Recent reviews by Rogue Party Man

This game isn't complete without the DLC and it really makes sure you know it. NPC factions will have access to tech you can't have without DLC, every update that adds DLC drastically changes something about the base game to make it incomplete without the DLC that was added. Empire sprawl used to be as simple as "Build more administrative buildings, have more capacity." They updated that to be more complicated and hard to manage, without the DLC at least. Same with vassals, when Overlord came out they completely redid the vassal system, and obtaining and integrating vassals became much harder and convoluted in the base game.

I quit playing after Overlord released, and I'm only posting this review because I looked back at the store page to see if getting the DLC on sale would be a good idea. The ultimate bundle at 50% off right now is nearly 10x as much as the game is on sale. They want you to buy the game cheap, get hooked on what's basically the demo, then buy 200$ of DLC to get the complete experience. Not worth your time or money unless you have 30$ to fork over every month (or you can magically get access to the DLC...), because the base game only gets worse with every DLC release.

Hoooo... This is gonna be a long one.

Raft, on the surface, seems like a great game. Calm, slow-paced resource gathering and survival. Lots of endless ocean, numerous islands, and pretty reefs to explore. You get to build your very own raft however you want, and there's very little you can't build with all of the raft pieces and decorations that are available to you. Early game progression is alright, it's just made clear that you have to stick to smaller islands, as boars and a rock-slinging bird thing guard the larger ones and your early-game weapons can't scratch them.

But what I feel is wrong with this game is that it's too shallow. Once you play for longer and have a more in-depth experience its many flaws start to affect you more and more. Those enemies from the large islands? They don't get that much easier to fight once you get better weapons. The fights against them are almost turn-based; the boar's animations reset every time you hit it, so you can only get a hit in after a charge, then you have to hurry up and sprint out of the way then chase after it for another hit, rinse and repeat about a dozen times. If you try to hit it more than once per charge, it's animation resets and it begins to charge again, getting you skewered in the stomach. I've died a few times because I'd try to stab it quicker to make the painfully long fight shorter, only to get wombo combo'd by the constant charges. The bird is worse, you can't fight it off at all until you have a smelter, and a lot of metal bars for arrows to feed into your bow. This one is a turn-based fight because it flies so high and far away from you most of the time, that you can only reliably hit it with one of your expensive arrows just before it drops a rock on you, or if it happens to fly down to grab a rock somewhere where you can get line of sight to it, most of the time it lands on nearly the other side of the island, or up a mountain where you stand no chance of getting to it in time for a shot.

These two mini-bosses make grindy tedious, risky, and painful, as you're forced onto the larger islands once you start getting grills, soup pots, smelters, and the radar, as you need a nearly endless supply of planks for fuel, and to make your raft large enough to place the three antennas you need to progress in the story. You can farm palm trees with large crop plots, but you aren't guaranteed the seed back on harvest, which forces you onto the large islands to chop more trees for more planks and seeds. If you can't fight off the bird, you'll be stuck having to watch the skies constantly while it bombards you with rocks, sprinting out of the way in the middle of chopping trees or getting a chunk of health knocked off, and early/mid-game first aid doesn't exist. If you think you could simply avoid the bird AND the boar, you'll be proven very wrong, as both are way faster than the player, and losing aggro from the boar especially is nearly impossible except for leaving the island entirely.

With large islands being so deadly, you WILL die at some point, and if you're in singleplayer, you'll quickly notice that any items that were lost from your inventory are simply gone, there's no collecting a backpack or pile of items where you died, the items are just gone. Early in the game, there isn't so much to lose. But once you start grinding the large islands you could easily wind up losing the entire island's worth of planks, because the boar and/or bird you killed earlier respawned in the 5 minutes you were out gathering and killed you after you slipped up one time too many in the fight. And it's difficult not to slip at all; with how much you have to sprint to avoid attacks, they'll catch you in a bad spot eventually.

For a last point on the island grind: you visit the non-story islands so often, yet there's only about four or five variations of each size island. Every island is prebuilt, they aren't procedurally generated. By the time you get a steering wheel and paddle engines, you've seen all the non-story maps this game has to offer. The grind becomes so repetitive that you could know each map from memory, where every tree is, how many crates there are, where the trading post and red berries are located. You run out of things to explore very quickly, and this really feels like the kind of game that could use some procedurally generated environments, especially in an endless ocean.

