Recent reviews by Ace

First and foremost, I reported a potential bug and the developer replied and fixed it in about two hours. Extremely based.

Now, for the game itself, it's a fun, short incremental game with great quality. The bug I reported and that has already been fixed was the only one I encountered. I like the visual style, the upgrades are satisfying, the game doesn't stretch things out longer than they need to be, and there's also the potential for infinitely upgrading your stats to keep the run going and pushing to higher and higher levels just for the fun of it once you beat everything. I wish more incremental games had that option.

It took about two and a half hours to get 100% of achievements as well.

I've only got two criticisms. As one of the endgame unlocks, it would have been nice to have an option to open all loot boxes at once since opening them in batches got a bit stale. And for my second criticism, I'd like to mention that I'm biased since I tend to strongly dislike prestige mechanics in games, but the prestige in this one felt especially rough the first time. Now, apparently, you don't even need to prestige to beat the game in a similar timeframe. It just helps out a little. And I didn't know this, but if I had pushed just a couple more bosses before that first prestige, I would have been able to purchase the unlocks that let me keep all my upgrades. But instead, I prestiged after beating the first boss, and that felt way worse than usual in these types of games to the point where I stopped and had to come back the next day since I didn't want to go through the early game unlocking everything one by one again. But once I caught back up and made it even deeper into the skill tree, I went back to loving the game. And I can't say that the prestige mechanic is objectively poorly implemented or anything because I'm too biased against them in the first place, but still want to give as many thoughts as I can.

Overall, the game is extremely worth the price, short and satisfying, and if you love incremental games then you'll probably enjoy this one. And with a developer who so quickly responds to bug reports and implements fixes, I'm excited to see what else the developer might publish in the future.

Took about 2.8 hours to 100% all achievements. Fun game, nice quality of life. At first, I was a little worried when I saw a prestige mechanic since I typically don't like those in such games, but this probably has one of the best prestige systems out there. It doesn't really start you over from scratch, you get an unlock that effectively lets you prestige without having to buy everything again, etc. Fun game. Figuring out a good ratio of fuel and elements to get level 50 was a nice little puzzle.

EDIT: I originally mentioned that the late game had some serious performance issues. Saw that the dev updated performance the next day. Booted up the game just to see if that fixed the performance, and I can confirm that it did on my end. I've no longer got any complaints. Great job, dev!

Abiotic Factor is easily my game of the year for 2025. I'll write a more in-depth review once I'm done with the latest content, but I just absolutely love the game and there are maybe only one or two questionable design choices that I can criticize. It's, by far, the greatest survival-crafter game of all time imo, easily beating out some of the best competition such as Valheim and Project Zomboid.

Enshrouded is a game that I have mixed feelings about. When I first tried playing it, I only made it about eight hours in and felt like I was bored out of mind and just staying quiet while my friends enjoyed it because I had literally nothing positive to say and didn't want to bring the mood down. Then I came back to it more recently and something just clicked this second time around. It was fun. The building is one of the best in the genre with some of the greatest QoL features, the world is beautiful, exploration feels rewarding because there's always something new to find somewhere and those suspiciously out-of-place ruins with weird looking floors do, in fact, have dungeons hiding them if you're smart enough to dig an opening into them with your pickaxe, and the worldbuilding is awesome.

But after about 90 more hours, most of which I enjoyed, I feel myself liking the game less and less. Each zone offers a couple of new enemies but, for the most part, 90% of what you're fighting are the same enemies you encounter in the first zone, but higher level. Ranged combat is eh and pretty much every review will confirm that magic combat is absolute garbage. Melee is the easiest and safest way to play, but also brain dead boring since all you need to do is spam left click. On a related note, though, I will say that I absolutely love not having iframes. I always feel that iframes are stupid and make no sense unless a character has some sort of magic ability to phase through attacks. But being able to just roll through a sword or monster? Stupid as hell. So, props for being one of the only modern games that has the balls to not give exploitable iframes.

But my appreciation for no iframes doesn't change the fact that the game is just... boring after the initial excitement falls off. It never feels like it evolves in any way. It's just more of the same but with bigger numbers the entire time. Like MMO gameplay, but without the hundreds of hours of content, huge community, unending updates, and with 1/10th the variety in playstyles and combat complexity.

As some other reviews have also pointed out, the "E" spam in this game is obscene. I've got carpal tunnel in both my hands and farming at any scale in this game makes my hands feel like they're on fire. I haven't even had this issue in Valheim where I make farms 10x bigger than they need to be for a group of people.

And then there's how long everything takes. Unless you place down a dozen seedbeds all for one crop, have fun waiting multiple, real hours for your seeds to be ready. Same with smelting ore. Now, to be fair, I think there are settings to lower this time, but it's ridiculous that this is the default. It's not fun to go on a mining trip, come back, then see that everything I gathered won't actually be usable until I wait around for four hours.

Food, which is one of my favorite things to mess around with in these types of games, is probably worse in Enshrouded than every other game when it comes to the actual flavor. Mechanically, it's fine, I guess. Some food items are just straight up worse than others with no reason to ever use them despite taking longer and more materials to produce. But they're working on that. What I mean is more, we get a new type of meat almost every tier, but then all you get to do with it is grill it. There are so many ingredients and vegetables, but we barely get to do anything with them.

