Recent reviews by NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98

Absolutely filled with mobile game nonsense

The main menu is a confusing cluttered mess of nesting layers of P2W schemes; daily missions, daily login bonuses, weeklies, multiple layers of seasonals, battle passes, hourlies, seasonal elo rewards, amateur full-screen popup ads, gem system, even an (unforgiving) energy-to-play system. Possibly the only thing it might lack is a watch-video-ads function

Early on I finish a race, there's no restart race button anywhere but I do find 3 secondary progression systems obscuring each other trying to alert me about rewards, I fail to click something about a "point bank" and fear I may never find it again. Later after finishing another race I humor a full-screen popup ad about claiming rewards that takes me to multiplayer, but am intercepted by a battlepass meeting a threshold & giving me an entirely separate claim button to click away from

Speaking of post-race, the menu music is soft corporate pop music that I'm not entirely convinced exists outside of being licenced for cop/firefighter soap opera affair scenes, race music is largely bland EDM with one(1) actually exciting track. The music is largely a snoozefest helped in no small part by missions being short and menuing being long, I'm broken out of whatever brief hype I may experience by transitioning to someone's naptime playlist for 3 consecutive loading screens

Gameplay is okay, simple almost on-rails racing (or QTEs on rails if you use alt control scheme) on short but pretty maps

Trove is a hack & slash lootbox gembox RPG with fun core combat and lots of cosmetic content but occasionally suffers bouts of terrible server performance & some significant progression aspects (i.e class crafting, gem upgrading) are made excessively grindy to entice convenient IAP boosts/skips.

Mid to end game boil down to gem farming, of all the equipment gems offer the most stats:

• In the midgame for every class you need to get 7+4 gems of very specific types of the highest tier you can access(your best class CAN farm un-upgraded high tiers for your new classes).
  
• In the lategame once you have those future-proof gems slotted you need to grind for their respective gem dusts and a generic player-tradeable currency called flux in increasingly larger quantities to upgrade them with decreasing chances of success each time, this is where the gem grind should have stopped - a reasonably lengthy grind that takes you all across trove as you try to beat dungeons as fast as possible for dust and uses up weeklies to up your %chances.
  
• Gems have per-statslot stat-ranges (effectively IVs) that are random on acquisition leading to some gems of equal type and tier being weaker despite equal effort. In the endgame gems can be further minmaxed by augments (raises one of 3 IVs nearer to it's max cap) which require weeklies to make and effectively doubles (or perhaps more) the grind to minmax a single gem and thus every single class.

Trove is filled with weekly, daily, and seasonal chores, among them is empowered gem boxes from weekly contests which are required for 3 out of the 4 empowered gem slots per class, a 10% cheaper gem upgrade day (cough every other day is technically a 10% waste of gem dust), and weeklies contests for powerful gem upgrade chance boosters

Trove is in short, essentially alpha cube world but mmo'd, along with all the pain that usually entails.

+Lots of content; 17+ classes, 21+ biomes, multiple dungeons per biome, etc

+(Clientside) Utility, model, and FX mods

+In-game player market, buy/sell orders for a wide variety of mundane materials to rarer mounts/allies/collectables

+Gems and many lootboxes have a karma system where you're guaranteed progress or a <insert rarity> minimum result after X tries (though some lootboxes go as high as 50 or 100+ attempts)

-Dragons and some content locked behind (many) hourly challenges and weeklies (shadow tower/tomes) respectively

-Requires third party account(maybe not anymore?)

-Server's strain ranges from occasional hiccups to unplayable with occasional rubberbanding being normal and unloaded chunks and/or unpredictable hitreg at worst

-Perpetual underlying nudge of MTX (Patron = grind faster for better/more gear/resources. Buy stuff outright with credits or credit pouches. No immediate and direct stat advantages.)

-Mixed bag of good & repetitive music

-Wiki heavy

MachineCraft is a vehicle/contraption builder with a large amount of creative freedom and fantastic building tools, but poor tutorials, and ultimately not much to do with the bots you make. Despite it's flaws MachineCraft remains one of the best creative oriented builders even before it's low price of free.


+Nearly Free: no IAP except cosmetic DLC
+QoL building features like sliding connected block-chunks, wireless block pairers
+Scripting support for crafts (C# with (discontinued?) lua support)
+Map editor


-Ugly & occasionally unintuitive UIs
-Out-of-the-way and subpar "tutorial" (you have to load sample machines and press Tab to see what may or may not be an adequate explanation for that subject)
-Minor grievances; arbitrarily finite keybinds per build, mirror not mirroring hinges and rotators correctly

Hack&Slash exploration sandbox with several playstyles and a booming unofficial mod community.

Terraria comes as advertised, you initially hide from enemies underground gathering loot but as you gear up nighttime enemies become less of a threat until you can gather enough mob drops for your first boss summon. From your first boss kill it's all downhill (uphill?) as you gain more gear from more combat, mining, and exploring as the world evolves to try to kill you.

