Recent reviews by duty

I discovered the original Wizardry on an Apple IIe in the computer lab in elementary school. Nearly four decades later, the original dungeon RPG still stands on its own as a quality gaming experience. Play with some of the quality of life improvements - or don't!

Not certain if there's something wrong with the description or the dlc pack itself, but it only comes with 9 enemy sprite sheets and some terrain odds and ends. The other 40 character sprites and their sideview battlers appear to be missing.

Do you like Stardew Valley? Airships? Twin stick shooters? Moths? If so, you're going to have a lot of fun with Black Skylands.

The gameplay is really solid. Crafting and building is an involved, but not overwhelming with a reasonable list of resources. Every bit of stone and ore is meaningful and worth the time to carry each precious crate back to your ship's hold.

The story and dialogue still needs work. Motivations are difficult to relate to and the tutorial for the young protagonist feels out of place. But it's pretty easy to ignore once you're flying, shooting, and looting.

Overall, a promising experience. Looking forward to seeing how the game development progresses.

This title feels like everything I expected for an X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter remake. The story and narrative are not all that impressive, but it's good exposure to the maps you'll fly through and the techniques that'll give you an edge in PVP.

Each individual star fighter got a LOT of attention. Every instrument panel is different, and even where you sit in relation to the crosshairs changes from fighter to fighter.

While you could hypothetically play without ever customizing a loadout or rebalancing power, making those tactical choices have very immediate and meaningful outcomes. Overcharging your lasers could be the difference between damaging and eliminating an enemy on a pass. Reinforcing your shields and focusing to the rear can be the difference between a safe getaway or going to pieces. Diverting power to engines gives you a noticeable advantage in a dogfight while you attempt to out-turn your opponent.

There does seem to be a bit of an advantage to playing on VR, as you can visually track a target by looking around the cockpit, as opposed to relying entirely on your radar. Heavily recommend a HOTAS or a game pad if you do go the VR route. Unless you're an ace at blind navigating your keyboard, you may end up hitting the wrong button at a critical moment.

I'm a bit disappointed that the fighter roster isn't bigger, but hopefully we'll get to see some of the more interesting Tie or Rebellion fighter variants in future content.

This review is for the full release version 1.0.1. It's written after ~9 hours with the product.

Just to set expectations, RPG Maker is not intended as a Unity or Unreal competitor. It's a specialized utility for creating games of a certain genre and style.

If top-down, 2d, narrative experiences with turn based combat are your jam - then this is the tool for you.
If you're looking for something with 3d movement and real time, twitch action - this isn't the tool to construct those games.

MZ is the most streamlined product in the RPG Maker series. It may not have changed much graphically from its previous iteration, but it has several quality of life improvements where it counts: helping you to make a finished playable product faster.

MZ gives you all the flexibility to create a really great narrative gaming experience with just the base engine.

In the month leading up to the MZ release, I spent 12 hours creating a simple dungeon crawl on the previous version of the software, RPG Maker MV. Much of that time was spent completing the maps for each dungeon room, setting the movement routes for wandering monsters, and configuring a handful of plugins to enhance the bare bones UI scaling and battle options.

Recreating that same dungeon from scratch in RPG Maker MZ took only 4 hours - and that included writing a very simple plugin to modify the in-game menus and side view battler home positions. No other plugins were needed. No additional compromises were made. It was just easier to do the same work with MZ.

I'm not crying... you're crying. Stupid platypus...

This shows a lot of promise for an early access title. The code base is very solid, and after 20 or so hours I've yet to encounter a crash, game-ending bug, or even a modestly annoying error. Much kudos to the devs and their QA. You can tell a lot of love and attention went into this version.

Space Have is a good mix between a real-time strategy, builder, and space simulator. Game documentation is very light and there's a steep learning curve. Be prepared to meet many ignominious ends as you ascend it.

After you learn to build a star ship that is not a death trap of randomly placed machinery, space itself continues to provide a challenge. There's no certainty that you will always find enough fuel to keep going, or enough resources to defend yourself from pirates.

Every day your modest crew manages to survive is a triumph - and I'm looking forward to further developments and refinements from the developer.

I started Star Trek Online on its launch day and have tried to pick it up again a few times since then.

My first captain was the first Tamarian in Starfleet. In a tongue in cheek way, my captain was named Darmok Jalad. I played with a few friends, mostly in character, flying heavy cruisers, extending shields, sending repair crews to wounded allies, and helping other players (as any good Federation captain would do).

Somewhere in Romulan space, I ran a series of missions with an oddly equipped science vessel who asked all kinds of questions about being a Tamarian in Starfleet. I never confirmed if this was related or not, but the "Tamarian Envoy" com-badge ended up in the next content release.

That's the kind of immersion and community that existed in those days. That is to say, that playing the game involved a lot of private joy. It was an immersive fandom experience of other players that just "got it".

Darmok retired in his admiralcy and was followed by a science captain and a Klingon pirate - and that's about the time the game changed studios and went free to play.

Since then, the overall quality of production has declined. The newer missions and faction starting missions lack the polish of the original content. There used to be some finesse in positioning your away team or mid-combat energy allocation, but much of that has gone by the wayside as the play experience is streamlined.

Player created missions from the "Foundry" limped on for a bit longer, bolstering the lackluster updates, but that creative tool was eliminated, too.

Not that it can be confirmed, but several of the later design decisions remind me of the triage decisions made in the dev-ops world of my real life. User options are reduced and homogenized to improve consistency, decrease risk, and lower development costs. Good stuff for an enterprise application - not so great for a player experience.

There's no investment in narrative driven player incentives - which makes sense for a company attempting to make money off of a product. For a Rodenberry-esque post-money economy, the Federation is a pay-to-win society constrained by artificial limits on activities and obsessed with a variety of specialty currencies.

I'm sure somewhere out there, the Grand Nagus is very pleased - but as a player, I cannot recommend this title to a fellow gamer or Star Trek fan.

Bought this on sale. Just finished the Western Hole and looking forward to the rest of the game. Delightfully quirky and feels a lot like a streamlined version of DQ3.
Lots of good ideas in this title. Classes are well done. I really like the over world hidden locations and wandering NPCs.
Monster names are entertaining. Battles are fairly vanilla (but they wrap up very quickly, so it's not so bad).

In short, Avorion combines the best of voxel vehicle construction and 4x space games. It scratches a LOT of gaming itches simultaneously.

It's a surprisingly solid and polished product in early release, and continues to grow in depth with each developer update.