Recent reviews by Julius

If you enjoyed Castle of the Wind (I'm old I know), Izuna, Mystery Dungeon, or Elona then this game will be something you want to at least check out. It's not perfect, but it is gamepad compatible and it's got a lot of things you'll love. If not, your mileage may vary so nab the demo. Just bear in mind, this is an open-ended roguelike, so you'll want to visit ingame locations if you're the sort of person who needs objectives. It'll give you more than enough.


Creator of Another World is a roguelike much in the same vein as Elona 2014 (The not-rip-off one), but fans of Castle of the Wind or similar games from the early 90's will feel very much at home. Fans of Izuna will like it, but there are a few caveats we'll get to later.

Entirely "Turn-based" in that unmistakable "Roguelike" way, you can - from what I've seen so far - opt to live your life in a wide variety of manners. Dungeon delver? Sure. Chef? Why not. Murderous rampage? I mean... You do you, buddy.

Like these, you're given enough information to start off, but the further you dig deeper the more there are a variety of mechanics which you can sink your teeth in to. Fortunately, the game doesn't fall in the trap of expecting you to learn everything right off the bat and you can muddle your way through fine early on (Looking at you, Dungeons of Dredmor).

Arcane unexplained mechanics don't stop there; There's a "war" feature for some quests akin to Suikoden. You'll want to learn War Tactics from the Adventurer's Guild for that. There's a casino. There's fishing. There's *stuff* and I probably haven't seen half of it. The best bit is you can ignore or engage in as much or as little of the content as possible.


When it comes to it's roguelike credentials, It hits all the satisfying beats many come to expect:

• > You walk and explore randomly generated tilemaps, towns, dungeons, and so on.
  
• > You can discover items and weaponry, much of it needing identifying.
  
• > Dungeon delving!
  
• > Skills to learn, scrolls to use, explore as you go.

When it comes to Elona-esque features, you can be satisfied that:

• > There are a wide variety of procedurally generated characters to interact with.
  
• > You can, indeed, partake in the world in other ways such as fishing, gambling, murderous intent.
  
• > You can befriend plenty of people.
  
• > Procedural questing is very well sign-posted, with characters going "Damn that's a problem" as you walk into a town, and an adventurers board which has plenty of stuff to signpost your exploration.

As for the more general stuff:

• > The tutorial does a genuinely good job of going through the basics.
  
• > There is a main plot, but you'll have to do a little exploring and check any red text you come across to uncover the Main Story Quests.
  
• > There's enough base character customisation to enjoy, and the game doesn't tell you, but if you press confirm on the portrait or NPC walking preview you can see a much more user-friendly table of them... More on that later in the bad side though.
  
• > World customisation is... Interesting. Not that I'm fussed, but you can absolutely customise an all male/female world if you want, have custom adventurers come in and out of your world as they retire (Ew) and so on.
  
• > There is definitely a lot of scope for modding, with an in-game browser for portraits, walking animations, ally dialogue(!), and more.
  
• > You have a lot of stats and stuff you can fiddle with or not at your leisure.
  
• > Side content, including fishing, gambling, and just generally being at one with the world, is pretty good.
  
• > If you like content with no set goal and a persistent, everlasting world then this is your bag. It does have a Main Story, but you need to pay attention to come across it.

I actually kinda want to really reiterate this though: [b[ The procedural questing is actually quite refreshing in how it's handled and the variety.[/b] It's decently executed, doesn't happen so constantly it's in the way, isn't rammed down your throat, but is definitely sign-posted and very visible if you want or need it. You definitely won't get bored.


Again, bullet point list because I like them:

• > Character creation is horribly inconsistent. Like terribly. There are portraits for NPC's which have no correlation to the walking animations and vice-versa. I am not saying that the portraits are AI generated, but they are definitely very inconsistent
  
• > The UI is kinda sign-posted, but also a lot not. Ew. It makes navigating what you want to do ingame 60% okay, 40% not.
  
• > The translation. Hoo-boy. I volunteer myself to help, because oh heavens it needs some work.
  
• > Some of the mechanics are extremely arcane or are very much "well we've thrown you in, have fun having no idea that you needed to prep first" (Looking at you, Suikoden war mechanic)
  
• > Menus could do with a bit of work, as could resolution/zoom information. I feel someone really needs to change how they do window resizing and the like, it took me a good few minutes to make the game squint-free.
  
