Recent reviews by sam

I sadly cannot recommend this game yet. I will update this review when/if the game-breaking issues get fixed.

Starfield is big, fun, good-looking, and has a lot of enjoyable mechanics. I really liked it for some time.

It does have its issues, though. Inventory handling is incomprehensibly bad (when buying stuff there is no way to know how much of that stuff you already have in your inventory), as is the UI in general. There is no real incentive to build and maintain outposts. There are only four companions with a deep story and associated quests, which pales in comparison to Fallout 4’s 13 companions. And, as usual, it’s very hard to immerse oneself in a world with interplanetary travel where land vehicles simply do not exist.

And then the bugs hit. I am well familiar with funny bugs in Bethesda RPGs, things breaking in comical and unexpected ways, having spent almost a thousand hours in Fallout 4, and hundreds of hours in each of the other Fallout games. But in my case Starfield has become unplayable for me. There are too many broken quests, characters spawning out of reach, and even some core mechanics have stopped working.

Edit: as of April 9, 2024 (6 months later), there have been no significant updates to the game that improved my experience. It is still very broken, I frequently get stuck in combat mode, my ship becomes invisible, dialogues are silent, NPCs get teleported to remote parts of the map… Still not recommended, sorry.

This review is based on the early access version. I will update it accordingly when the game changes.

Right now I would not recommend this game. It is promising and definitely fills a gap among educational games, but it is very incomplete.

The UI is very basic and many features are missing or a bit clunky for the moment. There is no audio. There is some kind of background story in the form of a chat log which makes the overall experience more enjoyable than a regex tutorial. As far as content is concerned, some very basic regex concepts such as .* or ^ and $ are not very well explained. Some other things such as \w or lookahead/lookbehind or {n,m} matches are not covered at all.

The level design needs more balancing and a better difficulty curve: there are 20 levels (plus some kind of unkillable final boss level) and I would consider most of them very hard for a regex beginner. A game such as Human Resource Machine does a far better job at increasing difficulty, teaching new concepts along the way, and restricting available options in the earlier levels so that the player does not get confused.

On several occasions I got faced with the choice between rolling myself a spliff of crazy weed and playing Super Meat Boy, and I chose to play Super Meat Boy.

This, people, is how addictive Super Meat Boy is.