Recent reviews by ilenisaatio

If I put it simply: Dishonored is a nice immersive sim-lite. Systems are simple but work. Powers make a lot of the situations trivial. But I liked the story for it's gloominess despite it not being anything special. The way the world changes depending on your actions is a nice touch. The DLCs were short, but I found them worth the few € they cost.

Once you start to figure how things get going and what you need to take care of, RimWorld becomes an awesome game. Want to be the basic interstellar shipwreck survivors group? Check. Want your people to live in a cave with neolithic weapons? Check. Want to go on slave raids or just plain old mayhem? Check.

I normally come up with some kind of a framing story and end goal before starting a new game, and let the AI storyteller take it from there. Basically, the chosen storyteller persona affects what events happen and at what frequency and magnitude. RimWorld has a lot of replayability with RNG worlds, a ton of settings for the planet you'll be on, varied character types, social relations... And if you buy one DLC, get Ideology. It adds so much stuff to tweak and play around with to customize your people and how the game plays.

Let's get this on the top: I play on Linux and this game works well

Never kinda understood why some one would want a hunting sim. Saw this one on big sale and thought: "Oh what the heck. I'll give it a shot." So, now I have all the dlc and almost 700h of playtime...

The maps are nice and varied, and some places are down right beautiful. Some issues here and there, but it's the common stuff most mainly procedurally generated maps have. The soundscape.... Oh man the soundscape. It's spot on. I don't even care to guess how much of my life I've spent in the great outdoors, but that's the good stuff. After the map (Revontuli Coast) based on Finland (where I live) came out, I noticed that in many places the surroundings were pretty perfect, but in others things were.... wrong. Like an island bordering the open sea had the long smooth rocky side towards the mainland, and the side with trees coming almost to the waterline towards the horizon. It was the wrong way around. I've talked with others from places the maps are based on, and they have similar experiences.

Shooting's pretty decent. You have bullet drop and drag, and wind affects the trajectories in a reasonable manner. A good deal of the organs inside the animals are modelled so that hits in different parts have different effects. Double lungshot and the animal either drops right down, or gets a short distance before the blood loss and shock drops it. Get a flesh wound on a water buffalo, and you can track those blood drops til the end of time. Rifles and pistols have generally two types of ammo, one that does shock and a wide wound channel but loses penetration fast, and a penetration focused that does the opposite. Both tend to have their uses. Bows and x-bows have different draw strengths, that combined with the weight of the arrows or bolts affect the shot. Shotguns come in different gauges (10, 12, 16 and 20) and bird-, and buckshots and slugs.

I think the gamification of hunting is quite decently done. You have those slow times when it feels nothing happens, and then ones where you get a lot of game. Still, you get stuff done at a comfortable rate without much of a hassle. Portable hunting structures (various blinds mostly) and tents etc give some variation and utility. Lures (sound and scent), wind, ambient sound level, terrain and vegetation all play into the sneaking part, as well as the senses of the particular animals around. The story missions are mainly for easy cash and xp for those starting out, and give some ambience. Do them or don't. Nothing's forced.

I think that's the main gist of it. I find Hunter: CotW really relaxing and a good way to get that light nature "fix" if I can't get the real thing. ;)

Usually I don't like games without a set goal/goals and a curated narrative arc unless they are management sims or something similar. Kenshi breaks this mold. So far 71 hours in and several restarts later, I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Kenshi is unforgiving and you need to learn from your mistakes. With the default starting scenarios, you're normally worse than a farm hand at start. Screw up once and you'll quickly be a limb short and bleeding out on the desert sands and are actually happy when slavers passing by spot you, patch your wounds and "rescue" you into their cages.

The amount of stuff and mechanics really impresses me, even more so as they mostly work and give depth, thought being simple enough to not choke you under them. After larger fights between factions, the field is usually covered in dying people (YOU can patch up and sell to slavers in turn), others crawling with smashed or severed limbs, some lying unconsious or comatose, some might even feign death. It's not just "everybody dead, I like that". And you can mess with the factions and things do change.

Your outpost can experience raids and tithe collectors. Research is implemented in a nice way and specialization bears fruit fast. Many functions can be automated by making them into jobs for the members of your group. Your compound can function as anything from a military base or a bandit camp to a farm or a trading post.

That being said, Kenshi does have it's problems. they mostly come in the form of undeveloped facets of the game. There's so much stuff in it that it's inevitable some things will be left on the back burner. Trading is one of these. While you can be a traders, either travelling along a route or having your own store, the customers and trade goods are implemented way too simply for my taste. For example you can't set your sell prices and some stuff you can sell is not wanted anywhere and just stays there, gathering dust. Also the social aspects with the NPCs are quite limited, though there's some fun stuff going on in overheard conversations and chats between your characters. A lot of these problems can be marked down as problems stemming from the size of the dev team (as I understand it Kenshi was a solo project and the upcoming Kenshi 2 has more people involved).

