Recent reviews by UniQMG

It is ridiculously good, the closest I've ever found to my ideal game.

The gameplay loop consists of one crisis after another as you struggle to keep everyone alive in the face of: impending heat death (of the "everything has stopped working because it's too hot" kind), impending lack of oxygen (not included) (dig more algae faster until suddenly there's no more left on the entire map), impending lack of water (no food, no crops, no mid-game electrolyzer o2), impending power failure (there is just enough of each kind of power source for you to immediately run out before you're done adapting to the next one) causing all your feedback loops to shut down making all the other problems worse.

The numerous physics systems allow for a great degree of actual engineering to go into designing a base. You have to consider travel time, logistic proximity for storage/crafting/power generation, power routing, exclusion points (airlocks to keep bad air and germs out and good air in), thermal characteristics (everything needs cooling eventually...), airflow design (carbon dioxide sinks, lighter gases rise), etc.

You will start and abandon many bases - never because you've actually "lost" (since there's no real lose condition), but because things are so dire that you just want a fresh start. Each time you get a bit further, figure out what you need to do to stave off another type of disaster, figure out how to use another tech from the tree. You're also drip-fed lore, explaining the surprisingly cohesive universe behind the game.

Its got pretty much every thing that all the other typical games I like are missing. There's actually a point: survival, unlike in Factorio where the factory must grow to meet the needs of the expanding factory. There's rich automation with no infinite loops, unlike in modded Minecraft where the goal is to automate everything ex nihilo. There's real danger too; you're in a state of constantly losing and every small effort just staves it off a bit further, unlike many other base-building-with-mooks games (e.g. Dwarf Fortress you can just wall yourself off and survive indefinitely on cave crops; Frostpunk isn't really designed to be played indefinitely so end-game everything is infinite; Timberborn your only real limited resource is water and it essentially boils down to a fixed amount of it per timestep once you can store enough to outlast the longest droughts, essentially creating a hard population cap).

It's a good game.

The dupes are incompetent, though. Yes, I'm talking to you. GO PUT COAL IN THE GENERATOR SO WE DON'T ALL SUFFOCATE. AND THEN EAT. STOP STARVING YOURSELF TO DEATH. NOW. [!!].

(I'd like to see an extension to the priority system that allows binding dupes to specific rooms or buildings. It starts to break down a bit with larger bases, and you sometimes have to resort to hacks like micromanaging yellow alerts or locking dupes in specific areas with door permissions.)

Chill Dwarf Fortress with relatively incredible graphics, a solid gameplay loop, great building, and quite good performance. It still suffers a bit from the 'end of the tech tree == end of the game' problem, especially once you've situated yourself to survive a max-length drought, but the core loop of build / harvest / hoard / survive is addictive.

Some things I like:
- Great focus on performance with only minor compromises. Pathfinding is mostly restricted to actually built paths, reducing search space. Water physics are fantastic but implemented as a 2D heightmap. Graphical FPS will start to dip late game, but simulation performance is great.
- Amazing building, feels great to be able to plan and build structures on top of other unbuilt structures.
- Mid-late game district item shuffling, starts to feel a bit like factorio. This material is produced here and needs to be moved over to this other district that can process it, all districts need food distributed to them, etc.
- Most game mechanics are built around water, which makes droughts all the more interesting. Beavers and crops require water to survive and early game power gen uses water wheels. Water evaporates as well, requiring you to build deeper reservoirs to survive long droughts. Early to mid game, your civilization will stick very close to the river. Looks nice on big screenshots.
- Fantastic default hotkey layout. Everything just works and you can mostly guess them as well.
- The entire game has a lot of inertia. Crops take a relatively long time to grow - no throwing some seeds in the ground when you get hungry. Water neds to be stockpiled, because there isn't going to be any more during a drought. Trees take a LONG time to grow - make sure to plan your timber production or risk being unable to build when you need to. And if you screw up, you can load an older save. Might have to load one several saves ago as well, easy to drink yourself into a corner during a drought.

