Recent reviews by Cowbless

Amazing DLC, feels bigger than the game, and is rather long and super entertaining!

Basically "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes" in gamefeel but with actually meaningful consequences. Hands down, one of the most creative genre mix AND in-game art - I mean the screenplays, the quirky and a bit amateur acting (and you sincerely cannot tell whether it's just game budget or in-universe detail about the news network you work in).

It also comes with a not-so-obvious local multiplayer - since the game is pretty hard for one person, you can split tasks between two people, one can be the editor and micromanage nuisances while the other person does the executive producer's job, manages time, reminds to switch cams, etc. It's mighty fun!

Endearing and witty humor cleverly balanced with drama, surprising amount of branching in the story (90+ gigs of video!) and replayability, especially if you like core game mechanics, video editing, re-watching videos for hidden details or just turning every political speech into blips to misrepresent people.

A couple of small peeves that I've noticed, that are hardly important for a person looking to buy this.

- It's unclear whether you, the player, merely choose what to comment on (with A/B system) or actually somehow make things into reality, e.g. when you choose whether a huge gets turned into an amusement park or an apartment complex.
- Sometimes the choices and consequences in the visual novel sections seem abrupt or stupidly limited.
- The timeskipping makes sense considering the magnitude of the events covered, but it makes it feel less risky to annoy your boss - if you, a player, consistently do disruptive stuff, but you, the protagonist, keep working for years.
- Atrocious music segments. The sync-to-music feature pushes you to make absolutely bonkers edits, and the beat itself is very poorly mapped onto the song - usually in rhythm games you're expected to just be the metronome, but here you're expected to sync with the kickdrum that sometimes does fills or stays still for a couple of bars (how am I supposed to know that?!). Or it suddenly decides it's time to sync with the snare too, cuz why not! It's as if the devs had a very particular edit in mind. I'd probably just let players cut on 8th notes (tightly timed for complexity) and hold for bars/half bars, something more intuitive like that.

All that aside, this game is a masterpiece and makes me happy that I've found it.

I've been playing this game on and off since 2019, and for the first time I can say that, despite certain not-so-immersive additions, they've finally struck an amazing gameplay balance between realism, challenge and fun.

The progression feels neat, blood moons always feel challenging, changes to the building system, if a bit weird in places (cobblestone ladders, anyone?), bring so much variety and flexibility to the table it's amazing.

My only complaint would be that the linear structure of POIs gets a bit old after a while and procedurally generated worlds feel "flat". But I'm sure there's a way to tweak the generator settings to make them more fun.

The animations and controls are super polished, and the graphics are brilliant, this is where all the effort went and it shows.

This game has the audacity to warn against installing it on a hard drive. And you know what, it is right in that it's woefully underoptimized.

Here's a not so full list of games that have no issues running off of my HDD (I only mention the online ones with a considerable graphics level and amount of players, for a clean comparison).

- Tarkov
- Apex/ Titanfall online modes
- Battlefields, all of them
- Rust
- probably more, I just don't play these types of games often

And this game lags like crazy if you don't have SSD space for it so customer watch out. That's what you get for using Minecraft Java as your starting point I guess.

Other notes:
- Invasive dubious Chineese kernel level anti-cheat - check
- Incessant battlepasses/levels/multiple types of confusing coins - check
- Creepy-ass AI text to speech cheers from the game when you kill opponents - yeah, that happened I guess?
- Pet peeve, but trivializing a beautiful and complex culture and repurposing it in this way - red white and blue underpants have more to do with liberty than your game has to do with awakening.
- I freaking miss Darwin Project, why did it have to die q-q

A better take on Roadside Picnic that keeps you in suspense well over half the game. Even when you get decent car upgrades and are used to all the dangers - the atmosphere, the weather, the sound design, the darkness - all of that keeps you immersed.

And the way the game can simultaneously be a vibey ride with an amazing radio track AND an adrenaline rush mere moments later - that is just amazing.

I only wish it had more unique location-based anomalies that are connected with the world building - places like Cappy or The Well - things that radically change the rules of the game for you and reward you for studying them. I really liked the aspect of world crafting with magnetizer, but I wish there were more creative things there too.

The worst possible situation for an online game is when the devs create a cheaty mechanic for everyone to either ignore to their detriment or abuse to get easy points. This game has two of such mechanics - optional 3rd person camera available in any game modes (ranked too!) and "body feinting".

All players should either be locked to 1st or 3rd person perspective (with a possible option to switch from 3rd to 1st for aiming with a bow or a stab attack, but then back to locked 3rd person cam). Otherwise it's an honor system where you always have to choose - do I want the game to feel fun, or do I want to abuse the game?

Body feinting boils down to abusing ingame animations with unlikely and unpleasant turning/twisting/spinning of your character. On a surface the drag/accel system is super nice, and the fact that it's all about reading feints and trying to react to genuine hits - all that should work. But people just circumvent all that by feinting with their mouse, bending in half via the third person view and spinning with ridiculous mouse sensitivity. The game ends up looking like a buggy Gmod addon where enemies hit you seemingly at random.

Oh and the ranked mode is full of smurfs.

The most pleasure I've gotten from this game was from encountering people who, same as me, were not yet versed in exploiting these mechanics. It actually looked and felt like a real fight.

Although I appreciate the art and vehicle controls, the endless preachy, often shallow dialogues that are sometimes unskippable, and the abysmally long and clunky on-foot navigation, that makes you spend a LOT of time backtracking through rather confusing elevators and platforms with not much to see besides the general cityscape, but it gets old rather fast. And the punch card side quest exacerbates this problem even further.

Also, and it's quite personal, but to me the main protagonist's tone and attitude are perpetually dismissive, to Camus, to CORA, to whoever it is on the street. It's quite frustrating.

The dog's name - Camus - is supposed to be pronounced ka-moo, the name of the existential philosopher you're trying to homage. I can hardly believe the name is not a reference to Albert Camus, because existentialism is rather linked to cyberpunk in many significant ways. It's a small nitpick but it drives me insane every time.

I'd want this game, but with a cab (more opportunity for interesting people) and with better writing.

And, look, I'm all for bashing the rich and stuff, but can't you make a more believable strawman than "Ugh, I'm so rich, please deliver my super expensive painting, also I like gentrification, especially if it's fast! These poor people can't afford to stay there another hour!" Or "I'm so rich I ordered pizza from an expensive illegal delivery company because I don't want to wait!". If you really want to tackle these topics, you gotta do something better than that.

It's an amazing combination of Oxygen Not Included's management mechanic with roguelite dungeon crawling. Stellar game, I hope to see it grow over the years like ONI has!

Because GamesWorkshop


P.S.
- Crappy optimization, after every darn room there's a lengthy loading screen
- Combat isn't punchy, way less fun than L4D2, feels and sounds like rattling tin cans on the floor in Fallout4
- Messy art direction
- Tutorial that talks over itself
- Starts as a windowed app every single time, how hard is it to get right?
Bad L4D reskin.

Fun Hotline Miami-like gunplay, but with a lot more variety.
Engaging ship-on-ship battles, with bigger ships being available for boarding. (Although the ship AI on bigger ships could be better - it's too easy to just stay in the dead zones)
Very aesthetically pleasing art, tight controls, rewarding progression.