Recent reviews by SweetPete

video game

its alright? I just wouldnt play more of it, the enemies are a little neat but the world traversal just feels sparse and uninteresting. averages out to a mediocre game I wish I could appreciate more but don't

yo this rocks

:/ this company should do better

I thought I might like this despite the reviews, but the execution is just that little bit too clunky.

At first it seems straight forward, and like pausing will be enough to sort your way through each plan.

I think this wouldn't be terrible if you had time to plan things out, but you're already being rushed to get haphazard weapon crafting done during the first day. It doesn't seem like it'll be too hard to get this done, but the lack of a queue system or automation system means that each individual step of that process becomes a mental weight to lift instead of a few pieces of a puzzle you sort through.

It's tough to put into words just how many steps go into something like making a spear.
It's something I've done in a dozen other games, but I think here there's such a period of stress between each step that it becomes unfun. You're juggling 4 workers who you desperately need to make the best of your limited time with before the zeds come, but it's difficult when various tasks take different periods of time and making something can go all out of wack when you're trying to keep in mind the 4-6 things you'll be trying to disassemble by travelling to different locations, which'll result in various amounts of resources (seriously, I ripped apart a leather couch once and either didn't get leather or it fell behind a stone table that I no longer had time to disassemble, and I really needed that leather to make a machete, but no leather means no machete so no 2nd weapon that night meant my one defender took a ton of damage defending herself and just AAAAAAAA I thought I was making a spear but couldn't find the metal poles either!!

I was able to handle Factorio and Rimworld but not handle this, even with the pause feature. I'd really like to see this company iterate on the idea and come out with a second title in the future, but I think I'm just stopping here. One of the 4 survivors whined an 8 second quip at me about being asked to tear down a shelf I needed metal out of for a barricade so she wouldn't you know, die later that night, but oh my god who says "no, fine, you know what, its fine, it's just as bad as the last thing you asked me to do" and like AAAAA maybe thats supposed to be a hint but I cant tell and despite their backstories none of the characters at level 0 seem to have bonus stats to any particular actions before they level up into new skills so I don't think she's supposed to be doing anything specialized anyway?? just AAAAAAAAAAA

surprisingly fun parkour system, liked the art style a lot, and the mystery was neither handholdy nor impossible to solve

It felt like it was close to engaging but not quite.
Music was good. It felt like I was waiting for stuff to happen for too much of it though, and that was half of the whole ~40 minute play through.

So, something that I realized was interesting and lovable about this game is that it simultaneously feels like a Metroidvania - unlocking parts of the map bit by bit by unlocking different tools and trinkets - yet it accomplishes it in doing so in what feels like a way unique to survival crafting.

The general loop for the melee weapons in the game is that, yeah, you do craft them like a standard game - and you raise their damage - I.E. it's like 8, then 12, then 16, etc. for the Crowbar. You start encountering different objects in the game, like first a wood fence that you can only break to harvest resources if you can do at least 12 a swing, then tables that can only be smashed apart for a better material for 20 a swing.

What got really cool and made me want to point this out is that I realized the level design itself took this standard survival-crafting harvest gameplay and turned it into Metroidvania too - at one point while travelling a new area of the map that I could have chosen to come to earlier, I saw a shortcut that wasn't necessary to get through an area, but what I realized was pretty cool was that only because I had gone out of my way to grind and overupgrade the second blunt weapon in the game that I could actually smash a path through a set of chainlink fences blocked off by a set of metal transformers. It was pretty cool to have that little moment. This game makes Metroidvania-ing really enjoyable and I hope to see other devs catch on to that idea.

Other than that, as this is a review - solid movement, nice visuals, strikes a nice balance between relaxing crafting and some engaging combat sections, plus I'm still discovering a surprising number of, well, surprises across the map that are cool too. I went all at launch price - this has definitely been worth that and I totally recommend picking it up if you ever see it on sale, and I haven't even tried out the co-op yet.

Purchased shortly after the 1.0 release, for clarity's sake.

I mean that was fun. Sorta a hot 6 to 9 out of 10 experience at different points in time. Really enjoyed the strategy layer, from time to time the tactical layer could feel repetitive - not so much with the Pandorans, but against Ancients and on Nest missions.

Looking forward to the fifth DLC for a second run in late 2022 as well as future games from this developer. This really made some unique steps forward that I hope are reflected in the XCOM genre.

After some several hundred hours in XCOM 1 & 2 and more than a few hours of trying to enjoy this I just can't.

There are plenty of neat ideas here, but underdeveloped is the key word that comes to mind.

There's a genuine discomfort with the game introducing new ideas, but limiting control you have over them in a way that feels arbitrarily difficult rather than an earned difficult. Breaching mode starts your units in random positions out of control - your melee breachers choose a covered space at random, sometimes leaving their flank wide open to shots. The turn based system starts out feeling nice, but devolves into problem in the mid-late game of feeling immensely out of control when your spec ops police team bizarrely decides not to bring 6 troops to missions later on despite enemy numbers growing from 4-5 to 8-10 enemies that you're scrambling uncomfortably to manage as they attack some of your soldiers who haven't even been under your control yet.

I certainly think they'll be able to take some lessons from this into XCOM 3 and put them to better work there. I didn't hate the game, but at this point I feel like both XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen are much better pickups, and if you're hankering for more XCOM 2 I think you can find a way to just play more XCOM 2.