Recent reviews by Jesus Cat (Fwyrl)

Game no longer launches after a recent update. Again. If I could ask for a refund, I would, because this is just silly.

Relaxing and fun!

Somewhat short, but worth it to me.

I used to enjoy Trove. My tagline for it was "It's not a good game, but it's fun". It didn't do anything special, unique, or particularly well. It was buggy, the community management and dev communication was sloppy at best, balance was poor. But... It was still a game I enjoyed playing.

For the last few updates though, things have changed. Updates have been more and more transparent about reaching for my wallet, while simultaneously also de-valuing all progress made before the update, from slightly, to almost entirely, depending on the update. They've reneged on mechanic after mechanic, some costing real money, others costing hundreds of hours.

The last update I had positive feeling for, before OR after playing it, was well over two years ago. I've continued playing it in the hopes that, like Warframe just did with their Warframe Revisited updates, Trion might change course, and return to making a fun game, instead of the ragged and worn hamster wheel the game's been morphed into. Unfortunately, they just keep pushing deeper and deeper into killing the soul that the game held for me, and making it into a soulless, unfun, grindwall, where any progress made is profoundly pointless, as it'll be negated next major update.

I'm not even suffering burnout; I know how to deal with that. The game just has no soul anymore, and I can't keep watching as they continuously kneecap mid-game progression, and routinely shovel new crap on the pile, without regard for who or what it lands on.

New players: It will be fun initially, I won't dispute that. But be aware; unless you're willing to drop a few hundred, the game will quickly grind to a screeching halt once you reach midgame, and once you get to endgame, you have, at best, a few months before you're right back at the end of midgame, with no progress to show for your effort beyond that. This will not happen 'just once', it's how this game operates. I recommend staying away.

-New review pending, all the concerns in my old review were addressed, so it's not longer relevant. Today's update was a very nice surprise-

It's Techno-Magic Space Ninjas commiting mass genocide against 3 different races, and looking fabulous while they do it. What's not to like?

Warframe is a looter-shooter, Kinda. It's an MMO, Kinda. And it's a Corridor-shooter, Kinda.

You Fly down ships, across ice flats, over rolling hills, shooting, stabbing, etc in a squad of one to four, picking up crafting materials for new gear to wield.

It's difficult to name what the 'feel' of the game is - cyberpunk, western, dystopian, etc - but it certainly has one, that, while dynamic, the devs have done a good job of sticking.

In Warframe, the devs have given players a powerful an versitile movement system, which pairs well with the powers of the robots/supersoldiers, allowing vets to play endgame content without any increase to base survivability. Until then, there's the modding system. Every piece of equipment - your Warframe, your guns, your sword, your flying robot buddy, even your dog, has a spot to put in mod cards. These can do things like increase your max hp by 400% of your base hp, or give you 120% Multishot, Make you fall slower, give your dog a better nose, tell your flying robot how to scan items for you, and so on.

To address the big possible concern about Warframe - Yes, it is actually free-to-play, and it's done well. The biggest trick that lets it be done well, is that premium currency can be, and is encouraged to be, traded - it's more-or-less the currency of trading, as no other 'coin' for trading exists. This allows players like myself (I've only ever bought 3 things, and those were out-of-game items) to play for completly free, and also be unconfined by any restrictions a lesser company might have put on free players. On the flip side, it allows my friends with more money than time to buy items they really want, but don't have the time to farm for.

Was reading the reviews here, and just realised that I've never reviewed what is (in my opinion) one of the best sandbox games I've ever played.

I've played almost 200 hours on steam, and about twice that on the standalone (which I got for free because I'd bought it on steam. These devs rock)

The closest thing I can relate this to is Minecraft's origional Tekkit or Technic modpacks, but someone decided that the modpack's pipes, wires, countless machines, and general factory feel should be made into a game. They accomplished this quite well, and the game is a blast. There's lots of ways you can do things, and it's pretty addictive.

