Senaste recensioner av Alestrius

I was hesitant when I saw this tagged as RTS, but this is nothing like Starcraft/Age of Empires/etc. For anyone hesitant on the tag -- it's pure PVE without multiplayer or combat. To me, makes ATS very much not an RTS, but YMMV.

General:
Against the Storm combines the best parts of RTS base-building, roguelite choice-building (in the buildings that you pick per settlement), and charming aesthetics into wonderfully satisfying bite-sized playthroughs (I've seen other reviews say ~2h each and while time has flown by way too quickly for me to keep track of, that sounds about right).

There's a VERY satisfying amount of progression, a genuinely fun gameplay loop, and it's so easy to not notice as time passes by. I know it's early in 2023 yet, but this is easily the most fun I've had with any game thus far this year.

tl;dr --
Long Version:
I have significantly more time played that 6.5 hours, as my Deck seems to have docked some of the time, and I had 20+ hours in the Demo version before full release. Overall I'd say I probably have about 40 hours total in Backpack Hero, even if this review says 6 hours. From that time, I cannot possibly recommend Backpack Hero enough. The game has an extremely enjoyable game loop, and the pixel art has so much heart to it. It's a labor of love, and you can really tell.

There is enough item and build variety that I never really feel shoehorned into playing the same way each time as is the case with some deckbuilders and roguelites; basically every variety of build I've played has been extremely enjoyable (with a possible exception for mage/wand builds, but I've probably just not run into the right wands yet since I usually focus on other builds).

One minor nitpick; the game doesn't advise you that you can skip the tutorial (so far as I've seen). Definitely play through it your first time playing a character since they all play radically differently, but after that, on the main menu screen just hit M to skip it. That'll save you a lot of time, especially if you end up really loving CR-8 like I do.

Summary:
If you enjoy deckbuilding games (I know this doesn't *quite* look like one, but it definitely has a similar feel to me), roguelites, turn-based games, or a mixture of all three, this game is probably for you. The demo is free and includes more than enough content to find out if you'll like the gameplay loop. Seriously, what are you doing still reading this? Go download the demo, and soon enough I expect you'll be buying the game as well.

BFD is one of my favourite games of all time. The characters are fantastic, the dungeon-crawling superb, and the story well-crafted. I've beaten this game 3 times now; once on Switch alone, a second time on Switch while showing off the game to friends to convince them to get it, and now a third time on Steam (partially for enticing achievements..). I whole-heartedly recommend this game. "7 hours" is really more like 25-30 at this point, just most of it not on Steam. One playthrough, though, starting fresh, I'd say is probably between 5-10 hours (depending on how good you are at the dungeon-crawling, and whether you want to bond with all the weapons or just your faves).

One note to mention: some of the plot revolves around a stalker who won't take '♥♥♥♥ off' for an answer. If that will trigger you, this isn't the game for you.

That said, to anyone else? 25/10, would recommend.

**tl;dr No kids and stubborn devs, don't recommend.**

Medium version: The developers of this game are strongly opposed to adding children. If you, like me, enjoy playing colony sims to see families develop, generations pass, and see storylines develop over a long period of time, find a different game. (Additionally the requests for children seem to have been pretty overwhelmingly supported to this point, so it's kinda another point against the devs that that's clearly what the community wants, but they just don't give a hoot.)

Long version: To me, a lot of the fun in colony sims is starting out with a meager handful of settlers, surviving the tough early years, then once they've started to get more capable and the settlement is stable, having them settle down and create families. I don't find fun in "just min-max it, play for efficiency," I find fun in "My lumberjack and botanist hated each other initially (for unrelated reasons, but I'm going to pretend in my head that there were disagreements about when to cut down trees vs not), but over time they grew to value each others' contributions. In time, they even settled down and had a child, and that child grew up adventuring in the forest, learning its ways from their parents."

