Recent reviews by VelociRandom

You can skip the Paradox launcher with Steam launch options (though change the path to where you have the game installed):

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Across the Obelisk\AcrossTheObelisk.exe" %command%

Not normally much of a card game person, but this one I enjoy. Other than the latest update now taking like a minute to launch instead of seconds because of the launcher and the unskippable dev logos (that the game isn't even loading behind...).

For people who like Factorio, but also like bright colours. And have an unhealthy love for Scratch.
Performance is surprisingly good even as you get hundreds of bots doing their own thing, and the recent QoL patches were a godsend.

I'm really not sure why you'd implement an invasive Anti-Cheat system for a game with... no objectives, at the expense of hundreds of good client-side mods that help with accessibility and performance. And then get the amount of feedback they've gotten and *still* go through with it. Seems like a lot of loss for literally no benefit if there's not actually anything to cheat on.

I'll admit that I haven't played a ton, but I've literally only ever run into issues with the client itself -- never other players behaving in ways where a poorly-implemented Anticheat would have helped.

I spend more time in the Vinyl designer than actually driving. 10/10 for creative potential.
Plus the LEGO DLC, which is just beautifully done.
And the fact I'm pretty sure I drove past my house.

Really wish there was a "Not yet" review option. I would wait a little while before buying this if you're on the fence.

I can't speak much for the quality of the game, having only played a little of it before refunding it. It seemed sweet, but the highest framerate I got was ~45fps (GTX 1080, i7 10700k, 1440p) on even the lowest possible settings and with the RTX features disabled, which for a game that renders so little at a time seems absolutely absurd.
If you've got a 20/30 series GPU and can support RTX features and DLSS, by all means give it a try, but short of that it seems most of the experience comes from the hyper-realistic graphics -- which you won't be able to enjoy without one. So yeah, I'd skip it until at least a few performance patches come out otherwise.

I couldn't tell you how much money I've spent on LEGO, including their games, and enjoyed every moment.
But this one is absolutely the worst LEGO game I've played. Including LEGO Worlds.

- The opening is awful. You start on the Milano, and you're basically just left to your devices. If you don't know the comic versions of the characters, you don't know the abilities you have at your disposal, and even playing with a friend it took us 10-15 minutes to work out what we were supposed to be doing.
- Everything is a boss fight -- boss fights that are artificially extended by randomly and lazily locking out the health bar instead of giving an actual excuse for the bosses to leave the fight.
- Every level seems to have a completely useless character. She-Hulk comes to mind, being packed into levels with Ms Marvel who has all her abilities and more, despite there being plenty of characters for every player to use anyway.
- The game randomly decides to run terribly sometimes. Solid 60fps in 1440p 90% of the time but occasionally I'll boot it up and it runs at 15-20 instead.
- While I understand that getting all the MCU voice actors in would be prohibitively expensive, every Groot line (not the baby, baby Groot sounds fine) sounds so awful. How is it that hard to get "I am Groot" said in a way that doesn't constantly sound tired or disappointed?
- Only a minor point but the TT Games intro which usually is quite impressive, is very dull. It's just the Guardians opening but with the TT logo pasted over it. You've got decades of comics to reference, and they couldn't find a way to integrate an interesting opening cutscene like they did in TFA or Jurassic World?
- Oh dear god, the webslinging. It's so nauseating and impossible to control, especially when really early on in the game you're tasked with chasing some dude as Spidey and Gwen. Flight isn't great compared to the first game either, but that at least doesn't give me a headache.
- The Time manipulation ability. Expect to sit there twiddling a thumbstick for like 5 minutes with no feedback that anything is, or should be, happening. Then you turn it the other way and get no feedback at all. Turn it back the first way, and oh, suddenly it's working and there's a new stage to it.
- All the extras start pre-unlocked. Why? Red bricks has always been a good and rewarding system.
- The character unlock animation length. Bloody hell. You don't need 15 seconds of shuddering and shaking before you show us a character, especially when you're unlocking 5-6 each time and you end up waiting over a minute waiting to find out what that one character is that you didn't recognise.

On the other hand:
- It's pretty. Plenty of really nice details on the character models (like the LEGO logo under the arms I hadn't even noticed was on real minifigs until now).
- The Season Pass actually seems to include all the DLC, which is a huge step up from the other recent games that haven't included everything.
- The hero customisation is pretty solid. I made a fairly convincing Elsa to go with the multiple Frozen references this game seems to make.

It's free. So there's no harm in giving it a go regardless.
Though, that said, I had at least hoped going in that the camera would be in a decent place, rather than far too low and half way inside the steering wheel with no way of repositioning. Tends to be useful to see while racing.
Controls were... interesting. Might be because I'm used to more arcadey racers but turning and reversing were much less predictable than I had expected, with either simply seeming impossible for some reason. Didn't stay around long enough to find out. Was pretty though.

To put it simply, Machinecraft is like Robocraft crossed with Besiege, only you can build literally anything with very few limits in place.

Want to make a tiny box that murders everything? You can.
Want to make a flying, transforming laser toaster? That too.
Want to build a super accurate car with ALL of the details? Go right ahead!

The possibilities with what you can make in this game are limitless

However, nothing is perfect. This game has two drawbacks; the first of which being the barebones tutorial.
The tutorial is in Japanese, so the only option is to use the subtitles in your native language (usually not translated that well, but it gets the point across).
Once you're done with those and you have a basic idea of the controls, you can start looking at the sample machines (in the _samples folder) to get an idea of the functionality of each aspect of the game.
Did I mention the Workshop support? You can download a huge number of machines built by the community, and either play with them as they are or dissect them and see how they work.
So all things considered, the barebones tutorial isn't that bad.

The only other drawback, I would say, is the number of players. There aren't that many people playing, but those who do tend to play quite consistently, and you'll start to recognise names and make friends very quickly (most players can be really lovely). Plus, as people are trying the game the community is expanding and the game is becoming more populated.

The reason I say this game is like Besiege is not only the fact that individual sections of machines (bodies) can be destroyed, but also the freedom to assign any functional part to any number of assignable buttons, at your convenience.

There is DLC available for this game, in the form of a £7 'donation', in a way. Upon purchase, you gain access to two cosmetic parts: the stamp, and the emitter.

The stamp works by allowing you to paste one (or several) custom image(s) (up to 512x512 pixels, for obvious reasons), onto either the chassis blocks, the whole machine, or just a widely configurable part known as a box, which is simply a giant, or tiny, customiseable cube.



Any questions, feel free to comment on this review and I'll try to answer them.

I am Groot.

Some of the plantoid portraits look seriously cool. I don't think I'd buy it at full price, but 40% off seemed fair for the extra additions to the game, especially given that the AI use these too. The extra diversity is a nice change from the usual empires.

Chances are, you'll only buy this to support the developers if it's not on sale. There isn't anything game-changing, but the new stuff looks pretty.