Recent reviews by Ozymandias

If you love automation and building games like Factorio and Satisfactory, you're probably going to enjoy Foundry. I sure have!

The crafting, automation, and manufacturing design are all very solid, but what I found unique about Foundry is the use of destructible terrain. Although it sounds simple, it really adds an interesting and fun layer to the game. My first conveyor belt to connect a distant resource went over a mountain, but later I started just digging my own tunnels straight through. The way elevators work is really brilliant and makes it both fun and practical to integrate deeply buried resource deposits. Oh, and do you want to mine an area with your drill or would you rather toss out a handful of (cheap and easy to make) explosives and detonate them remotely!?! Tons of fun.

The game is still early access and there are a few relatively simple changes I'd really love to see. Upgrading your drill speed by 20% doesn't really feel impactful when you're drilling out hundreds of blocks at a time. Why not double drill power? Or let the drill reach 1 block farther so you don't have to throw down a cube to stand on top of to clear for a ceiling? Similarly I wish there were more early-mid game mobility options. I'd love to see enhancements to move speed and jump height prior to the (admittedly awesome) jetpack.

Overall I have really enjoyed building my factories and trying to expand them organically as my needs evolved through the tech tree. Two thumbs up for sure!

This is a good game and definitely has improvements over the first in terms of building, balance, and general game mechanics. So yes, I would recommend this if you like sim games and/or dinosaurs...

BUT I'd still recommend the first game above this one just for how good the campaign is. In this sequel the campaigns are just, well, lackluster. There is a ton of just sitting around for minutes at a time waiting for cash reserves to build up, where in the first game you could do mini-quests for cash boosts at any time. There is also a lot of repeat content in this one, with multiple of the Chaos Theory missions 'teaching' the same things you've already mastered in the Campaign (which should be called the Tutorial).

Overall I really did enjoy this sequel, though the next time I get the urge to build a dinosaur park I'll probably go back to JWE1 which was a masterpiece.

This is a thumbs up with some strong caveats.

At its core, ARK is a genius game in terms of both crafting and survival. I've played a ton in this genre and ARK is the gold standard in terms of how progression scales, how many different paths of progression there are, and just the sheer amount of challenging and interesting things to do. I have over 2k hours in the original and I'll likely end up with similar numbers in this remaster.

That said, there are a few significant issues that can really ruin the experience. If you're playing online, server crashes, roll-backs, and bugs will account for almost all of the times you'll die and lose hard-earned equipment or tames. Years later and the game is still full of exploitable bugs, so don't be surprised when your base gets wiped out on PvE or your defenses completely bypassed on PvP. On official servers there is no moderation, so exploit to your hearts content, I guess. Half of the online community is completely toxic, especially the PvP community.

All that said, ARK is a great game with some serious flaws. It is decent as a single player game, but really shines when playing with others, whether your style is PvE or PvP. However, don't be shocked when bugs/exploits/crashes ruin hours (or days) of work, because that WILL happen.

Ozymandias has a great name going for it. But even past that, it's a really good strategy game. It is more of a strategy board game than what I'd usually consider a 4X game on the PC, but like all top notch board games, Ozymandias is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. After the tutorial campaign it took me a few games (and a re-read of the FAQ) to start being able to complete the more difficult maps. There is very little luck involved, so it really does come down to understanding the rules and improving your strategies.

When you do start playing, pay attention to the difficulty of the Civ you're playing (not just the difficulty setting of the game), as starting position and traits makes a HUGE difference. You'll get frustrated if you try playing a Hard civ just because you like it before you master beating the game with Easy and Medium civs.

I'm 15 hours in an expect to put in a good bit more time getting better. Definitely worth a buy if you like strategy board games.

For less than the price of a mocha frappucino you can't go wrong with this game! It is fast paced with plenty of interesting combinations and weapon/item choices, plenty of heroes to pick with different starting skills, and an absolute TON of things to try to unlock. I've played over 25 hours in the last couple of weeks and still have plenty of 'advanced' aspects of the game I haven't even touched yet.

My only (minor) compaint is that I wish there was a save game feature. Each run is up to 30 minutes and sometimes real life comes up and I won't be playing again for a day or two, which has meant losing 20+ minutes of progress several times. Oh well. Still fun.

I'm about 40 hours in and this is easily the best CRPG in the last 5 years, possibly ever. There are just so many choices that feel meaningful, both in the story and in the mechanics of the game. I continue to be amazed by how many ways there are to solve every problem and how deep every aspect of the world is.