Some things I don't like:
- Many buildings can't be built on top of others. This is probably a balance decision, and late-game you can squeeze out a bit of extra building surface with metal platforms, but it's a bit of a squeeze on creativity. I want to do a one-chunk tower base! 2D water is also a bit of a restriction. Full 3D voxel simulation would probably be nonviable, but would multiple heightmaps be doable? Split each connected floodable vertical segment of each 1x1 slice of the world into its own logical unit on the heightmap, and then precalculate connections so fluid logic runs in O(n^2+m) time where m is the number of vertical splits the player has made and n is the map size. (This is really hard to explain with text.)
- Inability to plan structures on top of resources marked for destruction. Sticks out a bit when you can plan structures on other planned structures.
- Impossible to build drainable reservoirs (i.e. floodgates) deeper than three tiles. Not really a huge problem since you can pump directly out of deep reservoirs, and there's (pretty weak tbh) mechanical pumps, but it's still there as an issue.
- Science is boring. You have a few buildings that produce 'science points', which you then spend to unlock things. You're essentially just exchanging beaver hours for new toys with zero variation in process for the whole game. At least add some tech trees with specific material or objective requirements (e.g. factorio style).

Some things I'd love to see:
- More varied and interesting external events. Droughts are great, but they eventually cap out in length. Some sort of trading system with other colonies might be neat, or some form of invaders that you have to deal with. Weather events would be neat too: rain to fill up tall tanks, frost to kill crops and freeze over still water, windstorms to knock over trees.
- Some sort of logic system. Networks of ropes and levers, if you want to keep it in theme. Ideally turing complete. I want to be able to automate floodgates opening to maintain a downstream level of water, scale active production buildings based on demand, and toggle power production based on gravity battery charge.
- Charts and graphs for supplies and water volume over time.
- A few niceties for more ergonomic building: make gears connect automatically, build certain new buildings in place over old ones (notably gear shape upgrades, and splitting a 2 high platform into 2 1 highs), blueprints to clone multi-structure constructs.

It's a little light on content (especially for the roguelike singleplayer mode) but the construction, logic and mission gameplay is rock solid.

Needs real multiplayer though, not asynchronous leaderboard stuff.

3.5/5

Nice things:
- Building is very freeform compared to similar games in the genre: Free placement (excluding intersections and with a range limit, but you can chain blocks) and physics-enabled parts (wheels, springs, pistons, etc.)
- Procedural destruction: Planets are fully excavatable and your drones are destroyed block-by-block. Seeing a drone malfunction after taking some hits to the logic gates is entertaining. (e.g. Self-immolating drone caused by a heater connected to a stuck NOT gate after the thermometer is destroyed).
- Logic blocks have a 'tag' system which allows you to create non-key signals with meaningful names (essentially variables).
- The logic system in general is solid: loads of sensors and logic gates allow for significant automation. There's enough to be turing complete and then some: You could theoretically build a processor and display (using the LEDs) that takes keyboard input directly.
- Freeform difficulty customization, incl. sandbox mode
- Roguelike mode works well, allowing you to retry missions but placing an upper limit on how slowly you can go via limited resources and an accumulating mothership risk/damage stat.
- No hard limit on drone size: A small number of blocks are free, then each block after that costs a small bit of resources.

Not nice things:
- Drones tend to flip out with certain weight configurations. (Always a problem with physics engines, but could be handled more gracefully)
- When mining with lasers, it's easy to get stuck on 1px bits of terrain.

Balance woes:
- All blocks have exactly the same cost: a single logic gate costs the same as a large battery which costs the same as a small battery which costs the same as *a small indicator light*. Somewhat justified since you only have so many of each part, but gets annoying when trying to do moderately complex logic.
- Factory is absolutely broken (but hilarious to play with). It clones any attached blocks for free, including rare blocks like large batteries and supercapacitors (which spawn fully charged too). Making it use up tritium from your total supply would work much better (at a reduced rate, e.g. 1/4 as much as normal drone parts cost but without the initial 10-25 free parts).
- Mortars *suck* to fight against, they'll impact on your shields but the AoE goes through them to take out some of your more vulnerable blocks. Relatively easy to dodge entirely though.

Deep Rock Galactic made me realize why I get bored of other typical team-based competitive shooters: There's just too much waiting and general downtime.

