Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον Willowtron

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a genuinely phenomenal game, but it is NOT perfect. I just want to go over some of the common complaints from the perspective of someone who still recommends the game in spite of them.

The most common complaint from Early Access was the enforced 15-minute shift timer; this is still present in the game's "career" mode (which functions as the campaign), but there's now an option to play a free-mode without the timer. The forced shift time is a requirement for the campaign to function, but playing with it is now optional from the moment you load up the game - so if it was putting you off, don't worry.

Secondly, a lot of complaints leaving early access were the number of ships. I somewhat agree; the game revolves around the internal systems of the ships becoming increasingly complex, but if you progress quickly through the levels (ie: if you're good) then you'll reach a point where you've seen everything a little quicker than you might expect. This means that the only real "challenge" the game has is how cleanly you can salvage a ship - the focus is no longer on learning, but on perfecting; however I'd say that only now, 70 hours in, have I reached a point where I can perfectly salvage any ship. Some more variation would be nice, but I wouldn't say it makes the game not worth playing, there's still plenty to learn before you hit that plateau.

And thirdly, the story. BBI explain in their FAQ that they believe a game to be "a conversation between the developer and the community", and while it's a sentiment I agree with, in H:S's case it is VERY literal. The story takes the form of a series of dialogues that the player listens in on; you cannot interact in any meaningful way, and the only "choice" you have is at the very end of the story. Because there is no interactivity, and there is ONLY dialogue, the characters come across as very 1-dimensional. There's no way for the player to know these characters outside of what they say, so they kind of have to put their whole personality out from day 1; this leads to a heavy use of cliche and trope that makes the story itself predictable and bland. The actual quality of the voice acting is pretty decent, which makes it not intolerable, but again if you progress through your salvage goals quickly (ie: you're good) you will be getting unskippable dialogue between AND during EVERY shift, and there's probably only one character you actually care about (Weaver my beloved).

In my opinion, BBI needed to pace their story WAY better. They've used the line following the prior quote, "the other side of that is that sometimes we value different things", to seemingly shield themselves from any form of criticism; but when you make a game about having a relaxing time breaking ships, and then have your story sort of... get in the way of that? You literally just needed to have the frequency of dialogue be lower and it would've been fine, avoid trapping the player in the HAB between shifts and just let people interact with your game. Maybe if there was any way AT ALL to be involved in these conversations it would've worked in its current form; but having no choice but to sit and wait, with literally nothing to do, while your characters monologue at me for 5+ minutes at a time is NOT a compelling way to tell a story.

HOWEVER. You CAN just turn down the volume for voices; while the dialogue can get in the way sometimes, it's not actually too often - mostly just towards the campaign's conclusion. And the worldbuilding, oh my; it's genuinely really compelling. I just wish the main storyline explored it a little.

So, why do I recommend it?
Because H:S isn't really ABOUT the story. That's not why you play the game. You play the game to deconstruct ships in Zero-G, to get better and better at it, to overcome a seemingly insurmountable debt; you play the game to see number go up, and feel like your skills and dedication have a tangible impact on how quickly that number changes. The physics are fantastic, the visuals impeccable, the soundtrack enchanting - everything that isn't the story is done with a level of polish that would make AAA studios blush. All the complaints above amount to minor annoyances that don't really stop you from enjoying the game for what it is; that's why I kept playing it, that's why I recommend it.

A game with a wonderful premise and charming art direction similar to the old miniclip-style pixel art games, that very quickly becomes bogged down by lack of QoL features. It never quite manages to find the right approach to any of its mechanics, and ends up feeling as though you're meant to replay the game multiple times before you're fully acquainted with all the minute details you need to be aware of; but it's... sooo long.

It's frustrating simply because it wouldn't take much to make this game an instant classic; but the parts that are lacking just make it too infuriating to be worth recommending - by the 10th to 15th day (of 40!!) the fun "shopkeeper" gameplay loop has already been smothered by the "literally never make a mistake and still get punished" mechanics. There's a way to do what the devs wanted to do without sapping the enjoyment out of a game, but you won't find it here.

