Recent reviews by Roenie

Hamsterwheel / "progression": the game number 9001, this time with a very high level of frustration. Miniature player in backyard is a great concept for exploration that is feels wasted on this endless resource gathering, crafting, survival BS. The usual needing X number of Y and Z to make A and B so you can make C while always thirsty and hungry. Enemies get stuck on almost every blade of grass and inside of rocks. Bugs far above your progress level stray into your area, charge and instakill you. 100% GPU and >600 fps at main menu, no fps limit setting enabled by default.

Nice graphics quality (Unreal engine) but way too heavy on the DoF effect that you can't disable (maybe .ini editing, don't know). Framerate performance isn't great and you can't improve it 'cause no advanced graphics settings menu, only "low/med/hi/max". No control over anti-aliasing settings either, for example. You have to use medium or low so the massive DoF effect doesn't blur everything your aim dot isn't very specifically pointed at.

Early game is great exploration and the first 10 hours are great fun. It then becomes very repetitive in the midgame scanning several hundred planets by pressing X, and late game turns into a terrible experience. It takes forever to get anywhere in your ship and you're constantly backtracking, flying all over the map in futile attempts to progress the story. It's a needle in a haystack simulator without telling you that a needle is what you're looking for in the first place, the haystack is literally the size of the universe, and you can barely move.

Early game any star system you bump into gets marked on the map. As the game goes on, more and more you will have to try and find specific planets and systems that you missed, in order to progress. Except you don't even know if you've missed any or not! All you know is the story doesn't seem to progress and you don't know why. It could be that you just need to talk to a specific alien to progress, or fly to a specific planet again that you already found. You don't know and you'll have to look it up on the web.

When you finally get to the end, the boss doesn't pose a threat. It's literally go to him and press this win button once on your keyboard. It's not a fight, so there is no need to time it or be specific about positioning. The outro then is text again, there's no video or voice acting in the game.

Zen Studios were sold to Saber
Saber is owned by Embrace Group
Embrace Group is owned by its shareholders
Embrace Group's largest shareholder is iShares
iShares is owned by BlackRock
BlackRock destroys the world in the name of greed above lives and human rights
Buying from Zen empowers BlackRock

In november 2020 Zen Studios were acquired by Saber Interactive which is owned by Embracer Group from Sweden, the largest "gobble up all the things" acquisitions firm in gaming in Europe, the same one that Square Enix are looking to sell the Deus Ex, Thief and Tomb Raider IPs to. The CEO of Embracer Group, Lars Wingeford, is worth 1.6 billion according to Forbes. In 1993, at age 15, Wingefors started a company to buy and flip used video games. 4 years later he dropped out of high school 'cause his company had sales of $10 million/year. If you're turning over 10mil flipping games it was never about the gameplay or the artform. He could have went trading in literally any other industry and not squeeze the life out of the creative arts. But no, guys like this have to destroy in order to be happy, the world must burn. This is what I imagine an embrace by Embracer Group is like: https://imgur.com/a/JyVWBEb That is not to say that Zen weren't driven by greed to begin with, that much has been apparent from the way they've done business. There must be something about pinball tables, arcades and gambling all being somewhat related in people's minds that draws greedy people in. Zen Studios are dead. Overtaken by greed and people dressed in penguin suits. The only way from here is downhill.

Original review below.

I love it and I hate it. It's abandonware while the devs work on their next title, an Epic 1 year exclusive called "Pinball FX". FX3 has multi-year old problems that were never fixed and never will be. In spite of that it's still the best currently available, convenient to use pinball sim. This review will focus mostly on the issues you should be aware of. Issues that most likely won't be in the new Pinball FX. If you buy tables for FX3 now you won't be able to transfer them over to the new FX. That's the reason this review is negative: you should wait for the new FX instead. That doesn't mean you can't play FX3 in the meantime, just don't go buying yourself a large number of tables. Most tables from FX3 will likely be copy/pasted over to the new FX just as they've done from FX2 to FX3. But you're gonna want them in the new FX' game engine not in FX3 and I'm about to explain why.

Consider using the good and free Visual Pinball X until FX comes out on Steam if you don't mind tinkering with files and learning how to get it working. Tables for VPX are made for free by people in their free time so it's an inconsistent experience. Probably even more so than FX3.

OK, let's get into FX3's technical issues.

A particularly bad bug is the one where active outlane kickbacks are on rare occasions ignored, letting the ball drain anyway.

