Recent reviews by Saber Cherry

Kingdoms Reborn is not very good. Please ignore my 45 hours. I kept playing because I thought it might get better. But it never did.

The AI is hopelessly incompetent. On my first playthrough, I hit Industrial age when everyone else was either Dark Age (starting point) or Middle Age (next point). Despite cheating to have buildings that the player cannot build before the Enlightenment Age (hauling services, like why should that even require research), the AI's had successful civilizations with zero industry - just houses, farms, and Trade Centers for importing the massive quantities of resources they couldn't pay for. In my first, last, and only game, UAE had 4 seaside importation ports, one landlocked importation port (they were on an island but unrealistically you can still trade stuff from a landlocked port), a bunch of farms, and 1 furniture factory. In the desert. Where there are no trees which are required to make them operate. I should note, all importation ports cost a ton of money to maintain whether you use them or not.

So -

1) The AI is braindead.
2) The balance is kind of bad. Like, did you know that with enough upgrades, 1 ton of wood can generate 10 tons of coal, which is many times more effective at heating than wood? No, I didn't either. So why mine coal, which is a limited resource? ...no answer. Or, who knew that you could eat raw wheat and get X calories, but if you baked it you could get 20X calories? This may satisfy some people but to me it just makes the devs look lazy.
3) Some territories can grow cocoa, or coffee, or lilies, or whatever. Isn't that cute? So it makes you want to claim them! But, no. They don't matter at all. You just get a "Cocoa breeder" card that you can put in any province and grow cocoa there. The province you got it from? Should have a bonus, right? No. You can't even grow cocoa there even though the tooltip says it grows best there. Once you get the card shop, which happens very early, all these geographical bonuses are obsolete. You can just buy a "Cocoa Card" from the shop for way less than the price of expanding or placing a colony, and it works better, too. But the kicker is that you don't even need one. Ignoring the fact that AIs with +999% bonus are never a threat because the only thing they build are houses and importation facilities, and troops that never attack you, you are always overflowing with luxuries. Your people think you're a god.
4) Eh... there are some niggling details, like the Museum bonuses don't work. And a quarter of the tech tree is military but there is no military action, because all the enemies are too dumb to field an army, let alone a navy or a fort. Then another 10% is spycraft, like you could ever learn anything by spying on barbarians in the stone age.

Kingdoms Reborn simply does not work as a game. I regret all but the first 10 hours I spent on it. Back when I thought it would get better.

Terraria is fun. Unfortunately, it kills your computer if you leave it alone for a while. Or background it. Or anything. I have never used another program that hard-locked my computer before Terraria. My hat is off to Redigit, like how the hell do you even do that.

Songs of Syx was fun until it wasn't. It was fun when I was building, planning, training, and so forth. It felt like Dwarf Fortress with graphics!

Then out of the blue, I got invaded by enemies that annihilated my forces. I replayed this battle in different ways, waiting or pre-emptively engaging, and each time I managed to kill less than 10% of the enemy troops, while fielding roughly 40% of my population, all training constantly and with an economy focused on armor and weapons.

That was my second invasion. The first was a complete joke and I won with almost no losses. The second, well, I just abandoned the game. There was no point.

Incidentally, I've played for over 100 hours, and after migrating to a new computer, Steam randomly reset my progress to 0, so I had to leave the game running on the title menu overnight just for the privilege of posting this. Whatever playtime Steam claims is probably false. I'd estimate 150 hours.

Palworld seems like it could be a wonderful game. However, it's not ready to play.

1) It has keys hard-mapped to WASD, and they are not remappable. It claims to support remapping, but actually doesn't, because so many keys are hard coded that you cannot, for example, use a sane ESDF control scheme or map mouse buttons. This is important because it actually allows you to remap to ESDF, but then, the game just doesn't work anymore - since F is hard-mapped to "interact" if you try to interact with anything the game locks you into moving right forever (or until you alt-tab out). Fortunately you can use AHK (AutoHotKey, which is necessary due to games like this with bad programmers) to circumvent some of this idiocy, but not all of it. But it's worth noting that the default keybinds are TERRIBLE and you cannot remap the most important ones without a 3rd-party tool.

2) It is a singleplayer game that does not support pause. I hear it has MP too but that it's super-buggy and full of cheaters/grievers currently, and your progress is tied to a server, so solo is really the only currently viable play mode and an SP game without pause is like a car without breaks. It's fine 98% of the time and the other 2% you just die. I don't consider that fun in a game or a car.

3) The tutorial is terrible; it says things like (in the first minute or two) "Craft a Pokeball to advance!" without any indication of how you can do that, since it requires Pokeum. Turns out that is a rare output from mining rocks and common from Pokeum nodes, but there were no Pokeeum nodes near the start.

4) For a starting player, night comes before you even know what you're doing (especially because there is no pause); suddenly everything just becomes black. Especially for me because I spent most of the first day trying to find a key mapping that was legal (again, it is NOT PAUSED while you remap your keys or do anything else in menus, because the game is apparently designed for a multiplayer mode that is not currently implemented). You can't see anything and you start to freeze because, well, at night, you just freeze if you are not next to a fire, so you constantly lose HP. That's not very fun. There is a helpful Team Rocket member with a campfire who will give you some wood near the start, but the day-night cycle is so fast that I was left adrift. It was annoying having a mostly black screen for several minutes. Valheim and Terraria seemed fine on the first night there but this really needs improvement.