1000xRESIST is a solid 8/10 in just about every area; in some areas it excels, like the quality of voice acting (which is easily on par with Disco Elysium) and its soundtrack (perhaps just shy of NieR:Automata's); though in others it's weaker, like the visual style - while the stylised look is striking and, honestly, really pretty, the animations can sometimes feel a little clunky, and the edges a little too soft (particularly on the faces). But overall, most everything about the game sits somewhere between "good" and "great".

To start with the good, as I've already mentioned, the auditory aspects of the game are almost perfect - the only scene I believe could be bettered would be when you are prompted to listen to the rain, only for the music to persist rather than fading out. The voice acting is phenomenal, with fantastic nuance to the delivery, and distinct voices for each character; which helps with the writing itself sometimes making characters sound too similar (though perhaps that's intentional, considering).

The visual style as well is striking; the colours themselves are beautiful, and many of the levels carry the same love of detail as NieR:Automata (a game 1xR draws clear and significant inspiration from), though the step-down in terms of budget is apparent when the two are compared side-by-side. Where 1xR truly excels in regard to its visuals, however, is the way in which the game uses perspective and medium interchangeably - similar as well to NeiR:Automata, but this time used in less of a "game" way, and more in an "art" way; in terms of individual scenes, 1xR has a number of moments where its use of striking colours and light create some earnestly stunning visual effects.

This is where I think 1xR is at its strongest - as a piece of art. A conversation. It carries themes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sinophobia, generational trauma and abuse, isolation, the Hong Kong protests (and authoritarianism in general), and more still. The sheer number of things the game urges you to think about can be overwhelming by the time the game reaches its conclusion, and all throughout it doesn't feel as though you're given a chance to properly dwell on these themes, or feel them out within the game itself - I can't tell if this choice, to provide a glance at many different aspects of the world the game exists in as opposed to a focused dissection of one or two concepts, is good or not. If nothing else, I feel as though I need to think about it more; and good art makes you think.

The game is somewhat weaker in the more... "game" elements, however. To rattle off a few of my biggest frustrations;
• The Save/Load system is somewhat buggy. Sometimes loading a file causes characters to disappear if they're scripted to leave after being spoken to (even if you hadn't actually spoken to them on that save yet), and saving during scenes or conversations will load you back to when those scenes or conversations started - which is particularly frustrating during the longer segments of the game.
• The "Zip" mechanic feels clunky throughout the game - it's not a big deal as it doesn't come up too often, but it does make the segments where it's implemented feel more frustrating than perhaps they should.
• A lack of map for when the player is in the Orchard, alongside a convoluted series of paths and doorways and a waypoint system that poorly represents distance, makes the parts of the game that take place in the Orchard feel like they drag on - going out of your way to speak with every NPC is worth it, but still feels like it could have been streamlined somewhat.
• A few smaller things; animations feeling "off", "cluttered" level design that gets in the way just a little too much; subtitles that don't quite match what's being said; a notable lack of actual mechanics. They wouldn't be much on their own, but start to add up little by little, and leave the game feeling "not quite perfect".

I think my biggest hangup with 1xR lies in the ending; or, specifically, the endings for the characters. Over a relatively short span of time you meet and talk with so many people, and while they change at points, it doesn't necessarily feel like they... grow. Some simply have key moments that alter them, but they go from being "A" to "G" with no... B, C, D, E, F, and many do not receive even that. There are exceptions; the character you play, Watcher, develops the most of all the cast by far - but it feels more like the rest of the characters simply have more of their facets revealed, rather than seeing them genuinely develop. It feels as though they're all about to grow a great deal, but only after the game concludes - again, art inspiring art, but...

Perhaps the most egregious example of this, though not spoiler friendly, is Prime Jiao, and the "yellow secretary", who both receive essentially 0 screen time. Prime Jiao receives maybe 10 lines of dialogue total; the "yellow secretary" has no dialogue at all. Even though these characters seem highly relevant to many of the plot-points the game has, they could just have easily not existed within the game at all, and the story would be practically unchanged.

Overall, if 1xR seems like a game you'd enjoy or be interested in, I can say it almost 100% WILL be interesting, and will have specific moments that surpass expectation; but I can't help but feel that it needed just a little more room to explore the themes it wanted to show us.

