Recent reviews by Popeychops

Simply brilliant. Most roguelikes segment their ideas into playable characters, which might have different mechanics to synergise and exploit. Balatro does not do that.

Its ideas are segmented into the suits of a deck of cards, some card modifiers, and other types of cards (jokers, planet cards, and tarot cards). You can carry a limited number of each: one modifier and one seal per playing card, five jokers, and two planet or tarot cards.

You are always making choices. Do you use a tarot card now, to free up the slot to take another, or wait for a better hand? Do you sell or keep that weak joker? Discard, or play a low hand? Do you take Jokers that improve your economy, and hope to buy something better in the next shop?

The real reason Balatro shines is that every choice you make matters. And any choice could be the right one, under the right circumstances. It is a triumph of art and design.

Let me start by saying that I'm a huge fan of the first Rebel Galaxy game. I thought it was tight, polished, and had a great vision of 'high seas piracy, in space'.

RGO is a disappointment. Every aspect of the game just feels undercooked.

Firstly, the 3D spaceflight model. It's a huge downgrade. The map is utterly impossible to read, with all the same problems as elite dangerous. However, with no 'contacts' UI element, I have no way of telling which hostile ships are near me, which are the biggest threats, or which are approaching me. To dogfight, I have to select a target, then aim for the lead indicator. That would be fine, but since this game focuses on fighter combat, the pirate ships are very fast and dogfights become a repetitive cycle of zooming 10km towards a target, shooting them a bit, they blow up, and something attacks you from behind, so you turn, shoot them, they run away, and you chase them.

You can bump into Pirate Lords in the first system, with their huge retinues. Good luck working out what they are or how to escape them. The game is balanced for a well-built ship, with all the modules and a full rack of guns, not the starter-ship you have to begin with. Oh, and the enemies scale against your ship when you start upgrading it, so you never feel like you've progressed at all. When I realised this, it was time for me to stop playing.

The art direction in the story cutscenes is interesting, but jarring against the realistic style of the main game and stations. The sound design has highly-processed, monotone vocals. 'CRAFT HEAVILY DAMAGED' being chanted as loud beeps warn me about incoming missiles, for example. It's annoying, it tells me nothing I don't already know. Graphics are muddy, looking pretty ugly at 1080p and coming with an atrocious film grain effect as standard, which hurt my eyes. I do not like the artistic choices Double Damage have made in this game - they've tried to make things more complicated than Rebel Galaxy, and it just didn't work.

The economy is dull. Early missions don't pay enough, you'll buy your second ship by mining ore in the first system, not by doing the story or side missions. In Rebel Galaxy, I smashed out dozens and dozens of missions without realising there was a story at all, and worked my way through all the ships having an absolute blast. RGO makes everything feel like a chore, like it's gated behind upgrades which don't help me at all. It's taken all the worst aspects of Elite Dangerous, but on a lower budget.

When I got my ship of choice, for a short time I did feel like I was having fun. It was manouverable, had plentiful hardpoints, and gave me a couple of higher-grade systems to feel a but of a power curve. But unless I underpowered my guns, the aforementioned enemy scaling makes the combat tedious, and I just don't see the point of throwing good hours after bad.

I can't recommend that you play this game. Play Rebel Galaxy, instead.

The lovechild of Burnout Paradise and NFS Underground 2. Real-world cars with unrealistic physics, this game is a treat of graphical fidelity and arcade racing. It perhaps doesn't have all that much depth, but Heat attempts a story with interesting and timely themes, commenting on the abuse of power by the police.

The cars feel responsive, and customising them is satisfying. There's nothing more fun than taking one of the entry-level cars and souping it up into a monster. And best of all, the community skins can turn them into incredible works of art.

My biggest criticisms are the soundtrack, which is weak (mainly Spanish rap), and the early difficulty of police chases which can escalate very quickly beyond what lightly-modified cars can outrun.

Too many of the reviews for this game say nothing about it, in order to try to avoid spoiling the game experience. I won't do that.

This is a game about grief. It's the closest I've ever seen a fictional medium come to capturing that sense of loss and hopelessness. You have to find your own reason for carrying on, even though it feels pointless.

In Outer Wilds, you're an explorer, visiting the same planets of the same solar system and discovering something new on each one. The game is split into 5-10 minute mysteries, with quite a lot of written text. The amount of reading is one of the game's weaknesses, which wasn't a problem for me, as I'm a fast reader, but it does slow the player down and interrupt your thinking.

Sometimes, that's good, as you need to read a piece of information to continue. It doesn't just feed you events, either. You have to think, piecing together what you know about the universe in order to continue the story.

There are relatively few characters, but a lot of the storytelling is procedural or visual. The extremely strong sound design, along with the charming and impressive art direction assist this, and are some of the game's best assets. The music is particularly haunting.

