Recent reviews by Smirky Cat

It teaches rhythm in a visual manner. I think that's helpful no matter who tries it. Even if you aren't reading music traditionally, reading music at all is already a niche and i can appreciate this way of going about it.

A lot of elements resemble the old dust game from armor games, but in the end the fact that every "pixel is simulated" really constantly gets in the way of actual gameplay. I really should have expected this going in, but a few out of place pixels can kill you and i think that is really bogus.

There is also not very much diversity with what you can do, you start with 1 of 3 basic wands and not much happens until later floors.

Meh. Pass.

This game is pretty terrible.

The mechanics are pretty decently programmed but its so unfortunate that both none of it is explained AND none of it is properly gated, you'd have 3 things to work on at the start and about 10 minutes in they give you the option to granularly change every little setting and its so overwhelming I gave up after nearly 5 hours.

The progression up to a certain point is fine but watching numbers tick up for a thing arbitrarily time gated is also pretty frustrating.

If you're looking for a decent sandbox experience and were expecting anything other than a Cities Skylines-esque game, I'd look somewhere else.

Please feel free to correct me about any of this, I don't think I'm alone in these feelings.

Fantastic RPG for the committed player, but otherwise lacks decent documentation. Couldn't finish it because it became too difficult too fast near the end.

One of the better sandbox titles. I wish they would update it more though.

Trials is the type of game where you enjoy it for a second, then hate it forever for beating you. Then you try to get good at it, then next thing you know you're playing ninja levels. Great game.

The game is fantastic. I don't play it too often but I respect it for its replayability. A game like this is very tricky to pull off.

I would like to point out that I really had high hopes for this game. This is a game that I constantly come back to and sink hundreds of hours into new worlds hoping my experience is different (citation: my hours played). Every time I see youtubers glazing this game to death I always am reminded of the hundreds of small nitpicks I have with this game which make ALL playthroughs thoroughly unenjoyable. I am mostly logging my thoughts here because I need to vent my frustrations with the awful UX of the game that is seemingly not intentional or intentionally unaddressed:

1) Chests are a NIGHTMARE. There is literally a "must get" mod in the modded version of the game that essentially deletes the storage system for the game, because it's such an awful experience to deal with every time. Every house I build, the majority of the time I spend time constructing like 30 chests each with their own category name, making it a complete nightmare for other people to sift through.

2) Chests wouldn't be such a nagging problem if you didn't AT LEAST have a way to split stacks using your mouse or quickly craft things in large amounts. Why can't you craft 9999 things at once if you can stack things that absurdly high? Why can't you right click a stack to split it in half instead of picking up 1?! I have never wanted to do that for only 1 item. Crafting can also only go so fast.

3) Hammering is a joke. who's idea was it to make it so you have to hammer each individual set of 2x2 pixels multiple times to get the block design you want? I actually have an easy solution to this: Introduce a radial menu when holding a hammer on a block that shows the option so you can quickly navigate to the desired block. If I can come up with that improvement in 3 seconds, why is this feature essentially untouched since its introduction?

4) Fishing needs a complete overhaul. I hate using that system for a plethora of reasons.

5) Bosses need a huge balancing pass to address massive exploits and unbalanced gameplay. Why does the destroyer deal as much damage as it does, but only its head?!

6) Hard mode should NOT scale regular mob's health. It's obviously lazy programming.

7) I wrote a previous negative review focusing on this point, but I don't feel it needs that much focus. I really wish there was some kind of internal tutorial at least pointing you in the direction of the next objective, or for it to at least give you something to do. It's especially unacceptable these days when the developer had eons to sort this out, when that has been relegated to a hidden "Help" button in the guide. I still think this point sticks and I hate how blind playthroughs of this game are essentially not possible without hints. It really should be. No, the game is DEFINITELY more fun with friends to learn but people in multiplayer learn at a different pace so that's not comparable here.

8) You should be able to give worlds the option to instance player's characters so they can't bring in top tier loot to a fresh world. Obviously, what an oversight.

9) Pregenerated railway tracks don't have any rhyme or reason. There should be stations at either end with houses instead of houses showing up around the railway being just "incidental". When there's no station at all it just feels forced for the purpose of accelerating finding stuff and it's plain to see.

10) Chat messages should be displayed on the first fight of a boss advising you what may change in the world if you defeat the boss. This is a no brainer for game design for people who don't want spoilers.