I have LOVED this game. Felt every emotion, related with intensity, adored it, truly. There are other reviews that do a good job of describing the "pros/cons", or what they liked or disliked, so I'll try and use this as more of a... FAQ, for questions I imagine people might need answered before buying the game.


Q. I saw In Stars And Time has a prologue (START AGAIN: A Prologue)! Do I need to buy and play that as well? Is it worth it?

A. START AGAIN is kind of like... dipping your toes in the water. It's not a difficult game to "beat", it's short and it gives a pretty good taster for what the main game is. I'd say that the cost, in combination with the cost of ISAT, IS worth it - but you'd not want to buy both if it wasn't going to be something you were interested in. You don't NEED to play it, but if you're on the fence, or you know you'll LOVE the game, then I'd say playing the prologue first is a good idea.


Q. Does it really take 40 hours to beat?

A. Yes, and no. You could probably do it a lot faster, especially if you're using a walkthrough, but that... kind of defeats the point. You're playing a character stuck in a time loop, and the game WANTS you to feel like that's happening to you. Using a tutorial to get through it as quick as possible just isn't in the spirit of the story.

ISAT is also a COMMITMENT. You play as a forgetful character, and the game has a mechanic to help you remember what it is you need to be doing, but I can't imagine trying to play this over the course of several weeks. If you don't feel like you can sit down and knock out the whole game in the span of a few days, maybe wait until you can - it's one ludo-narrative element that I feel doesn't actually do the game any favours.


Q. The game is tagged LGBTQ+, and other reviews mention queer elements; is it done well?

A. If pronouns bother you, give the game a pass (not that I'm sure why you'd browse for LGBTQ+ games if that's the case anyway). The game has gay, aro/ace, trans, and non-binary representation. None of it is a focal point of the game, but there are some earnestly touching moments, and the usage of character's individual pronouns is consistent throughout - in fact, you can notice that certain characters use them in different ways, if you're paying attention to the specific distinctions between the character's "voices". It's done really well.

In short, the queer elements fill the game, but never feel forced or unnatural. These themes aren't explored in-depth, but aren't left to be entirely surface-level either.


Q. Were there any story-beats or plot points that felt forced?

A. Okay. Look. There's this one particular, very spoiler-unfriendly thing that I think could've been done better; but I know that, in order to do it "properly", it would expand the scope of the game a tremendous degree. Ultimately I think it's just important to remember that you're playing a character, and if you feel like you'd "just do [x] if it were me", keep in mind that that would be a different story.

Did it ruin the game? Make it unenjoyable? Sour the ending?
No. Not even close. But if you get to the end and feel the same way, I get it.

Recommending Patron is difficult. It's not that the game is bad, but if you're looking for a full and complete experience you won't find it here. In short, this game is a cozy, sleepy little management game; I've just been building up a massive city on Normal difficulty and found the game incredibly easy. If you're wanting something relaxing and simplistic, Patron is probably in that exact niche you're looking for.

But, that said, Patron lacks in a lot of ways. The mechanics are often too simple; for example, you have many different choices for crops to provide to your city, including the option to trade for more varieties through events; however there's no actual benefit to growing different kinds of food options - you're better off providing your citizens with fish, and using your fields exclusively for wheat and oats. It feels like the addition of carrots, lettuce, beetroot etc is there for a "food variety" mechanic, but there isn't one in the game, so they end up being redundant.
Similarly, the "disasters" are limited in their scope, and mostly pretty boring; a raging fire that just kind of happens sometimes with no interaction on lessening the effect beyond building as many wells as possible to decrease the chance of it happening; a "tornado" that will destroy at most a few houses and then just not touch the rest; there are also heatwaves and cold snaps apparently, but I've experienced neither. As there are no enemies either, these are the only sources of "challenge" in the game beyond resource management, and they're both annoying and pitiful, with no real way to negate them, but also no major threat posed by them.

