Recent reviews by Archimedex

Tarkov, but simpler and buggier.

For me, PvE is the right direction for a Tarkov-like. No player camping, no unfair nonsense. Initially I wrote a long, positive review, suggesting some changes.

I played the game some more and changed my mind. It seems like it's designed and coded by inexperienced, messy developers, who don't really know what they're doing. They cloned and simplified Tarkov and added some Stalker elements for a twist. The game is fun but buggy and rough. To the point where buildings, exits, or quest areas can be sometimes inaccessible, due to proceduralism gone wrong. Main quests can be bugged, so player progression can be bugged. Gear can disappear in your inventory (this seems fixed). There is a lot of unclarity about Where to go and What to do. Poor wording, lack of direction, you're often lost and aimless. And then there are the regular bugs.. like bugged items that don't work - waste a healing item and get no heal, or UI fails if you open and close it quickly, or good old memory leaks if playing long enough without a restart.

The core game has some unnatural mechanics that are hard to accept or get used to. Like no run and shoot but run and reload yes. Bullets hit only around the cursor like in FPS, but this is no FPS. Restricted player visibility, like awareness cone, messy trees, blind spots behind tall structures, nasty weather, but the AI is a laserbot with instant reaction time and instant awareness. Min distance shooting limit, but the AI dances around you at rocket speeds in absurdly tight dark corridors. Max distance shooting limit, but the AI shoots you from outside your screen.

And if you're a bit color blind you will have even more problems that I do, identifying friend from foe in this game. They're all tiny, generic soldiers, almost featureless, almost identical.

It needs some serious polish, better UI, overall focus and clarity, and a lot more content. Ideally, it needs to find its own voice, not just imitate Tarkov.

And now it's out of EA.

They added some, they broke some. Quest lines can still be bugged. Unfun changes happened to make sure the game makes less sense and is less fun. Basically the same game, same bugs, same UI disaster at its core. But perks/upgrades are less useful, less engaging, armor kits look the same as weapon kits, maps are more crowded, more exit camping/problems, more unfair visibility problems, more scarcity in early game economy while late game you sit on mountains of cash, so on. And 5 maps turned into 6, instead of the 8 maps people were expecting. Cloud Saves are still not working, because.. I guess.. Cloud Science needs to be upgraded to BioMolecularComputerologyCloudScience tier VII.

It's maybe a sign that they've reached the end of development and won't add more content nor the very much needed polish.

5/10 for now, not really a thumbs down, not really a thumbs up.

Wait 10 more years for Final Release to truly enjoy this Grand Game!

The reason to buy, for me, was not so much to play it now, but to learn to mod it, and enjoy it later with some fine Full Conversion Mods. It's an investment in the future really.

The gameplay is a mixed bag atm.


The main game loop feels pretty polished and satisfying.

Combat is great, challenging, a bit better than in Warband.

Smithing is an amazing crafting minigame and one of the best new features of BL. You smelt, refine, discover new parts, and explore new unique weapon combinations as you make your own gorgeous weapons. Make some of the best, most beautiful weapons yourself, and use them to chop chop smash smash! Thanks for that BL!

The UI.. now allows for easy micromanagement. Significant quality of life improvements here.


The whole game is vanilla, rough, unbalanced.

Some mechanics don't work yet, or work poorly. Like don't try to get your brother married, it won't work. Don't get married, don't save your brother. You can, but you might not be able to access their inventories.

Main quest can be impossible to complete.. you can only complete as vassal, the game doesn't know you are an independent faction when you are in fact.. an independent faction.

Troop trees are rough and basic and copy-paste vanilla values, uninteresting to explore.

Characters can be missing, impossible to find, stuck in some castle while in fact are not in that castle. The game points to Location A when in fact you can find them in Location B, somewhere probably.. near Location A. Or not.

Characters can sometimes be teleporting around like Nonsense.

Smithing, which I like a lot.. is beyond OP and completely crazy broken. Mild spoilers.. at least for now, until they fix their sht.. you can smith 2 handed swords, level up smithing like crazy, sell dozens to kings, at half price or so, and make easy millions. Or buy the best gear in game and hundreds of horses.. by trading just 1-2 swords.

While Workshops are very hard to figure out, make very little, and most will not make any money at all. As in: zero.

Kingdom features are broken or questionable. Like Clans, which are now your vassals, they are a mess. Instead of getting auto-offers from AI, Clans are hard to get, easy to lose and unfairly destroy relations. This makes Kingdom almost impossible.

Peace offers from the AI will not happen. But you can buy peace with money, and since money is not an issue atm, it's just silly.