Yet despite how tedious and treacherous the grind may seem, there's two things that may make this game worth playing, which would be the story, and the base building. I don't have as much progress in the story as I wish I could have had, so I'll mostly skip over it, other than my initial impression being that it's quite alright, the narrative fits the environment well, and I wish I could stand to put more time into the game to see the rest.

Building out my own raft and eventually constructing my very own ship was the main thing that drew me into this game, but this is the part that makes me need to repeat myself, and say that the enjoyment is surface-level; once you dive deeper, the game's flaws become painfully apparent. Raft building in this game got an overhaul before its final update, and to emphasize this, they included some player-made raft designs right on the main menu. Very beautiful house boats, utilizing all the game's newest decor, but what I didn't consider when I first saw those rafts that made me want to build my own, was that these front-page rafts they were showing off are really quite tiny. There's way too much stuff you need to grow in Raft to be able to afford all of those decorations in the first place when playing survival, and the one I saw on the menu just a bit ago didn't seem to have any smelters, sails, engines, or cooking apparatus whatsoever. If you want to make a raft as pretty as the ones featured by The Renovation Update, you have to build way bigger, and use considerably more building material to do so, making space for all your crop plots, smelters, and chests, having places to put your sail, your nets, your kitchen. Instead of the cozy tiny home you see on the main menu, you're suddenly roped into slowly grinding your way to a wooden cruise ship, eating up half a dozen full chests of planks in the process. Your raft being of considerable size is even required to begin the story, as your radar station's antennas will need to be on a second floor of your raft, be at least 2 blocks away from the receiver, and 3.5 blocks away from each other. Out of curiosity, I went into creative mode just now to see what it'd take at minimum to get to the first story island. Using as few materials as possible, with no considerations for comfort, and no extra defense against the shark, a raft smaller than 5x3x2 in size and with only 4 half foundations, yet still containing everything required to have a working radio reciever, it would still take clearing out half a dozen small islands to gather the resources to build such a "meta raft", not counting the need for food, fuel for food and water, smelter fuel, or tools. And with how punishing this game can be, your hours of grinding could be wasted due to any number of mistakes, such as starving, being killed by a boar for daring to explore a large island too early, getting caught by the shark, or worst of all, the shark could attack a foundation supporting something important on your raft, and because placed objects are destroyed when their supporting structure is removed, you could be set back by hours on your grind to begin the story. Just like dying, any raft pieces not picked up or directly deconstructed by the player vanish completely, nothing is dropped. If the shark destroys a foundation with a chest on it, all of its contents are lost.

(1/? Character limit reached.)

UPDATE: Recently learned that in reality, 70% of Steam's reported playercount for this game are bots. This is absolutely abysmal. This game is where all of Steam's stolen accounts go to die, and the real playercount has been hanging at around 25,000 humans since Jungle Inferno. As someone who began playing just before Jungle Inferno and didn't even know how much of a disaster the previous Meet Your Match update was, now that I've learned about that I'm not confident Valve can even make another game like this. Deadlock is going to fail, poorly. Class-based team shooters are dead, thanks to Overwatch and MyM killing TF2, and then Overwatch killed itself.

I'm removing my previous review in favor of a new one, so here it is:

I no longer play this game. There are various outstanding balance issues in the gameplay itself, which Valve refuses to fix because this game has an established trading economy that they profit from, and to fix half of the weapons being useless would likely decrease the value of the currently meta weapons, especially of ultra-rare varieties like say, a procedurally generated texture for a weapon that is one shiny color picked from a warpaint with a gradient of 5 or so colors, which is valued at hundreds or thousands of dollars (a bit ridiculous). Warpaints also aren't even available for all of the default weapons, as a side note. The economy is one reason, but the bigger one is Valve is just incredibly negligent of this game, just like all of their other IPs (besides DOTA 2 I guess?). That second point is the real reason why I'm leaving this review, after having been gone for so long.

