Recent reviews by mosch

Where does this shape go? In the circle hole. And what about this shape, where does it go? That's right -- it goes in the circle hole.

The wind's gettin a bit choppy. You can compensate for it, or you can wait it out. But he might leave before it dies down. It's your call. Remember what I've taught you. Keep in mind variable humidity and wind speed along the the bullet's flight path. At this distance you'll also have to take the Coriolis effect into account.

Congratulation to Dennis Gustafsson for bringing this vision to finished fruit! There's not much a single reviewer can add to "Overwhelmingly Positive" recent+all. Teardown has its own in-house graphics engine and its own in-house physics engine. It is its own genre. It has no competitors because they don't exist.

It's Men-of-War with destructible environments and a first-person mode, in modern setting. The same developers Digitalmindsoft. The FPS mode brings stealth to the RTS genre, and it really blends well.

Some are saying the AI is simple but the AI is superb. A GRM soldier crawled on his hands and knees around a building and up a stairway into top floor where my soldiers were barricaded, but set on "return fire" mode. The AI exploited that. If you camp too long and close together, the AI will send a truck bomb to the area, it most cases smashing it through the wall before exploding.

CaT is not a AAA game. When it comes to MoCap and voice acting, it is just not there. Voice actors come in during transitions of mission objectives, but nowhere else. "I'm hit!" , "Enemy spotted!" enemies talking, soldiers yelling, none of that happens, giving a sort of eery silence to missions. The FPS mode was ambitious and it works, but seeing enemies without MoCap in first-person is cartoonish.

The historical setting is modern. I prefer modern over historical so my itch for it was scratched. Rumor is that Digitalmindsoft studio is putting all its energies into DLC for CaT, Gates of Hell Ostfront and Talvisota. So this base game is really becoming sort of a bridge for the DLCs, which many are excited about. However, the problem is that both DLCs are WWII setting. Do we really need another WWII RTS? That genre is totally saturated. I'm disappointed in the decision.

Have you ever been cutting wrapping paper for a gift, and the scissors start to glide? That's what this whole game FEELS like.

The interface has fading transitions and glides around like ice. The construction of conveyors is smooth, and the game's software knows where you're going before you finish. There are many indie games out there who suffer from general clunkiness, bad interfaces, and other nags. shapez.io is not one of those. All the parts click in a satisfying way.

You are alone in the Amazon rainforest miles from anything. You have no gear, no cooking pot, not even matches. It is so dark that you can't see anything beyond vague shadows, as your makeshift torch keeps getting soaked by the rain. You huddle under some boulders that offer temporary protection from the elements. But you're starving -- you're exhausted.

How will get out of this alive? Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Production Line was not what I thought it was. What I expected : A game that concentrates on factory floor flow, in the vein of Factorio or Mindustry. Something more engineering-related. What I got : Game is a micro economics simulator. The core mechanic is loans, expenditures, revenue, profit. If you ever took an Econ 101 course or if you have ever managed a store's inventory, and this was fascinating to you, then Production Line is right up that alley.

Only game in my library I seriously considered getting a refund for due to "Not what I thought it was."

One reviewer described SS4 as 'arcadey'. I found it more like a deliberate chess game. The enemy force has a limited number of fighters and vehicles just like you do. They do not spawn an infinite wave of more combatants. SS4 does not have a dramatic storyline that follows a story in the game's own world. Instead missions are inspired recreations of historical battles of World War II.

I am fond of more realism. Even when that realism puts a drag on your attention span, or makes the game a bit inaccessible. Sometimes realism can make a game's learning curve too steep for busy people (I'm thinking of Hearts-of-Iron 4 here). You can pick up SS4's mechanics quickly which is just a matter of learning the basic controls.

SS4 is like Company-of-Heroes but with limited ammo and limited fuel in the vehicles. It sacrifices "game-like balance" for the sake of combat realism. Here are the effects of that decision in general :

1. Foot soldiers and infantry don't stand a chance against a vehicle with a mounted gun. Infantry could get a grenade onto a vehicle, possibly damaging its engine. Maybe one lucky guy will survive the encounter if he crawls away.

2. The missions take a really long time to complete.

3. The distance that weaponry and guns are fatal is very wide. Something off the edge of the screen can kill you.

4. The missions put a limit on the total soldiers and armor. You can't refresh them out of a base that infinitely creates fighters and vehicles. You have to make-do with what you have.