Parties are poorly maintained AI armies that you pay for, they do not auto-recruit, but will get themselves captured and will waste valuable troops.

Sieges have various issues. Like 1 guy unreachable forever will make you fail the siege. Troops management is a mess. Broken walls could be more like messy bottlenecks, but sometimes are simply turning a siege into a field battle, aka.. not much sieging gameplay if you simply break walls. Opening gates from the inside is tough, but when it works, it's silly and OP. I also had a few crashes after sieges.

Most castles are not yet in game, there are just a few, and a ton of copy-paste, so not much interest in sieging the same castle again and again.

XP seems pretty broken, it's extremely easy to get to around lvl 13-15ish, and then.. pfff. XP requirements for companions are simply broken. They will not lvl up, not this century at least. You finish the game and they are still 1-2 lvls away from where they started.

Executions are.. a questionable feature, that simply splits the game in: either you do it, play a quicker, much simpler and more repetitive game, make a ton of enemies, potentially ruin your character, ruin diplomacy, be forced to go down the genocide path.. and bypass any reason to siege or make a Kingdom. Or not do it, play the long game of building good relations with the nobility, but miss all the murdering fun, secretly wish you could do it, and cry yourself to sleep every night. And end up in a mess with your Kingdom anyway. The problem here is.. you can easily lamify the game by executing all nobles. And instead of a juicy, rewarding, emotionally messy and mechanically complex end game, you just chop chop chop chop chop... THE END.

The UI again! Needs more clarity, focus, better framing, better organisation, less clutter, more consistency and polish. Upgrades are hard to figure out at first, a bit odd, and the grey shield icons over the Skills that can upgrade are simply not visible enough, they should be Colorful Bright Glowy Animated [with a color that stands out]! Personally I prefer the grid structure of the Warband inventory.

The frequent, entirely useless, and poorly designed autosave.. doesn't async save in the background. It freezes the game for a few seconds. You can't turn it off.

And for now.. some crashes may happen, depending on how you play and what you may try.

Last but not least.. press N to access the Encyclopedia! There should be a large button for it in the main UI/world view, it's essential!

Cheers!

Stardew Valley has a lot of character and rural charm. There are genuine moments of beautiful storytelling that surprised me.

But.

Grind is real.
Poverty is real.
It will take 10-20 hours of gameplay to start finding interesting and/or profitable things to do.

And by fall you realize you have to wait half a year to plant parsnips or learn to make an omelet.
And by spring you realize you're kind of bored with the game and can't be bothered with that omelet anyway..

Multitasking is real.
Everything you do is against a stressful ticking clock.
I pause the game a lot, trying to maximize the little time I have.

Everything is slow..
Moving is painfully slow. Even with upgrades and horse riding.
Cut-Scenes are very simple and very slow.

Farm life is tedious and the game feels kind of tedious. It's all work work work.

The world is small and you have to always be in bed by 2AM. Thanks mom!
The game doesn't usually punish me for dying in the mines. But for falling asleep on my way home..

There's a reason why no other game has NPCs available only 9-5 and closed on Wednesdays, or whenever they like.

So if I want to find them, I use the Wiki.
If I want to know what makes them happy, I use the Wiki.

The UI is simple but not fun to use. You can easily buy or sell something by mistake.

Interacting with the world is a bit awkward and difficult. Especially a few actions, like fighting, placing objects, watering, can be real pain.

Exiting the game doesn't save anything. The game doesn't save constantly, only at the end of the day. Brilliant..

Fishing.
Most annoying minigame ever.

OK. So. Stardew Valley is a crafting sandbox that looks like Harvest Moon but plays more like Minecraft. Without much exploring, adventuring, building, without a special and original world filled with original creatures. You're just fighting simple, generic slimes, bats, flies..
Most days tho'.. you're a boring ol' farmer.
Fo' realz.

I said in a previous version of this review that I failed to find the fun.
But the game starts being fun after 10-20 hours of gameplay, after you start to figure out what's valuable and worth your time, and start to automate things a bit and get some cash flow.

To be fair, I'm focusing on the problems. Other reviews mention the positive side of this game much better than I could. There is something special about this game, after all, I played quite a bit, and will probably play some more. Stardew Valley is a place that can feel a bit like 'home'. Like you have a virtual place that you shape to your liking, and keep coming back to..

I just think the overall experience, which could be a lot more magical and fun, is lowered by mechanics, UI, and the lack of a world I would really want to explore. It's a great concept, clumsily executed.

WTF!!
Unfair, insane, creative, funny, and ridiculous.
Everyone should play this game, at least for a bit.