Recent reviews by Fohmyn

I'm a huge fan of the Monkey Island series. I'm replaying it before the new game that just released to remind myself of what's in the various games. The remakes of Monkey Island 1 and 2 released a few years ago and are some of the best classic adventure games ever. They're nostalgic, funny, challenging, and never too frustrating. You can't lose the games or die, which makes them more relaxing for me than some other series.

Monkey Island 2 I think is perhaps the weakest entry into the series, but still worth visiting if you are a fan or interested in the story. It stretches a little long and I find the story is a little less *epic* than the other games. I give the remaster 10/10, the issues are just that the base game was a little weaker than the others to me. It does introduce characters who return later in the series and sets up lots of jokes that won't make sense without context in the other games.

These games are cheap, and will provide hours of entertainment. They're family friendly, low stress, and can generate some creative thinking.

I bought Hardspace: Shipbreaker when it entered early access on Steam and revisited it for a full story playthrough at the game's launch. I very highly recommend the game. It's incredibly fun and innovative gameplay, not in any way similar to another game I can think of. You learn techniques for disassembling old space ships and dealing with various hazards, such as radiation, pressurization, and electrified components. Doing things out of order is faster and easier, but usually damages the expensive components you're trying to salvage and can hurt or kill you. You upgrade your tools, and through repetition learn more effective ways of using them, to disassemble ships faster and more efficiently. By the end of the game, I revisited a couple of early game ships and disassembled them in a tenth of the time it originally took me. There are a number of ship varieties, and each mission the layout of components and hazards is different. It will eventually get stale after you've done the same ship a few times, but the hours I got out of the game make it more than worth the price.

The game does have a storyline, which is entertaining enough. It's told through voice-overs from various characters as they talk to you, teach you about the ships you're working on, and flesh out the universe and storyline. It takes maybe 15 hours or so to see the extent of the story content.

Wurm Online is my favorite game I've ever played. It has the most intricate and rewarding crafting system ever conceived. I played Wurm probably 10 years ago and created a village alongside a few friends. It took us months of effort and I have never experienced gameplay so rewarding as watching my hard work over a long period of time turn into something not many people could do. It is akin to making a massive construction in Minecraft that takes months, turned up to 11.

Wurm Online is not without downsides. The terrain looks pretty good but character and NPC models and animations are poor. It looks like an old game. The user interface is unintuitive and I would imagine most people don't make it far past the tutorial. New players should absolutely band together and make settlement or join an existing one. This isn't a game that you can jump straight into PvP, so take it slow and enjoy the experience of being new. The game has incredible complexity, which is both a massive draw but also intimidating to new people. You can breed animals over many generations to become faster, capable of carrying more weight, or hardier in combat. Crafting a top-end set of armor is a dedication of months of training, resource gathering, and enchanting. It literally takes a village to do many of these things because for one person to do everything well would take years of effort.

I would HIGHLY recommend anyone interested in crafting, open world gameplay, building, or immersive MMOs to give Wurm Online a try. The Steam release is the perfect time to jump into a new server where everyone is on a level playing field. If you stick with it, I assure you the payoff will be fantastic.

Conan Exiles is a great game from a developer who has respect for the players. The game on official PvP servers plays similar to Rust, with base building and raiding, regional resources you must travel to obtain, and lots of PvP between individuals and clans. However, Conan Exiles has a lot of PvE content as well as RPG mechanics. The character levels, chooses stats and feats (similar to ARK), and explores the world to find monsters and bosses with unique loot. A major feature that differentiates Conan Exiles from other games in the genre is their thrall system. Human NPCs can be knocked out and converted to your cause to help with crafting or combat. They all have different stats and are an important part of the PvE experience.

The thing I like most about Conan Exiles is how well the game has been developed. I purchased it as soon as it hit Steam in Early Access. The game is 500% more fleshed out now than it was then. They are continually adding more content for free. The game does has purchaseable DLCs that add cosmetic variants of buildings, decorative items, and gear. The gear might have a different stat bonus than the armor in the vanilla game, but would be a simple sidegrade rather than a direct upgrade. The best weapons and armor are in the base game.

Not only would I recommend playing this game, I would happily pay full price for the game. We should support companies who develop their games well without releasing expansion packs before the full release of the game, who fix bugs and add new content for free. Their model for paid DLC is very good. The game is innovative in its genre and could very easily entertain players for hundreds of hours.

Battle Brothers is phenomenal. You get a procedurally generated map, a few procedurally generated characters (random backgrounds, random stats within a distribution for that type of character) and increasingly challenging missions. The game teaches you how to be better through failure. You will get your entire team wrecked so many times, and I'm still playing on the lowest difficulty. When your characters die it is permanent, too. Unlike some games, the steep learning curve and high difficulty make your successes feel more rewarding. You get a few gear upgrades and you get a sense of tangible progression, like you EARNED that. This game doesn't give away anything for free, and I love it.