The devs rock, and are super open and cool about the development of the game. I have learned more from the FFF (Friday fun facts) articles about programming than my actual major in college, so far. I've learned about thread saftey, goood design, modularity, etc, all from reading these. I learned about network protocalls, such as UDP and NAT, and how to not need port-forwarding (kinda).

The game itself is amazing, fun, and doesn't feel like an early access at all. There's a lot to do, it runs well, and looks polished. 10/10, no flaws in my eyes, and very well priced.

This review doesn't even come close to giving Factorio justice, but I tried.

Having played this game for I almost 100 hours, I think I should probably leave a review for the game.
I don't usually leave reviews for games, and I only leave reviews for real extremes; good or bad. With that said, this is in the extremly good part of the spectrum.

PROs:
-Great dev team
-Amazing atmosphere
-Deep gameplay (yep - pun intended)
-Large, intricate, beautiful map
-Feels alive

CONs:
-Map is not generated, is static
-Game updates "slowly".
-Heavy game (difficult to run)

In Depth (I could do this all day):

-Great Dev Team:
The devs are on the public discord server constantly, and are readily open about as much as they know about the game and it's development, past, present, and future. They interact with the community lots on the forums as well, and are a great bunch.

-Amazing Atmosphere (Get it? It's underwater? Haha..? No? Aww :( ):
The game is *REALLY* immersive. If I had do describe the game in one word it would be atmospheric. It sucks you in, and you *feel* the depths as they open up below you, you pant as you swim for your life from a Stalker, and you shiver upon hearing the Reaper's roar. The world feels truely alien, and it's terrifying. I normally go into open world games with the mindset that I am not in the game, and act accordingly. If I die, I have a backup save. Not so with Subnautica. Subnautica makes me feel as if I AM the character, and that death will really mean something. And, below all the excitement of the day-to-day living in Subnautica, there's an eery feeling that you just don't belong...

-Deep Gameplay:
I'll admit when I first picked this up, after the first 25 minutes of pure awe at how beautiful and immersive this game is, I started questioning my brother (who had introduced me to the game) what I should de. He (thankfully) replied that I should figure out what to do. Now, almost 100 hours later, I've spent over two and a half real life days in that save file and I'm still learning about the world, still building, and I'm not even close to done. The goal of the game is exploration, never forget that.

-Large Intricate, beautiful map:
The devs have hand-crafted Subnautica's map, which means that the whole thing is absolutly stunning. There's soaring mountains, plunging valleys, cliffs, ravines, islands, caves, and so much more. And every bit of it looks great. The map is way more detailed than you could ever hope to get from a generated map.

-The game feels alive:
The whole game feels like a living, breathing system. The preditors eat the prey, the prey repopulate, and show up again. As preditors move around on the map following large groups of fish, the populations change over time. The same ocours for plants, if the player harvests them. And the player can effect the preditor/prey balance too: Killing a lot of local preditors will result in an increase in the local fish population, and eating a bunch of fish will cause the preditors to move on to more populated waters.

-The map is not generated, it's static:
This is both a pro and a con. The one downside of having a developer hand-crafted map is that there is only one map, and it's the same for all save games. That said, I have a very good sence of direction, and I still get lost constantly, even after 90-some hours in one save with literally dozens of waypoints placed now.

-Game updates "slowly"
I put slowly in quotes because it doesn't really update slowly, but there are lots of changes lumped into each update, usually more than most people realise. If you prefer being on the cutting edge of things, and getting more frequent, but smaller updates, and don't mind some buggyness, you can enter the experemental branch (in the betas tab) which is automatically compiled and shiped 3 times a day.

-Game is heavy (hard to run)
This is really the only major, unmidigated con of the game. It is a very demanding game, as far as hardware goes. With a high-end gaming laptop, I get around 30 FPS on the lowest graphics settings. If I had a gaming desktop of similer price ($1,200), I could probably use medium settings and still get around the same FPS, but that's not great FPS for such a powerful PC.