Patron also suffers from the same kind of issue as games like Hearthlands (which Patron seems heavily inspired by) and Cities: Skylines when it comes to buildings like schools and churches; these buildings are much bigger than houses, however their radius is usually only enough for a couple of neighbourhoods; for example, my city now has 518 houses, and to cover that I need 20 schools; each school is 14x16, where each house is 8x8, and because they act in a radius you need them right in the middle of a neighbourhood in order to be most efficient with your space. However you ALSO need to have churches or shrines, universities, inns, embassies, tax offices, guard houses or prisons, wells, and markets; which means, in order to actually get the full benefit from most of your researched buildings, and also to keep your citizens happy, you suddenly have very little space for housing. It may seem sensible to need a fair number of these buildings, because you don't want them to be so powerful that people only need one or two, but having to fill your city with these becomes very cumbersome very quickly; especially when you start running out of room (plus the radius is only like 3 houses long, somehow having to walk 10 seconds means you're outside of the catchment area, which is just visually silly).

There are also "warnings" that will appear above buildings; more often than not, it'll be about a resource that is required for a building to operate not being delivered. However, you have no indication as to which material isn't being delivered, or why this is happening; you're simply told "carriers/workers not bringing enough resources to this building". But I have enough of both of these, and also I have all the resources required in stockpile, so...

Edit:
When I originally wrote this review, there were other issues with the trading mechanics, graphs, and production lines - and I closed off noting how the devs no longer update the game. Most all of these things have been addressed in some fashion since then; Harbours in particular now show which repeating trades have been set up there when you hover over the trade icon, which is MASSIVELY helpful. This is a small QOL change that improves enjoyment of the system 1000x

The game is not fundamentally different, and many of the same "issues" still persist; a different one that I've found upon returning is that waiting for new adult citizens to work jobs feels like it takes FOREVER at first, and then you reach a point where you're kind of just expanding for the sake of it - which is nice, but the game goes from "easy" to "trivial". It's pretty much the only true bottleneck I've encountered, and it's both something you have little control over and also the only consequence is that you sit there on x10 speed and be bored for a while - so, not the most engaging.

But the game is still enjoyable, I still recommend it - and now that the devs are giving it more updates, and showing it more love, I'm a lot happier to say it's a good game to pick up.

It's very rare I make reviews for games, however Yes, Your Grace hasn't gotten the attention I think it deserves. For context, I went into this game completely blind; it was in a bundle with The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, and Suzerain, which were both games I'd been interested in, so thought "why not".
I'd read no guides, seen no videos, and I've finished the only run I'll ever do in 7 hours.

The important bits first:
- How long to finish the game? * I beat the whole thing in almost exactly 7hrs.
- Is there replayability? * Depends; I'd say no once you've got an ending you're satisfied with unless achievement hunting.
- Is it worth the cost? * Ehhh... I'd say maybe. I really enjoyed it, but I can understand it won't be everyone's thing.
- Is the music fire? * The Music Is Fire.

Yes Your Grace, at its core, is a "choices matter" resource management game. With many people within your kingdom in need of your help, but war with an overwhelmingly powerful foe on the horizon, its your job to try and provide stability and security for yourself, your family, and your kingdom. To that end, the general storyline is set in stone - you will either fail or succeed. However the fates of individual characters, and how you arrive at your ending, are the bits that can be affected. I got what I would consider to be almost the perfect ending on my first go, but there were still plenty of times where I figured I was very close to losing outright.

Resource management is not too difficult, but you can still be caught out by poor choices - spend your gold on one village, you may not have enough for another, and if you give to someone undeserving expect to see no benefit at all; there's a loan system from the bank if you need help, but those weekly fees start to get real annoying; things like that. You're essentially trying to prepare for the worst at all times, but if you neglect any one area for too long then you're going to be in trouble regardless.

Criticisms of the game for me were the lack of transparency in some mechanics; inventory items have no description so it's hard to know what happens when you use them, or indeed when they can be used - know that items may have multiple occasions when they could be useful, but each one pretty much only does one thing. The "archives" menu too, which acts as your quest tracker, is sometimes missing important bits of information which can make it difficult to remember what exactly you need to do at certain points - the fact that you can't open it during dialogue is especially frustrating, and punishes heavily not playing the game in one sitting.
There are also some elements that can feel frustratingly forced upon you, but I feel it's the game trying to say "immerse yourself into the character of the king, don't approach it like you're a player who can just reload with no consequences". Forcing yourself not to reload can be difficult, but trust me when I say that most minor mistakes can be recovered from, and the game's best played when every decision feels tense - it forces you to pick choices that can feel immoral because you just can't guarantee that your greater objectives will be safe if you don't.