If you play or follow news about Team Fortress 2, you probably know of the "Bot Crisis". Since the game stopped receiving major content updates, the game's official servers hosted by Valve has been infested with automated accounts that use Valve's own (very lackluster) AI to flood servers with Sniper-class bots that make the game unplayable, as the Sniper has the ability to kill any class at any range in one click, plus 0.2 seconds, as long as they have a sightline, for 5 of the 9 classes death is instant, the rest take 2-3 shots, which can be consecutively hit in 1.7 seconds. Highly skilled players can already abuse this (the subject of my previous review in addition to the weapon balancing issues, as this is a 17 year old game there are multitudes of people with thousands of hours in playtime), but Valve's poorly designed AI that bots utilize will make these shots with inhuman accuracy, with one or two aimbots in a game being able to prevent an entire server from playing the game until they can be kicked. Said aimbots regularly join games in groups of six using the game's party system. If matchmaking places two parties of bots into one server, they can abuse the vote-kicking system to outvote and remove real players from official Valve servers, with no action from Valve on their hardware effectively being held hostage.

So what has Valve done about this? In 2020, the Bot Crisis started gathering media attention as the automated accounts began to regularly spam racial slurs and other vulgar messages over in-game text and voice chat. As a band-aid fix, Valve simply restricted the ability to communicate in-game PERIOD, including 'voice commands' which are lines recorded by the official voice actors for essential game-related communication, such as "Yes", "No", and most notably, "Medic!" which places an icon above your head to indicate to your team's healers your location and health status, and the keybind for which is placed right next to the movement keys by default on standard QWERTY layouts. Only "premium" accounts, which have purchased either The Orange Box game bundle from Valve, or a microtransaction from the game itself. This diverted the attention of major media, but it was a purely profit-motivated decision that has resulted in a net detriment to the game's experience for players who aren't contributing to Valve's revenue. Even more insultingly, this did nothing to alleviate the root problem, as Bot accounts still abuse the in-game chat with the same frequency as before, meaning the bot hosters simply bought all their automated accounts Premium status, generating more money for Valve. In 2022, a coordinated community effort was held, called #saveTF2, in order to garner attention from Valve on the crisis and demand real solutions. This resulted in a (soulless) corporate Tweet, a couple lines of code changed here and there, and a return to the game being unplayable as usual soon after. A year after the tweet, the game got it's first 'major' update in 5 years in the form of community-made content and a gamemode being ported to the official game. To see what it's like less than a year later, Google "state of the Saxton Hale gamemode in 2024".

The worst of this? Community figures who have been doing their best to keep the game enjoyable for fans of TF2 have been actively harassed, impersonated, doxxed, blackmailed, extorted, and even swatted, all as a result of Valve's negligence towards the game and letting a toxic cluster of bot hosters fester and become a threat to anyone who dares to have fun. All the while Valve continues to use user-made assets, not in-house works, to generate millions of dollars in revenue with minimal effort. Valve's stance on this whole situation is immoral and corrupt.

If you want to make a difference, you can look up the new SaveTF2 movement, #FixTF2. Other resources include the Mega Cheater Database, a community-run database of automated accounts, bot hosters, and suspicious users, and the video "The Dark Truth Behind TF2's Bot Crisis" by community figure "TheWhat Show" which goes more in-depth on the bot crisis in general and specifically hate crimes committed by the bot hosters that Valve willfully ignores. It also contains a document with an overview and evidence of the aforementioned crimes, intended to be a resource in investigations and to spread to news outlets for generating awareness.

While I could tell you to sign the petition for #FixTF2, simply standing around and complaining has already been tried and proven ineffective. What I WOULD recommend is hitting Valve where it matters: in the review score. A negative review score falling upon a timeless classic of a game, especially ones that call out criminal activity being carried out due to Valve's negligence, would certainly raise alarms with Valve's shareholders and endanger their revenue stream. A general boycott of Team Fortress's microtransactions and Steam Marketplace would be effective as well, and is something that YOU yourself can choose to do, right now. Team Fortress 2 in its prime was monumental for gaming culture. It's up to YOU and the community to protect its legacy in a time where so many beloved franchises are lost to greed and neglect.

Never works on any computer I play it on, not sure what I'm doing wrong though. On my hp tower it worked for one play session, then stopped functioning after that. On my nana's laptop it never worked to begin with, only got to the loading screen before it froze on some hellish red-out image of the intial load, would've been cool to show to people but screenshot wasn't working. Doom's great but this version needs some compatibility edits.

(P.S: Only thumbs-downing this so it gets noticed, a postive one would just be another number)