5) There's very little guidance as to how you do what. I read on the internet today that some critters of the same species have different skills, or something. Is that a thing? Is there a way to know which critters will mine, which will chop, which will be good fighters,

6) It's a bugfest in SP too. I heard that if you do solo you can avoid bugs, but no. A few minutes into the game (subjective time; it was actually day 2 because I screwed up their expectations and assumed going into a menu would pause things, then came back later and it was night, so I had to fumble around for a long time) I made a Palbox. Nice! Then I upgraded it, etc. Then I decided to build a house, so I built a foundation. But can you move things? No. So I unbuilt the Palbox and rebuilt it on the foundation. Great! Then I wanted to build walls, and the Palbox has this gigantic invisible no-build radius for no good reason. So I unbuilt it again. Then I tried to build it on my platform with walls, and... no. But not just there. I literally could not build it ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Then I thought, "Aha! This is a bug!" So I restarted the game and yep, I could build it most places... so I built a wall first and then tried to place it within the wall... NOPE! Once you build a wall, you can no longer place a Palbox anywhere in the world in the same session, it seems. Works fine when you leave and restart.

Anyway, this game is not ready for primetime. It has the potential of being fantastic someday, but currently, it's only good if you want to jump through their hoops and put up with a lot of BS.

Stellar Tactics is fun. I recommend it.

It's not perfect - the space combat is a weak point (this game would be so fantastic if it married its ground combat with Freelancer space combat) and there's this issue where you need to spend a bajillion hours crafting to be able to make anything useful... I mean, I'm clocked at 135 hours and that's not enough. There's no random chance that your crafting will give you something useful; you're just guaranteed (expensive) crap for a long, long time.

But it's still fun. It's a bit like X-COM (the original) and if some issues were addressed (like space combat not being fun and crafting being more interesting) it would be fantastic. As it stands it's still fun. And generally I don't give bonus points for a lack of staff, but... since I'm a programmer myself... wow, he's doing a fantastic job solo. A few other solo-dev games I recommend are Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, Stardew, Terraria, and Starsector. All fantastic games that I've spent hundreds of hours on and were developed by a single person (or a pair of siblings).

I skipped Oblivion because I heard bad stuff about it. But... that was a mistake. This is another great game from Bethesda!

Compared to Skyrim, the NPC dialogue and quests are much better (and even in 2024 I think the graphics are fine). After 202 hours I'm just starting the main quest. I do get distracted by alchemy though so most of my time is spent excitedly jumping form flower cluster to flower cluster... and like all Bethesda games prior to Skyrim the levelling is totally broken, so I'm using an "all stats +5" mod... and a x2 carry weight mod... and a reduced weapon weight mod (because how can a dagger possibly weigh 10 pounds).

But! It's loads of fun. If you skipped it and only played Morrowind and Skyrim (like me) I recommend you try Oblivion too. The NPC dialogue and quests are absolutely better than Skyrim. I mean, I read that, and thought, "That's so subjective, and Skyrim was fine anyway" but no, it's true.

This game is fantastic and incredibly cute. The plot is good, the gameplay is fun, the graphics are nice, the writing is great, and the characters feel real.

The only problem is that it's very easy, with no option for higher difficulty. Normally I don't like very easy games but as long as you intentionally avoid overlevelling it's fine. Levelling is actually optional - you don't level automatically through combat, it's just something you can choose to do every so often (whether or not you advance the story) so you can pace it yourself.

Anyway, too easy is IMO better than too hard, and again, though there is no difficulty slider, you can adjust the difficulty yourself by simply not levelling when you have the option.

I don't usually write positive reviews for games, but I will also mention that this is the kind of game you might like if you played Recettear. Combat is more like oldschool FF games, though. Funnily enough, Steam's autocorrect wanted to change "Recettear" to "Cigarette"...

I don't really understand why people like this game... it's very repetitious, and the combat is terrible. If you want space combat, play Freelancer, and if you want resource-gathering and base-building, play Valheim or Subnautico. I played for 12 hours and kept expecting it to get better, but it just never did. It's worth mentioning that the UI is horrible. I thought Borderlands 2 inventory interface was the pinnacle of intern-written UI's designed to make everything more frustrating than they need to be, but NMS takes the cake.

Hmm, probably also worth mentioning that there nominally is a plot, but it seems half-assed. I mean, I'm mentioning it, but just to notify you that it's not worth mentioning. Just, "Go to point X for reasons. Now go to point Y for reasons. Now there's a voice in your head that wants you to go to planet Z. Then it wants you to go to planet W." In other words, don't buy this game if you're hoping for a story.

...and just in case that wasn't enough, there are lots of aliens in space stations, but you can't communicate with them. You can randomly find obelisks that teach you one word from a random language. You can also ask aliens to teach you a word from their language (then you can no longer interact with them). After 12 hours of begging every alien in every space station to teach me and hitting every obelisk I could find, I got to the point where I could read less than 1 word per alien dialogue sentence. Maybe at 100 hours I'd be able to communicate... but would it be useful? I'm guessing no. In the theme of recommending other games that do it better, if you want to communicate with aliens and have an interesting story, go play Star Control 2 (aka The Ur-Quan Masters), which happens to be free!

Dungeons 3 worked fine on my old crappy computer. I just built a new computer which is fantastic for every other game, and Dungeons 3 no longer works. It launches but I can't click on anything in the menu (like "Campaign"). Still Win10. I have no idea why it's broken.

Edit: Now I can click on Campaign but then I can't click on anything on the next menu, so I still can't start a game.

Anyway, buyer beware. I can technically play this game on my old computer but then I'd need to reconnect my mouse, keyboard, etc so it's a pain.

If you are hoping for a modern Privateer/Freelancer alternative, this is not it. It does have some nice features like semi-randomized loot. But it does not allow the freedom of Freelancer. You can't just wander around a system and find things or map them, because it's point-to-point. No wandering. No mapping. No systems (in the sense that some points are physically closer than others). It's just points with a limited cloud of freedom around them and no continuity between the others regardless of their spacial proximity.

On the plus side, the combat is way better than the hot garbage No Man's Sky delivers.