This is what I was expecting from Going Medieval, and initially it was off to a good start with the extensively customizable backgrounds/titles and the stories based on them, the little lore every time you load your file, etc. But after a while, I found out that no, the devs refuse to add families and children to the game. While it would be one thing if it was "Yeah, this is early access, so the systems just aren't in yet" -- that's not the case here. The developers actively oppose adding children and family systems to the game because "oh but what if someone complains that we have cannibalism and children in the same game?!" Guess what buddy, people will complain about anything; if you're so worried about cannibalism + children, then work the systems around each other. Make it so children can't be eaten, and bam, problem solved.

Instead, "no kids ever." Great. Take away most of the fun in a colony builder, why don't you?

I wish they had been more upfront about that; it's too late for a refund for me, and what I thought was just "it's early access and not in yet" turns out to be "oh, a lot of the community wants this? Too bad! hahahaha."

**So yeah, not recommended/10.**

Honestly, I wish I could recommend this game. Maybe if you enjoy pointless, tedious questing, it's the game for you, but for me? Get me the ♥♥♥♥ out. Seriously, please, I want out.

The combat in this game is FANTASTIC, 9.5 or 10 out of 10, so I really wish I could recommend it. But for every hour of game that I've played, which at the time of posting this review is just under 50 hours, only about 10 minutes out of that hour has been doing combat gameplay like dungeons or instanced scenarios. The other 50 minutes has been "run here, talk to this NPC, now run back, oh hey you get to kill 5 monsters now, but now you need to run to 6 different places and interact with objects by pressing G then standing there waiting for a bar to complete."

It's miserable. It's hell. The game has so much potential, and they squander it with the most inane, tedious quest grind I've ever seen. And unlike FFXIV which has a similar system, the quests are just bad and boring. Imagine if the only game in XIV was ARR. No Heavensward, no Shadowbringers, just ARR -- and the low points at that. That's the Lost Ark experience, and I no longer recommend that my friends play this game.

(I also have about 20 hours in the Switch version before deciding I wanted Steam achievements and purchasing it a second time, so add about 20 hours to whatever my playtime is when you read this.)

If you're a turn-based RPG fan OR a fan of league of legends lore, I recommend this game. If you're a fan of both, I STRONGLY recommend this game. There's sometimes bugs here and there, but honestly, it's almost never anything gamebreaking (on PC at least; I've had a few full-crashes on Switch and a lot of broken textures, but PC is mostly minor visual stuff at most). Some reviews mention it being the devs' previous game but reskinned, but I personally can't speak to that. YMMV if you've played their previous game(s?), but if you haven't, it's a very strong turn-based RPG.

The only time it's even been close to gamebreaking was one very specific time when Yasuo's ability that's meant to get extra hits, but it wasn't proccing the extra hits, so playing on a higher difficulty was very difficult to beat the fight at the level I was at since I was losing 2/3 of the damage I was intended to have on him and he was my main DPS. (At the Normal difficulty, it would have been fine, or if I had replaced Yasuo with another character like Pyke or MF.) It was an optional boss, so I also could have come back later with more levels and items under my belt to defeat the bug. While it was certainly frustrating, it wasn't game-ending.

The most common bugs I've run into are just visual bugs where the game clearly wasn't really intended to be on an ultrawide monitor. It's fine for the most part, but the fishing UI is kinda screwy, and I've had one single cutscene where the speech bubbles that matched the narration spawned partially off-screen. Minor nuisances, but nothing game breaking. (Though on the subject of ultra wide, I do wish they'd supported it better rather than just "here's some greenish spooky-themed bars on the side of your screen. It beats black bars, but only barely.)

While it took me a few battles to figure out the lanes/speed system, it honestly works really well and is a fun and engaging system to play around with. The characters are all unique enough in their gameplay that you can customize your party with whatever you like most (or whatever works best on higher difficulties). Personally, I felt that Normal difficulty was a little TOO easy and have been playing on Veteran, so if you've played a few RPGs, I recommend playing the tutorial on normal to get used to the specific mechanics, then immediately cranking it up to Veteran, possibly expert or whatever the 4th difficulty is called. (Even on veteran, I still sail through trash mobs without having to remotely pay attention, but I've also done a little grinding on the side sometimes while bored, so again, ymmv.)