I'm really on the fence with giving this a negative review. I played through the entire game and, until the last hour or so, I would have given it a thumbs up. This game is a prime example of the developers making the last boss fight (and to a lesser extent the last few levels) a completely different game than the ~25 hours leading up to it.

Additionally, there are some really odd decisions they made when making this game. Like making several of your characters really unlikeable, but treating them all like heroes. And the story gets really wonky towards the end, especially with some of your characters switching sides arbitrarily. And at one point in the game there is a massive ~40-minute battle where... the developers disabled saving. God forbid you are a human who may have something come up during that 40 minutes where you'd need to stop playing. (Note: I am one of those humans who had to stop playing about 30 minutes into that... so I had to start the entire slog of a battle again)

And equally mysterious of a design decision, they made the Miasma Powers (ie. magic) such a rare resource in the game that it can't really be used. Even with the skills, equipment, and modifications to regenerate power, you'll still only be able to use a power once every 4 battles or so. Making it something that, by definition, can't be used as part of your general strategy. Indeed, powers aren't even powerful enough that they make a huge difference. You can do just fine without ever using them.

All that said, most of the core mechanics are pretty solid. The stealth aspects are well done, the skill trees give decent utility, and it is satisfying to be able to crush encounters with careful planning. There are a few problematic bugs (most notably the teleporting and starting combat when leaving ambush mode), but the save-system means that you don't lose much progress when that happens.

Overall this game is SO CLOSE to being great, but a few poor decisions put a damper on it.

Midnight Suns is a bit of a mixed bag.

Pros:
* The turn-based, card-based combat system is great. It has tons of interesting mechanics, interactions, and dynamics. It is a bit puzzle like (in an Into The Breach sort of way), such that it can be very satisfying when you figure out the perfect set of plays to turn around a bad situation.
* The whole game is very polished. Other than one crash-to-desktop the only bug I experienced was a missing line of audio from a dialog.

But also... Cons:
* For a strategy game, there is a lot of non-strategy part of the game. Way too much. I'd estimate that over 80% of my ~70 hours were spent listening to dialogs, farming components, and playing a weird hero-fanfic-friendship simulator game.
* The grind is real. You'll spend literally hours of the game running laps around the building each day, looking for little glowing resources that are 100% critical to upgrading cards to keep your deck relevant. As you progress through the game, you'll need even more resources to reroll random card mods till you get something decent.
* For a deck building game, they sure make it a massive pain to build decks! To break down unneeded cards you have to run to one end of the abbey, to upgrade cards you need to run to another area. You need to go deep into a character menu to unequip cards that you'll want to upgrade. But you'll need to fill in the deck while you have those cards out, then manually dig through the deck and your card stockpile to place them back in. Why not allow upgrading of cards equipped in your deck? Why not just have one tool for deck management, upgrading, modding, and disassembling??
* Nothing you do matters to the story. Sure there is only one ending, but that is fine. But every time I beat down an enemy boss, the cutscene is as if none of that happened. Beat down a boss... cut to a scene of your group cowering in fear of him. Beat down a different boss... cut to a scene of your group getting beat up, watching idly while he monologues, triggers his doomsday trap, and leaves. The conclusion to almost every boss battle was extremely unsatisfying.

Overall, the core aspect of the game (the deck building turn-based strategy) is very good, but the only way I'll be doing another runthrough is with mods. Namely mods that dramatically decrease the grind, in particular by bumping up resource collection, friendship gains, and removing bad card mods when you reroll them.

This is a very solid squad-based tactical game. It has some really cool risk/reward mechanics that really make for interesting and challenging gameplay. It is quite polished with just enough story and character to keep it interesting without getting in the way. Boss battles are intense and overall the options are pretty well balanced.

That said, this doesn't have the quite depth of something like XCOM2 and the switching out gear mods between every battle became so cumbersome I stopped doing it after a while, just ignoring upgrades I got. But this is still definitely worth a buy if you like this type of game.

A very fun manager game, certainly worth $10. It's not super deep, but the different classes have plenty of synergies with each other, making it a good challenge to select the right gladiators for the opponents in the upcoming fight. There are some notable balance issues (that you can use to your favor of course) and some unintuitive concepts (like how you can double the DPS of an archer by adding a few points in Intellect), but hopefully those will be cleaned up by when this releases.

I spent about 10 hours playing and I think I finished most of the content/quests in game so far. I'll probably give it another playthrough once it's out of early access.