Recent reviews by Sancho

Very frustrating experience. A single small mistake can mean the complete wipe of your run, which can take hours. In addition, there are many gotchas (aka poor game design) that make it nearly impossible to complete a map. Add onto that the terrible and annoying voice acting. Can't recommend.

I got this game as a free bonus for another pack I bought and was very pleasantly surprised at how fun it was! Fun enough that I played both the main game and transcendence to completion, as well as obtained all badges, token items, and achievements. That said, I can see why programmers and/or players of other automation games might have been underwhelmed by this game. I have some improvement suggestions for the devs that I think would address these problems (though the most recent patch was a year ago so I'm not sure if they're still working on it):

1. Default bot memory should be increased dramatically and made the same for all bots - The low level bots have a very restrictive amount of memory that forces you to focus on very specific, simple tasks. This makes the game a bit more tedious until you get to higher level bots.
   
2. The Bot Database Wonder should be removed and the functionality available by default - It is very frustrating using the disks as you upgrade bots.
   
3. More programming options - Even simple functionality such as ANDs and ORs are missing. Not to mention, there is no way to template commonly used patterns. ie. I have a bot that needs to get a tool when it's hands are empty from X container to perform Y action. Why can't I just build this into a template and fill in X and Y?
   
4. There should be an upkeep cost on the bots to encourage fewer, more complex bots rather than an infinite simply of simple, boring bots - By end game usually 90% of my bots are doing nothing at any given time. I would enjoy the challenge of trying to make the most from a limited number of bots. Or perhaps a different mode for this. There is an option to limit the number of bots to 200 but that is still quite easy.
   
5. Longer end game - I really like the spaceport idea, which takes in random batches items in exchange for tokens. It forces you to expand your infrastructure to accommodate for all of these. However, I was able to get enough tokens for all of the available items within just a few hours.

Though it's easy to compare this game with Overcooked, I think it's important to say up front that this is NOT Overcooked. It lacks the charm and silly arcade style that makes Overcooked a great party game. Those going into it with an expectation of Overcooked might be initially turned off, since at the start that's essentially all it is; a less charming Overcooked with the added option of where to put your stuff.

However, if you stick with it you'll find a deep and replayable game with many different decisions to make as you evolve your restaurant. You need to manage your economy, choose cards that modify the game, setup decorations which modify customer behavior, try to get appliances you need via the desks, and eventually add in some automation. The latter of which makes the game more similar to Overcooked meets Automachef.

My wife and I have been playing this addictively since we got it with no end it sight. On that note I think that the game is more suitable for 1-2 people than with 4. Most tasks can be completed pretty easy with just 2 or 3, and then automation eventually renders the remaining tasks obsolete. Not to mention the careful planning necessary just doesn't fit a big group atmosphere.

There are some downsides to the game. The instant-loss mechanic for missing even a single order is infuriating. Fortunately there's a mod called Overcooked Patience that can smooth this out. Interacting with objects in the level feels rigid and frustrating compared to Overcooked (it's common to get stuck with an item in your hands with nowhere to put it). Also you are often relying on RNG to provide you with the appliances you need for your kitchen. Though this also helps with the replayability since you sometimes need to improvise with what you get.

Despite this PlateUp! is a great game well worth the purchase!

Most of the ideas in the game are borrowed from Terraria/Minecraft with very little innovation. The world/levels are extremely simple and get old very quick. Most of the quests are literally go to X location and kill Y enemy exactly 1 time. The Rimworld mechanic is about the only thing interesting in the game, but the utility of it is pretty limited and just removes a bit of tedium without really enhancing the game much.

Been playing this casually for years. Was very good at first but came to realize no effort is put into offline play at all. You cannot rename local players, bugs exist that haven't been addressed since I started, and absolutely zero features have been added that you don't have to pay for.In the latest update they force you to agree to their terms and conditions just to continue playing, must create an epic games account, they removed a feature to customize the cars of local players, and my controllers don't seem to work at all anymore. It's very rare to play a game and see so much backwards progress. That's ignoring the fact that this is all for a game that I paid for that they are now making free.

This is a very unique and challenging colony sim that tip-toes the line between scientific realism and cute sci-fi game. Along with the typical game mechanics of balancing food, electricity, and building materials, it touches on concepts such as air pressure, thermodynamics, infectious diseases, and even the carbon cycle.