Lengthy gameplay is split up in 2 (3 in modded) major segments (commonly called "pre/hardmode", not to be confused with world difficulty presets or character hardcore mode) and lots of minor segments. Boss deaths trigger minor and major events in the world and new biomes, enemies, and side content appear and unlock, even areas you've already explored are refreshed with new content throughout from some main boss deaths.

There's also golfing.

• 35+ hours worth of content before mods
  
  
• Runs well (50-60 fps average) on a low end GPU (see specs below)
  
  
• semi-official mod support[forums.terraria.org]
  official mod support.
  
  
• Easy drop-in steam multiplayer

-Community filled with children, literal and otherwise

-Slow-ish start.


Specs at time of posting:
Win10 / GT610 / AMD FX4100 / 16GB Ram

A short (6-9 hours) hack 'n slash game with little replayability and repetitive combat that doesn't go near matching the feel or quality of the show in anything but superficial. GE is mediocre - doubly so for it's price and paywalled JNPR, but only borders being outright bad.


Grimm Eclipse squanders the immense creative freedom for movesets and mechanics that the RWBY IP allows. Team RWBY all walk, run, sprint, dash, and jump the same mechanically. Ruby features no unique gimmick, Weiss features a janky stunlock in her standard set that highly rewards low risk cowardice, Blake might as well be a second Ruby, and Yang has a full ult bar recharge when her aura shatters.

Grimm themselves aren't accurately done in GE even before considering their low variety. Time to Kill (TTK) & enemy portions are in an awkward place between horde slasher and having you work for your kills. Despite the grimm's biggest canonical threat being their absolute gargantuan numbers and propensity to brutally horde rush things, groups of grimm act more like batman/spiderman enemies by... taking turns attacking and trying to maintain a middle distance.

Speaking of grimm, even superficially GE sometimes misses the mark: Grimm dismemberment has been in RWBY since the red trailer but in GE it's the half-life vaporize effect without any fanfare or relevance to what you hit them with. If the game needs a new wave of grimm because the small group they gave you died, more enemies are simply teleported in.


GE is a game for RWBY fans looking to buy RWBY content. As a hack n' slash Metal Gear Rising is better in almost every single aspect; TTK, music, proper cutscenes, actual dismemberment, character expression and development, performance, parrying, controls, & skill ceiling. MGR has the slight disadvantages of sometimes wonky camera movements & less immediate modding.

RWBY:GE is canon and set between volume 2 and volume 3.

+Explore a very small selection of decent rwby environments from the show

+Unofficial mod support.

-Minimal replayability on top of low content; Stages have little to no paths & don't deviate between runs. Different non-dlc characters devolve to similar tactics when difficulty increases. A level up tree does exist but different builds don't change playstyle enough to fix low content.

-Non-rebindable controls. No pausing in SP. Terrible optimization. Linear levels from sometimes linear terrain and other times completely invisible walls.

-Generic plot that despite being canon isn't referenced in the show

-A total of 5 grimm and elemental/alpha versions appear, nevermore, king taiju, goliath (all should be notable for having their appearances in the show during this game's canon timeline), and every grimm introduced in or after volume 3 and since-released works(e.g manga, comics) aren't included


Note: I don't own the jnpr dlc and never will so I can't review the extended roster. :shrug:

Great builder, great exploration, but lackluster combat.
Starbound has a surprising lack of substance for the amount of content it has; unique randomized monster? They all draw from small behavioral and attack pools for their monster type. Space stations? Limited buildspace and hull designs. Pets and crew are weaker than their enemy/wild counterparts, etc.


Between beta to full release every enemy was given damage on contact: if you hit an enemy their DoC is disabled for a second or so but otherwise entering their hitbox while aggro will do non-trivial damage and knock you back.
Previously, enemies had some combination of ranged attacks, patterned attacks, quick swipes, and in some cases DoC. They had "tells" to their attacks and if you avoided them then you'd have free reign to move into, around, or often through them.

Movement was clipped in a nerf(fix) to dash, energy bar doesn't refill while in use so DoC can only be stopped in bursts for most weapons, and attempting to jump over things is either risky or impossible in many situations.

All combined, you're rewarded for not getting close which leaves combat very unsatisfying.


+Tons of blocks (many paintable), and decor

+Mod support

+Easy multiplayer

+Decently long

+You can play compatible music files on in-game instruments[starbounder.org]

-Space mech combat while cool in concept is unwieldy and sluggish, often placed in huge but mostly empty/similar maps, and has a tedious grind for progression.
-Placeable space stations: You can change gravity on the fly but can't change the name or desc. Station room hulls are unchangeable, unremovable and limited to a handful of modular room segments.
-(sometimes fix)SB runs on an internal server and can sometimes get server lag even as host/in sp.
(fix)Unskippable cutscenes

I don't keep up with sb controversy but there's been quite a bit, the shadiness around CF has convinced me not to buy any future games from them.

unpaid workers (reminder this game made millions)
https://twitter.com/barkbarkclark/status/1166602250363555843
https://twitter.com/tobyfox/status/1167069264475566081
https://twitter.com/demanrisu/status/1166549893223198723