Ball physics and ball speed on many tables are incorrect unless you run them at 60 fps with v-sync on. V-sync off physics differ from v-sync on even when capped at a steady 60 fps using RTSS. With the new FX game they're switching to the Unreal engine so hopefully that fixes the fact that physics are tied to fps. FX3 was designed to run at 60 fps with vsync, showing its age in this regard and revealing its console focused nature. A majority of tables still work OK at 120+vsync besides 60+vsync, but you better make sure you never go below or above either 60 or 120. I'm really enjoying my time with those that do work at 120 (albeit not perfectly).

Zen Studios very rarely if ever seem to retroactively fix or improve already released tables. Any improvements are only in new tables, while old ones keep their old physics and problems. Some game breaking bugs are fixed a year after being reported, others remain to this day.

60 fps tables
Tables that need to run at 60 fps + vsync among most likely others, to avoid game breaking issues:
Black Rose
The Getaway (seems to work at 120 vsynced for me, ball maybe a bit faster, needs testing)
Party Zone
Venom

Vertical Up Kickers on tables like:
- Creature from the Black Lagoon
- Party Zone
- Champ Pub
...are unreliable with low/variable FPS

On Black Rose, the table most affected, if I cap my fps below 60, and shoot the ball into the "pirate's cove" the ball won't even be ejected with enough speed to make it back onto the playfield. At above 60 fps, it comes out way faster than the devs intended.

How can one table be affected more than another? Because FX3 is inconsistent: every table is almost its own separate game title with its own physics code. Even the 8 camera angles you can use are sometimes different between tables.

Physics differences between table packs
PinStratsDan wrote: "Maybe the easiest way to explain it all is to begin with Pinball FX3 before the Williams tables were released. Then you only had Single Player and Classic Single Player. The difference being that Classic Single Player had no Powerups. That is still the case for the Zen original designs. The Williams tables have the same Singe Player with the same Zen brand of fun but unrealistic physics and powerups. Classic Single Player is though replaced with Classic Arcade and Classic Tournament physics. Zen aims with the Classic physics to be as realistic as possible so that you can do flipper tricks e.g. live catches, and where you must deal with a ball and playfield feedback that is much livelier and more unpredictable. Tournament physics is the same physics as Arcade and the differences come down to the playfield being emulated at a much steeper angle, extra balls being disabled, and the order of random rewards being standardized or replaced with a score value depending on the table.

One other aspect regarding Williams Classic physics is that it has gone through different iterations. I won't go into details but from Volume 1 to now the ball has become slower and heavier and the flipper physics has been improved. Most people prefer the Universal Monsters pack and later physics. I prefer a combo somewhere between Vol 4 and UM."

IMO the UM physics make the ball too bouncy and exaggerate spin so I agree with Dan there.

Real people appreciate others for who they are, within reason. For the women in this game to appreciate you and to get a positive outcome to a "date", you have to say you like and believe all the same things they do. You have to be the same as one of these 5 women. You won't be because there's only 5, the odds are zero, so you have to fake it. If I have to pretend to be someone I'm not, I couldn't care less how they respond because it's not me they think they're responding to, it's an imaginary person.

You also can't skip anything you've already seen nor can you go back to choose a different answer, only restart from the beginning. Refunded.

The more "hardcore" racing sims are simply better. Graphics, physics, handling, FFB, thus more fun to drive. You'd have to be a massive F1 fan to prefer this - with official teams/names and a Formula 1 atmosphere over just driving a random open wheeler in a better sim. Kinda what I was expecting except for the graphics, they were disappointing. You'd expect them to be better in a game like this compared to hardcore sim titles but they're not as good. Very blurry with anti-aliasing and like most of these driving games can't do without it.

Had the physics, FFB and handling been on par with Automobilista 1 and had the graphics been sharper this would've been a fantastic alternative to the hardcore sims that just give you cars and tracks and don't present their content as a complete, structured, game/career mode experience.

Do you enjoy looking at icons and numbers? Are you purely a strategy guy? Then you might really like this. If you also want entertainment value and stimulating visuals from your strategy games to make them more palatable, then you won't like this. Most people will be in the 2nd group with me. The strategy side of things felt simplistic rather than making up for the game's presentation. There's just not a whole lot you can do. After 4 hours of learning how to play, I didn't feel like coming back to actually play the game.

Watch The Scarlet Seeker's video review, he makes some good points. I won't repeat them all here. https://youtu.be/Z6Maro9aNYw
Besides being faster to learn, more intuitive and more exciting, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion from 2012 has better graphics than AI War 2 from 2019, a better UI (although I'm not a fan of the cluttered left sidebar there either), and more things to do / ways to play strategically. AI War 2 is more restrictive, IMO it decides for you a little too much by e.g. predetermining what ships will be in your fleets and how many of each. It boils everything down to "which galaxy map nodes will I take over, and which do I leave to the AI enemy". Despite being tagged as 4X it's not a 4X title, those have more to them.

