Recent reviews by Don Cool

This is a gem of a game with a lot of flaws, mostly things I don´t mind. Some cheap voice acting and the lack of a few life quality implementations, I found however that I am enjoying the pace.

You hunt some, mine some, kill bandits, build your little village and do quests on the side. I would recommend anyone to watch a few Youtube videos of how the game is played.

So far I am really liking it but it this game will not be to everyone´s taste.

It´´s a very cautious recommendation, the game is in early access and it will appeal to some, others won´t like the current crafting system.

It´s first and foremost a crafting game with very little survival in it, once you learn the basics you won´t starve or get tired which are the two main survival gauges.

Crafting in my opinion is overly complicated to the point where you might need a spreadsheet to keep an eye on all the items you have in storage, I have discovered 13 types of fiber thus far and knowing which to use and when becomes a sloggish afair, especially because my memory isn´t cut for this. Fiber is just one of the many resources which has multiple categories, each with their own purpose as you want to craft items with better resources while leaving the lower tier resources for base/workbenches. Some people will love this, some won´t.

The AI of your companion is non-existent but he is an excellent mule, you do have the option to allow which chests he/she has access to in order to limit their usage of high tier resources when fueling the various workbenches. He/she also serves as a decent distraction in combat but usually warps all over the place.

So, why did I recommend this? Because I am stupid and did not inform myself enough when purchasing the game, I actually thought it would be an RPG/craft/survival fully voice acted and with dozens of quests, it´s not an RPG, it´s a crafting game and it delivers on that.

The game is in early access currently and thus missing some features, this review is written with that in mind.

4 survivors crash on an alien planet, your job is to settle, build, seed/harvest, scavenge, analyse some resources before they can be used and have your settlement prosper. It´s a very basic Rimworld style of play with much prettier graphics.

There are currently problems with some items taking too long to craft and thus your survivors are often busy bees and all you can do is watch without expanding, this is very much also a luck induced factor, if you don´t get that 5th survivor fast things take a lot longer. The game seems to run at a slower pace than Rimworld which isn´t necessarily a bad thing.

Is the game fun and why do I recommend it? It´s early access and there is plenty to do initially, enough to keep you occupied for a good number of hours and retries as you learn the ropes. The tutorial is very well done and teaches you the basics, highly recommended if you never played Rimword, even if you did there are some different mechanics.

Farthest Frontier is in early access and thus subject to future changes which might change my opinion.

A tutorial is missing and since the game isn´t telegraphing the activity on screen it often leads to questions which the devs definitely aren´t busy answering. It´s a medieval city builder with you placing buildings and villagers going about their business, the first problem, villagers don´t carry anything visually, like lumber or food. This can lead to a lot of activity clicking on every single villager to try and understand things aren´t working in the village.

Example : The worker tasked with getting clay from the clay pit has too long of a walk to a warehouse, that´s what I am being told by the game, the fact is that there is a warehouse next to the clay pit and he lives nearby. So, I am trying frantically to google and seek answers, none so far.

There are no max settings for product production. This means that you need to babysit the baker, he will get all the flour made by the mill and turn into bread before you can blink. That´s pretty much guaranteed to spoil, so I had to baby sit the baker and turn off production constantly.

There are several things I can´t get to work like the market, it´s not distributing the goods I am producing. Perhaps it´s my mistake but nothing is obvious nor logical in the logistics department, I have posted a lot of questions in the forum and so far I got lucky with one problem which was solved, the rest is left to experimentation but havn´t had much luck with that.

Having played another far more detailed game which was just released in early alpha access and doing things far better with the basics in almost every aspect I can´t with good conscience recommend this at the moment. Can´t mention the game here is this is not a place for advertising.

Having played this game quite a lot I can warmly recommend it. The overall setting is reminiscent of almost all survival games out there, something bad happened and you have to survive the aftermath.

The AI is at times extremely clever and sometimes just plain stupid, farmers will f.ex. help out carrying goods if farming is currently unavailable due to f.ex. a disaster. The game has disasters which are manageable with a bit of micro management, not much really, you can instead focus on priorities and which path you chose through research.

