Recent reviews by chatgpt-4o

I write this review right after finishing the main story, on the first try, on Officer difficulty, on Survivor mode.
I went into the game knowing about its differences with the original, and it is very different. Where the first game is high tension game of micro managing your city design and your workforce and deal with problems like efficient building layouts and worker allocation, the sequel is much simpler in that regard. Even though I unlocked almost everything in the Idea Tree, for most of them it wasn't out of necessity or efficiency. It was to keep my factions in balance and pleased. That's the main management mechanic in the sequel. You're not concerned much with surviving, but you are concerned with keeping the people happy, and obedient.
It does sound like a very interesting gimmick with lots of potential, and in my first playthrough I had a few moments where I was struggling with keeping the factions from destroying everything I built. But unfortunately, just like in the first game, if you setup a good infrastructure early, the game does start to snowball and become very easy to manage. That said, I still enjoyed managing multiple cities, and dealing with the factions and the council system, for the little time it did matter at the start lol
All that said, I do really feel like the game still has great potential, esp with a number of DLCs planned in the future (which were also the best part of the first game imo). And if you're new to the franchise, it is a very unique game, so I wholly recommend it still to anyone who just wants to experience a survival, and political take on city builders.

I had already put many hours into both Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program before I played Satisfactory. I went into the game and to be completely honest I did not enjoy the game as a factory building game at all. It has a lot of jank with building placements, clipping and many more instances of weirdness due to the game being 3D and not forcing a standard grid or building size scale. Your only option to organize your factory neatly and scaling it late into the game is to build on foundations, high above the terrain. And that's a big negative imo because the world itself it meticulously designed by hand and is interesting to explore. But it's an absolute pain to build a factory on. Other than the building aspects tho there's also many little instances of qol that other factory games have to make scaling your factory late game tolerable, e.g. Satisfactory lacks a good build camera. And the closest it gets is an endgame jetpack that only works when your very close to power poles.
All the negativity aside tho I still recommend the game. But not to factory building enthusiasts like myself that like to build huge factories and obsess over watching graphs and scaling different production lines massively. I would definitely consider Satisfactory to be more about the creative building and visual aspects of the factory building process rather than the factory itself. If you like making cool buildings, coloring your walls, and making huge sculptures in other games like Minecraft or No Man's Sky then Satisfactory would be a really cool game for you. It's also much much easier to learn as a factory game than the other games I mentioned at the start of this review, so it's very beginner friendly and approachable. It's also very fun to play with friends the same way other sandbox games are.

I'm a huge fan of the first game, and apart from a few puzzle instances, especially from the end of the dlc, I very much loved the game. This sequel is a decent upgrade from the first in some regards like ui but in my opinion the story of the sequel doesn't have that cool sense of mysticism the weird cases of the first game had. Instead the events in the sequel mainly have the same exact reasoning of trying to throw you off with a weird twist every time. And specifically, twists that don't really feel too intuitive but rather speculative. It feels a lot more like looking at the puzzle pieces and just thinking what would fit, instead of trying to solve the mystery through the clues sometimes.
That all said, the game is still pretty good and I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes unraveling cool little mysteries.

This game is genuinely, thoroughly satisfying. The game mechanics feel really fresh and amusing. The world is filled with little puzzles that are fun to tackle. The environment is pretty and vibrant with life. The visual look simple but they are very polished and do have a good amount of detail and variety to them that is genuinely surprising given the entire game is one single 34MB exe file. The post game content are very very good and imo make this a very accessible game to get into "community solved puzzles" similar to ARGs, without breaking the game immersion or having to do absurd things. That being said there's still stuff in the game at the moment of writing this that aren't fully solved yet.