DRG is very very good at minimizing waiting. No queue times, just pick a lobby (optionally filtered by difficulty) and you're in. No mission start timers. Respawn times are only determined by how fast your team can rez you and there's no time wasted walking back to the fight. Each mission type has good pacing: There's a lot of variation in intensity, but none in stuff to do. If you're not shooting bugs, you're mining/constructing/exploring/shooting more bugs.

Overall difficulty is moderate, but modded lobbies (no clientside mods required for the common difficulty enhancers at the moment) can crank it up to Very Fun levels.

Overall, Tetra Online is doing it's own thing. It feels good to play, and while the matchmaker isn't all there yet, it's still decently fun. Give it a try, despite the mixed reviews. If you're going in not expecting anything, you might be pleasantly surprised. The lack of combo attacks means the gameplay is not only slower paced but less prone to unfair-feeling spikes.

-v- Old review, still relevant though -v-

Big disappointment if you're expecting Tetra Legends with multiplayer.

- Fixed DAS/ARR, line clear delay, FT3, no 180, receiving garbage mid-combo makes it feel like PPT, so avoid if you dislike slower games.
- Singleplayer modes... exist. It's 40 lines and score attack. Nothing original here.
- Matchmaking is super fast but has pretty poor results (put me against the #3 player three times in a row, losing horribly each time), though since the game just came out it's forgivable for now.
- Most animations are fast and stay out of the way, and the UI is simple and straightforward but a bit rough around the edges in terms of design. Settings menu is particularly rough: Key changers don't consume key events, so the UI jumps around if you try to bind Escape or arrow keys to something. FPS slider range is 0-999/Infinite which makes it very hard to impossible to select an exact framerate.

Currently a No, but if matchmaking improves will change to Yes.

(*free weekend review*)

>Main party is recovering
>Side party all pretty stressed, whatever lets do a quick run with them
>Doing fine for awhile, party starting to get low on health, might retreat
>Combat!
>Due to an unfortunate series of attacks, a hero dies
>As a result, another hero has a heart attack
>One stressed hero slaps that hero for a nice 3 damage
>They die
>As a result, both remaining heroes have heart attacks
>Run from combat
>Both die from another heart attack due to the stress of running from combat

10/10 It's like Dwarf Fortress without the fortress part

More serious review:
Game is fun, has a nice way of modelling progressive and cascading failures (see above). Runs on a semi-roguelike system where you pick heroes from an existing roster for each run, and survivors are returned to your roster. Each hero is an investment and losing one can be a serious setback: they can level up, have their equipment and skills improved, and accumulate positive and negative traits over time. Recruiting new heroes doesn't cost anything and you always receive loot even from abandoned runs, so you won't reach an inescapable game state.

Stress is an interesting mechanic which accumulates over time and is rather expensive to remove in town and nearly impossible to remove in dungeons. The main source of stress is darkness and taking damage, but once your party reaches high levels of stress it starts a feedback loop where idle animations and speech cause further stress among other party members. Removing stress can be done in town for a price but prevents you using a hero for the next run. Small amounts of stress can be recovered in the dungeon via enemy kills, critical healing, and on certain runs camping skills (which have limited uses over the entire run).

The game UI is generally ok except for in town, where it gets a bit clunky going through menus and managing heroes. Managing large numbers of heroes is confusing and a bit of a chore. The UI is basically unusable while combat animations are playing, which is a bit annoying when trying to plan ahead between turns. On the other hand, the animations are super slick. The narration and cutscenes are also amazing and provide a lot of atmosphere to the game.

This game is very heavy on RNG though. A total party wipe because of random crits and an unfortunate turn order is possible, and with how much investment you put into heroes this can be downright infuriating. I'd recommend against getting this game if you're easily annoyed by unfair-feeling RNG.

Didn't care for it at first but after playing for a bit the depth of the mechanics and applicable strategies really stood out. Don't forget the tower defense part of the game.

Voluntary exercise

It takes your childhood experiences making bridges out of popsicle sticks and turns it into epic warfare in a game design so unique you won't leave your first session till you drop dead from exhaustion.

Yes, it's like programming. No, not in the way everyone tells you.

Good game, would overengineer logistics again.