Recent reviews by Coactum

A top notch remake of a classic game with well thought-out QoL features to bring it up to scratch with more modern titles. A must play for anyone with a remote interest in RTS! For old AoM players : It's been done right

I'm actually really enjoying this and it's why I'm kinda torn with this review. I'm a huge Fallout fan, coming up to 30 and followed the games all the way from the first. I'll likely continue to play only for a short while though -

Fallout Shelter could have been so much more. I'm not sure what went wrong at Bethesda, because there's a real gem game hiding underneath the monetisation.
It's such a lovely, charming game. The artwork is brilliant, the audio is fantastic, and I like how much you can customise different aspects of your vault. I like that you send your dwellers out into the wastelands, and the logs they record while they're doing it. I played on release on ios as well, but in all honesty it didn't last very long.

The game is weighed down by microtransactions. I wholeheartedly believe that if this was treated like the single player game it is instead of parroting that crappy model that countless games on the mobile stores follow, if the wait timers were divided by 10 and all of this stupid quantum cola stuff was removed altogether, if questing was fleshed out somewhat and timers were reworked to timers in the range of 1-3 hours, long enough to put down but quick enough to ride through if you kept yourself distracted, if you had slapped a £17.99 price tag on the front of it, I'd imagine it'd have sold like hot cakes and the reviews would be immeasurably in your favour. You could have added card expansions in the form of paid DLC if you really were looking to squeeze a bit extra and it would have raised a lot less eyebrows.

If you had slapped it on the ios store like that at £9.99, it would have sat at the top of different mobile site's top charts for years to come. There's very little in the way of deep strategy games on mobile without in app purchases, this probably would have made a mint done the right way with integrity, instead of taking this trashy route that only serves to annoy people into paying money. A Fallout themed strategy game with no iap that cross synced between my PC and my iPhone? It'd feel like Christmas.

I'd like to imagine that many of the designers were not on board with any of the monetisation stuff and I'd like to believe there's probably a few guys out there that wanted to do something entirely different but had to keep the bosses happy. I feel like this is a good example of what happens when the quest for money interferes too much with a player's experience. You pick these designers up because they are talented people who are passionate about their work and art, let them do their jobs properly!

Bethesda in my eyes is respectable when I compare them to other companys in the industry. Get off this road, it leads to ruin. And from a fan's perspective, Fallout deserves better than a honey trap. Shame on you, Bethesda. >:(


The jist of my review is that the content is fantastic, I can't fault it. The problem is the way it's served is questionable and why I have not recommended it. Fallout is a flagship title and holds weight in regards to normalising IAPs in the PC gaming marketplace, and said games are more often than not shady, anyone who is familiar with mobile gaming will understand what I mean. Their design makes it easy to irresponsibly mine money from people in an irresponsible way, and I fear that this title will help make it easier for this price model to become commonplace.


Cont-
So why would you use the microtransaction model? As others have touched on in the comments, part of the reason is that it makes more money, particularly by badgering players into spending small amounts a lot of times to make it harder to recognise the value of things. It's a deceptive price model and the majority of the reason I didn't recommend the game is because I see a brilliant game underneath a model that is unhealthy for the industry.

There's a perfectly reasonable arguement that places the responsibility entirely in the hands of the person spending, and I believe the majority of people who thumbs up or downed me are probably divided specifically on how they view that. Is it the responsibility of the designer or the player? I'd argue it was both and I'm not one to complain incessently about games, but this kind of price model is notorious for going after what you call "whales", and I just think it's in bad taste.

It's not where I want to see PC gaming go, and in my opinion it's dishonest game design and irresponsible because the majority of income from this game will come from players on both extremes, the ones with oil baron parents and addictive personalities or "low hanging fruit". I work in mental health and these kinds of games can end up pretty much robbing vulnerable people, where the model is most effective. You could quite literally lop the microtransactions off this beautiful game, readjust the timers to compensate, and have an honest title at a set price.