11) There is so much useless bloat in terms of game items. I'd like to go through a diatribe on how annoying showing 50 options for 1 item you're making is in the crafting menu, but let me list off a few quick examples instead: the entire copper/tin-tier (obsoleted within the first 20 minutes of the game, where in that time you cant get a full armor set anyways), shortswords (when's the last time you actually aimed for one?!), drills?! (they don't even do their stated purpose of being faster, they are pointless bloat), fifty variations of each table chair door wall hammer variation paint style, dyes, golf. Need I go on? I can continue listing off more useless bloat for a full ten minutes but that isn't helpful.

12) Chat is annoying. In old versions of the game you couldnt even chat in singleplayer, but in the current version it's very apparent that the chat system needs a bit of uplifting.

13) There should be more options when creating a world. Why is it so limited when there's so much content?

14) I have never played on a small world, but even large worlds feel small. I really hope this doesn't come across as a minecraft bias, but I think this game should get an infinite world size type. I am well aware that this would break a lot of the systems that are currently in place depending on a normal sized world and fluids and whatnot. I still feel like a procedural world can benefit from being more than just a constrained box. It's already 2 dimensions. Why does it have to not be infinite too? Terraria would have far more of an RPG feel if, say, the further you ventured out in an infinite world, the more tough the mobs got. Seems like a no brainer to me that I thought true since the beginning.

15) The crafting system needs a rework. This kind of update literally everyone is asking for, but every other platform does crafting right, and I feel that is unfair to this version.

16) The goblin tinkerer's reforge system is OK, but only OK. It's absurdly expensive to get the reforges you want. I think reforging should allow you to spec into a specific forging type and exponentiate the cost instead for each level you increase on a reforge prefix. Legendary shouldn't be a doom roll style reforge, it should be something you have to pay to eventually receive with enough effort, money and maybe even items. Accessories ALREADY HAVE 4 levels to each reforge, literally a skill tree would suffice for it.

17) The game's creator didn't do enough with the Moon Lord and it's underwhelming to fight for how BROKEN ITS REWARDS ARE.

18) Doesn't wearing an accessory in the social slot over the regular one replace the accessory graphic already? why does making the regular accessory invisible not also make the social accessory invisible? This might be a nitpick but my characters look goofy when I use the social slots to store extra accessories I'm not using.

19) Vines and crimson vines, jungle vines grow way too fast. Every time i clear them out, I visit them again and they're all filled in again. I promise you I am not AFKing in my world, these obstructions obscure torch light so why do they grow so fast?

20) Growing potion plants also needs a rework. Why can you put any plant in any planter box, and for that matter why do plants seemingly at random bloom where you can collect their seeds and randomly you can't? Fireblossom and blinkroot were particularly finnicky. I know there's a specific game related reason they dont all bloom but it looks very messy in a farm when only half of them bloom, but only sometimes for some indeterminate reason.

That's it. I have many, many more nitpicks to go through but these are all the major ones I wanted to post. After a long time of chilling out, randomly building and stuff there are many elements of the game that frustrate me to no end that I feel just don't have to. Fixing most of these issues would elevate this game beyond any AAA-title by leaps and bounds and make it approachable for new people so I don't understand why none of this was attempted yet. I am reluctantly leaving a negative review since I deleted my last one. I feel my other review was not very fleshed out, and this should be an exhaustive enough list to show it.

I feel the game is too ambitious to be having these basic problems that should have been addressed ages ago.

I'd like to give this game a positive review I really would, but there's just nothing to like about this game. The people who play it are horrible people, the arenas are highly detailed but nothing feels unique about them, the updates are practically nonexistant (NO MAJOR UPDATE IN OVER 2 YEARS!) and the updates that they do put out are focused solely on cosmetics. Despite this fact, I think with my playtime that I've given this game as fair a shake as you can give a game.

I was always neutral about how the game is. It has its good points, and its terrible points. The physics are generally consistent (Except for the flipping mechanics, how the car reacts to flipping makes absolutely no sense, especially in the air). They haven't bothered fixing obvious bugs like flip resets, demos sometimes being allocated to the wrong player, horribly fragile servers that will drop you in an instant with nothing you can do, terrible camera systems that are awkward to the point where you have to constantly switch between them, etc.

I think my least favorite part of this game is the moderation. The metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back for me was when I went into a 2s (NOTE: CASUAL) game, seemingly to have a good time and just practice my mechanics, when suddenly the entire lobby just turned against me in an instant in the middle of the game. I WAS PLAYING LIKE NORMAL, but my team, and the opposing team would not let up and was resorting to bumping and demoing me the whole duration of the games.

Do note, none of the other lobbies i've been in that day had any sort of complaint about my playing.

What is my suggestion to improve the game on this aspect? Fix your broken moderation system. I'd like to elaborate on this point but I don't feel like bringing the mood down.

If you can forgive these kind of people and/or ignore them, this game might still suit you.

I will probably no longer revisit this game.