I did find a few parts of the game frustrating. It can initially feel that everything can only be interacted with in one way, but most of the environments are free enough that you can try multiple logical approaches. One key thing I noticed is that you can't remove a "scroll" from a "wall" if you have another "scroll" in your hand - this was a big barrier for me to overcome in enjoying the game and feeling like I got a fair crack at every puzzle.

Unfortunately, being an open-world puzzle game, it does lose a lot of its cohesion once you've explored the majority of the game and figured everything out. That means that the last few steps before the finale can feel a bit slow and repetitive at times, especially if you're trying for 100% completion and following every lead.

Overall, the strength of Outer Wilds is the use of the medium of the game. This wouldn't work as a film or a novel. It relies on you, the player, to experience this story, and it delivers an emotional, punchy experience that really got under my skin. There were times I couldn't stop playing because I felt infuriated, or enthralled, or desperate. I just had to keep playing, to see whatever the was to see. Sometimes I forgot to eat. Sometimes I forgot to sleep. At just under 13 hours, I completed the game in what sees to be a short run, but I also only took three or four sessions with the game to see it all.

A very badly archived game. The final two patches break crossplay between linux, mac, and PC.

As for the game itself, it replicates the feeling of being in a casino without having to lose money, which is nice. The difficulty is entirely unbalanced and dependent on how lucky your gun generations are, which is not.

Don't bother playing it alone.

Pixel Starships is a space-themed MMO with puzzle elements, and teaches the player basic concepts in computer programming.

I've been a long-time player of this game on mobile. It is a PC port of a successful mobile game with microtransactions, but you should already expect that as it's a F2P game.

While the game draws thematic influences from space RPGs and MMOs like FTL and EVE Online, Pixel Starships is something altogether different. Spaceships are a blank canvas for you to place weapons, reactors, android constructors and shields on, arranging them with lift shafts and internal armour blocks to create a custom design. Unlike other games where ships might have tougher hulls or bigger guns, in PSS all ships at each level have the same stats, and access to the same rooms.

Pixel Starships really shines when you treat it like a puzzle game. The way to success is designing a ship layout which balances power, offense and defense, while being fully automated. Wait, fully automated? That's right. PSS revolves around an "AI" mechanic, where crew members and rooms are pre-programmed with your orders, based on certain conditions. Think the "gambit system" from Final Fantasy XII: If a condition is met, an action is performed. By utilising checks for rooms on the enemy ship, you can tailor your strategy to your opponent and synergise your rooms ingeniously.

While reaching the very top of the rankings is the preserve of only the people who pay large sums of money, you can reach a respectable top 1000 ranking without spending any money at all. Joining a fleet in the top 100 is an important step, and since the barrier-to-entry is understanding the basics of programming, the community is warm, welcoming, create, and intelligent. As the game progresses, the waiting times increase in duration, and planning for the future becomes more and more important.

Give it a whirl. Make your way to level 5 in a couple of ours and see if you like it.

Stellaris is... not the game it originally launched as. It's not the first time it's become a new game, either. Paradox has devoted a lot of time and effort into developing a balanced, immersive, randomly-generated Grand Strategy 4X game. Like all their other games, there is plenty to praise and plenty to complain about.

PROS:
- Incredibly customisable
This is the biggest and most important feature of the game. It's a brand new galaxy, with no prior material to refer to. There's no need to balance the nations of Europe against the Ottoman Empire, or to remove particular symbols or events in order to avoid censorship in certain countries. So you can mod it. You can mod anything you don't like. And that means that even if you have problems with certain mechanics, you can change them to something you like. And that's awesome. It also makes room for Star Trek, Star Wars, Eve Online, and many other total conversions, which are all pretty neat, but usually suffer from a heavy performance hit. But more on that later...

- A sense of scale
Stellaris is deep. Every planet has "pops" which carry out "jobs", like mining minerals, or turning minerals into the metal alloys you use to build ships. Each pop is simulated with their own ideology, growth preference, and happiness. And each day, they're checked against every other job on their planet to see if they should fill it. This is about as bad for the late-game performance as you might expect. But it's an indication of the detail the game delves into. Your decisions might affect the happiness of your pops of a certain species, and if that species lives on your world mining minerals for your empire, you can crash the economy by ruining the mineral income you were depending on to fuel those alloy foundries which you built on your homeworld.

Similarly, the game doesn't push you in the direction of any one playstyle. Almost everything is viable, so long as you keep up with tech. Fortunately, there are ways around the drawbacks of a particular game. Settling lots of planets? Build the bureaucratic centres and remove the penalty to your research and leadership costs. The depth of ways to play is difficult to explain in a review. You make choices, which lead to more choices, and all snowball to accumulate powerful effects.

- Art and sound design
What can I say? Andreas Waldetoft composes another masterful score. Despite drawing inspiration from all sorts of sci-fi and fantasy settings, Stellaris manages to deliver a fresh setting which looks pretty, delivers information reasonably well, and sounds fantastic.