In Conclusion:

I really like Kenshi despite its rough edges. For me it's a breath of fresh air and another reason to keep an eye out for indie games and leaving the risk averse AAA-companies on less attention.

More Agent 47. What's there not to like?

How is it that a linear shooter manages to have more cyberpunk-spirit in it than many big budget games?

Ruiner is a nice little fast-paced shooter. The pure ambience and the awesome soundtrack deserve a special mention. The skill system is nice, but not too complex as that shouldn't be the focal point of a game like this anyway. That you can freely re-distribute the points, even in combat, is a really considerate decision by the devs. There are a few hidden little things tucked around for you to find, and a lot of references.

The Rengkok South, between levels, struck me. There's enough NPC chatter to get a feel for the place. Things may be low life, high tech, but it's still just people trying to get by with their own lives. And I liked how it changed between visits.

I hadn't heard of the dev before this. There's some clumsiness occasionally, and some skills might've benefitted from better descriptions, but all in all it's a good quality product. If you like shooters and are willing to take a slightly different take on the genre (at least by my experience), give Ruiner a go. I haven't regretted it.

Gotta say I really like Production Line. Earlier, I've played Big Pharma from the same publisher and found out I really like the combination of optimizing processes and the puzzle-y task of fitting the pieces of the production line together. Always felt Big Pharma was a bit lacking in detail. Production Line isn't.

There's so much tweaking and adjusting and head scratching in this game that I'm a happy camper. Some of the data windows could use some more adjusting possibilities and the tutorial is a bit lacking, but watching some vids from YT, the maker of Production Line has his own channel there as well, things are starting to... come together (ha-ha).

If you liked especially the older Settlers-series games (1, 2 & 3), this should be for you. I've followed Foundation for about 6 months, and the development has been great and I finally decided to dole out the money to get the early access even though I usually avoid them. I haven't regretted doing so.

Being early access, there are some placeholders as is to be expected, and things are bound to change. The direction is good, though so I have faith. Good job devs! Keep it up.

Reminds me a lot about good old Syndicate. The difference is that Satellite Reign has a hefty focus on stealth and preparation via scouting and buying info or bribing employees etc. The atmosphere is good and the map design is spot on. When infiltrating hostile facilities, there are many ways to approach things. Single operative approach is sometimes the best one, but in full squad ops you can synergize with the different skills but have the down side of having more to control and a higher risk of accidental detection. If you're detected and can't take out the enemies fast enough, the mission turns into a frenzied scramble out of the facility as reinforcements pour in. I also like the balancing of stealing prototypes for new equipment from the enemy vs buying them from the black market dealer.

I definitely recommend Satellite Reign to fans of tactical games and cyberpunk atmosphere. While it lacks the raw action of syndicate, at least in the beginning, it more than makes up for it in intensity and complexity.

The best city-builder I've played. It's not all nitty gritty, though, so if you want absolute micro-management experience, this is probably not for you. The game looks nice out of the box, and really good with a few graphical mods and colour corrections. The atmosphere is awesome when you zoom to ground level and the good sound design is a big part of that. There are a lot of nice tiny details when you zoom all the way in. Traffic flows are the big thing gameplay-wise. If you make the road network and public transport haphazardly, you'll suffer later. Studying some real-life road planning really helped. The editors are good ones, and this leads us to the best feature of the game: customizing.

So many things you can tweak or build or modify by yourself or by downloading from the Workshop from the really active community. Maps and themes are the easy ones, but you can make your own models for everything from the citizens to cars to buildings to trees if you want, and import them to the game. The documentation for the editors is a bit sparse, but people have made several guides online. By making or downloading a theme with good textures and settings and adding a few graphics mods, the game will looks really sweet. Especially after you add nice plant models, like the ones by MrMaison. Several mods improve the game experience greatly, and several DLCs add a lot as well. But...

The Paradox DLC-hell. There are a few important DLCs I feel you need to get the most out of the game. Industries and Park Life DLCs are the critical ones in my opinion. They improve the base game a lot. Then there are some good ones like Snowfall, which brings the Winter base theme and trams. Trams are great! After Dark has the bus station and cargo hub which are good and also bike- and bus lanes. Those are the notable ones. Others are more for if you want more options for some specific part. You might want to do some research on the DLCs before deciding whether to get them or not.

The radio channel-DLCs are pretty cheap and I like several of them a lot. They are a lot better in my opinion than the base game ones. But that's just me, though.

If you like city-building games with good ambience and a lot of customising possibilities, give this one a go.