And this leads me into my next point. We get way too much ♥♥♥♥ and there's not enough resource sinks for said ♥♥♥♥. Because, again, 90% of what you fight are the same enemies you fight in the very first biome. They drop the same things every time. Those level 25 bandits are still going to drop the same level 3 materials that the level 3 bandits drop. Oh, and for some awful reason, the higher level bandits drop MULTIPLE waterskins. You know, the things you only ever need one of and that you stop using after a few hours of gameplay because you have better a better drink available. So, unless you want to spend time manually sorting through every single corpse to make sure you don't pick up the endless drops of useless garbage while looking for the few drops that are actually useful (aka, weapons to scrap into runes), then you're either going to constantly clog up your inventory or just miss out on a ton of runes that you'll need for upgrading your weapons.

There are a bunch of smaller things that I have problems with as well. Having to travel into the shroud just to find a gem altar to socket a gem, to upgrade that gem, and then to remove that gem once you're ready to move onto a new weapon. And it's got to be the right level gem altar, too, because certain gem altars are only good for specific level ranges of gems. Oh, and most gems are just underwhelming and not even worse using. They should be game changers that really influence how you play to make you feel more unique. Instead, have fun dealing 7 extra damage (note: your weapon is already dealing 100 damage per swing, and that's without putting skill points into damage buffs) while under very specific circumstances.

Worst of all, probably, is just the fact that I never really feel like I'm getting stronger unless I go back to kill things multiple biomes beneath me in strength. Everything takes forever to kill, even with a group of friends to play with, and you've got to repair your weapons every few encounters. At least in Valheim, once I'm properly geared for the newest biome, I actually feel strong. Not overpowered, but strong. I never get that feeling here. And don't even get me started on how this game has no idea how to cater to the tank fantasy. It has an entire tree supposedly dedicated to tanking, but does it actually make you tanky? Lol, no. Like so many modern games unfortunately choose to do, the best tanking you get in this game is just parry spamming. Either that, or stacking lifesteal so you just absorb hits and then heal to full every swing, which gets very boring and repetitive over 90 hours. If you actually try to use your shield to block attacks? Have fun losing all your stamina in a few seconds.

Anyways.

A lot of people will praise the building in this game, and the building is, in fact, great. But when you look into the community, pretty much everyone who builds anything nice says to not even bother building unless you go to a public "resource world" to take thousands of free materials from it to build with, because few people are masochistic enough to actually gather materials for significant builds in this game. And this is part of where it's kind of crazy if I'm not into the gathering for a game. You see, I love gathering. I'm the person in our group who loves to play Valheim with no portals so I can spend eight hours sailing, loading the boat up, then sailing back to get materials for everyone to build with. I love making use of the carts to transport tons of heavy materials. Nobody ever wants for materials in a game like this when I'm playing with them. Vintage Story is another example. I will happily set aside an entire day to gather and transport materials for my friends if they tell me what they need.

But in Enshrouded? You need to gather so much, and it's so boring with no "challenge" since you can just fast travel everywhere. And you always need more materials for building. Even my friend who has been playing archer and is also doing all the building, he has to spend hours gathering materials just for basic buffs and arrows that run out all the time, and that's not even grinding for building materials.

I don't know. The game feels artificially dragged out by repulsive grinds that I would expect to see in MMOs, with no interesting combat (but they are supposedly working on this with an entire team dedicated to it now), each biome doesn't even have a proper boss fight (as it stands, out of 6 biomes, only 2 have real bosses), the dungeons are copy-paste, and I'm hitting the review length limit now.

Was thinking of trying the game out again after last playing it almost a decade ago. Kept seeing people on Reddit hyping it up as a game that became great over the years and got curious. Then I saw that they added battle passes which they have since removed and that there is no way to acquire any of the items that used to be on the passes.

No thanks. I hate the modern standard of games introducing FOMO content, especially for games that can be played single player. Make your battle passes like Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2, or don't make them at all. Nothing kills my motivation to play a game more than seeing that I'm permanently locked out of content, whether it's purely cosmetic or not. But should the developers change this and bring back *all* previously limited content, I would be happy to try the game out again.

Just finished the painful grind of getting 100% of achievements because I was too stubborn to give up. Unfortunately, I would not recommend the game when there is so much great competition you could purchase instead, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

To start with the good things, it's got some great ideas, I like the RNG stats of runes and gems, I didn't encounter any bugs, and the graphics/sounds were fine.

But the bad things are... oof.

To start with, it was extremely disappointing when I unlocked a second tower and found out that the game randomly picks from all of your unlocked towers, and only one until endgame. So if you spend the money unlocking four different towers, hey, guess what, you only get to use one of them at a time and you don't even get to choose which one. This is slightly alleviated at the very end of the game, but by that point, it didn't help nor mechanically matter.