CONS:
- Horrible endgame performance
Look, you likely haven't spent £1000s on your PC. Or maybe you have, like me, but it was a few years ago, and your i5-4670k just doesn't have the beans it used to back in 2013. All those simulated pops really cause problems during the late game. Stellaris struggles to run a medium-sized galaxy into the ~2400s. Just when your empire is finishing the tech tree, your fleets are stronger than all your neighbours, and you're ready to conquer the galaxy... it's frustrating. It also locks you out of the endgame content and makes it feel like progressing onwards is a chore. While the latest big patch helped somewhat, I think Paradox need to dial back some of the "simulation", especially for AI empires. Why should AI pops be simulated? The player will never see that.

- Piecemeal DLC model
Look, I'm not a fan of having an "incomplete" game. I'm really bad for sinking a lot of time into games to collect everything I can possibly find or unlock. Paradox's games since Crusader Kings II have abused that tendency by offering up many slices of DLC, which each offer a few small tweaks or storylines to pad out the game. In multiplayer, at least, having a host with all the content means you can play with it there, but I don't accept that as OK. I have given up on EU IV, CK2, and HOI4 because I'm unwilling to pay £100 for a full game, even using steam sales. Stellaris is the only one I've stuck with. This is a greedy, greedy publisher.

- Tough learning curve
The downside of having a lot of content. Multiplayer helps, a lot, as you can have a friend take you through the mechanics and ask their advice on the big choices. But it will take a couple hundred hours to really get good at the game. It's not a game for people who don't have lots of free time. And that's unfortunate.

All in all, I (marginally) recommend Stellaris. Pick it up if you're a fan of 4X games, or Sci-fi strategy, and have plenty of time for it. Otherwise, give it a miss.

**I first reviewed Elite Dangerous after a couple of hundred hours back in 2017. I had experienced all of the main aspects of gameplay and just felt frustrated with it. With significant overhauls to the game mechanics in mid-2019, I decided to give it a second go.**

Elite is not for everyone. It doesn't do a particularly good job of teaching the game mechanics to the player. It doesn't even attempt to teach the player how to successfully make money at a fair rate. It requires you to undertake prior reading in order to understand how most of it's mechanics work.

I shouldn't be able to recommend it. But, somehow, it manages to find a certain charm that keeps me coming back. While in the past, FDev decided to nerf any method that made more than 50m credits per hour, with the advent of fleet carriers and the endorsement of deep-core asteroid mining, there are reasonable ways to make money in the game and unlock the full range of content.

What is its content? The Milky Way galaxy, simulated at 1:1 scale. There aren't many games with that level of ambition: EVE Online might have 50,000 players across 10,000 systems. Nullsec seems positively urban in comparison to Elite Dangerous. You can explore the vastness of space and really get a sense of loneliness. Nothing else I've played has really achieved this.

There are a few dozen ships to unlock. Unfortunately, only a handful are viable, even for the different roles and gameplay modes. The real content is found in engineering ship modules to beyond their initial parameters, requiring busywork to obtain "materials" rather than cash. This gets tedious pretty quickly, and has to be repeated for each ship. Again, you'll find yourself following youtube guides on how to unlock everything through traders in a single day's play.

That's right, a day's play. The grind is real. And when your ship is destroyed, you almost always lose whatever progress you had made in that session. It's not my favourite design choice.

The bread and butter of the game is it's flight mechanics, which are pretty satisfying. If dogfighting hadn't always been fun, I'd have never considered coming back to check the current state of the game.

The community is a mixed bag. On one hand, some established players will help you out of charity, and give you a leg-up on the early grind. On the other, some players will grief you in open play, through methods such as suicide-ramming ships breaking the speed limit at stations. But you have the option to play with only a group of your choosing. I use this game mode exclusively.

If you're interested in space exploration, asteroid mining, or combat flight simulators, this might be worth playing. If you don't have a lot of time on your hands, save yourself the bother.
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Original review:

This is not a good game. This is a very shiny game which tricks you into believing that it's fun. It isn't. It's a grind, an unpleasant set of design choices which insult the player and their time. Simple things, such as not rewarding a player for defeating enemies if they die in the process, demonstrate an attitude by the devs that they care more about the purity of their intentions than how fun the game is for the player.

The expansion locks away crucial content for PvP which gives holders an enormous advantage over other players. It features microtransactions for ship skins, engine and weapon colour trails, despite its premium price-tag for the full content of the game.

While it can be rewarding to play with friends, I cannot recommend this as a game for people to buy. It simply takes too long to surpass the extremely steep learning curve, and then keeps the player invested only through the feeling of not wanting to waste that time. Avoid.

A clever game with a meta-narrative, Pony Island combines competent running and gunning with puzzle mechanics. While the writing is extremely entertaining and the visual style intelligent, some of the later sections rely on cheap visual ploys to distract the player and obfuscate targets. Contains flashing lights.

"Even if it worked, there's one word to describe this game.

MEDIOCRE."

-Jim Sterling