Characters are very customizable, and while you can't make them entirely different archetypes (e.g. Illaoi is a healing tank and will never put out the DPS of Yasuo, nor will he ever be able to tank quite like she can), you can change a lot about the way they play. Burst damage, bleeds, on-hit builds, slow-but-large hits, shield tanking, heal tanking. There's so many ways to customize, and on higher difficulties, it's recommended to do so depending on the boss you're facing.

My one frustration is that Inspect mode (where you can see character de/buffs and whatnot) doesn't necessarily do a great job of explaining the hazards on the field, but barring a few unique boss mechanics (where you can check the boss' abilities to see what they do), they're mostly repeatable random buffs/debuffs so you can get used to recognizing them pretty quickly.

The game is very nice-looking as you explore. Some of the facial expressions in some cutscenes can be... on the comical side of things on rare occasions, but for the most part, it's a very good-looking game. I wish weapons had a cosmetic slot so that if you liked the appearance of a weapon (since they do visually change based on the weapon you're wielding) you could still wield the cool appearance even if you got a stats upgrade, but even as-is, I haven't run into any objectively awful-looking weapons, just ones that were less my taste than others.

The environments you roam around in are absolutely FANTASTIC, and while I've never given a hoot about Bilgewater as a region before, it feels genuinely alive in this game in a way I can't help but begin to care about.

This is extremely, extremely subjective. I'm a little bit of a LoL lore nerd, but none of these characters are the ones I pay the most attention to, so I have a surface level understanding for the most part, and can't say with 100% certainty that they're depicted perfectly accurately, but I've yet to see anything that felt out of character, let alone jarringly so (unlike the Sentinels event...). There's clearly been a lot of love and time put into getting the characters right, and Airship Syndicate deserves a lot of credit for that. Honestly, they do the lore better than Riot themselves has half the time, so uh. Yeah...

I haven't yet finished the game (I'm roughly 2/3s of the way through), so I can't speak to the ending yet, but the actual narrative itself has been really solid so far. There's so, SO many good character moments in the aside optional conversations too -- I didn't care about Illaoi before this game, for example, but I've really come to love her as a character, all because of this game.

The one complaint I have is on pacing. The early part of the game (first 25% or so) can feel a little.. slow. You only have a single character for what I'd estimate to be about 60-90 minutes, two characters for a couple hours, and the third character unlock probably 2-4 hours in. I don't have exact estimates because my Switch didn't calculate the time right and I skipped the cutscenes until I reached the point I'd gotten to on switch, but it feels like it takes WAY too long to assemble the full cast. I was over 20 hours in before I FINALLY unlocked the 6th character, which is quite frankly, too slow. I wish they had worked out a way to assemble the cast more quickly, especially since you get both tanks as your first two characters which makes the early battles feel even *slower*. Once you start picking up DPS characters it feels a little better, but this is your advanced warning that assembling the full cast is glacially paced a bit slow.

Using the full 10 point scale and not IGN ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I'd still give this game a solid 8/10. It's a very strong game, and the only thing keeping it from being my GOTY for 2021 is the fact that Monster Hunter Stories 2 also came out this year and there's just nothing that can compete with that. That said, I have recommended, and will continue to recommend, this game to most of my friends regardless of whether they like the lore of League or not. It's a very strong game on its own merits, and if you do like League lore, that's the icing on the cake.

I am of two minds on this game. If you just want a sci-fi tactics game to mess around with, Ticket to Earth has a vibrant and beautiful world and (at least as far as I got) interesting characters, and a very enjoyable draw-a-path set of mechanics. If you're a perfectionist who needs to get every bonus objective all the time, this game is NOT for you (or me).