Recommended!

I really enjoyed Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. It's a crafting/exploration game with no combat. The game is all about exploring new areas, meeting characters, and simple crafting. I played the entire main story, completing all the side quests I found, but NOT maxing out most of the farms, in 10 hours. That being said, for $25 at full price, it's not the cheapest game around, but for fans of this sort of game, it's worth it.

The graphics and sounds are cutesy, the harvesting is simple (no tool upgrades), the character customization is all cosmetic, and there are no decisions that will close other portions of the game. For that reason, I think it would be a great game to introduce kids or non-gamers to video games. There are some easy puzzles and places where you have to jump/climb a bit, but nothing I would consider difficult. Crafting recipes all have to be unlocked through quests, exploration, and crafting. At the beginning, you can't craft much, but by the end of the game you've got hundreds of recipes for interesting stuff to make.

I'd recommend the game, especially on sale.

The reviews for this game are unnecessarily harsh. This is a fantastic management simulator, and a really great dinosaur game. I have played without any of the DLCs, and there are dozens of dinosaur species, lots of buildings types, maybe 50 research items, and some definite challenges. I've beaten the campaign, and I do recommend the game and I would pay full price for it again.

Other reviews I have read call the game shallow due to formulaic dinosaur interactions, but it isn't. Dinosaurs have comfort levels, and if they are too low, the dinosaurs will attack each other and the enclosures. The factors that cause each dinosaur are different. Some dinosaurs, especially large carnivores, don't want competition from their own species. The herbivores all want company, and some of them are happy with many different species, which results in dinosaur enclosures with 10 different species of dinosaurs living in harmony. All the dinosaurs have different requirements in terms of space and biomes, simplified down to the area of forest, plain, and water they require. A brontosaurus requires a massive enclosure, while the small guys are okay with something akin to a zoo enclosure.

To complicate things, the dinosaurs can be genetically modified which can change their base stats, but also make them more (or less) social, more violent, more or less disease resistant, even increase their lifespan. To further complicate things, dinosaurs start to lose comfort in randomly occuring tropical storms, and the dangerous predators (think velociraptors, tyrannosaurus rex, and especially the genetic hybrids from the two Jurassic World films- the indominus rex and the indoraptor) have super high thresholds for comfort before they attack their enclosure and murder your guests.

The other complain I've seen is a lack of space constraining the player's creativity. This is the big challenge on the campaign maps, of which there are 5. They have crazy shapes, some are very small, all are designed to give environmental challenges and force the player to have different dinosaur species interacting to meet the mission goals. If you had an infinite canvas, players would put each dinosaur type in its own pen and the game would be easy but boring. Instead, through trial and error, the player discovers that velociraptors play well with armored herbivores like the ankylosaurus, but they will eat parasaurs, and carnotaurus eats them. I appreciate that after the fourth campaign map, which is a long, thin island, my knowledge of dinosaur interaction increased the the point where I knew MUCH more about dinosaur interactions in the game than before. Take that to the sandbox mode (which there is one, Isla Nublar), and you will be able to pack more dinosaurs into smaller areas for more money and guest enjoyment. The campaign maps train the player.

Definitely play this game if you like management simulators. This game is the best zoo management game I've played, and also a great dinosaur-themed game. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed Firewatch. It's a short, maybe 3 hour linear adventure game that tells a poignant story. I find it rare in gaming that I get any sort of emotional response to video game stories, but Firewatch evoked one. This is one of those games that could be described better as art than a game. I would replay it just to see what different dialogues open up and fully poke around in every corner of the world.

If you've got a couple hours to spare, I'd recommend picking up Firewatch and playing it. Try to allot yourself the time to play through in one sitting and you'll appreciate it more.

Prey is the best single player game I've played in years. It's a survival exploration game set on a space station that presents many options to surpass challenges ala Deus Ex or Dishonored. I genuinely love every aspect of this game. It has an awesome engaging story that grips you from the moment you start. It has awesome enemies and environments that give it a horror game feeling. Huge selection of weapons and skills to allow you the ability to customize your playstyle. Branching options in the game depending on how you devleop your character. Multiple endings. The best feeling of progression I may have ever experienced through skills and abilities ramping up yo ur power gradually.

A++

Legend of Grimrock is a surprisingly awesome game that I'd highly recommend. I saw the screenshots and videos of it before and didn't think it looked like anything special, but the gameplay is phenomenal. It's a dungeon crawler with lots of exploration, secret passages and traps, loot and lite crafting, and interesting combat. I'd definitely recommend giving it a try if it's your style of game, even if you've looked at the media and thought it looked weird.