Recent reviews by yourfriendwill

I love HoMM3 but, this ain't it. total hackjob, no QoL improvements - not even either of the expansions. for a game I put hundreds of hours into so many years ago, a real disappointment.

0/10 slow shipping.

if you have any, and I mean ANY, interest in tower defense games then this is well worth the price of entry. you don't have to be willing/able/masochistic enough to get past the first run - I'm 7 hours in as of writing and still haven't completed a run - to have a good time.

there's an insane amount of depth here if you're good at these kinds of games (I'm ♥♥♥♥ at literally everything I touch so ymmv), but even sucking at this game I'm having a great time. as it stands I've barely scratched the surface in the metaprogression, I'm still just barely grasping basic concepts - 100% my fault, I'm also bad at tutorials. people keep comparing this to Slay the Spire which I get, but I think it's nuanced enough to have its own niche? if StS is any metric, I currently have ~26 hours in Slay the Spire at the moment and haven't finished a run there either!

I regret neither purchase. I'm a 40yo man who can waste my time in whatever way I see fit.

maybe my brain is broken in a specific way where this game and I just vibe? but for my money, if you want to support devs who clearly care and have put a crazy amount of time/dedication/work into a product, then there's no reason to spend less than the full asking price for this absolute gem. 11/10, stoked as hell to continue to suck at this game for several dozens of hours to come!

two or three days like the beginning of love...

do you remember the first isometric crpg/arpg you encountered? the uncanny worlds they contained & lived within, the absurd but internally consistent rule sets & ideologies they followed, the at-first-esoteric aesthetics & moralities they adhered to?

I do. I miss that ♥♥♥♥. svarog's dream scratches that selfsame itch; the ux is obtuse but not incomprehensible, the setting is bleak but within the grasp of restoration, the stakes are simultaneously mundane & cosmic.

it's good, it's really good. that this is an indie game isn't a concession, it's an accolade. I'm delighted I stumbled up on it and I'll probably quicly put more than a hundred hours into it.

I watched a spattercat video about this game recently and that motivated me to buy it. I'm very much a fan of the single-indy-dev work-of-passion approach, and I love supporting folks like them when I can. my initial impression of this game was that it is reminiscent of many older exploration-focused non-hand-holding titles that I love - in this I was not disappointed.

the good: exploration is extremely satisfying, getting new items feels pretty earned and combat isn't particularly fatiguing. the world feels big and mysterious, your impact upon it feels pretty palpable.

the bad: not that bad, but combat is pretty floaty. hit boxes - especially player character hit boxes - are incredibly vague and you don't feel the weight of combat much, generally. I'm used to and can look past quite a bit of jank in my games, so this hasn't been a deal-breaker but if you're looking for a "souls-like" challenge, this ain't it. I'm not particularly good at gaming and even so I have only had a couple "sit forward in your seat" combat moments thus far. I'm sure this will change in future updates and honestly I'll probably miss it. do love me some jank.

other thoughts: UX is probably the biggest point of failure, and it's not even "bad" just a little "difficult" to work through in some specific instances. not a deal breaker. the development seems incredibly ambitious and reading through update logs going back the past two years it seems a ton has been added to the game in the intervening time. pretty impressive stuff, imho.

full disclosure: I have clocked well-into several thousand hours in Morrowind. as a "Certified Old," if you look at my steam profile you won't see that number of hours but that's because I clocked most of them using actual physical discs prior to the ubiquity of steam & therefore it's mostly un-logged. if you also love(d) Morrowind, this game is gonna scratch an itch for you.

tl;dr: great city builder. if you like the genre at all, and especially if you are the type that likes to play just to make your theoretical villagers happy, then really you need to pick this up. 11/10 all day

Everyone deals with anxiety in their own way, I figure. Contemplative city builders have always been a go-to for me because I find the ability to set up relatively worry-free lives for my silicon-based wards helps with my IRL inability to affect change in a meaningful way.

Foundation is a one-of-a-kind city builder that really got me hooked with the pathing and zoning for building approach, as they're quite novel. of course, thirty plus hours later I was also into designing organic looking villages with different sectors/streets for different artisan crafts and resources, mimicking the construction of 11th-14th century villages in whatever ways I found feasible. to that end, I find that Foundation - like the best simulation games really - guides you towards an organic structure closely resembling that of pre-renaissance europe, at least within the capacity of a relatively simple - I might say, "elegant" - city builder.

this game is great, handily worth the price, and I'm excited to see what directions the devs take it in the future. updates have been regular and substantial in quality, they're not worried about resetting things or coming up with new approaches which is honestly pretty refreshing for an early access game. between this and Valheim I've pretty much scrubbed any bad taste other early access games may have left in my mouth.

I don't write a lot of reviews, but I kind of feel like I have to for this one.

I'm a big fan of waiting a year for patches and updates to do their thing before buying big name games, especially if they're basically console ports. So when I saw NMS on sale a couple weeks ago - combined with the "recent reviews: mostly positive" I figured that the bungled launch was over and corrected, that I could safely purchase this game and get a couple dozen hours of fun exploration in before the banality of procedural generation sets in. At the time of writing this, I have successfully logged two hours in this game, with probably ten to fifteen hours troubleshooting the various graphics issues I've been plagued with: chief among them this maddening headache-inducing screen flicker I have still yet to resolve. I've done enough modding of Bethesda games to know my way around and internet forum, the fact that I'm still dealing with these issues after a dozen odd hours of working on them does not speak to my inability to google errors. The build I'm playing on isn't under powered either (radeon rx 580 8gb, ryzen 7 1700x, 16gigs of DDR4 3200mhz). At this point, I'm pretty much giving up on this game, perhaps in another year they'll have fixed these issues and I can reinstall it to give it another go but for right now it's just half baked.

If there was an "I'm not sure" answer to "Do you recommend this game?" I would have selected it. As it is, go play Starbound.