Kickstarter backer here, easily sank 1000+ hours into this over the last couple years. Every patch (and regularly inbetween) I'd have a day off work in my boxers and completely burn it on establishing a new colony with a mishmash of mods you can find on the Ludeon forums. There's a lot of cool and creative people over there.

If you're like me and you know Dwarf Fortress is pretty much your perfect game, but you never managed to get over the hard learning curve, this is what you've been looking for to fill that hole.

Edit: Updating for Steam awards, I had to come back to Rimworld and pick it out specifically. Rimworld is by far my favourite game, something I'll always come back to and load up a bunch of mods with. Some weeks it's all I'll play for 20 minutes here and there, slowly building something up and just pausing and minimising. I honestly recommend anyone even remotely interested in open world building games, from Factorio to The Sims, to give it a try.

I want to get this in first before any disgruntled Steam key recievers turn up that have been around before EA.

I backed the original kickstarter when it was still a concept in early 2011, and when you kickstart a project there's no deadlines. I'm happy to wait, the fact they're still going and trying to realise their idea after all this time gives me their full support in finishing what they started.

Kudos to Warballoon, take as long as you need because you have something really special slowly taking shape!

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Honestly, you guys need to start updating the community(?) more often. I'm under no doubt that the game is still under development regardless of how people scoff and I also imagine it must get frustrating having to bat off "is this dead" so often, but it's taken a fair bit of research to piece together that the game is still even in development. Youtube has had nothing for 3 years, the Reddit looks terrible, I can't find a Discord if one does exist.

Frankly I'm going to have to switch my recommendation as I simply can't recommend the game in it's current state to any new buyers. I'm actually still hopeful you guys manage to get the game to where you want to be and I'll definitely be checking it out if and when you get there. There was a lot of good ideas, the writing was engaging and made me smile, the artwork was nice. I think that's the problem though - I view the game in the past tense. Let me know when 1.0 is here and I'll come back with an honest review. Right now there doesn't really feel like a game to review, more a loose collection of cool ideas. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's because I'm uninformed.

Good luck!

First off, great work Stubterranean games! I've been a backer of this project from its inception, and other than the occasional 5 minute bout every six months to get a feel for how things were coming along I've all but avoided every piece of news about the game in the hopes that I wouldn't spoil myself for release.

I'm a long time fan of the Dungeon Keeper series and fondly remember as a 10 year old sinking entire school holidays into figuring out how to deal with digging into clusters of level 10 Samurais. Dungeon Keeper has and always will have a place on my hard drive alongside many of the Bullfrog classics, back when Peter Molyneux could keep up with his big ideas. How the mighty have fallen! Anyway my review ;

It's no secret that this game is a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper, and while I want to keep in mind that it is it's own beast and I shouldn't directly compare for the sake of biasing myself, inevitably, and inescapably, this is something that will be part of this review. Thankfully whether that's right or wrong, WftO in my opinion has nailed the atmosphere extremely well. The background hum of dank dungeon corridors and the deep, thumping beat of your dungeon heart, alongside your insidious sounding, witty assistant has thrown me back to my schooldays.

Dungeon design itself I have mixed feelings about. There doesn't seem to be as much of an incentive to place down traps or dig your dungeon out in areas to encompass rooms and a necessity to mine out entire areas to make use of the tiles you get is apparant.

I feel like the actual map sizes don't compliment the number of rooms given particularly well, even if the rooms themselves are well thought out in terms of theme and function. Something as simple as converting particular rooms and their functions into room addons may be able to accomodate this where it makes sense - The Sanctuary's functions placed in the centre of a library with an expensive altar for example, or unlocking an arena pen to attract your Beast Master which you could then place on the grounds of an expansive and somewhat barren Beast Lair to fill it out.
I would assume at least for the campaign, fiddling with map sizes would require a horrendous amount of work, so combining rooms with a usefulness that seems somewhat saturated would possibly be a good direction. Some rooms feel a little empty and as a whole the sheer number of room types doesn't translate well to the room you tend to have on each map.

