Recent reviews by Liwet

Well this game kept me in long enough that I'm not able to get a refund.

I didn't have a good time. I tried playing Assault first but my gun had a lot of recoil and even when I got the drop on an enemy, they killed me faster than I could shoot and kill them. I respawned and tried to run back to the battle only to die in less than half a second from someone in some position that I didn't expect. So I had to choose whether to spend my game time running and then looking at the death screen or staying back and not taking objectives.

I got annoyed at constantly being killed by a single bullet or two from snipers that my own gun couldn't do anything about so I tried recon. The gun I was given took forever to zoom in, gave my position away to anybody I was looking at who then killed me with their non-sniper rifles, and even when I hit an enemy they didn't die. I then had to zoom out, shoot my gun again , and 5 minutes later I could zoom back in and take another shot.

I never got to see any of the vehicle gameplay because people kept voting for Rush maps with no vehicles.

I've probably played about 60 more hours than what's shown as I initially pirated the game. But the developer kept releasing weekly updates, requiring me to repirate a new version of the game, which broke my saves. So I gave the developer his $25 and here we are.

The game really has no campaign. The only thing pushing you forward is the desire to try out larger ships. Larger ships cost a lot of money to get so the acquisition of more money will lead you through the game. There are a few ways to get money and every player will likely do them all in a playthrough but you'll usually focus on one area. The first way is combat, flying around the universe, assassinating targets. The second way is through mining, finding asteroid fields, destroying all the rocks, and then processing and selling all the ores you get. The third way is through trading, buy supplies at a low price from one station then selling it somewhere else at a higher price though the current state of the game makes trading a joke right now. There's also exploration, but pretty much everyone will do that to some extent.

There are 5 talent trees dedicated to your activities. Taking points in one of them will increase the amount of XP you get by doing activities that the talent tree improves. For instance, there's a combat tree which affects your combat capability and improves the XP you get from combat. There's a business tree that benefits miners and traders, improving what they can get out of mining, improving the sale price of goods including the stuff that's mined, and improving the cargo space in your ship to carry it all. There's an Exploration tree that's all about going fast and finding stuff. There's a Social tree for people who want to manage large fleets of ships rather than just one ship. And there's the Engineering tree which is all about crafting items.

The thing that keeps you playing this game is the miniscule increments you keep making to your ship. You acquire a few items and now you can craft a better weapon for your ship. You can't put an infinite amount of weapons on your ship, you're limited by the hardpoints on the ship and the size of the weapons. Even a ship with 10 space for weapons might have a hardpoint that can only hold 4 points worth of weapons. Weapons generate heat and smaller ships can't dissipate as much heat. With a ship carrying 3 space for weapons with 2 weapon hardpoints and 12 heat dissipation, you could craft a weapon that's size 3 that dissipates 12 heat and put it on a single weapon hardpoint but then you're wasting the additional 12 heat dissipation from the unused hardpoint. So you instead make 2 weapons, one a size 2 and one a size 1, each that generates 12 heat or less and you put one on each weapon hardpoint. Or if you intend to do some mining, you craft two weapons that are size 1, put them on both hardpoints, and then put a custom mining laser on one of them. You set up the way your weapons fire so you only fire the combat weapons in combat and the mining weapon when you intend to mine. It's this kind of thinking in crafting that can keep you playing the game for a long time trying to optimize your ship.

Your ship also carries equipment. Those weapons require energy to fire. You need to put reactors on your ship. But reactors take up space, space that can be used to bolster your shields in combat. Those shields take energy too, requiring you to dedicate even more space for power generation. You also need to fit an engine on your ship, lateral thusters for sideways movement, gyroscopes for turning, scanners for finding stuff, all kinds of codices to benefit whatever methods you're using to make money, and they all require power which requires more reactors. Then you run out of room on your ship when you want to add more hull reinforcements so you take out a power reactor but then your weapons don't have enough energy to fire. So you have to craft new weapons with lower energy requirements so you can add more armor to your ship. Again, it's this management of your ship's resources that will keep you playing this game for a long time.

You can even upgrade all your gear. If you're familiar with the rarity system that Blizzard Entertainment uses, you'll understand how the colors go from Grey>White>Green>Blue>Purple>Orange. You might not have enough space for more reactors so the game gives you ways to improve the quality level of your items. Improving a white quality reactor to green can increase the amount of energy it produces by 20%. You can craft items up to blue quality, exploring will allow you to upgrade those blue items to purple quality which give you 100% more than their white version, and then orange items are dropped by bosses or through the Engineering tree.

Finally, once you've managed to trick out your ship, all the goods you bring in can be sold. Eventually you have enough money that you can buy a higher tier of ship and the whole process starts over again, except now you've got your old ship to manage on top of your new ship. And when you get to the much bigger ships, you also have to manage a small classroom size of employees who will run that ship. Though you get to fly the ship, the game considers you the captain. You'll have to find a First Officer, a Pilot, Navigators, Engineers as well as various Support staff and enough gunners to man any of your weapons that come with a firing arc. All these people come with various bonuses which they add to your ship in their respective field and as they spend time with you they level up on their own either gaining new abilities, new professions, or improving the effects they already provide.

With all this said, the game is not finished so I would wait until it's complete before you let it suck you in.

