Recent reviews by Jimlo

I do like this game, and playing with friends is enjoyable but the main gimmick of this game is to fight off a horde of zombies on the 7th night. The first few are definitely manageable, however once you start hitting those beefy waves expect game performance to tank to single digits. Even after dropping all settings to bare minimum. Gameplay and basebuilding then just devolves into cheesing the game rather than actually playing it.

The factory must grow!

I'm 10 hours into this game and I'm having a blast. At it's core is a survival/crafting game, but it does so in a narrative, exploration focused manner, heavily inspired by the Half Life universe. The level design, so far, has been great and feels well thought out. Exploration and advancing the narrative set in place opens up short cuts to progress further and faster, much like in the manner of Dark Souls. Exploring and scavenging open up crafting designs which you have to 'learn' by putting together materials, at which point you can share with your fellow survivors.

The RPG leveling system seems interesting, and feels like you can specialize with-in your group by picking certain talents/perks, such as you would in Project Zombie. I'm currently playing as a combat-weak, bonus experience gainer with medical, cooking, and agriculture skills. The base building is easy enough to learn, and you can easily build up useful buildings to give you a safe spot to return to, patch up, and go out and progress further. Combat is fairly easy and not super punishing so far in the game, but the difficulty does seem to ramp up and match your power level, both in new enemies and mechanics that the game will throw at you.

I would highly recommend playing this with a friend(s) as it seems you can tackle much more in a group than you would solo. But with how this game is built, I very much think playing this game solo is viable, as you level up all skills just by playing the game, and aren't gatekept from progressing anything unless you pick certain talents when creating your character.

I'm looking forward to playing this more and more and seeing where the story goes. Highly recommend playing this game!

Updating my review:

A fantastic game! The atmosphere and vibe of the game leans heavily into and is inspired from Starship Troopers. The game can be quite wacky with friendly fire, ragdoll physics, and interactions between you, your teammates, and the enemies. The guns feel satisfying to use and are distinct from each other. The stratagems are where things really shine, you get to rain down massive amounts of eye popping, and deadly explosions. Another satisfying part of the game is how increased difficulty levels are handled. Rather than just arbitrarily increasing enemy health and damage, more and more quantity and deadilier opponents are thrown at you. Mission types change as well and get more complex.

The monetization is surprisingly quite great. You can easily earn the in game 'premium' currency to purchase any warbond (aka battle pass). Plus there's no FOMO pushing you to spend money on the premium currency as all the warbonds are permanently in the game. Extra armors/helmets/capes that are only purchasable via the premium currency offer no extra additional perks that aren't readily available by other means of gaining armor, and they're listed at reasonable prices which are again earnable by playing the game and exploring.

The community is quite positive and accepting, even more so if you make an effort to chat either via text or voice. Which I recommend as this game is better when played with other people. It's not necessary to play in a team, however the game really shines with teammates.

Disclaimer: I have not bought the deluxe version of the game, but I have spent money (~10$) on in-game currency.

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OLD REVIEW:
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Great game marred by the fact that you now have to create a PSN account and link it, which will lock out some players from certain countries being able to play the game.

Dwarf Fortress just isn't any normal game. It's a game where stuff happens, and you get to watch it happen and learn about the cool stories that happen. Yes you have a hand in shaping those stories, but Dwarves have a mind of their own. You can read about their desires and help them achieve those desires, or you can drive them to insanity. This is the kind of game where you have to embrace the chaos that happens, and resist the urge to save scum, because in the end it's a cooler story to have half of a fort wiped out by some horror beast to be finally felled by a heroic Dwarf who is honored in statues and engravings by the survivors and have them rebuild their home, than it is for a perfectly running fortress where nothing ever interesting happens.

You can play this game in all kinds of manners, and experience different biomes, creatures, adventures, situations, and struggles. There's so much depth to this game, that it's very easy to overlook certain aspects of exploration, commerce and game mechanics. Things can be and are obtuse, which complicates the learning process, but once you grasp those concepts and start playing around with what the game allows you to do, it's very enjoyable.

Let me preface my review that I've put 108 hours into this game so far, and I will put many more hours into this game. With that being said, I still do not recommend this game. Let me explain a bit why:

The core gameplay of this game is amazingly fun, hopping into a mission, killing enemies with both melee and ranged weapons is extremely satisfying. Ragdolls, gore, animations are all top notch, and combined with tight and satisfying weapon animations really make it feel like you're demolishing the enemy. The classes all feel distinct and unique and complement each other. I've leveled each class to max level and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are a bit stronger than others, but they all do well in their own way. I'd much rather have a team consisting of all four classes than a team with duplicate classes. The sound design and soundtrack to go along with it is amazing, and really complements the gameplay and the hub area.

There's also a "Meat grinder", aka training area. Which you can change to reflect the different difficulties, and it has all enemies, and you can freely change between weapons you have and talents. You get to see damage numbers, and test things out. It's pretty neat, pretty easy to use, and I wish more games had something like this.

