Recent reviews by Devlin

i went in blind and was left in awe

Video game junk food in the best way possible. One of the best value purchases you can make at $3 and even at the new $5 price

This game is incredible.

Of all the games I've owned and played over the years (600+ games, 20+ years) Outer Wilds is an outlier and completely unique experience that reaches highs which might be peak moments I won't ever achieve in a video game again. It's been over 9 months since I completed Outer Wilds, but I still think about it every day. Whenever I look up at the stars in wonder and feel the wanderlust to explore distant planets I'm reminded of Outer Wilds, which immersed me in a world where space exploration and discovery were my primary methods of unearthing a mystery I don't want to spoil even a microcosm of. It would be a disservice to this wonderful game, and tarnish the once-in-a-lifetime experience that is Outer Wilds.

Looks like a great game; really wish I could play, but as the other reviews say the game is completely dead. Zero players across the servers list, too bad I never got a chance to play it. If you're deadset on playing this game I'd recommend the four pack and giving the copies away to friends. Devs should go with The Ship treatment and give free copies away with each purchase, and lower the price by a large amount to try and revitalize the community. R.I.P. Strike Vector.

Praise the sun!

In the games current state, I would not recommend it. There is absolutely no help for you once you jump in the game, no tooltips or tutorials whatsoever. There is a user guide which was very helpful to me, but I don't think that people should have to rely on guides to figure out the basics of a game. It's all pretty much trial and error for noobies, and can be very overwhelming with all the different types of blocks and such, especially when you have no idea what any of them do. While trial and error is good and all, when it's the only way you have to learn the game's mechanics, it becomes quite tedious. I also think some of the games mechanics need to be reworked - such as dying in your own home. In order to finish booby-trapping your house, you have to reach your vault yourself, which I think makes perfect sense. However, if you die while testing out your defenses, you start over from scratch. Sure it makes sense, but I think the player should just simply be cut a break here. How are we supposed to know if a certain trap works if we can't test it ourselves? There's also a five minute rule. In which if you are inactive for five minutes, the game kills you off; this happens even if you are testing your own home. As far as I understand the developer is frequently updating the game so I'd advise waiting for a few patches to roll out before trying this game.

Edit: After playing a bit more of the game I'm starting to realize how broken it is. Rather than using clever traps that require the robber to think in order to break into the vault, I'm finding most people just use simple game-breaking tactics that make it pure luck if anyone succesfully robs you. An example of this that I've seen quite often is making columns with walls with a door at the end of each one, behind one door is their vault, behind every other is a pitbull ready to bite your face off. That is just one of many examples I've seen, which makes robbing other people's houses nearly impossible. This game is a great idea and I hope the developer can find a way to fix these issues, but until then this game is not worth your money.

Second edit: The game can certainly be fun, after doing some research on traps, tools, etc. via the wiki and understanding the game a bit more it became pretty addicting. I still would not recommend this game because robbing others houses is just simply too hard. There's many cheap tactics you can use and in most cases I find myself either stepping inside someone's house, turning around and leaving, or walking around a bit and end up dead with everything I worked for lost. The addicting/fun part of this game for me is building my house, then watching people attempt to run through it, while killing my family in the process. Robbing others is just way too risky, and about 99% of the time will end up getting you killed. As a lot of others have mentioned, there is also a huge level of unfairness depending on how much money you have. I think that as long as the people on the top of the list don't get themselves killed from robbing others, then they'll just stay at the top from people trying to rob them (you get a bounty reward when robbers die inside your house). These giant maze-like houses become literally impossible to break into after a certain point, when just one false step can end up being fatal; and with dozens of doors to choose from, it's pure luck if anyone were to ever succeed. Definitely could use some balancing - for starters I'd suggest raising the measly $2,000 starting cash; even an extra $500 would be enough to make a difference. Whether it be more money to defend your home, or buy tools to break into someone elses, or have more in your vault to attract robbers attention to get their bounty, or more money for them if they successfully rob you - the more money that goes around, the better. As long as it doesn't go to the rich scumbags, haha.

Feature requests: Due to how often you die in this game, it would be nice to have layout saves, which would be especially useful for the start of the game. There's not a whole lot you can do with the beginning $2,000, so once you find a starting layout that you like it'd be nice to not have to build it over and over again each time you die. It would be useful for the end-game as well, and maybe the developer didn't add it in because he didn't want people to use the same layout each time, but I know that a majority of people will find one they like and stick with it rather than going through the trouble of coming up with a new one, if the developer wants them to or not; so a layout feature would just make it less of a hassle.

Secondly, because of how hard it is already to rob peoples houses, I don't think that you should lose every item in your backpack if you make it out alive. Dropping the items to make room for their cash in the vault makes sense.

Third, improve the search at the menu. As of now you can only search by name, and the list is sorted by richest to poorest. Add some more filters, such as "people who robbed you" or "sort by poorest", even the option to search by money rather than name would be nice. Obviously the people with the most money will have the hardest houses to break into, so if you're starting out you could try breaking into some low/mid-tier houses instead.

Lastly, a hand tool when building your house. When making a mistake while building you have to flip through the different items/blocks/animals and re-place them where you want them. It would be much easier and speed up the process if I had a hand tool that allowed me to just pick stuff up and drop it somewhere else, which could then be doubled as a tool that let me select multiple items by dragging a box, and moving them all at once.

Completely free to play, all in-game purchases are purely for cosmetic reasons only. On top of that it's also the best ARPG I've ever played, adding new features and ideas (most notably the massive passive skill tree) that make it unique.

Awesome game.