I don't want to spoil anything, but I'll say that overall my experience with this game was one of increasing stress and tension right up until the achievements popped up informing me of the final outcome; the rush of relief and joy that came from the positive conclusion of seven hours of careful management for a situation I never felt quite prepared for was enough to make me want to leave this review. Yes, Your Grace excellently captures that feeling of escalating tension, without ever making you feel quite hopeless enough to give up, nor quite comfortable enough to relax.

Dorfromantik is a peculiar game; by many standards it lacks the qualities of a game that can be seen as enjoyable - there is no plot or story; no characters to empathise with; no action-packed adventures to grab your attention. Instead, Dorfromantik is the most relaxing instance of carrot-and-stick I think I'll ever see.

There are points and progression. You fulfill certain easy-to-complete objectives and in return you get more tiles. Your own success becomes the biggest motivator for you to get better at the game; not because you can ever really "fail", but because running out of tiles means starting over from the beginning.
At first it seems like you can just place things wherever, but it quickly becomes a matter of careful planning and management of what tiles you have where, what goals need to be completed, and what you can do to account for six small turns of train track in a row.

Dorfromantik is by no means a "difficult" game to play, and you don't have to get massive scores in order to enjoy yourself; you can easily become calmly sucked in to this artistically adorable little tile-placing game, regardless of whether you're aiming to do well at it or not. Thoroughly recommend to everyone; it's cheap! Give it a try! You may just find something you love.

Dawn of Man is a game deserving, in all honesty, of a video essay outlining all the good and bad about it, as there is plenty of both. However, nobody would watch that before buying, so I'll try to keep it quick instead.
The main thing I like about DoM is the AI; the way that the game gets stuff done without me having to directly tell it to. I just set out a few instructions and the rest is done for me - this makes managing a large population of individuals very easy.
The biggest issue though is the broken parts of priority, and the main flaw in the AI. One thing I always struggle with is maintaining a population in the copper age, without them all starving to death. No matter which route I take, from lots of farms set to high priority, to disabling repairs on as much stuff as possible, to enforcing tighter item limits than I had in the stone age, this is Always a problem.
The issue is that my farms are almost always left half-harvested, or less. Why? They're all set to high priority, and they were always done fully before, even when my population was smaller. So what's happening?
As far as I can see, the issue is that, when the game queues up tasks, it doesn't mark high priority tasks to be done first overall, only for them to be done first of the assigned tasks; of which, it only assigns a portion of them at a time. This means there is a long period between these tasks being done, where the "harvest" task just isn't queued up. At larger populations, this means that even more tasks are queued beforehand, and the problem snowballs. From there, people are needed to maintain a settlement designed for a larger population than is available, and you slowly decline into a famished, 200% workload mess.

When I mark things as top priority, I want them done before Anything else. Not just moved to the top of the queue, but queued up first too. Please.

Just Cause is an old game, originally released for (and for me, played on) the PS2. It is clunky, starts freezing up if you keep it on too long without saving, has (compared to modern games) terrible graphics, sound design, and story. The voice acting is mediocre at best, and the game is severely lacking in many areas (such as describing game mechanics, for one) which we take for granted in modern games.
But you know what? It's FUN. There are guns and explosions and the cars can't be controlled in mid-air, and things blow up for seemingly no reason sometimes; if you stand in the road and do nothing chaos ensues around you, you can punch an AI and then they'll punch another AI (why???). This game is, by modern standards, broken, flawed, and bad. But I don't care. Because when I play this, I'm reminded of a simpler time, where games didn't have to be complicated to be great to play. And that's why I love this game.

Easily one of the most enjoyable singleplayer fighting/conquering games I've ever played; despite it's outdated graphics, it's a stable and relatively bug-free game (relatively), with a brilliant campaign, fun if chaotic multiplayer, and settings/options that actually let you change how the game works for you, which seems to be a rarity nowadays. Bannerlord when.



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