TtE, in my eyes, is held back by the fact that often times, the bonus objectives are LITERALLY impossible to complete without restarting a least a handful, if not dozens of times. Missions where, for example, you need to kill an enemy on the first turn, but there aren't enough tiles to power up your ranged ability, and there isn't an available path all the way to an enemy/enough power to kill that enemy even if you can get there. I spent about 55 of my 96 minutes of playtime on a single mission, restarting over and over again to try and fulfill all the bonus objectives, before finally realizing any more attempts would have me smashing my keyboard in frustration, at which point I gave up and just completed the mission with 1/3 objectives done. I kept hoping that the RNG would favour me, but even with heavy restarts, it seems that completing every bonus objective is nigh-on impossible for most missions.

I really wish that the devs had included pseudo-random RNG, ensuring that there was always a solution (assuming you played perfectly), rather than pure RNG, but for now, I'm just going to have to give this game up.

TtE MAY get better once you can purchase better abilities, but honestly, I'm so angry at this game and its RNG that I'd rather just refund it and not waste any more of my time.

If you can get through the RNG balogna, Ticket to Earth is probably a great game, and I'd recommend at least giving it a shot. That said, if you're a completionist who needs to finish every objective, I recommend staying the hell away, as it will be nothing but an exercise in frustration.

When I say that I recommend this game, I do not recommend it for everyone. There is a specific niche of players that I believe No Man's Sky will be enjoyable for. If you do not fit in this niche, consider this a 'do not recommend' review.

Also, keep in mind a lot of players are reporting performance problems. I am not personally having problems on my set-up, however, your mileage may clearly vary.

• Some (a lot of?) people have performance problems. I personally do not, but that's one experience of many.
  
• There's basically no tutorial. At all.
  
• Core gameplay loop is pretty much 'find planet, land on planet, hopefully find some animals, grab some minerals, repeat.'
  
• Animals within the same systems tend to be VERY similar. You absolutely WILL run into "Animal 1" and then "Animal 1 + added <body part>."
  
• Resource management is huge; you have VERY limited inventory space, and you're going to constantly run into 'your inventory is full' notifications.
  
• KB+M controls have some problems.
  
• Game is primarily single-player (unclear if intentionally so).

Tutorial, or lack thereof
In No Man's Sky, you're essentially dumped on a world near a broken ship and some resource containers. That's it. You're not really told what to do, and I found myself having to fumble through the controls section in the options menu to figure out how to do ANYTHING. If you play with KB+M beware, because at the moment, any time you want to look up 'how do I X,' you'll mostly find answers with controller prompts in mind.

The game also doesn't really describe well where to get basic items you'll need. I'm currently in need of antimatter, but the only place I can find it is buying from traders. I'm assuming it must also be a naturally occurring resource, but there's nowhere I can find that actually gives me the foggiest hint on where to find it. I also had trouble finding some other elements I needed to get my ship off the ground, and ended up stumbling into them quite by accident after 20+ minutes of thoroughly hunting for them. I imagine that a wiki would help with this, though I'm not sure how helpful it will be considering that (in theory) there should be a variety of plants/minerals that give various elements.

Core Gameplay
No Man's Sky has a very basic gameplay loop of 'find planet, land on planet, hopefully find some animals, grab some minerals, repeat.' If this does not sound enjoyable to you, you're probably not going to enjoy this game, and can go ahead and consider this 'not recommended.' To further specify, a lot of animals (that I've seen thus far) are fairly similar. I ran into an awesome animal earlier, then 60 seconds later ran into what was essentially an identical animal with an added set of horns. To me, this was still enjoyable, but if it sounds boring or repetitive to you (which I can hardly blame you for), this game is probably not something you'll enjoy.

Plants in particular tend to get repetitive, since you see the same plants on nearly every planet, as they're a source of basic resources. I can see the reasoning behind it, but even I am getting a little tired of the same basic plants on every single planet, under different names.

Have an example of what I'm talking about with very similar species.
This is what I've called a Whiskered Bortimeya.[i.imgur.com]
And this is what I've called a Horned Bortimeya.[i.imgur.com] (Though I suppose Finned may be more appropriate, in hindsight).