The maps themselves from a campaign standpoint are well thought out, the variation of mission types is welcome and I'm glad as it brings a particular flavour to each map which allows you to apply your creativity in different ways. Dungeon planning was always a big part of Dungeon Keeper and I feel like the variation offered in each map is similar enough to give you that "lets get to work, I got this" feel, without making everything too samey and keeping you on your toes somewhat.

My biggest gripe is creatures and battle. I have found myself a few times leaving rally flags sitting up against an enemy keeper after all but wiping each other out, resulting in a 30 minute long battle that pumps every level 1 spawn on either side into one place until something ever so slightly tips the balance. It doesn't feel decisive enough to be satisfying, as does the level increases for each minion. Level 5 and 6 creatures feel somewhat irrelevent, especially when you consistently go up against them in the campaign with swathes of level 1s, and having a level 10 creature doesn't have that feeling of acomplishment that DK had.
There is a feeling of overwhelming higher level units which again is not a good thing - I just feel like something is missing when it comes to how satisfying this is. I feel like more emphasis should be placed on the power of each level and battles should feel a little more decisive, in return I'd welcome a higher difficulty although I understand if some people would be put off by this.

Another couple pointers is the minimap. More clarity would be helpful, as would a little more intuitiveness in regards to what's going on where. And the hand! The actual reference point is lost on the hand and I really feel this needs redesigned to better handle some of the UI. The rally flags on the left for example require pinpoint precision to the point where the concentration to do so successfully is immersion breaking, and I regularly find myself missing torture racks when I try to drop heroes, even when it feels otherwise.

Bugs I don't particularly want to go into - Every time I check my downloads on Steam there's another massive patch and I'm quite happy to hold off negativity regarding this (which other than a restart of a map due to a broken ritual doesn't bother me. If you're playing this kind of game specifically to win the map you're on then I suggest you sit back, relax and enjoy letting your creativity run wild instead!), but it's nice to see so much work getting put into addressing issues that other players may have a harder time dealing with.

All in all, WftO is a great spiritual successor to DK, most definitely one of the best, you can see from the outset that the team really understands the intricacies and have most definitely made it their own while paying homage. I love to see what happens next and all in all I'm very satisfied with backing Subterranean.

Whether you're an old player or new to the whole concept, I suggest you take a look, regardless of whether it's for nostalgia or just for a new experience. I hold DK in a VERY high regard and consider Bullfrog part of a golden age which wasn't swamped by corporate fatcats, and true creativity was something to be welcomed and encouraged. I'm very happy to see a dev team capture the essence of this in a way that really pays homage to the concept as a whole. A modern DK has been a long time coming and I'm glad to say it's almost there. Just a little more work Subterranean, a touch more clarity and you got this.

Keep up the good work, you won over a venerable Keeper!

Played for 1 minutes and had it summed up, waited another 4 to post this review the second Major Tracy Summers' seductive aviators off and cleavage pose appeared to insult my intelligence. This game is no different to many "free" social games that play identically and charge the crap out of you for a premium currency lest you stay horrifically bottlenecked.

This doesn't belong on Steam, take it back to the IOS store where it belongs.

While I was originally put off by the idea of looking after horses and seeing so many of these kind of games in an already overloaded market, I was pleasantly surprised by the amazing graphics, the sheer variety of horses (mythical ones too) and minigames that are so well designed they completely ♥♥♥♥ on the likes of Guitar Hero. A must buy for all you horse breeding enthusiasts out there. At this price, you can't go wrong.

You haven't lived until you've experienced the joy of your horse winning a golden cup in one of the many gripping races, and after spending so long training him up and upgrading his horseshoes with the well thought out reward mechanics that always leave you with something to work towards, you'll realise that the quality level of PC gaming as a bar has just been raised dramatically.

A masterpiece, and I'm looking forward to the next few years when the likes of EA and Ubisoft realise they're going to have to work on a whole new level of quality to contend.

Can't get enough of this one. It's one of those games where the incredibly active modding community based around it makes up for everything that was even remotely missed. And multiplayer is hilarious.