Recent reviews by Ya Boy Yoggy

One of the best RPGs ever made. The combat system is taken from real sources (primarily Lichtenauer and KDF), it’s truly a pleasure to play.

The writing is also setting a new standard for AAA games - none of it is thoughtless or templated, there’s no AI generated slop. Every piece of it is cinematic in a way that no other game, except maybe Cyberpunk, has managed to achieve.

The realism is also above the rest: people run from fights, they don’t like you when you stink, and lock picking is a real pain in the ass at first (it becomes trivial fairly quickly). If you pay attention, you’ll notice there’s a privy in every camp, a midden heap in every town.

The polish is high; there are almost no bugs, and all the mechanics work seamlessly. As with KCD 1, your character has a bit of a slow start, The first 5 hours can feel like an uphill battle, but after that progression isn’t a problem. You’ll feel rewarded because of the learning curve.

You can’t do better than this game. It it’s one of the greats.

Void Crew is pretty fun as-is, imagine first-person FTL, and it’s not super expensive so it’s well worth the money. But there are a couple of caveats.

For one, you absolutely must bring your own friends, because the randos in this game can be just impossible to play with, and there’s really no way to solo or carry a group.

The aesthetics are fine but lack for flash. The roguelike format fails to capitalize on the inherent draw of customizing your own spaceship. And the space flight mechanics are third grade ♥♥♥♥ — there’s no maneuvering in three dimensions, youre stuck oriented in the ecliptic plane, which takes most of the fun out of piloting.

The game idea is really good and it mostly works, but the budget execution gets boring quickly. What this game needs is probably another 2 million dollars to add the depth it deserves.

Hmm. The automation piece is robust, but the rest of it isn’t really thought out. Why are there wildlife or guns at all for example? That part of it is incredibly boring and shouldn't even be in the game.

There are a lot of little jokes in the memos you see here and there, but there’s no world building that makes a difference, and there’s no characterization or plot. If the automation engineering is enough for you, it’s probably hard to do better than this game.

But if you’re looking for anything else, anything at all, you may want to look elsewhere.

I have to recommend this game because it's undeniably the result of skilled execution on the part of some folks who knew what they were doing and cared about what they were making. This game has been __designed__, by designers, and it shows.

The minimalist aesthetics of this game are very stark and very serene; they give the game a formalist feel. But it's a bit of a monkey's paw: in games about battle, often the mess and the impact are a big part of the appeal, so in a game where any sense of roughness has been shaved away by clean lines and tritone color palettes, it might end up feeling a little boring. The action in this game can feel like it's taking place at a very far remove -- again, almost an exercise in formalism rather than gaming. Is it fun when a game reminds you that it's all just data structures and real values under the hood?

The mix between RTS and tower defense works well. There's a lot of progression -- different skills, modifiers, upgrades, units, and buildings; the mix-and-match choices set the game up for high replayability. You can even make your task more difficult, and the game rewards you for doing so.

I guess, do you like Wes Anderson movies? Ingmar Bergman? You'll probably like this game, then.

This is a pretty fun use of local co-op, and a great game to play with small kids who are pre-literacy or don't like fighting games, though the demands are high enough that you'll end up carrying your team in that situation.

The aesthetics are very polished, and the mechanics are too, though they can be a bit tedious and sometimes unclear.

The scope, detail, and progression are nothing incredible, but overall, this is a nice example of what indie games can do.

This game has no right to be so addicting to play. It's not situated in any kind of world, there's no characterization to be had, there aren't really any surprises. And I don't really even care for TCGs, especially not pokemon. But somehow I just managed to blast 25 hours through this game over a single weekend. So I guess, you've been warned.

I think what the game needs to fulfill its potential is to lean more into the analytics and business management aspects of this kind of sim. I think spreadsheets or graphs (centrally accessible, not by clicking into the history of each individual card) could be leveraged to great effect, as could seasonal trends or fickle public tastes. Honestly this game badly needs a global inventory tracker. There also needs to be some way to build walls or somewhere to put backup stock that isn't just in the middle of your store.

This game is still very much in EA, but still very much has captured my attention.

There’s always going to be a place in my heart for a good city builder. Cities: Skylines isn’t an absolute banger, but it’s good enough to scratch the itch.

It’s mechanically pretty polished, it doesn’t have much extra fluff to get in the way, and it’s reasonably deep.

I didn’t like that you really can’t use modern urban design concepts to build something that resembles a walkable city. The mechanics are solid but unoriginal. There aren’t really any surprises.

Overall though, pretty good game.

Such an incredibly tight game, mechanically and aesthetically. There are no frills or distractions here, no fluff or side games or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Just ultraviolence.

Best soundtrack, quite seriously, of any game ever.

Holy s-balls this game is addicting!

I quite like my Steam Controller. It’s full of great ideas and great execution. It was ahead of its time, which is a bad thing to be for a piece of tech. But steam is going strong so hopefully we’ll see a new version at some point.

I really like that this controller functions as a mouse even outside of games on Windows and Linux — makes navigating on the TV super easy. I definitely used it for its intended purpose: to play mouse-only games like Civ from my couch. Plus the engineering and quality control are all very high — everything is solid and has worked great for years. Steam even replaced my usb dongle for free when it was broken by a child.

Hopefully someday they’ll add joysticks alongside the trackpads like they’ve done with the Deck. I love seeing innovations like this and I hope they keep coming.