SS4 has unlockable perks/upgrade tree. You must decide between three types of generals to lead your army, each with his own philosophy and with differing combat perks. These decisions have a huge impact on what takes place on the field.

Most realistic water in any video game ever. The programmers who developed the water physics in this game deserve a Turing Award.

The advertising for this game does not represent the basic gist. MudRunner is a logging simulator. You retrieve logs using trucks and various logging cranes in Russian wilderness in the 1960s. The natural landscape is unknown to you and the usable vehicles are hidden. You go through a process of adventure-and-discovery to find the vehicles and deploy them.

Nothing in this game is scripted as it is a simulator. Crazy, unexpected events take place merely due to the laws of physics. The decisions you make have consequences and there is no Game Over here to save you. Any mistakes require recovery with ingenuity. When trucks turn over they are stalled in distant forest. You must bring in larger trucks to perform "heavy rescue" with wenches.

Of course I wanted to Yes/recommend this game, but I clicked "no" to indicate that this is a critical negative review. There are enough positive reviews of ETS2 to keep anyone busy reading. If you like 'plusses vs minuses' go read one of the many positive reviews.

Short list of complaints :
1. Invisible walls.
2. Lack of content.
3. Developers have bitten the poison apple of DLC.
5. Little (or no) procedural generation.
4. Requires extensive modding.


Everyone in the industry knows that invisible walls are a design sin. I was driving a semitruck with a articulated double trailer. I had to turn around in a city to go back to a gas station that was off the path before my gas ran out. There was a nice enclosed wide open parking lot for me to turn around in. I could not get inside of it because an invisible wall blocking my truck, a wall maliciously placed literally 8 feet off the road. I then had to jackknife the trailer and turn around in a tortured manner in the middle of a busy street while ramming into passenger cars. ETS2 is in desperate need of more open cities. The drivable portions are suffocated by invisible walls.

A game audacious as simulating most of northern Europe should be gigantic. Sort of like the larger flight sims ( X-Plane 11.) I would expect a game like this to take up approx 80 GB on a hard drive, easily, if not more. Instead ETS2 clocks in at 4.5 GB. Not 45 gigabytes, four point five gigabytes.

The real cities of Europe are breathtaking to witness up close, unfortunately none of that was translated into this game.

This tininess effects the gameplay profoundly. The cities are lifeless, the assets of the game are repeated over and over again. You can turn pedestrians on or off. While the peds have wonderful mocap, they do not walk around. They stand exactly at the same spot near the same buildings at all times of day, making them little more than visual props. The total variety of cars seen on the roads is pathetic. (see modding below).


The developers have bitten the poison apple of paid DLCs. Paid DLC is an evil apple because it means there are active devs and artists out there creating content for this game. They are just not creating any content for what players want. They are not adding more variety to the cities, not adding more car types, they are not adding more options to the game. They are not manipulating the AI drivers to make them more realistic. They have not and apparently don't plan to add ultra 4K textures. Instead all of these responsibilities fall to the community of third-party modders.

The main difference between ETS2 and the real world is the distinct lack of residential houses with access driveways. I don't think I saw a single mailbox in all of Finland. I think I saw a few bags of trash somewhere along the side of the road in Estonia. In the real world you can go down the road in a truck and successively smash off people's mailboxes. A real trucker could do this for days or weeks before the police catch on. Before purchasing ETS2, the thought of doing this sounded exciting. Like I could go hundreds of miles around Europe smashing roadside objects with a truck. Sorry my friends, this option does not exist in this game!

Driving on international highways means you are going to see a lot of pastoral and natural scenery. Those portions do well with procedural generation algorithms with natural randomness, including also elevations and procedurally-generated hills. This wasn't used, and so the scenery looks strangely flat and "rectangular" in layout. Many roads are hugged by dense treelines, in what appears to be an attempt to hide distant scenery from the driver.


The roads are suspiciously empty, and the variety of cars is disappointing. The tree assets are something from 12 years ago. Fael may or may not help the trees. Anyways, the point is, if you own ETS2, you are going to end up in the steam Workshop fiddling with mods.
ETS2 lacks a genuine "simulation" feel right out of the box. To get the immersiveness you desire, you have to mod this game a lot. Here are the mods I am using in order of their "priority" in the modding menu.

+ Fael Environment v3.0

+ Realistic Graphics Mod - Frkn64

+ AI Traffic Pack by Jazzycat v11.6

+ DP's Realistic Traffic RST