Recent reviews by [Ars]Rampancy

Refunded about five minutes in due to a lack of basic tutorial. it just... stopped.

At the time of this review, The Universim is a combination of unclear mechanics, and lack of popularity resulting in fan wikis being outdated. This results in a lot of avoidable failure states due to the player not being taught basic gameplay mechanics.

Every once in a while I load the game to see if this has been corrected, and it has decidedly not.

I should have read some forum comments before to pull this down after pre-ordering it long ago. Turns out there's a bug where your staff will not feed animals, and I've run into it quickly.

Game crashed three times in seventeen minutes, so I didn't get a _ton_ of gameplay experience in, but I got the vibe that the game is really pretty but combat is annoying as hell.

Beautiful and funny, but unacceptable in basic gameplay. Once I found out how to use my wrench to smash open a door, I was half out of air. A solid half of the strikes of my wrench to open the door didn't connect, the other half did more durability loss to my wrench than the door.

This was after having to spend multiple trips trying to identify what the raw materials to make the wrench look like.

Bonus difficulty: 80% of the game's forums are engrish-riddled, meaning assistence is impossible.

A soft thumbs up for me, returning to the game after a long absence.

It's a fun, charming game, but suffers from a bad ratio of currency : units. In less affectatious terms, this means that the investment in gold/mana/whatever is never feels like it's worth the unit that makes it. Most of the RTS portion of the game always feels like I need at least double the units, but there's not enough gold / evilness / raw space to support it.

Hard to articulate, but a there's a lot of "I wish I knew about X before Y" situations that came up in my will-it-be-fun-by-the-2h-mark playthrough. I regularly spent money on guns that I didn't enjoy (guns are numerically defined, but I wish I could've seen them in action before buying them), and I got the impression that I could've gotten screwed by a bad gun choice for a level.

It might be up your alley, but I feel like it wasn't up mine.

Does a lot of things right in terms of informing the player on where enemies will spawn and the route they will take, but unless you're a 12 year old on adderall the difficulty is simply too high; demanding too much from the player simultaneously. At no point can you rely on your towers (in a Tower Defense game) to even handle a portion of what the game throws at you. This would be tolerable if your own weapons hit harder to compensate, but they don't.

It's telling to me that the developer has seen fit to comment on reviews, implying that players haven't quite understood how to use their towers. No, they _do_. As you can see in the comments below, the developers are extremely defensive about the failings in their game, with no intent or desire to correct them.

While others will kvetch about how the game went from a 2D top-down game to a 3D flight sim (that's still on a 2D plane), my core annoyance with the game comes from the impenetrability of the base gameplay. A lack of a general overview of your ship's strengths and weaknesses make it hard to balance things out (for example, no way to even track your DPS, or if you're weak in one area of damage-dealing), and options like damage-notifiers are disabled by default. The community page for this game is full of things that the game should explain, but does not.

I loved the original game, and really wanted to like this one. But I had to make a choice if 14 bucks made me happier or annoyed, and I'm really upset that SPAZ2 was more annoying than fun.

Attractive and with a lot of quality-of-life things that its parent Minecraft has (no needing a second page up to seek out crafting schemes!), the game fails to have the one thing that makes the original so appealing: the ability to change your level from a monster-populated one to a safe, explorative one and back. So many of the game's options feel locked behind a paywall, as well. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it, and I really wanted to like it.