The UI needs work: the panel covering the left side of the screen should be replaced by separate dedicated hotkeyed screens and a thin button bar at the top. The tooltips are very messy in terms of layout and have too much information crammed onto them that should not be needed or should be elsewhere, I'd suggest the devs look at Path of Exile for examples of cleaner looking tooltips.

The developer really enjoys making clever AI, then trying to figure out said AI's plans and try to beat it. The AI might be amazing, but I'll never know. I never really got to play against it, because the rest of the game made sure I didn't get that far.

There is too much reading in the tutorials. If you need more than 3 lines of text to explain something before the player executes the next step in a tutorial, there is too much text. Extra tip #1: this is way too much text already. Extra tip #2: don't tell me these are extra tips, limit yourself to the information itself and don't elaborate in the first place. Tutorials must be extremely concise and to the point, like Sins of a Solar Empire's are. Less reading, more doing.

It's very unique, the devs thought for themselves rather than following genre tropes and standards and I really appreciate that. I just don't think the overall quality is high enough to play this over other strategy games out today. Not only in terms of presentation but sadly even strategy game mechanics / freedom of approach as well, as far as I could tell from the time I was willing to put in.

I'll try to cover all major gameplay elements. Like in FTL (Faster Than Light) you get a map of nodes that lets you choose where to go next. It's supposed to resemble a nebula so I'll refer to it as the nebula map. Most nodes on this map have a derelict space ship you can board. Unlike in FTL, you don't fight with your ship. You fight in a strategic first person shooter fashion aboard the ships you enter. VB is a shooter with freedom of approach and emergent gameplay that results from your decision making combined with randomized challenges.

The point of boarding ships is to find items used to unlock upgrades that you get to keep when you die. Items are also used to unlock each next story segment.

Advancing by one map node consumes one "fuel" and one “food”. Passing a turn consumes one "food" which heals some of your character's hitpoints. Fuel and food are found on ships. They can also be found on some nebula map nodes that have just a small pile of one of these resources and no ship to board.

The nebula map will tell you what direction to travel to find the next item needed to unlock the next story segment. You plot your own course to get there. You may prefer certain routes over others because the ships at those nodes have less dangerous enemies or more items you want for specific upgrades to your weapons and abilities. Weapon upgrades really mean something in this game: triple damage, yes please.

The nebula map UI shows you what enemies you'll face on any particular ship selected, roughly how many you will encounter there, what special loot is there, and what mods apply to the whole ship. Examples of mods that apply to ships are environmental hazards like fires, smoke, a tough boss enemy being present, all lights out, all doors initially open or closed and (not) lockable, periodic power outages, etcetera. Enemies all behave and attack in their own very distinct ways. Based on this information you pick your loadout of 3 weapons. One direct damage gun, one indirect AoE like a grenade or plantable bomb, and a utility weapon such as the Zapper that stuns things or Kitty Bots that run around to distract enemies and then explode. Once you've chosen your loadout, you click “Board”, which puts you in first person view at an airlock on the target ship.

On the ship, you pull up the ship map to make a little plan for yourself. The ship's rooms all have a name and purpose. Let's say you want to find a “chain” to upgrade a weapon. You might decide to go to the Helm first, if one such room exists on that ship, because the Helm's computer can highlight all loot locations on your ship map. Not necessary but still very useful. But the power happens to be out on this ship, so to turn on the computer you need to make your way to the Generator room which might be guarded by a security camera and a turret or two. If your choice is to disable them first, you visit the Security room first. Whatever your decision, you will have to deal with the challenges in each room in your own way, using the weapon loadout that you chose at the start. And don't forget to visit the life support room to refill your oxygen supply, preferably before it runs out. For a price, a machine in the Hab room can protect you from hazards like rad clouds left by dead radioactive enemies. Planning an efficient route is half the battle. Just as important is knowing when to abort and leave a ship through the airlock rather than wasting ammo and hitpoints to do a full clear for rewards you don't really need at that time. When you exit a ship through its airlock, the game will list the items you found. It then switches back to the nebula map. From there, you use items found to upgrade what you can, then move on to the next node and boardable ship of choice.

Enemies vary from few to very numerous. Some of them can hurt you badly rather quickly, if you're in the wrong spot. There are ships with med bays where you can heal back up, if you can make it that far. If not, you can pass turns on the nebula map to consume 1 food and get a little heal each turn. Deadly pirates make their way to you, so it's best not to linger too long unless you have found torpedoes for your ship to blow them up with: another reason to board and loot other ships.