• > There is no option to zoom in/zoom out in-game. This is AWFUL for navigation sometimes or when things get busy.
  
• > No easy way to compare items. More a bug-bear, but given every item can have an inordinate amount of modifications it's kinda really a big thing.
  
• > Some of the UI is big. Some is small. Some things are obscure, some are not (e.g. You can't hand an item directly from your inventory to a party member, you have to "give" it to them... But if you want to take it, you have to go into their inventory and take it).
  
• > Some quality of life stuff is missing, including:
  - Better control over what party members do/don't use, especially when they're prone to blowing big stuff quickly or skill books when they have no business doing so)
  - You can't equip party members from your own inventory, or use skill books on them from your own inventory either.
  - Controller issues, but they're not a big deal honestly.

If you like the genre, absolutely. Despite what's missing, what's rough around the edges, and what's questionable, this is probably the best in the genre for years. It's not as polished as a Mystery Dungeon, but it's a lot more fun overall. It's not as fun as an Izuna, but it's got a lot more content. It's definitely no Castle of the Wind... But that's a good thing, because it can offer you so much more.

If you don't like the genre, absolutely not. This isn't one of those genre-busting games.

If you don't know then I strongly recommend you play the demo. It's gonna be a Marmite, you will either love it or hate it. Give it 90 minutes (including tutorial time) and you should know how you feel about it.


This really does need a lot more work done to smooth it out and I'm not going to lie to you and pretend it doesn't. It does. The gameplay is doing all the heavy lifting, simply because it's so good.

One thing which would help is the addition of Steam Workshop compatibility, but I dare say because it has its own in-game version we won't get that. It would really help though, given how lacklustre the in-game browser is.

But yeah, hope that helps you make a decision! Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

There's nothing I can't tell you that you probably haven't read elsewhere. It's got that "Just one more turn" gene in it, but in inverse bullet hell form. Don't ask how many platforms I've bought the game and DLC on...

Edited to add: Ode to Castlevania is the one DLC that, if you don't have it, you should get. It's *the* DLC for the game, really.

It's fun, it's cute as opposed to violent, and it's free. What more could you want?

Upset all my friends with Wormageddon. None of them wanted to play with me again unless it was disabled. Now gang up on me every game. 10/10, would make my friends hate me again.

[Review Update, 7th May 2021]

The original review can now be found in the comments, if you want to see the opinions on Stellaris 2 years ago. Pertinent, because once again, similar to what I said in my original review: It's hard to recommend this game, because - although it IS fun - The game is once again completely different to what it was a year ago... Which is different to what it was 2 years ago... As it was 3 years ago... And so on.

Not "Oh, slightly different with the updates," but it is COMPLETELY MECHANICALLY DIFFERENT ONCE AGAIN.

The worst bit? Stellaris is fun, regardless of the updates and how much they screw up and change... But you can't buy it and expect to like it in 6 months time, because you may not. When they remake the game all over again next patch, it may be better or it may be worse. I'm 50/50 on all updates so far, which means every six months I'm like "Well the game is now awful, I'll wait for the next update when they next fix it."

To clarify further, they don't just update a little: They change *everything* about an element. It's literally like using Facebook one day, then logging on the next and finding out it works like Twitter, and then the third it's mostly Twitter but with a little Facebook back and a smidge of Steam on top for no discernible reason whatsoever until a later patch implements lord knows what. One day you're managing your empire one way, with a very specific way of building up your empire and managing pops and manually allocating. The next? Completely changed, and then terrible until they fix it. Then change it again and break it, and then slooooowly update back until it works again. Another example: The galaxy could be explored freely for the longest time, so you could hop around all kinds of routes and - essentially - nowhere was off limits with enough time. Now? Hyperlanes, no free-flight, you have to follow a path for 99% of the game. Again, not necessarily bad... But the initial implementation meant nothing else suited this new gameplay. It was mad. MAD.

The worst bit? Stellaris IS fun. It really is. But you'll end up liking this game half of the time, and then waiting the other half for Paradox to fix the game again or make their new changes. Even then, to enjoy most of the changes that come? You need the DLC to really savour them, else your game balance is off... So... Yeah. I can't recommend this game to other players as-it-is, because I have no idea what game I'm recommending from one day to the next... And in its current form? Yeesh, we're still waiting for it to be fixed up a little.

