Recent reviews by SaintD

Well bugger me....it actually DOES just work.

It starts great, and the endgame just turns to ash in your mouth. What started as amazing fun, ends up being an exercise in frustration as earlier difficulties become too easy without any kind of progression system or reason to continue where you're having fun, and the final difficulty has build tolerances so fine that playing outside of any current meta requires even more RNG luck than the vast pile you need to succeed WITH boring rote meta you have to grind out over and over. Every time I start up this game looking to have fun, I just end up with the same frustrating experience.

Specifically, elites and bosses completely ruined the fun of this game. Just go play Vampire Survivors.

Update for 1.0! .....nothing changed.

The 2K Launcher is a P.O.S that will absolutely fail to run and outright prevent you from being able to play the game. And they explicitly patched out the ability to bypass it.

F***. 2K. GAMES. AND F***. YOUR. LAUNCHER.

I repeat, *do not buy this game*. If the 2K launcher decides not to work, that's it, you're done. 2K just stole your money. They've stolen access to my game from me with their trash launcher, and my money along with it.

It's fun only for an exceedingly short time, and largely only a single playthrough. The early game is arduous and utterly dismal, requiring an excessive amount of time plinking away at individual enemy infantry units with POS pop guns, with no variety at all possible since there's no option except pushing out Guardian bots and going for the Aegis shield, which will, if you know to beeline it, probably only be possible AFTER the first mandatory Siege mission that is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.

It can be fun to get it going and build a tower that can win for the first time, but after that it's pointless because most of the towers are of little value. The entire aerial tree is pointless because attack planes are slow to reposition and not even particularly effective. Just get guns. The SAM weapons are pointless because they're not doing anything guns can't do. Just get guns. Guardians are not optional, must have 100. No other bot variety or strategy, spend four slots on Rangers if you really want. Then just get guns. And getting the guns? Small towers.....just get plasma to attack ground and air. Chimera and Cryo towers have no particularly increased efficacy for their limitations, and the former reload one every ice age. Just get plasma. Missile interceptors? Dead stuff doesn't shoot. Just get plasma. Large towers? SAM is inefficient, you can't waste space on specialist air-only weapons that aren't really that much more effective. Just get Tri-Barrel plasma. Massive towers? There's so many enemies on screen that weapons need to be able to switch to new targets and maintain fire.....so just get minigun plasma.

This is an action-strategy game that gives you a frustratingly ineffective big gun for the action, which makes the action boring for a long, long time (also serving as an early game trap...waste resources upgrading it, and you'll die), and the strategy is so poorly balanced that it's effectively a linear puzzle game of working out what your initial steps need to be until you get 60-90 minutes in and can possibly consider different ways in which to gimp yourself by deviating from Maximum Gun. And when your strategy works the action is still boring, since you may finally have been able to upgrade and reforge your weapon to be.....kinda meh. It's another stream of lights in the lightshow of melting enemies. I guess you get to press the 'big missile' button now and then.

11 hours.....I'm done. Uninstalling it. The game just annoys me with its deceptive linearity crushing all strategy, and the earlier periods of the game where you have to lean on the action side of things is horrendously boring because your gun isn't any kind of efficacious or spectacular. It's a pretty game that looks good when your favourite YouTuber plays it, but is just irritating and rote when actually played for yourself.

There were a lot of different games I was planning to play over the summer.

Then this a-hole released an absolute banger of an expansion to Rimworld out of nowhere, and this is what I've been doing for months. Royalty is a largely optional expansion, but Ideology is essential. It adds new aspects to the game that are just too good to mess around with. Even if your ideoligion doesn't actually DO all that much, it's still a wonderful level of personalization you can apply to your playthrough.

It's a bug ridden, laughably tested pile of steaming garbage as of release. Numerous problems with failing to launch, requiring users to meddle with their files or, in my case, to verify the integrity of the files EVERY SINGLE TIME THE COMPUTER IS RESET.

