Recent reviews by NiyaShy

Neat little puzzler game. The puzzles aren't that hard, though some of them can be a bit annoying at times. But you always have the choice of skipping/auto-solving individual tasks without getting penalized.

UPDATE: Since Sony luckily decided to cancel the forced account linking, I will revise this review to positive. HD2 is a great game, and I really hope Arrowhead can keep up improving it.

Original review:
This game is a banger and really fun with friends just as with random players.
BUT due to the schmitt Sony is trying, I can't recommend it to anyone. It hurts to do this because Arrowhead did an excellent job on the game and showed great effort in patching issues and adding new content.
The last months showed that the game runs fine without being force-linked to PSN, i've noticed zero toxic or disrespectful behaviour by other players, and even if it would happen, blocking someone is easy enough.

So until Sony revokes the announcement and/or keeps account linking optional, this review will stay negative.

Other game studios and publishers should learn from what Larian achieved with BG3. A polished game with hardly any (major) bugs and frequent patches after release to fix those that were left, a DEEP story with interesting characters and so much (side) content that you can easily spend way over 100 hours on a single play-through, a very active modding community that provides additional fixes/QOL additions, and last but not least, the option to f*ck your preferred companion 😉

Not even done with my first play-through yet, but I already have plans for a second one.

While the game was still in development the devs poured a LOT of love and work into the game, did regular update videos and interacted with the community. Then came RIOT and bought them, and AFAIK they more or less forced them to finish the game ASAP. So they had to drop some ideas/plans that were still on the roadmap, but at least they managed to get the game into a decent state and added modding support before having to quit/stop.

Stonehearth isn't perfect, it can be buggy, but it works, has cute voxel graphics, interesting gameplay and a decent story. If you like colony builder/management games, get it!

It's definitely not perfect, but still a very good time sink if you like city builder games. The DLC packs aren't cheap but definitely not overpriced either, and as long as you don't want them right on release they go on sale every once in a while.

The community is very active and the amount of mods and additional assets is HUGE. For almost everything (from sewage and garbage treatment to new buses and trams) you have a wide variety ranging from "just new skin, same function as vanilla model" to versions that are already close to cheating (like a waste recycler that creates energy without causing any noise or pollution).

I'd consider some mods almost mandatory so you can properly enjoy the game. Those include Traffic Manager PE, the anarchy mod family and loading screen mod.