[Review Update, 19th November 2019]

So... It's been some time, and Federations is about to come out. In the interests of fairness, I played a speedy solo and two multiplayer games with some friends to see if the game had improved, gotten any better, or if the changes had been adjusted appropriately...

...and I'm sorry to say the answer is "not yet". The new system is in full swing... And it's glitchy and highly exploitable still, 10-11 months later. Even if we take the new system objectively and ignore the whole "It's not the same game I paid for" lark, it has multiple issues:

- First of all, I have seen the game chug towards the end game on a 2060 with a current i7, yet run fine on my RX480 and Ryzen 2nd Gen. There seems to be some issues based on peoples setups or something, but there's a lot of talk out there about end-game lag. You need to do some research first.
- The tutorials that I saw in the game are STILL the tutorials for the 2018 game, and do not teach you the new gameplay system. Instead, you've got all this information on gameplay mechanics which no longer exist.
- For the new gameplay to be fun, you need the DLC. Played solo without most of the new packs and the game was abysmal and skewed, with odd imbalances making it feel like I was missing something which was meant to assist with keeping pace with Fallen Empires/Crisis. Played with the DLC in a friends multiplayer game, and suddenly the game is balanced. Err...
- The way home worlds work with resource management means it's better for most worlds to be copies of each other with the same layout until the end game, when you'll end up pausing the game constantly just to micromanage yourself out of an unintended resource black hole, only to reset back to the previous setup you had.
- Speaking of which, home world development is still sketchy on the clarity. Whoever designed the UI for it tried their best to make it clear, but it really needs a working tutorial to explain what you're dealing with.
- Sectors. Literally haven't had the ability to either create one or have one generate. Not sure how it works either, because the Tutorial was telling me how to make a sector based on the old game, using buttons that no longer exist.
- Half of the species/government options are pointless at this point - A select few are so horrendously overpowered (And the remaining ones not even adjusted to work well with the new gameplay mechanics) that you know who'll be doing well by the end game just from their ethics.
- There is a way, with a little planning and luck, to max out your Ascension Perks in like 10 in-game years. This is entirely due to a balancing thing, and then skews the rest of the game for anyone playing with you.

Do. Not. Buy. At. Full. Price.

You will want to buy the following DLC: Utopia, Leviathans, Synthetic Dawn, and Ancient Relics.
Megacorp is nice but not required really, and Apocalypse is pretty pointless apart from to annoy you now.

Let's get the most obvious comparison out of the way now: Starbound can, and likely will, eat more of your time than Terraria. This does not mean it's better: It is simply different.

Pick Starbound if:
- You like building structures. It has, by far, the most options and the best variety.
- You like exploring strange new worlds.
- You like your progression to be based on something other than boss fights (You can get to the vast majority of content simply by working your way through new worlds/items, not even touching the story bar the introduction and the first "instance").
- You like the idea of mods.
- You like placing a variety of NPC's... And you're not too worried about being tied in to an arbitary "tag" system to get the NPC's you want.

Don't pick Starbound if:
- You want regularly updated official content (At the time of writing, the last update - 1.3 - was June 2017, and update 1.4 is not in sight at this time.
- You want well thought out combat. For every advantage this has over Terraria, it is hampered by a real lack of... Well... It's hard to describe, apart from perhaps "Variety". Sure, there are lots of NPC's, but the approach/build when dealing with them is all the same. Also no raids or the like to spice things up.
- You want a streamlined experience of one world, work your way through a series of bosses. Honestly, combat progression is not Starbound's strongest point.
- You want a game which is suited to a controller. This really, really isn't it.
- You have a lower end system. The way Starbound handles its chunk loading/unloading and rendering can be exceptionally taxing on older systems, or systems with a bottle neck/without a GPU (It won't, for example, work well on a Surface Pro 3).

Really, that summarises most of the review... But I cannot encourage you enough to download mods for Starbound if it gets stale. Frackin Universe is the go-to mod for most, but there are some lovely ones which add furniture, new races, new blocks, costumes, and all sorts. This is where Starbound is strongest.

Better than DX:HR in every way. A deeply misunderstood game.

It is awesome. End of.