Recent reviews by tanzy

What to say about this game? It's a monster catching game that has a variety of sub-systems and a multitude of classes to keep the gameplay interesting and as dynamic as you want to make it. It absolutely scratches that itch of classic games where you collect monsters. But there are some major flaws in this game as it currently stands. Very few of the systems (like how specific spells/skills work, buffs/debuffs, stats, spell gems) have any in-game explanation. Almost all of the unlockable character portraits are masculine looking, except for the Dancer, the Princess, and Woman 1-10. These are fixable problems that I hope will probably be addressed during early access. But then there's the writing.

The writing of this game is bad. Not laughably bad, not terribad, just BAD. The game starts with a recurring "joke" about you pissing the bed. There are jokes about people being fat. Jokes about sexual harassment. The tone and style of writing fluctuates wildly. Sometimes, the writing is that of a Serious RPG Having A Dramatic Moment. Then in literally the same conversation, the writing will break the 4th wall to try and make an ironic joke about games. Honestly, I stopped reading the questlines because they were so painful and awkward.

Obviously I've still played a lot of the game, but it's hard for me to recommend a game with such terrible writing that I was literally skipping the story.

It's become the metric by which I judge other games. So, it's alright.

A fun exploration and base building game. Explore! Jump! Whee! Build a spaceship and fly somewhere else! Build a rover to drive around! Drive that rover into a cave! Cry into your keyboard when you die deep underground and have no idea where your stuff is.

Are you the kind of person who plays Stardew Valley and really wishes they could design their own house while also farming? Or are you the kind of person who plays Minecraft with Pam's HarvestCraft mod and peaceful enabled so you can get those sweet, sweet crops without having to stop to deal with pesky skeletons? You might be me, my friend. And if you are me, my friend, then this game is right up your alley.

If Stardew Valley had 3D graphics and instead of being a farmer you were a rancher/handyperson about town. That's probably the best analogy for this game I can think of. This game is way more quest focused though. Each day you can get comissions for your workshop to make things for the town or villagers. Very heavy focus on crafting and resource gathering. The occasional spelunking in mines (abandoned or otherwise). Villagers to befriend and romance. Is that a Rival entering stage left?!

The first skill I learned was Stupid Walking. Will absolutely be crab walking, cartwheeling, butt scooching, squating, and facerolling my way through this delight. 10/10

I was jonesing for a super lazy, not super deep strategy city builder game and this hit the spot. I mean that as a genuine compliment. The graphics are cute, there's just enough of a story to tie it together. There are some worker management and market mechanics that if you really want to min/max your effort in the game you /can/ but that is 100% not the goal or focus of this laid back game about building your own slice of paradise. You'll get maybe 10~ hours out of this game, and it's very linear so there's pretty much no replay value. The only reason my hours are as high as they are was because I lost my save to an OS reinstall and replayed about 2/3 of the game. Buy it on sale and it's a good deal.

Mercenary penguins you can hire for your crew. What's not to love?

Such an awesome game. Excellent story, voice acting is superb, the art is great, and the UI is minimal and well designed. I had no idea this was a horror story when I got this as part of a Humble Bundle (I probably would never have bought it based on a horror tag). But there are almost no jump scares, no gore; this is horror done through narrative and atmospheric tension at its best.

EDIT: This was initially a negative review, but the devs have been steadily patching the game to address the major flaws the community has had issue with. With the changes made thus far, I'm giving the game a qualified recommendation.

Planetbase is fun, although it lacks the depth needed for lots of replayability. There are limited chains of production and very little base specialization. Several reviews have compared this game to Banished, which is a fair comparision although I think Planetbase doesn't have the complexity of Banished. It is very resource management focused and you expand your base to anticipate the increasing needs of your colonists. Because you are a lone base on a planet, failing to meet some of these needs can be pretty catastrophic.

The colonists' AI is relatively strict, which sometimes results in seemingly counter-intuitive behavior. This was my biggest issue with the game at launch. But they have recently patched the game to allow for limited prioritization of behavior and building queues that can supercede the AI's default behavior.

===== From my original review =====
As an example, while playing my second colony I was in the middle of trying to build a spare parts factory when I realized I was going to need more power soon. So I put down a wind turbine plot and waited. While waiting for either the factory or turbine to finish (because you can't control what gets built first or pause the construction of something), my other power generators degraded enough to need repairs and started causing power shortages. The power shortages prevented my colonists from sleeping, and a tired colonist won't do jack. Within two days, all of my power generators were failing or needing repairs, which meant even greater power shortages. Then the water stopped flowing because of the power shortage, so I had tired and thirsty colonists just milling about inside, refusing to go outside and make the repairs that would fix all of their problems. I gave up when the airlock shut off from power failure.
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I went back to this save after the most recent patch (10/28) and was able to save my base. Although the base lost power for part of one night, this didn't cause a cascading failure of needs like it had previously. Instead my colonists struggled through their tiredness and built that wind turbine so they could get some sleep the following night.

TLDR: Now a qualified recommendation from a previously negative review. Fun game, but with limited replay value.