And why would you spend money on unlocking towers in the first place when the only real thing you should be spending money on until the endgame is increasing your damage? Nothing else can compete with the damage output of your basic "manual" attacks until the endgame. You are slowing yourself down and prolonging the grind by spending your money on anything other than damage. All those cool special abilities and perks are worthless compared to improving your manual attack's damage.

Ores, ghosts, and shiny slimes become increasingly harder to kill each time you make it to a new stage. And, unlike with coins, they do not drop more the harder the stage gets. This results in (prior to the literal end of the game) feeling like you are getting punished for progressing. You might get more money, but you get fewer of the other upgrade materials until you catch back up in damage. You can't go back to previous stages to grind, either, unlike most games of the genre.

And the mimics/treasure chests? Absolutely worthless. Probably the most pointless enemy/mechanic/gimmick/whatever-you-want-to-call-them I have ever seen in any incremental game. Their entire purpose is to give you more coins than a normal slime, but they are rare, a bit tankier, and you get obscenely more money just from focusing on killing slimes. They need to give some other reward instead to actually be meaningful in any way, such as random other materials, maybe more seconds to prolong the run, runes, etc.

Bounties also felt worthless... again, until the endgame, which you might be seeing me say a few different times here. So many of the game's mechanics feel like they just let you barely dip your toes in them until the very end of the game. Then, once you're at the end of the game, you get tossed into the deep end of the pool, are drowning in resources to upgrade with, you actually get to feel powerful for the first time in the entire time... and then it's over in five seconds. Most of the upgrades locked behind the well system should be spread out throughout progression to feel more impactful rather than just getting them all at the end.

It's a really weird decision, in my opinion. The mechanics are there to make a great game. This could have been a very easy recommend. But the progression up until about stage 38 is so painful, slow, and boring that you will be repeating the same stages five times each just to make it to the next one while only spending money on damage upgrades if you don't hate yourself. Then you finally get to feel powerful and have some fun and it's over right after. Five and a half hours of feeling weak, slow, and (worst of all) bored all for ten minutes of fun at the end of the game.

I think there's a lot that could be done with the game and the ideas behind it. I would also be interested in checking out any future games the developer publishes because I can tell they have what it takes to make some great incremental games. The progression decisions in this game are just outlandish to me, though.

Overall, I don't regret buying the game and supporting the developer, and I would be happy to support the developer in the future if they learn from this game going forward. But I would not recommend this particular game unless the progression gets rebalanced.

Also, "collect powerful loot" and "uncover tons of content" feel like false advertising. The only "loot" you collect aside from currency are runes with RNG stats, and those are pretty rare even at endgame with runes buffing their rates. They also don't matter that much. And for "tons of content," you have seen 90% of the game within the first five minutes of playing. The level never changes, you fight the same blue slimes until the end of the game with a couple of extra spawns, and the skills/unlocks are just standard for the genre.

And taking another look at the page now, it's hilarious how it says, "Every node matters, unlock meaningful stats, not just a boring +1 damage," yet choosing the "boring +1 damage" node is the only way to progress without wanting to jump off a bridge.

The archer is a bro, though.

Very cute game with a great feeling of progression, satisfying upgrades, and nice visuals and audio to go along with it. Probably one of the highest quality incremental games on the store right now, and I was able to get 100% of achievements in just under 3 hours.

Cute and fun little incremental. Says it takes around four hours to complete and managed to 100% it in exactly 4 hours of playtime. Zero complaints. UI is good, upgrades are fun and plentiful, challenge and rate of progression are just right, and it looks like there are still more levels to complete just to push yourself even after you have 100% of unlocks which is always appreciated. It's also amusing that beating a new cat gets a kiss from it. This implies that, in order for a cat to win the love of another cat, it must assault its love target with lasers, bombs, poison, daggers, and guns to seduce it. Very unique philosophy on cat romance.

The more I play it, the more I like it. It felt sort of slow to get into it at first, especially with the first campaign that I now realize is basically just meant to be a very simplified tutorial compared to the other campaigns, and it didn't help that I mainly played with friends at first in multiplayer which had some desync issues going on. But the developer has been consistently pushing out fixes, greatly improved multiplayer, and as I start playing the other campaigns more, I really start to love this game more. I'm very excited to see how the game continues to develop with the post-launch roadmap.

Also, boosting around jousting enemies and 1shotting them while a lance while holding a shield up feels extremely OP. I am not complaining. I love lances. I love mechas. I love combining them and feeling like a god.

EDIT: The game just keeps on getting better. And, in my opinion, it easily has the most innovative gameplay of 2025. It might not be in the finals for innovative gameplay on Steam, but I did my part in nominating it for that.

Got a couple of runs in and I'm enjoying the game. The unlocks add some nice variety to make following runs feel more unique, a full session lasts around the perfect amount of time, and the wand customization system is pretty fun to play with. That being said, I wish there was an "endless" option to keep going after the end of a run since the run tends to be over just as I'm feeling powerful. And despite not really feeling powerful until the end of a run, the game also manages to be really easy. At no point in my first two runs did I ever feel like I was in real danger. So, it's a fun game with some nice concepts, but it struggles to really let you feel powerful (especially since every upgrade increases the cooldown of the wand you put it on), and it's really easy to survive until the end of a run.