Recent reviews by Kahrstrom

You ever watched a movie, thinking "why the f*ck did he do that? He should have done this instead!" ? Of course you have. I mean, who hasn't? Late Shift is your solution! Now you can actually chose where to go, although, without spoiling too much, I have to say you cannot expect it to go all that well every time...

Late Shift is a fantastic interactive movie experience (I cannot really call it a game). The choices are often hard and stressful. You can end up in so many different situations - it is unpredictable, it is morally challenging and it is certainly a very different experience. Being able to chose where the story goes, while at the same time having to make those hard decisions, makes for conflicts inside of you and often leads to stressful decisions.

Easy buy in my opinion, especially if you can get it on sale like I did myself.

Combat: 8/10

Story: 10/10 -Extremely good story that puts you in the role of a citizen in the Moskva metro and presents unexpected twists. I replayed it just a couple of days after I finished it.

Graphics: 7/10 -Not next gen, but environments are built very well and it really brings you in to the game.

Immersion: 9/10

Stealth: 7.5/10 -Very different stealth system that very much relies on shadows and light, sometimes to the degree that it might feel kind of unrealistic. This makes the stealth rather unique, and the focus seems to be more of a tactics based game, wich I quite like.

Difficulty: Depends on chosen mode, I've played on Survival (more stealthy, less ammo, filters etc.), Normal - kinda average, with some strategy it'll go just fine. Ranger (=hard) -a rather challenging experience, expect to die. You have no HUD, there's even less ammo, filters, medpacks, etc, and both you and your enemies deal more damage, this I liked very much, I definitely recommend this mode. Planning ahead, disabling lights, assassinating guards and trying to avoid fighting against large groups of enemies. There's often a hidden route around enemies that alows for backstabbing them or simply avoiding them completely.

Length: about 10 hours, depending on how you chose to play the game and so on.

Overall a fantastic singleplayer game with an amazing story that really immerses you in the role of "Artyom". I feel that the trailers didn't quite show how good this game is. Definitely recommended.

A few tips:
-Go for headshots, mostly a one-hit kill
-Look for weakpoints on creatures, often the belly or the back
-In survivial, spare all the bullets and alike you can, they're quite sparce...
-Look all around you, it's not always obvious where you're supposed to go. There could be something in the roof, there could be generators to start or objects to break. These will sometimes glow or blink.
-Plan how you're going to take out your enemies -tactics is key to succes!
-Buy the Metro Redux bundle, Metro 2033 is the first in the storyline and you should play that one first. I played last light first and it contains some spoilers. This is however not a must. Last light is slightly better in my meaning, but both are great.

With the full version of Space Engineers being released, with the game progressing good, I thought it was only time I wrote a new review for the game on which I have spent way too many evenings and afternoons on, and look at what makes SE the unique experience it is.

There is no game out there quite like Space Engineers. You may try many sandbox builders and space exploration games, but none of them do what SE does, none of them offers what SE offers - total freedom. Freedom to create, freedom to explore, freedom to build on the basis that Keen Software house has given us. The game has its flaws, those are more than one, but thanks to what it accomplishes I am ready to overlook that.

So, what does SE have to offer? What is it that keeps me coming back to this game, that has kept me playing it pretty much every day the last 6 months? Like I briefly mentioned before, freedom is what makes this game so good, but let me get a bit more in-deptth with that... Space Engineers is the game for the kids who always spent their entire afternoon building Lego's, the kids who played Minecraft a bit more than the others, just to build that massive castle or spaceship, silently wishing that they could make that ship fly, make that car move. Space Engineers is sometimes compared to Minecraft, but I like to call it Minecraft on Steroids, with a bit of extra space.

Another very important factor in Space Engineers is the diversity. I spend so much time on this game, and doing the same stuff over and over would be boring, but in Space Engineers, you are never really doing the same thing. Of course you mine resources, you build ships, but you can always find new ways to do that. There is always a better design, whether you are going for looks or function, you can always improve, you can always learn something new. And then, when you grow tired of building ships, you hop in a mutliplayer session and discover the great community that the game has to offer, or maybe you share your creations on the workshop, trying to reach that sweet front page place, maybe just once. When you grow tired of the planet you live on, you go to space, maybe you go to another planet, maybe you get into modding and discover that SE has a massive amount of mods, building on the game, changing it to another experience, adding functions you never knew you needed, or maybe fixing that annoying pet-peeve you had. Maybe you try your hand at multiplayer PvP, one of the most adrenaline rich experiences you can get, and there is never an end to how much you can improve your skills in ship building and piloting, learning or coming up with new methods to beat your rivals.

The list of things to do goes on, and even with the 1670 hours I have at the time of writing this review, there are still many, many, things to learn. The truth is, a good SE player is not the one who knows every little detail about the game or has memorized every single components cost for the blocks in the game, but the one who can learn, the one who can evolve and carry forward, continuously improving on every aspect of the game. Engineering is about improving your designs, finding the flaws and patching them up, covering the leaking hole.

This review got a little bit longer than I meant it to be, but if you did read - thank you for taking your time, and I sincerely hope that I have shown you what this unique, yet flawed beast of a game is about, and why it is such an addicting experience. Fly safe, engineer, and I hope that I see you in some day in the universe.

About me: In short, my game experience consists of multiplayer survival and singleplayer creative, building ships to post on the workshop as well as designing ships for the multiplayer server. I work as an admin on Upside Down, the highest ranked server on https://space-engineers.com/, where I also play with my faction.