Overall: If you like alien worlds, open world games, and/or atmospheric games, this game is for you. It's beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. You're frightened to go into the glowing blue caves with blood sacs hanging from the vines, but your curiosity won't let you NOT go in.

I do not have enough good things to say about this game, or the devs. It's as simple as that. If you liked ORION: Prelude, you'll probably like this. It's a lot of fun, and there's a lot of content coming. Even though it's "Early Access" It feels like a complete game at this point. There are no bugs that I know of which effect gameplay, and only 2 bugs that I know of that exist at all. Just go buy it!

Edit: As of the Febuary patch, I am now the proud owner of a shotgun that sets things on fire, then, when they die, they explode. I have never been happier. I turn compys into frags. With flaming bullets.

Edit 2: Oct. 2016: I am sad to say that I can no longer recomend this game, because the developers have really screwed up one too many times, and have really turned into moneygrubbing devs, which is sad, because the game had potential. This is painfully obvious with the most recent croudfunding campaign, and bolstered by some of the responses to allegations of asset theft, and also the (very) slow rate of bugfixes. Many major bugs go unfixed for months, and the lead developer does know about them. The game used to be doing well, bugs were fixed prompty (with hotfixes if they were, say, server-crashing), new features etc. were released in a nearly bug-free form 100% of the time, and were well thought out. Now, new features are coming out at either the same, or slower speed, and noticably lower quality. In addition, bugs that crash servers, clear inventories, etc. are not patched for *months* sometimes, and no official warning is put out about them. I paid $20 for the earliest version of the game, not because it was worth it, but because I believed it would be. This is the first time I've ever had to recind a positive review, and I believe the first negitive review I've ever left on Steam, and I'm sad. This game had a lot of potential. It's sad to see it squandered becase the developer is half-assing development, and a bad person in general. How far they have fallen in just 2 years. :(

Putting the TL;DR at the top:
I don't know why you're reading recomendations, instead of buying it. Go buy it. Now. I've bought 8 copies so far, and may buy another 4 pack. I've not regretted it. Ever.

Disclaimer: I've only ever played PvE mode, so everything I say here reflects this mode. I've heard PvP is good, but PvE is just too fun to quit.

Broad Description: Does shooting raptors in the face with a magnum in slow-mo, and watching their head pop and their body stumble to the ground sound fun? Buy it. Does driving a tank down a vertical cliff side (does take <i>some</i> learning) and using the cannon to knock a T-Rex's block off sound fun? Buy this! How about punching a triceritops to death? Or mowing down flocks of flying pests with a 250-round-a-minute hand-held gattling gun? Or maybe you'd like to spam grenades? Not your thing? Rockets. No? LASER CANNON. No? EXPLOSIVE BOW. The list goes on and on. The AI is simple at first, but as you turn up the difficulty, and face the bigger dinos, you might start to see some surprising moves. I can't recomend this game enough, even if it was $10, I'd <i>still</i> recomend buying it, it's that good.

Details:
The 2 PvE gamemodes that I play (there are others)
Survival: Simple enough: 10 waves, with 3 side objectives. You have a generator to defend, and a spot to buy weapons and augments. Good for a quick game (lasts 10-40 minutes, usually around 30).
Conquest: Like 3 survival matches strung together, almost. You have 30 waves with 9 side objectives. This is split up over 3 different generators, with 10/3 on each one. Every base has a weapons and augments area, but 2 of the 3 also have vehical shops, where you can buy anything from and air bike to a 5 person party tank, or a VTOL. This one is more fun for experementation, because of the massive quantities of in-game cash you build up by the end. I've actually built walls and/or card houses using tanks. Took me like half an hour, but it was totally worth it. Usually lasts close to an hour

There is a level up system, which gives some awesome stuff when you get higher up, though every levelup gives something nice.

Sometimes there's a few glitches, though the VAST majority of these are harmless and funny, such as a dead stegosarus suddenly deciding to do front flips.

STILL updating, though I'm not sure what the patches are for, as I'm always too impaitent to read the patch notes when I could be playing Prelude instead.