The two are very similar, which makes sense since they're from the same planet in the same environment, but also means that it may feel repetitive to discover both of them. I personally enjoyed finding both the Whiskered and Horned variants, but if this is something you could see yourself finding tedious or repetitive, this is probably not the game for you.

Resource/Inventory Management
As I mentioned, you have VERY limited space in this game. You ARE able to transfer freely between suit and ship inventories, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it makes more inventory space, but on the other, your inventory is now spread across two screens. Personally, I would've preferred one big inventory, but I suppose that'd break some players' immersion, so I can see why they went with this approach.

I'm a massive packrat; I tend to be the kind of person to hoard everything under the sun. My struggles with the inventory system have been pretty frustrating. It really does seem like pretty much everyone has mentioned the inventory system, though, so I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Controls
KB+M controls are clunky. I personally rebound a bunch of keys, but the button prompts in the UI don't update. My crafting, for example, is on D (I use QWES instead of WASD), but I still see the button prompt to 'press X to craft,' Sometimes, I'll even see controller button prompts, which is just as unhelpful.

Controller is significantly better (coming from someone ♥♥♥♥♥ at using one), but there are some noticeable omissions, such as pulse drive not seeming to allow you to bind it. I've been using controller + occasionally a key or two on the kb (e.g. Shift).

Flying also feels fairly unresponsive. My main complaints with it are that you can't look below your ship (and turning the nose of your ship earthward seems impossible, as far as I can tell), and that turning in general feels VERY sluggish.

The inability to see below your ship makes landing at a docking area on a planet a nightmare. I will regularly over or undershoot, and at that point, it's not worth spending the fuel to try parking a few more times. This may get better with practice, but honestly, the limited area of vision is frustrating in other respects as well.

Turning feels very sluggish, but I'm hoping that this is simply because I have a fairly basic ship (using the preorder one, which is marginally better than the default one you start with) and thus don't have any sorts of upgrades on it. I'm assuming there must be upgrades for speed and handling at some point, and that I just haven't gotten there yet, but as it currently stands, flying is frustrating to try and navigate. If you see something cool that's not directly in front of you, you'd better hope it's large enough that you're a significant distance away in order to turn your ship in time.

Single vs Multiplayer
Ah, the big controversy. Currently, this game plays fully single-player, with the only multiplayer elements being 'maybe someday you'll run into someone else's discoveries.' It isn't fully clear whether this is intentional or not (Sean Murray has been vague in answering the question), so for the moment, assume that it is, and that the product you buy will NOT have multiplayer.

I would not recommend No Man's Sky to the vast majority of players, simply because I believe it is a niche game that was marketed to far too many people. The gameplay IS fairly repetitive, so if the core loop isn't one you find enjoyable, you're not going to like the game. As stated, I'm the kind of person who still enjoys seeing "animal plus added <bodypart>," so this game is ideal for me since there's a near endless universe of places to explore and new animals to see, even if they're not all that diverse. If that last sentence sounded like it described you, and you're patient enough to deal with severely limiting inventory space, I highly recommend No Man's Sky.

Originally, this review was posted about 3.5 hours in. I may edit a bit into the body of the review for contex, but primarily, anything new will be added in the comments section for space.

(Game received for free not for promotional purposes, but as a gift from a kind redditor.)

tl;dr
I don't often care about games enough to write a review, but Abzu has easily rocketed to the top of my 'favorite games of all time' list. Abzu is what I would consider to be a masterpiece.

Pros:
+ Stunning art style and consistant art direction
+ Beautiful soundtrack

Subjective:
= Loose storytelling. You're very much shown rather than told, and for those who would rather not interpret their own meaning, this may not be the right game for you.
= Relatively short main storyline. I finished in about 3 - 3.5 hours, though I haven't gone back and collected everything yet. That said, that time was all killer and no filler, so personally, I'd say that it's well worth it.

Cons:
- Simple puzzles. Honestly, I didn't mind this, since I felt this was very much an atmospheric game, but if you're the type to get bored or lose interest because the puzzles aren't complicated, this may not be the game for you.
- Set control scheme. You can invert certain options, but it may take you some time to get used to the swimming controls in this game. (I'm a bit under 4 hours in, have beaten the story, and still don't feel used to them. That may be because I'm notoriously bad at video games though, so your mileage may vary.)