Unfortunately, everything outside of the core gameplay just plain sucks, or doesn't exist. Once you get to max level, you'd expect to be shooting for higher difficulties, and min/maxing your build and gear by crafting, tweaking, or obtaining specific items to make use of your build. Swapping builds is easy, but the rest is all up to chance. There is no crafting, re-rolling, or mechanic to obtain gear. You run missions to get money, and you spend money at the shop to obtain gear. That shop resets every hour, and if there's nothing there for you or that you might be interested in, well too bad, so sad, wait until the next hour, because obtaining gear in missions is a crap shoot at best. If you're lucky, you might get a weapon drop, you probably won't, and the chances are that it's for your build, with the right perks, on the right weapon, is practically non-existent.

There are weekly missions/rewards, however the reward currency you get are not account bound, but character bound. So you feel penalized if you're playing multiple classes. Some of these missions are quite intensive and require a bit of time to pull off, and to boot they're sometimes mission dependant. Since the missions are randomly generated (and the difficulties that they are assigned), during the time you play, you might not even see the mission that you need. And if you do see it, it might be on the hardest difficulty.

If you've come looking for a story in the Warhammer 40k universe, don't come to Darktide. There is no story, there's a series of 'cut scenes' (using that term very loosely), where people on a ship tell you that you're worthless and that they don't trust you, to the point where they doubt they'll remember your name and to come back once you've reached a certain level. There ends up being a traitor on the ship, and at the end they've narrowed it down to two people, you and someone else. Well SPOILERS, the traitor isn't you. Big surprise!

To top it all off, updates, patches, and content have been delayed by Fatshark, with very little to no communication. Leaving many players frustrated as deadlines have been missed and gone past with a nothing said save for a WereSorry.jpg posted. There are core features of this game that are missing, and with no plan or communication from Fatshark to indicate that it is coming. With all that being said, I cannot at this point recommend this game. If you don't mind overlooking all of this, and enjoy the core gameplay of going into missions and killing stuff, then you'll have fun with this game. I know I'm having fun playing it. I just hope that with time, they'll update the game and it'll end up being amazing.

Foxhole is an isometric top down, WW2 era, MMO, strategy / logistics / warfare simulator. Just about everything in the game is player supplied, manufactured, built, dug, transported.

There's a little bit for everyone in this game, whether you want to harvest materials, transport goods via ground or sea, build factories, bases or trenches, work in an artillery team, man a tank or mounted gun, be boots on ground and support armor units and engage in infantry warfare, or pickup a medical supplies and an ambulance and treat wounded soldiers and transport critically injured bodies to a medical facility.

There are so many different ways to play the game. While the basic underlying systems are fairly simple, there are so many types of buildings, weapons, vehicles and interactions between all of these that it'll take a while to learn. There is a bit of a learning curve due to this, but everyone in the game is willing to answer questions and help out as they were all there at one point. You can play this solo fairly easily, as there's always someone looking for a tank gunner, or an artillery spotter to dial in rounds, or an extra medic, or simply extra bodies to help push a front. Although I would highly recommend finding a "Regiment" to toss your hat in with as it's easier and more rewarding to participate in larger, more organized efforts.

There's definitely quirks to this game, some bugs here and there, but overall a very solid experience that I see myself sinking many, many more hours into.

Disclaimer: I've only put three hours into the game.

I held off on buying this game initially after playing the demo and not enjoying. However I picked it up during one of the steam sales after seeing mostly positive reviews after all the patches and content that has come out for it. Even at a discounted price, I still can't recommend this game. The menu interfaces seem clunky and unintuitive, inventory management and crafting just seem to be a slog and uninteresting.

I set the game down for a bit and recently re-installed after picking up an Oculus Quest 2, figured VR would make things a bit more interesting. And while it has, the VR controls, specifically the flight controls are miserable. Resetting the VR view snaps your character to where the games HUD is rather than the HUD to where you're looking. The game also seems to use "tank controls", where your head turning in VR does not impact the direction of travel. Tinkering with the settings didn't seem to change this behavior.

I do not get motion sickness, only a very slight bit of vertigo in certain situations in certain VR games. With that being said, flying was really unpleasant. It was like I was unable to keep the simulated joystick steady, no matter what I did, and the ship would just constant drift in a direction. Since flying seems to be a big part of this game, I can't bear to try and stick it out and see what else the game has to offer.

I had picked up this game a while ago and had some fun, but with the introduction of multiplayer, it's elevated this game to an insanely fun level. There's so many mechanics and ways to interact and play in this world and doing it with a group of friends is just a ton of fun. Solo play, group play, or group RP play are all viable and fun.

The amount of customization, game setting tweaks, and mods available for this game are just absurd. This allows you to work with the game to play it in almost any manner you'd like. Whether that be a cushy sandbox building mode, an extreme survival challenge where the odds are stacked against you, or somewhere in between.

Looking at the past development history, and recent dev updates, I imagine this game will go far. However they do take the "tortoise approach rather than the hare" as the devs like to say, but I think it shows in the quality of their updates. So while updates will come, they will come when they're ready, rather than pushing out a mess.

At the surface a very easy game to get into. However, it is super punishing and you get better at this game by learning the wands, spells, enemies, bosses, and secrets as time goes on. Super fun to figure out what works, what doesn't, and how to not kill yourself as you are the biggest danger to yourself in this game.