Feels very similer to how I think Halo feels (only watched videos, never played the game myself), but with dinos.

Community is very friendly, chatting with them ('t'? might be 'u') will usually be very helpful if you need help with the controls, or a trex that decided you looked tasty.

Complete control list (for PC):
LMB - Fire gun
RMB - Aim gun or spin up
v - Mele
t(might be u) - allchat
shift - sprint
c - toggle crouch if clicked, roll if held at the same time as a directional key
wasd - standard movement
space - jump
e - use/interact
k - drop 1k credits on the ground
l - drop weapon
z,x,f - quick message keys
g - grenade
ctrl - class special ability (jetpack for assult class, medigun for support and invis for recon)
tab - stats screen
esc - menu
Probably some Im missing
EDIT: Some I was missing:
1-Primry weapon, and adrenaline weapon. Hit again to cycle through choices.
2-Secondary weapon. Hit multipult times to cycle through choices
3-Pistol. Same cycling as the last two
4-Item. Only one at a time, purchasable in Weapons>Items. Ammo and health packs do not count for the slot.
5-Teleporter. Teleports you to your current generator. Has a short cooldown.

Remember: most of these controls can be changed in the options menu.

Probably one of my best game purchases ever. I played it for several hundred hours before finally buying it, and still play it at least 10 hours a week, usually in one session.

The best thing I can say for the game is that I keep forgetting it's early access. It's an amazing game already, and so much is coming still. I think it will eventually fill the promises it made, as well as all the failed ones that most, if not all, space sci-fi games made.

Pros:
-Ships are super-fun to design and build, and ship building is quite in-depth.
-Multiplayer is unbelievably smooth, even with hundreds of ships, small or large, all fighting. That said, your client might need the settings turned down if the ships are big enough. Some people (myself inluded) build ships larger than planets.
-The universe feels alive. They've redone the map, and it is glorious. We have blackholes (wormholes) now too, and a wide variaty of stations, planets and astroids now.
-Despite the above, it manages to highlight how big and empty space really is, which is something i enjoy.
-Docking is quite impressive and flexible, allowing for really cool effects to ships (Such as moving parts).
-THE DEVS LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY
-Beautiful Graphics (if you like cube games)
-So many awesome features, Im not going to even attempt to list them
-Excelent Configurability
-Good Community
-Good mod support (never tested this, but I've heard no complaints about it)
-Procedurally generated, and absolutly HUGE.
-Probably forgot lots
-Most importantly: The game is always improving, very quickly too. The devs push large quantities of bugfixes and updates every 2 weeks. It's similer to Space Engineers in that respect. Does not feel like an alpha game, really.

Cons:
-They're missing the inverse-corner shape D: I should get around to suggesting this. But I'm too busy playing the game.
-AI still needs work, though it's getting better
-Factions need work as well, though that's coming in a future update
-Very large systems cause non-negligable client lag (negligable server lag though) (I mean multi-thousand block doors, etc)
-Very large ships cause some lag (500x300x300 m3 + on my craptop, but easily 10 - 1000+ times that for good laptops. Virtually unlimited for a solid desktop.)
-Alpha game. Lots of balance changes, content changes, etc.
-Tutorial needs a lot of work - it's outdated. Again. Mostly because of the update frequency.

Very addictive game, good if you like designing spaceships, or space combat. The game also fully supports mining, trading, etc, however, I stick to ship building, because that's my favorite part. This means I can't speak for those systems, but I've heard they're good.

If you want a good example of the game currently, get the demo - it's the full game, and it will be, until the game leaves Alpha. If you want a good idea of where the game is headed, and how it's changed/is changing, check the website, and look at the "news" tab.

For some of the best reviews about why I (and many others) like the game, read the funny reviews tab.

Edit: Forgot to mention the learning curve. I joined back when the tutorial, buggy as it was, was plenty. At the moment, however, the game has become so complicated that I'd recommend starting in MP and asking a player to teach you, or watching a youtube video.