Got the game on sale for $19.99. I had pirated Forza Horizon 5 and wanted to try out some of the online aspects of the game but didn't want to pay $60 so I went with Forza Horizon 4. FH4 is pretty much the same exact game as FH5 but in a different location (Britain instead of Mexico). Technically the game is slightly easier on your video card, but both games look identical. The game looks decent and runs well; I haven't suffered many FPS issues at all and have kept 60+ FPS.

I have trouble recommending this game. I really enjoy realistic racing games but they all struggle with tying a narrative to what would be an excel grid of races. All races take place on a world map that's completely open from the start of the game. You go to various locations to start a race event there. You do the race and you're put back on the map to go drive to another race location. However, the races are too damn short. Sure there are road, rally, and cross country racing, there's drag racing and drifting competitions but they all get finished within 3 minutes. There's only 2 races that last 10 minutes in the 100 hours I've played this game. I'm a huge fan of 20 minute to 1 hour endurance races which this game just doesn't have.

The reward system sucks. You don't really make much money to buy all the cars you want but rather are given random cars as you play through the game. Sometimes you get nice cars, sometimes you have to buy them with your limited funds, and sometimes you have to overpay for good cars that people auction off. I probably made about $10 million in my 100 hours and the best and most sought after cars start at $12 million on the auction house so only dedicated or lucky players will get those cars. There are side missions that you can do where you purchase a business, drive some type of vehicle really fast, and then you get a score of 1-3 stars. Every couple of days you are paid based on how many stars you've earned so far but the amount of money you get is only just enough to pay for the upgrades on a car and not for a new car itself.

I purchased FH4 for the online features but sometimes it takes up to 30 minutes just to get an online race going plus 5-10 minutes in between each 3-minute race. These loading times have you stuck on a loading screen too; you're not allowed to drive around the map gathering collectibles or trying to do side quests, you're stuck looking at a camera rotate around your car while your avatar constantly dabs at you because you thought it would be a funny emote to use. Even though you're racing against other people, online features really don't exist for this game other than downloading other people's liveries and tuning setups. You can't use your mic even though some how other people can have theirs turned on without them knowing its on (and you can't mute them). You can't type to people, you can only use Rocket League-esque quick emotes. You can see other people on the map and drive by them but they are ghosted and can't be rammed or whatever. Any kind of online feature you're looking for in this game will need to be found by you outside the game.

I wouldn't recommend this game, nor would I recommend any other editions until they at least bring endurance races to the game.

I regret buying this game. I played 7 hours through the first mission before realizing I couldn't beat it. With better knowledge of how the game works (the game is terrible on this front), I beat the first mission. Apparently it's the only mission in the game; the only thing left is to do the same mission but with annoying conditions.

This was a waste of money all for barely an hour of gameplay. I'm sure the game will get better but as of 0.86, I wouldn't call it a game, it's more of a sandbox.

There's really no driving force to do anything. City A wants wood so you give it wood. City B wants iron ore so you give it iron ore. City C also wants some wood so you connect City C into your road network, buy a few more trucks, and supply the city with wood.

After that, you're just sitting there, slowly making money, not really needing to do anything. There's nothing pushing you to take out more loans or spend beyond your means in the hopes that your investment will be worthwhile 12 months later. Sure there's research and factories you can build but it's all for the sole purpose of making more products to deliver to the cities to pay off the loan you incurred so that you would have something to do in lieu of twiddling your thumbs while you wait for the profits to come in. The game isn't really pushing you or driving you to do anything beyond the 10-step tutorial process.

Consider checking out Transport Fever 2 until this game becomes worth buying.

My playtime should be an indication of how enjoyable the game is. Buy it, play through the game as each of the characters, maybe even multiple times to get all their unlocks. After that, you can attempt a more challenging version of the game or just do dailies which put various constraints/bonuses on you. There is also modded content which will probably add 3 times the amount of content as the base game (particularly the Downfall mod and the Packmaster character).

Yeah, I'd recommend it easily for $25 (cost at time of this review).

My game of the year 2018. After beating, instantly started a new game and beat that one too.

Got 10 hours of game time for $20 before fps issues (10-13 fps) caused the game to become unplayable. This is with a 980 ti and there are reports that people with 2080s are struggling too. Would recommend a wait until the game is optimized for modern day hardware.

The game map is filled with shapes and colors and you're tasked with manipulating those items to deliver a specific shape of a specific color to the Hub in the center of the map. It's a decent amount of fun and I'd recommend at any price point under $10.

I did suffer some frustration with the game though. As the game goes on, you're tasked with delivering more and more objects to the Hub. In order to do so, you have to keep up your buildings and belts and not strip them down. The massive amount of buildings and belts I had to make caused FPS issues until the game became unplayable. The developer has made some optimizations that allowed me to go deeper into the game.

I'm writing this review as I wait to deliver 2,200 more objects to the hub at a rate of 6 objects per second. Since I can't build large setups to pass each level quickly, I have to resort to sitting and waiting.

Still, I'd probably recommend if you like games like Factorio or Satisfactory.

I just beat this game after 6 hours of play over the course of a week and I got this game on sale (for free)!

I had quite a lot of fun with this one. The combat was enjoyable and the boss battles were interesting as well. The puzzles were fun to work through and there's a loot treadmill in the game which kept me hooked. The platforming was the only bad part of the game due to the 2-dimensional camera angle and three dimensions of platforming.

The enjoyment of this game convinced me to blindly purchase the next iteration in the series (though it's only $1.50 during the COVID-19 shutdown).