The game teaches these concepts so well, I'd even argue it's a great educational tool. Despite this, I have gripes about many unintuitive game mechanics:

* Polluted water produced by using toilets contains germs that you need to manage. Forcing the duplicants (the colonists) to wash their hands will prevent these germs from being spread to food. This is amazingly intuitive and realistic, but then come the oddities. There is a machine for cleaning Polluted water into regular water. However, this only makes the water usable again and does not kill the germs. Killing the germs requires a very complicated process that is largely unnecessary, due to additional quirks.

* Germs will spread to food through cooking, but beyond that they interact with the environment in very peculiar ways. You can turn contaminated water into contaminated oxygen, and it will spread through your colony at alarming rates. However, it turns out this is harmless since food poisoning in the air will not interact with the surfaces of your colony in any way (if the germ is slime lung, though, your duplicants can inhale it and bad things will happen). Similarly, a duplicant covered in germs can walk straight into your fresh water supply without spreading any germs to it. As far as I can tell, the only way to contaminate water is by mixing it with water or polluted water that contains germs. Which, by the way, can certainly happen and completely ruin an early run if you haven't figured out the bathrooms yet.

* Some things, such as polluted water and polluted dirt, emit polluted oxygen. Unless you're paying attention to the wording, you would think that means it contaminates oxygen by making it polluted. In fact, it's actually creating new oxygen. This can be exploited to generate oxygen from nothing, just by leaving polluted objects lying around.

There are many more strange mechanics and surprises that will leave you puzzled and looking through wikis and tutorials, or reloading a save because you massacred your entire colony. A few of these quirks have improved over the years of development (ie. some machines used to output liquids at a set temperature, allowing you to effectively delete heat). However, since the game is no longer in early access, I doubt the remaining issues will be addressed.

Very few games have affected my day to day life in the way that ONI has. When I use the A/C in the summer, I think about how it is blowing hot air out of my home instead of heating my hot water. When I take a shower in the winter, I think about the hot water going into the septic system instead of heating my home. One might even see it could be an excellent tool to help understand science, as long as you note the many quirks. I'm not going to lie, it's challenging, but if you're a fan of engineering games like Factorio it can be quite a fun challenge.

This game came a long way from a casual 2D Minecraft clone to the behemoth it is now. Now it serves as an example of what Minecraft should have become. There's such a ridiculous amount of content and features that you'd be hard-pressed to experience all of it in one play-through. Whether in a group or singleplayer, this game is the real deal and you shouldn't hesitate to try it out.

This is a great tower defense game with interesting mechanics and a long-tail of end-game content. There are tons of levels and a couple dozen traps eventually available. Though the game may seem easy at first, you are quickly introduced with the concept of "runes", which increase the difficulty of the dungeons while giving additional XP. Doing so is, as far as I can tell, required in order to complete some of the late-game levels, since the amount of XP you get is not quite sufficient for the quick difficulty ramp-up. This gives the player opportunities to re-play levels with a new challenge. I enjoyed this game enough to buy their sequel.

This game looks like it'd be a great party game but it didn't turn out this way for us. Playing this is actually quite a frustrating experience and rather boring experience. Worst part was the save system, which punishes you by potentially making you lose several levels or progress. We tried to tough it out and accept the consequences of this "forced hardcore mode", but what I won't accept are lost saves due to poor design. Example, we start a save game, but one of the players did not select the correct character. We back out so that the player can re-select, but now the save game has been erased! Poof! No warning that quitting the game would erase all of our progress. This happened to us twice, and the second time just decided we had enough.

There are very few games that support more than 4 controllers at once. Of those, this is the only one that seems to do it automatically without some kind of special setup. I was able to plug in 4 xbox one controllers, 2 of my generic SNES controllers, and an additional emulated bluetooth controller and all of them worked correctly the first try. That alone is amazing to me. I don't know what kind of wizardry the dev coded to make this work but I wish all games had this kind of controller support.

Otherwise the game itself is a pretty straight-forward bomberman clone. It is priced fairly and is a nice addition to a couch gaming collection for those times when you have a large crowd. You can go up to 64 players in one game, but the AI is much better at handling the chaos than you will and it will get old quick.

By the way, I see that the last update in the news was almost 1 year ago, but the other day I saw an update download which fixed an issue that I had with my TV. There may be more update activity than it appears. Thanks to the dev for fixing this problem!