Recent reviews by Roenie

Really doesn't deserve the hype for two main reasons. First, the story actually is very weak. Second, I knew to expect no gameplay but you still have to interact with the game quite a lot to move it forward and that part sucks terribly here.

People are crying over a love story full of massive plot holes, zero character depth and no love expressed between the characters. They have nothing together and shouldn't have been together in the first place. It didn't move me or affect me deeply in any way.

The dev bamboozled the players and possibly even himself with time travel, recurring items that symbolize things (every artsy fartsy movie director's favorite) and a few table spoons of confusion. It gets praise in part due to the way the story is told in that it keeps the player guessing despite being told backwards - and that IS clever - but in terms of tying everything together correctly the ball is dropped pretty hard and right from the start of the game too, confusing you through no fault of your own. Even though half of it made no sense, in the end the game plays sad piano music, the normies start crying and presto: best game ever. Puhleaze.

Autism spectrum disorder could and should also have been represented better with a lot more care. Players unfamiliar with it may well get the wrong idea.

I had to google how to progress at one point despite having been trying to do exactly what the game wanted me to do to progress, but it hadn't worked because of the bad interface, leading me to waste my time repeatedly re-exploring the area with the belief that there must have been something else to find. The game puts you on a horse with no ability to dismount. Then to be able to click an NPC to progress you have to get right on top of him, horse and everything and click in just the right spot. Movement in general is awkward. You frequently have to click the same object 6 times in a row, this is by design. Obviously that's bad design. The game will make you wait a second after every click before the next click can be registered. Why not let the player hold the button down instead of clicking over and over?

I did appreciate the overall creativity, the beautiful piano music, the witty dialogue and you do get the sense that the dev tried to get the most out of RPG Maker, creatively going as far as for example portraying a day/night transition where the sky turns red when the sun comes in. In a game with a 3D engine the engine can generate the lighting transition for you in realtime. In this case you have to appreciate that it's done with hand made pixels.

Later in the game however, the dev takes getting the most out of RPG Maker XP a few steps too far. While the story builds, so does the frustration. A confusing looping action sequence with enemies, floor spikes to avoid and 'shooting' is thrown in, something that the engine isn't suitable for, causing a climax in the frustrations just before the actual story's climax where it does the most damage. It felt out of place in a game that outside of this part is like a walking sim all the way through.

There's no settings and that's bad because the music is so loud and the graphics are too pixelated for fullscreen that it defaults to. You have to figure out on your own to press Alt+Enter to switch to windowed mode and the window you then get is far too tiny. You then drag the window's edges to make the game an acceptable size. When you relaunch the game it's back in fullscreen mode and after Alt+Enter the window is tiny again.

I don't always necessarily regret playing a game that I write a negative review for. In this case I do and I wish I could get my 6 hours back. The majority of Steam users are casuals with low end systems and on average they are suckers for easy to play games with a "cutesie" 2D art style that will run on a potato. That factors into the overall rating quite a bit. If what you're looking for is a story that'll make you cry then pick up Highway Blossoms. It kicks like a mule compared to this.

After finishing To The Moon I thought: "What the hell, dev.... did I miss something here?". Looking for the answer to that question I found this video uploaded 5 years ago. Huge spoilers so only watch it after you've played if you're still interested in playing.
https://youtu.be/67npeQIRVLU
I didn't miss anything. The one on the left is an actress who is generally more emotional and emotive than I am and probably has higher emotional intelligence. She gets really into social dynamics between characters in games, yet her experience in To The Moon matched mine pretty much exactly. She speaks my mind with every single point she makes including the ones I didn't write about. I just understood more quickly that what the game was trying to portray with one of the main characters was autism.

Syberia is still as charming as it ever was and the voice acting is excellent. One of the best point & click adventure games. Because of the slow walking animations backtracking takes a long time so when you are stuck use a walkthrough instead of revisiting every location multiple times.

It crashes on launch. To fix it: in installation folder create player.ini with this content:
800 600 16 0 BaseCMO.cmo

It then runs windowed, fullscreen will crash, and yes 800x600 is the maximum. You still have to set a desktop resolution of 1080p or less or it'll still crash. I suggest setting the desktop to 1600x900 with scaling enabled. That seems to be the happy medium between 1) making the 800x600 window appear as large as possible and 2) losing too much graphical fidelity due to too much scaling being applied. At least on my 4K 43" VA panel. If your monitor's pixel density is super high (e.g. 27-32" 4K), you may wanna go lower than 1600x900.

If you enjoy Syberia, you'll probably also like Gray Matter.
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/260570/Gray_Matter/

I didn't give a hoot about the mentally challenged NPCs with owl heads, their petty gossip, bad-mouthing of other NPCs and their inability to do simple things without the player's help. Someone gets their head stuck in a vase and you need the hero's help to get him out by fetch questing the soap? NPC woes is what the game seems to focus on so when it fails to make you care about them it's game over. After 1.9 hours I wasn't enjoying it so I called it quits. Not so I could still get a refund - that ship sailed a long time ago as the game's been in my library for a while. I quit because I have better games to be playing. For a 90% positive rated game the writing isn't good enough.

This is a positive review set to 'negative' because singleplayer can't be played offline and that's unacceptable.

I picked up the GOTY edition for €8 on sale. Well worth it but an always online game isn't worth any more than that because when they stop hosting the servers you won't be able to play it anymore.

After comparing to DR1 I uninstalled DR1 and moved that into a library category called "recycle bin". I'd call it DR 1.5 rather than 2.0, or basically what DR1 should have been.