Getting into the game itself hits you immediately in the face with the complete joke of how the AI cheats to know and beeline all the curiosities in the Neolithic era that progress you to the next era. The AI will know exactly where they have spawned and run directly to every single one, and we know this because it's exactly what YOUR units do when you turn on the auto-explore so the AI does the same for you. The Neolithic era, the very foundational moment of beginning the game, is a fundamentally broken nonsense of literally nothing but setting auto explore on, clicking end turn, splitting armies when they collect enough food so you can set more off on auto-explore, and being left to literally nothing but luck. Just dumb luck. It's just a dice roll of sheer RNG luck against ten other AI which you will absolutely lose and can do nothing about as you watch them gain a star and snipe out every Ancient culture long before you.

And God forbid you not know about the auto-explore exploit, you're going to be sucking **** in Neolithic forever while every single AI is busy taking the map and building cities.

Absolutely do NOT buy this game at this time. It is NOT finished and should NOT have been released. I wish I could refund this trash.

Start playing for all the obvious reasons. Keep playing because the puzzle game is actually really good and now the women keep getting in the way.

Crusader Kings 2 is a tricky one for me, because I have an unrelenting hatred for RNG horses***. My review history consists mostly of furiously burning down games for the exact kind of shenanigans Crusader Kings 2 engages in, and I'm about to tell you to buy it.

Y'see....there's a certain je n'ais se quois to CK2. You kinda don't mind anywhere near as much when your awesome heir gets hit in the face with a spear during an impromptu contest, right before the king finally dies of the syphilis that made him a lunatic these past twenty years, leaving your entire empire in the hands of the hunchback girl who somehow managed to succeed in her plot to kill the OTHER awesome heir with a manure explosion. Not only is this kind of absolute silliness little more than just another Tuesday in CK2, it barely even slows you down.

See, the RNG in CK2, while most certainly as arbitrary and unfair as any other game, is heavily balanced against the array of options you have to deal with the s*** it throws at you, how fun it is to actually implement those options (often rampant murder plots filled with bribed co-conspirators), and the fact that ultimately the focus is shifted from the Europa Universalis grand strategy focus of 'my country' towards the CK2 focus of 'my dynasty'. Losing the entire empire to some b4st4rd child of your grandfather and ending up as the count of the Orkney islands is a minor setback. The nation you built still exists and a few marriages here and there followed by judicious and extremely vindictive murders should get you back into that driving seat again.

In most RNG games, the RNG isn't balanced to create a fun experience, it doesn't create compelling decisions. It just rolls dice for you, you miss three times in a row, and then a halfling beats your ogre to death with a sponge on a rope. And you just watch that happen. In CK2, the game is built to make an amusing experience and generate genuine decisionmaking gameplay from the ridiculous hatf**kery that ends up happening.

Don't get me wrong, it can still be seriously annoying sometimes, and you might want to crack open the console to tell some more egregious RNG abuse to get lost so you can get on with playing the game, but when it comes to games that rely on throwing RNG at you, CK2 is about as good as you can hope for. Though you should probably stop hoping, because if you're hoping that awesome heir is going to let you implement your plan for a golden age, he's probably going to be murdered in his sleep by his own wife so his inbred imbecile child is next in line.

Started with the tutorial. It thinks it's 'funny' and cares more about that than actually teaching the game. Was told to move somewhere, ship blows in half, endure the one-note 'hilarity' of the hateful AI in charge of you, then stare at the monitor doing absolutely nothing waiting to die so the game can demonstrate respawning. Appear in the hub space station. More presumably hilarious dialogue with the AI. Spawn a ship. Stuck on that screen with absolutely no direction whatsoever except to enter the ship, but nothing, not even the community guide on controls (which also aren't accessible in the game), tells me how to actually return to the crew level to do that.

Click every mouse button. Click everything on the screen. Press every keyboard button. Get bored. Delete game.

Make a tutorial, not a demo reel for a failed comedy career.

*sigh* Another "trying to get lucky with an RNG system and no balance so I can pretend it was fun and I'm good when I finally DO get lucky" game. I wish XCOM had never happened and this type of inane 'gameplay' for the usual masochist crowd would just die already, so good concepts wouldn't keep getting ruined by it.