Security cameras that spot you will beep, like in System Shock 2, and trigger an alarm if you don't destroy or stun the camera within a few seconds. The alarm will make a powerful security bot activate and hunt you down. With the right ability unlocked, the bot can be made to do your bidding. Turrets can be your friend too, if you want them to be – if you have the coin. And there's a weapon that uses 1 ammo to pick something up, allowing you to place it back down somewhere else. That includes enemies: you might pick up a particularly tough enemy and set him back down on top of some of your explosives. It's not your run of the mill first person shooter.

I hope I gave you some idea of the freedom of approach and emergent gameplay I mentioned in the beginning of the review. The game borrows this from the “immersive sim” genre, that's games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. By intentionally offering you several ways to deal with almost every challenge, you get the satisfaction of overcoming challenges your way. Combined with randomization of enemy types, mods that apply to ships, ship map layouts, environmental hazards, security systems, oxygen running low, etc., you'll experience exciting, heart pounding, palm sweating moments unique to your personal experience.

The penalty for death is low, just enough that you'll try to avoid it. You can gather 3 traits for your character, positive or negative. You can swap them out at machines aboard ships. When you die, you lose your traits along with any ammo you stockpiled for all of your weapons, and any loot you were carrying from the ship that you died on. You'll receive a new character to continue playing with, and a “care package” consisting of some ammo, and resouces like fuel and food to get you started. Characters have default traits that can be negative, but you can swap those out later.

It won't win awards for best graphics. They get the job done as long as you're not put off by the comic book art style. As a fan of System Shock 2, I'm a sucker for sci-fi spaceship environments with (wall) panels everywhere, so I might be biased when I say the art style makes up for the lack of raw detail. The built-in AA filter is too blurry for my taste and only slightly improved by adding sharpening through the nvidia drivers. The gameplay is so engaging that you're too preoccupied to care. The upgrade UI is unnecessarily confusing. Unity by default doesn't run in exclusive fullscreen, required for smooth nvidia g-sync. G-sync users will be happy to know that adding: -window-mode exclusive to the launch options fixes the problem.

Solid. Inspiration was definitely taken from System Shock 2. You'll hear certain announcements being made over the ship's speaker systems. Enemies will say things to you. You can hear their distinct noises. The ambient sound isn't quite as atmospheric as System Shock 2's, but that applies to almost every game ever made.

You wouldn't play this for the story. Simplistic but funny, presented like a comic book, voiced by the artist who voiced Stanley in Stanley Parable. Having played that game, hearing his voice in VB is odd because it's so recognizable. Best in the business though, so there's that.

It blends genres very well and it's lots of fun. You should get this game, but €30 is too much for a Unity indie roguelite with limited content. I got 35 hours out of it. For most folks it would last half that long: I'm exceptionally meticulous and unlocked 100% of the unnecessary upgrades. By comparison, Hades is priced at €21 and lasted 85 hours. VB gets a big fat recommendation from me, but only buy when on sale.

Update 17-03-2023:
Gave it another chance two years after writing the review. I still hate it.

Original review:
Strongly overrated.

Gunplay is unsatisfying with weapons having no sense of impact and weak sound (try Synthetik, night & day difference). Bullet spongey enemies. Mobs respawn nearly instantly and in the same location. The game is on a timer. As time goes on, threat level increases. Never a moment to take a breather. Battle royale style pickups. The game is a grind full of unlocks (normal for the genre), so you'd think that after the first 4 runs you'd have unlocked at least one little thing, but no: still just the single, default starter class and starter loadout.

On a technical level, especially for a shooter, the game falls short. I suspect the game uses Unity because fullscreen isn't exclusive fullscreen, it's actually a borderless window which breaks g-sync. Yes you can temporarily enable windowed mode for g-sync in the nvidia drivers and disable it again after playing this game, but it's a pain, and windowed g-sync always microstutters. You can't avoid changing settings before playing even if you use v-sync with input lag as then you'll have to set the fixed refresh you want, and switch it back when you're done.

It took me 1.2 hours to get bored enough to quit and uninstall the game. I would not recommend this to my friends, therefore this review is negative.

FPS locked to 62 because fps affects the timing of everything just like in the 80s.

Walking in circles aimlessly in an infinite house of mirrors with so many branching paths and puzzles everywhere that you just don't know where to go, what puzzles can be solved in what order, or even why. Piles on way too much all at once.

It's just not worth the brain cycles trying to reverse engineer this infinite rabbit hole that makes you feel like you're never going to find the exit anyway. I'm not a lab rat. I have things to do. The game needs at least SOME structure to it. It seems the developer was a little too keen on laughing in his sleeve, making puzzles to go everywhere and adding as many branching paths as possible, to care enough about making your experience comfortable or rewarding.

Pure frustration served ice cold in upscaled 720p. What hole do you think I believe they should go spelunk.