----

Let me start off by saying that I have roughly the emotional range of a toaster. It's very hard to get me to /feel/ anything based on the narrative in a game, but Abzu absolutely managed it. There were points in the game, without getting into too many spoilers, where I felt genuine joy, mourned certain events, felt insignificant due to the vastness of aspects of the environment, or felt genuinely angry over something that happened. I felt sympathy for a character I had previously only felt anger for, and I felt joy when I wouldn't have expected to. This game absolutely runs the spectrum, and in my experience, does so effectively. When Abzu described itself as an emotional experience, I was skeptical, but having played it, it's absolutely accurate in that description.

The soundtrack for Abzu is beautiful. There's haunting melodies, songs of joy, and everything under the sun. I frequently find that I wish to play games with the music off, but Abzu joins the likes of Transistor in having a soundtrack perfectly executed, and masterfully made. Not once did I even THINK about turning off the music, and for me, that's saying something.

Similarly, the aesthetic of Abzu is beautifully crafted. It was very, very clear that each environment had a LOT of love put into it by the developers. Every little detail comes together to create a beathtaking world filled with colors, emotion, and beauty.

I honestly can't even begin to say how much I love this game. I've tried in this review, but I don't feel that I've truly done it justice. I strongly recommend trying it for yourself.

TL;DR? Narrow FoV plus clunky K+M controls mean I can't enjoy myself in this game as I would love to be able to, nor can I blanket recommend it. It's disappointing that, as with DA:I last November, this is clearly just a console port, but if you can get past that, or are primarily a console gamer before a PC gamer (though if so, why are you reading this on Steam?), TW3 gets a lot more attractive as a game.


Disclaimer: I am VERY bad at video games. I also have certain habits in terms of controls I've fallen into that may not be the norm, and thus what I struggle with may not be what you struggle with. Take my review with a grain of salt, or even better, a full shaker.


In its current state, TW3 is not something I can recommend. The story is great from what I was able to get through in the time I forced myself through, and the world looks fantastic (at least as far as what I can comfortable run on my computer), but that's about all the positives I can list.

The FoV is narrow as all hell. Some research dug up that apparently it's set to 55, and there's no slider or anything in the options menu to fix this. The result is a nauseating experience (to me, at least) where I can't play for more than 20 minutes at a time without feeling sick to my stomach. There IS a workaround that can be dug up on reddit by changing resolution + window size in config and some other stuff, but I'm not entirely convinced by that.

The K+M controls are.. awkward, at best. One of the issues (lagging input, for lack of a better description) can be cleaned up a little by enabling Hardware Cursor in the options menu, but there's numerous other problems. The actual control scheme is a bit strange, particularly from someone coming from a background of an MMO/single player RPGs.

For why that last sentence is relevant to me, and may not be to you, let me explain two of my biggest frustrations in this game -- I'm used to holding right click to rotate the camera. In TW3, right click is bound to 'Use Witcher Senses,' and even fi you rebind that, you can't use it to rotate the camera angle. Also, for anyone who's used to using Q+E to strafe left and right respectively? Sorry, can't do that in this game. Movement is firmly tied to WASD, and isn't able to be rebound at all. To compound the issue, by default, Q is bound to 'Use Sign,' so if you're someone who frequently rebinds WASD to WQES, have fun accidentally aggroing every guard/villager ever (tip: rebind this immediately if you're like me. it'll save you a lot of headache). This is less troublesome than being unable to rebind movement keys, since you can essentially disable the functionality of Q by reassigning it elsewhere (` is a good option, I've found), but still worth mentioning.

I can't speak to the controls using a controller since my 'skill' with one is best described as 'a highly inebriated monkey smashing the joysticks from side to side,' but so far I've heard few complaints, so that may be the way to go with anyone who has one. Certainly, it has to be better than K+M at least..