Recent reviews by falo

Another survival game with promise, that is going to die if they don't actually do some product management. Someone needs to grab ahold of them and tell them to rip out redundant systems/items, and sort out what they have before they try to make it more complex. The priority system is stuck in a weird halfway house of not being as limited as something like Medieval Dynasty, but not actually being granular enough to allow proper control, so villagers make odd choices.

Like many early access games, it is also going to suffer if they keep listening to the squeakiest wheels in the discord who are some of the stupidest people I've encountered in any gaming community.

This is utter garbage and I have no idea how the reviews are so positive. Once you've gotten past any fan love for the universe, the gameplay is just dull, poorly structured, and repetitive. There's no sense of peril or achievement. The reason the trailers jump around so much is to hide how poorly this plays minute to minute. This feels like a fan enjoyed sketching cartoon orcs, and was shown that you can use a stock game engine to rig them and get them to move. Avoid it, even in a sale.

Gameplay wise, this little taster seemed fine. Classic Commandos with some prettier graphics. Maybe a bit limited, but it's very hard to tell from just a prelude mission.

Unfortunately, if this is meant to be representative of the final game, the engine is in a dire state. Performance is awful - a 4080 Super shouldn't be sitting in the 30-40s on a prelude level with not much going on.

Huh, have I not recommended this yet? That seems insane to me, but then it's probably because I've been distracted playing it. Early access for Satisfactory was great - despite the occasional bug, you could see continuous progress towards a game that was going to be better for the player with each iteration. That has now been realised with the 1.0 release.

This game is the perfect chill out game, but can tie you up for hours more than you intend as you try to craft a new design idea into the perfect factory just so that you can ... build more factories!

Love every minute, whether solo or with friends.

It's worth adding that I'm now even more hours in and finally going for nuclear for my first time. I love the way your scale of factory ends up naturally changing as you unlock capabilities for large scale transport so you start thinking world scale rather than local scale. Making your way around the world as your train network goes about its business can be incredibly satisfying as you add more and more lines and routes and tear your hair out over signals!

It's a game with promise, but it needs a lot of work on balancing the systems, as well as some additional interfaces to help you actually find the problems. At the moment the AI characters seem to constantly self-sabotage, even on easier difficulty modes, and you will have to spend all your time trying to get them back to positive positions only to find that others are busy screwing things up while you're doing that. It's also impossible to properly inspect your population. The game will tell you that you have N prisoners, or X criminals, but there's no way to easily find these individuals (which would be fine if it wasn't possible for them to be on the lower bunk of a top down bunk bed ...).
As a concept it's great (influence the lords, who in turn influence the villagers), but the execution isn't enjoyable at this point in time. Very much feels like it's been configured by a developer who's forgotten what it's like to have fun playing a game and instead wants to see constant hard swings of his system for testing purposes.

A puzzle game all about changing the future (and not just in the story). Each decision you take has to be balanced with your acceptance of risk vs reward for both that level and the overall run. Incredibly simple to play, complex to master, and thoroughly enjoyable throughout. Plenty of replayability from both the random generation (which is balanced well) and the variety of unlocks / starting loadouts that will let you chop and change your style of game each time.

A game that seems to go downhill with every release, including the age old "ooh, look, let's use a new engine" time soak that then results in a worse game as they're not actually very good at using the new graphics capabilities while retaining actual gameplay. Dull and repetitive, and the novelty of the seventh day soon wears off.

Honestly, if I was just reviewing the game I'd still be finding it hard to decide whether to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. EDIT: The more I play of it, the more I lean towards a thumb down. It's just boring. The gameplay isn't compelling, there's far too many missions where you're entirely limited in your approach, and there's no particular mechanic that jumps out as fun or original. The AC games have gone downhill hugely ever since Syndicate, but even Ubisoft doing another copy and paste is probably going to be a better game than this. To suggest otherwise is just desperate. You start to realise that this is a game driven by the writers, not game developers, and so anything you do is simply to move along the interactive story. That's not a bad thing in of itself, if that's what you're after, but the story better be something special if that's what you're going to do and it's just not. You wouldn't waste a Netflix sub on this, even if you already had the sub ... </EDIT>

It's also worth stressing that there's a serious bug in a core game mechanic (stand-offs only work 50% of the time). This is a bug reported back from the Playstation release and it's still there now? That's just unacceptable.

Other than that, it's an alright looking game. The world is pretty enough, but incredibly empty - given the numbers of soldiers in the opening cutscene you've got to wonder where everyone on the island has gone. Fairly generic landscaping, combat is fair, but is mostly just rock-paper-scissors with different enemy classes. The story is bearable, but it suffers a lot from "walk with me while we do a cutscene", especially in the early game. A lot of the game locks you out of control while it does animations for quest status / completion information, among other things, and that just becomes frustrating when you want to get back to the game.

It's a really nice idea, and a nice execution, but it's sorely missing some intelligent tuning beyond "hurrr durr random good". Getting a score multiplier on the final blind that makes it all but impossible to beat makes you feel like you've wasted your time playing, only to be faced with "arbitrary big points make good" levels of difficulty scaling. Boring.

Co-op game doesn't allow adultery. Literally unplayable.