The FFB got a lot of hate but (nowadays) it is much better than DR1's and there's no way I'm going back to that. People say DR2 is harder but with the FFB no longer working against me and all forms of logic I have much better control of the car. DR2 also looks a little better, has way more cars and other content and a much improved menu system.

Unfortunately the leaderboards are effectively useless. You can't filter them to list just the times driven without assists and cutting the track is commonplace. This kills any desire to improve your times to get e.g. top 100 or top 10. Always online also sucks but it isn't worth sticking with DR1 just because of that. I do have a great internet connection and it hasn't caused any issues for me thus far.

I like the improved damage model as it forces you to adjust your speed to stay within your capability to control the car. It's very easy to get a puncture though - or in US English, a flat tyre. If you aren't a very experienced simracer you'll have your work cut out for you to learn how to not hit a tree every minute. It's not *quite* a true sim like Richard Burns Rally but still a very, very difficult game. It's sweaty. It takes a lot of effort and focus and therefore, energy. Not the game you play when you want to relax & just game.

This is the only game that I have to upscale from 2560x1440 to 4k despite having a 3080 in a brand new high end Ryzen 9 rig, just to get a mere 70-80 fps. 1440p is not even close to enough pixels for my 43" monitor, but wait it gets worse: to achieve this framerate I also have to set an FSR2 render scale of 75% which effectively upscales the game a 2nd time. The old game engine isn't efficient enough to run at 100% render scale. It looks so crud it feels like I'm playing Fallout 3 or worse. And what's with this extremely low contrast filter that removes the shadow depth? I've had to add a geforce experience filter to improve that but you still can't get the shadows back to black without making the overall image a little darker than it should be. Zero optimisation was done, no FOV slider added, changing video resolution has to be done by changing the desktop resolution, but they did have time to add a 3rd gender pronoun at character creation? Bethesda need to get their priorities straight.

The fact that you can't select a resolution in the game's settings means you cannot upscale a lower resolution that performs well enough to a size that is smaller than the full monitor size: it will always use all of it, so the low res ends up enlarged way too much, degrading image quality. You can't not upscale either because FSR2 on its own even at 50% render scale doesn't offer enough fps.

Cyberpunk outperforms Starfield by a country mile and looks way better doing it. Even Dead Space remake greatly outperforms it, and that game is known for bad performance on PC.

My companion robot keeps getting in my way and getting stuck and speaks so slowly I'm already sick of him. I'm also disappointed that you cannot actually travel through space, only fast travel so just like in Skyrim you select a fast travel point on a map, except the map now isn't fantasy style it's made to resemble a space backdrop. In Skyrim though you can actually travel to each location without fast travel, whereas in Starfield you cannot. So there is no sense of space. I also don't like gathering junk and resources for crafting and research. They carried that crap over from FO4 as if we haven't seen enough of that already in every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game since Minecraft.

Todd is a liar and when he's not straight up lying he's usually lying by omission and redirection. His job is to sell you on the game and that's what he does best. Used car salesmen are more honest than he is.

I don't see why you should play this over Fallout / Skyrim because it's the same talking to NPCs and having them as companions thing with various quest storylines except this time it's worse, you have a spaceship for a horse that you can't actually travel on. If you love Bethesda games and you've already played all the previous ones to death then maybe.. but you should wait 3 entire videocard generations and if by then you're really still interested you can pick it up on sale for next to nothing.

Short lived. Feels repetitive after about 40 hours, extremely repetitive after 80 hours. Needs to be greatly expanded upon. Wait a few years and if by then it has at least 32 units rather than the current 16, and more modes, more interesting maps, better 2vs2, THEN consider trying it. As it stands it simply has no real longevity.

Your play and your opponent's is very predictable because there is typically one viable counter to a threat. When one player is ahead, there's almost no coming back for the opponent. Lame cheese mechanic of tower rush to stun the opponent's entire army into slow motion to then kill it off in a few seconds. Too often the RNG of units you start with determines whether you will be able to win or not. If your starting units counter theirs, yours win, gain XP, and you snowball from there, one step ahead the whole time. Frustrating when you're on the receiving end of it. The mind trick played here is that if you're the one winning you think you outsmarted the opponent. That's not necessarily the case.

I had never played an autobattler before. I don't like RTS that leans on actions per minute either but I now understand direct control over units is vital to have enough agency to be able to express strategic creativity. The units in Mechabellum intentionally have zero intelligence, always targeting the wrong things first. Trying to play around that with unit placement is interesting at first, but it really does get old.

Boring console "gameplay". The endless repetitive 3rd person combat massively overstayed its welcome, as did the story that's all over the place and the banter between characters. Beside the metal music in the intro and pretty graphics these things are all the game has to offer.

Trash. I appreciate the effort from a one man dev team but this is the lowest quality game I've played in a long time, don't waste your money. Horrendously clunky movement and collisions plus super punishing don't go well together, terrible combat. 1.6 hrs of this game actually just pissed me off instead of giving me enjoyment.

Good "barebones indie" style small budget production that delivers exactly the core gameplay you expect but nothing more. No problem hitting my 110 fps cap with about 60% GPU load on a 3080 at 4k. One escape room will generally take 20-25 minutes to complete the first time you see it, so it's great for short sessions. Has a map editor and you can play other people's escape rooms through steam workshop.

Words cannot explain how awesome the controls and physics feel so try it for yourself. The developer is very approachable on Discord, immediately working on issues that people report. It's great to play already with a bright future ahead if enough players learn about the game throughout early access to populate the multiplayer component. Currently exclusive fullscreen mode locks you to 60Hz (breaking g-sync). This is being worked on. Until this is fixed use borderless. EDIT: fixed now.