (feat. Matt Mercer as an Irish barmaid), and optionally, Shaun Gilmore (as voiced by Matt Mercer). Finally, that very weirdly specific hole in my soul was filled.

...oh, and the game's pretty cool too. Still needs some stability fixes here and there, and I'm a bit miffed that the character creation is as limited as it is (as always, There's a Mod for That™, a Character Creation Unlocker located at https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/13 which I personally see as essential) but it's quite fun, and I'm kinda sad I never got the chance to get in on the first game when it came out.

That said, I can't wait for the Critical Role Season 2 DLC so I can bring along Pumat "Matt Mercer of Minnesota" Sol, Pumat "Also Matt Mercer" Sol, Pumat "Fargo's Own Matt Mercer" Sol, and let's not forget Pumat Sol "Probably Also Matt Mercer" Prime. Ain't no party like a Matt Mercer party 'cause a Matt Mercer party fills the void left by six days of not hearing Matt Mercer talk to himself.

(Is it Thursday yet?)

Do not buy Codehatch's games. Starforge is incomplete abandonware, and Reign of Kings is just Starforge with a new coat of paint.

I had high hopes for this game back when it was first announced. The information provided initially made it sound like it was going to be, in essence, a sci-fi themed high-definition Minecraft. I bought a founder's edition for myself and a friend, in hopes of the game being even half of what it promised. What we got was an incomplete alpha-build labeled as a release candidate.

Listed features:

--Procedural terrain: yeah, sure, that's there. Plains, sparse forests, plains, the occasional GIANT VERTICAL SPIRE OF OILDIRT, plains, mountainous plains, plains.

--Underground/Surface/Space Gameplay: If you spend three (real world) hours pointing your infini-drill at the ground, sure, you'll get "underground". And yeah, there's surface. The only "space" involved, however, is when you clip into the skybox at random while loading into a multiplayer game before falling indefinitely. Or the space between what this game promised and what it delivered.

--Dynamic World: Well, there's a day/night cycle. Never found water or lava, but to be fair I never played long enough to actually try to find either. Creatures didn't drop loot, there's only two of them, and they never fought each other 'cause there was only one spawned at a time.

--Loot and Survive: Yeah, no. Randomly generated kludgeguns that don't really function any differently from each other, with no discernable statistical differences besides 'this one goes bang more often' and 'this one has a chainsaw that doesn't work on trees'.

--Vehicle Gameplay: Well, there's vehicles, yeah. No actual use for them, but they're there. Make for halfway decent spotlights in a pinch, if you can't figure out how the unintuitive power/lighting system works.
Procedural 3D Tileset: Did they stab "procedural" onto anything they couldn't come up with a term for? Player-placed structures are built in chunks. There's hardly anything particularly available and the system is direly limited in functionality.

--Physics Sandbox: Nope.

--Resources and Economy: Wood, metal, stone, oil. That's it. No economy. Dig the oildirt spires for oil, dismantle trees for wood, dig in red dirt for metal, dig anywhere else for stone.

--Multiplayer and Singleplayer: Single player is... a thing, multiplayer is buggy as all get out.

--Survival: Haha, no. You die, you respawn at the ｓｐｉｎｎｉｎｇ ｂｌｏｏｄ ｃｌｏｎｅ ｖａｔ and go about your business. What can kill you? Monsters. That's it. (Also, your friends, in the event their goodwill runs out and they gun you down for subjecting them to this game.)

--Creative: I presume this means "creative mode". Not featured.

This game was a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of goodwill. Codehatch will not get my money again. From a glance, Reign of Kings (their other offering) seems to be Starforge with the numbers filed off and a medieval coat of paint thrown at it. Were it possible to get a refund, I would, full stop.

Steam says I've only played it 3.6 hours. I know I've played it more than that, as I have Steam in offline mode pretty often, and it doesn't track gameplay statistics during that period. (Which is annoying as all get out.)

I got this game on Monday, fully seven days ago, and I haven't stopped playing since. My dreams now move in rhythm, I can't stop tapping my foot, and I can't see myself stopping any time soon.

Also, I've replaced the shopkeepers in the base game with the Danny Baranowsky shopkeeper mod because of course I did.

So much fun. So much frustration. So annoying that I came up with a game idea that I wrote down months ago for a side-scrolling rhythm-based beatemup only to find that it exists as an isometric roguelike with more polish than my lack of developmental knowledge could hope to impart any time soon.

One minor-major nitpick/annoyance for those of us that meddle with mods, however: If you want to use more than one mod simultaneously you have to manually merge them into a combined folder. I wouldn't mind also having some sort of instruction or means to tweak the beat meter on custom tracks; I put in one of my own tracks (an original piece I wrote, hint nudge wink check my profile I'm a musician folks! :D ) and the game metered the rhythm half a beat too fast and a quarter of a beat early. Those matters aside, however, it's a solid game, well worth the relatively low cost.

Now to find people to drag into couch co-op with.