I absolutely loved Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP back in the day. Played through it on multiple platforms, multiple times. And that's how I came to know about this game when it was first announced.
Jett, along with its expansion upon arrival on steam, is simply put, two game modes set in the same one somewhat open world. Firstly you'll be going through a linear, story-driven experience exploring all the main landmarks of the world. And in the second campaign you would be in complete free roam with a few collection and exploration tasks to progress and finish the game.
I personally found the "narration" in the first campaign a bit too distracting and hard to keep up with. Since NPCs talk in a made-up language with subtitles and most dialog takes place during gameplay, it's easy to get annoyed or miss a dialog or an objective. However this issue is non-existent in the second campaign and you're mainly left to move around and figure out the tasks and puzzles without much hand holding at all.
Music and ambiance plays a big role in your playing experience, especially in the second campaign. However the overall theme and energy of the ost is not very exciting and much more calm and ambient, but still pretty good.
Same with the gameplay itself. Getting the hang of gliding and building up speed definitely takes practice and feels very awkward sometimes but overall it's a smooth and calming experience. However in my personal playthrough which was very shortly after the steam release, I did run into some really bad level streaming bugs that sometimes required me to restart my game to fix softlocks. Same with some areas loading incorrectly and sounds crashing, etc. I would say if you don't like bugs, you should really make sure those issues have been fixed otherwise I wouldn't really recommend this game to you.

TLDR; if the loading bugs from the initial release days have been fixed, Jett is a pretty interesting, and somewhat relaxing experience with chill sounds and okay gameplay. The first campaign has a bit too much exposition dumps and awkward dialog reading but the second campaign is the total opposite.

Having played all Myst games as well as Obduction, I want to summarize how Firmament holds up, as a puzzle game and also a Cyan Worlds game.

TLDR; Decent puzzle game. A little short and easier compared to mentioned games. Expect a few bugs. Classic, maybe dated visuals. But overall I had a pleasant experience with no complaints.

- Environment -
If you've played any of the mentioned games from Cyan, this will immediately look familiar to you. Beautiful, vast scenery, across multiple worlds. A feeling of loneliness and exploration in a world that was clearly inhabited, but for some reason is abandoned.
I will say, that the game does not have ground breaking graphics that will blow your mind. If anything, it does actually feel like the other Cyan games. I personally didn't dislike the dated visuals as it had a feeling of familiarity and nostalgia for me.

- Puzzles -
The puzzles themselves are pleasantly challenging. Definitely NOT as difficult as any of the Myst games or Obduction. I never had to take any screenshots, and I only had to use my notepad once or twice to test out a solution before I apply it in-game.
The Adjunct is a very welcome addition to the puzzle solving experience, with clear explanations of what you're interacting with, and friendly controls and even a display for some puzzles that you don't have good vision in. You're no longer left to figure out what the puzzles are for, or what their components are. That is not to say it detracts from the experience. There's still a bunch of clever solutions you need to do to progress, as with all Cyan games.

- A Few Important Notes -
Length - Compared to the other mentioned games, Firmament was to me, shorter, and also easier with less obscure puzzles that required me to backtrack.

Jank - Having played through all the Myst games just recently, it wasn't really unexpected to see a few bugs. There are a few that could hinder your progress in various puzzles, as well as other more minor game design bugs. I highly recommend SAVING before you attempt any solving just in case you run into a bug that gets you stuck (I encountered a few instances of such in later puzzles, but nothing too annoying or game breaking)

Performance - I have a pretty old pc, i7 7700k with an RTX 2080 Super, and I set the graphics settings to max, with no super sampling. Even though I did get 45-50 FPS in some very particular spots in the maps, overall I had a very smooth experience, mostly locked at 60FPS.

FINAL NOTE: YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO HEAR A NARRATOR AS YOU EXPLORE THE GAME. IF YOU'RE NOT HEARING THEM, THEIR DIALOG IS PROBABLY STUCK IN A PREVIOUS MAP. I realized this only at the end of the game lol but it didn't really hinder my progress as I still understood what I was doing and why and still finished the game with the important dialogs occurring and understood the story.

I'm a sucker for exploration games and I have to say this game surprised me. Don't be fooled by the simple looks and sometimes janky mechanics, there is a lot here. I've put more than 5 hours into this game when it was still unfinished and I had a great time exploring all the cool environments. There's lots of variety in art, difficulty and gameplay of the different areas of the game. You can get lost in the world trying to find out what to do next and that might lead you to a secret that you never thought could be there. There's lots of secrets, I'm not even sure I found all of them. The combat is simple, but it can be difficult, frustrating even sometimes but it's always satisfying to just shoot the guns.

I'll be honest, if you're looking for a perfect game without flaws this ain't it. But it's definitely the passion project of one man, and it shows in all the effort put into designing literally everything in the game. Nothing really felt like a stock model, or out of place, and I did really like the old school simple looks and I have to say even the jank was entertaining to me. Definitely recommend this for fans of exploring and light puzzles. It's also amusing to find ways to break the game and do sequence breaks.

P.S. I love dash hopping. By far my favorite way to move around a game in a while.

I feel like a lot of people are being emotional in judging this game. I will try to be as pragmatic as I can to give a clear view of what I experienced. I will also mention that I did finish the game as well as got 100% completion (items/map).

Bugs/crashes: I did not experience a single crash and I don't recall encountering any bugs at all in my 14 hours of play.

Exploration/Map: The game world is rather big. As in it takes up a lot of space. There are two main "worlds" you traverse. The Overworld and The Breach. The Overworld is a huge natural landscape with different biomes. As such, a lot of screens could feel same-y because of the natural/ruin/abandoned nature of the world. It still is a lot of space and there's a lot to explore and there is a fair bit of variety. Both in level design and also gameplay of each biome. The Breach on the other hand feels like a more retro version of the world, both in design and gameplay. The screens are smaller. The map is not as big and expansive as the Overworld and I would say the main use of it is traversal during the main story. There really isn't much use to going to the Breach once you have most of the game explored other than for hunting secrets. I should also mention that the Breach is a lot more dangerous than the Overworld with more enemies and tight spaces.

Gameplay: The main gameplay of the game is exploration. The abilities you find throughout the game are almost all used for traversal. There are two types of enemies in the game. Normal enemies you encounter all over the world, and stronger, unique enemies you may call "bosses". Combat in the game I would say does work but it is lackluster. Up until near the end of the game, almost all normal enemies are an annoyance mainly because of the melee combat. That being said combat is not your only option. There's also hacking that you can invest some skill points into and use against most enemies to ease the fight. But again it's a simple system and doesn't really make you feel smart or skilled for using it. The "bosses" I'm sad to say are all pushovers, every single one. There's no contact damage so you can just go into the boss' body and spam melee and there's a good chance you won't die. On top of that, spending some time upgrading your damage skills and finding good weapons makes combat trivial, and fast.

Comparison To First Game: I see so many reviews mentioning how the game is not as good as the first one. I personally don't agree with this sentiment. Reason being Axiom Verge 2 has evolved and built upon what Axiom Verge did best. The map is so much bigger. The unique abilities used for traversal and combat are still there and I would say they've become more integrated and fit together very well to enhance your experience. Another major complaint mentioned in other reviews is the overall theme and feel of the world not being alien. That is both true and false. It's true that the game does not at all feel like the first game but that's not a bad thing in itself. I think what has disappointed some is just the bland/abandoned feel the new world. It's just a different theme altogether, and I personally didn't mind it. That being said, the world is not all nature and landscapes. There are structures and environments that have the same alien feel the first game had, but again they are all mostly abandoned or in ruins, as is the theme of the world.

Conclusion: Axiom Verge 2 does have its shortcomings, mainly in the lackluster combat and to an extent having a mostly bland world. It really is a completely different feeling from the first game. However, in my experience, as I explored about half of the game, due to the abilities and upgrades I had acquired, and the variety in biomes and so many different areas to explore, I did start to enjoy the game more and more and in the end I did really enjoy moving around and exploring the world to the point that I decided to find every item and explore the entire map. It's understandable that the game did not meet many players' expectations coming from the first game however the game itself is not a bad game.

I've spent more time playing this short demo than I have playing entire games. The music is just BANGING. And you feel so cool hitting the notes, especially on harder difficulties. I cannot wait for the full game. This is most likely my favorite music-based game I've ever played.

Haven, true to its name, is the perfect life most can wish for. A very calming, intimate and heartwarming experience from beginning to the very end. If you've ever dreamed of living on a lone planet alongside your loved one, and enjoy your life and love for each other to the fullest while exploring landscapes that feel like watercolor paintings, listening to chill synthwave, encountering all kinds of cute animals (that you can pet), finding weird but juicy looking fruits and making weirder but delicious looking food with them, or just stay at home and chat, and do goofy things together all day, this game is for you.

It's not a challenging game. There's no deep mysterious lore or many characters. And I'll be honest, there aren't many enemy types, landscapes and combat will feel same-y but that's all fine because the random interactions and conversations are so cute and chill you will wish the game went on forever.