Specialists join your cause for free sometimes and can be purchased, they help out in the colony by retrieving certain goods and f.ex. building when materials are in place. They are however mostly used in the overhead map which contains various tasks to be accomplished, managing them properly is the key to a much easier game play.

There are other factions with whom you may trade, this will also help greatly as you can focus on one resource like f.ex. wood or fish and trade for much needed goods.

Unlike Endzone this game doesn´t suffer from the constant fiddling with numbers as far as your settlers go, guards and farmers are what you will mostly be taking off/on duty. While farmers can carry goods if their field is growing they can not tend to specific jobs, this means you remove farmers to f.ex. have more firewood cutters during winter times.

The game is fun overall and quite relaxing for the most part once you learn the ropes, it´s not a difficult game to master but it can take a while to get things lined up properly when it comes to getting the right amount of buildings, production and farms.

Just a word of advice, build one road at a time, this is one of the areas where the settlers are as stupid as can be. I have however thoroughly enjoyed my time with Surviving the Aftermath, I hope you will too. As usual I always recommend people to watch a Youtube video to see if the game suits their flavour.

Extremely short review:

It´s relaxing, easy to get into and not that challenging. You basically build a city in the sky, have to manage resources, happiness and tilt angles in order for the city to stay horizontal, really not that hard.

As always I recommend you to watch a video on Youtube and base your purchase on whether you like casual sim games.

Technical issues: There were none in my rig and no crashes during the entirety of the game, no bugs either. As for performance, I don´t play around with settings and just play at the recommended ones, everything was fine. The only real problem technically is that a lot of important keys can´t be rebound.

Story: Main story doesn´t win any awards and is pretty predictable for the most part with a few side quests being rather good, I would say it´s standard story telling for an action RPG.

Game play: Believe it or not but I am not a big fan of parkour in gaming, simply because I suck at it and thus can´t evaluate the parkour in game. I kept it simple, used it as needed and skipped the challenges.

The game play around combat is solid but difficulty is all over the place, most mobs being easy while a few are very hard to kill unless you have good reflexes on those dodges which I don´t. Difficulty seems tied to HP and how much damage you do/take, thus damage sponges are a thing.

Lots of fun toys to play with while killing zombies, a para-glider, a grappling hook (things which appear doing the main story) ... and you have all your killing assets like nades, molotovs, mines, decoys and whatnot ... plenty of ways to be creative.

I had a fun ride throughout Dying Light 2 and definitely don´t regret my purchase, the world is grim and the choices you make are often between bad .. and bad. I found it hard to get emotionally involved though as there are simply too many scumbags and many of them with ambiguous motives.

My recommendation of FM 21 is based on the fact that it´s still a good game based on the foundation of previous iterations, however there is very little new under the table. Most of the changes that are required for an optimal game play have simply been ignored by the devs.

1. Fixture congestion is a real problem, you will often have f.ex. 11 days with no fixtures or internationals only to have to play 3 games in 6 days, in a WC season I had 6 games in 12 days. It has been problem for a long time.

2. First team players who aren´t constantly starting will be restricted to light training schedules if you have a very busy season with games every 2nd or third day. It means they aren´t really evolving, sending them to the U23 squad to get normal training makes them unhappy and the "elevator" micro management of each player isn´t desirable either. A simple solution for U23 players would be to have the "Available for first team" option but so far I havn´t been lucky in getting any responses.

3. Regardless of tactics you will still encounter "super keepers" who just are your only opponent, their entire team getting 6.2 avg rating while the keeper is getting 8.5, I still win, sometimes by a large margin but their keeper is often MoM still. I have lost 4 finals in a row, conceded 4 goals in 4 shots while their keeper made MoM in all games.

4. Penalties are weird, in one of the 4 above mentioned finals I missed 5 penalties, Wolves missed 4 and scored on the last thus winning. At least the AI is having difficulties with penalties as well, in the league I have about a 50% penalty conversion rate and so does the AI, this has gradually worsened as seasons have passed so it could be a regen issue.

5. Speed/Pace still has too much of an influence.

6. While you can be successful without constant high pressing it´s difficult, it´s doable but tactics rely too much on total pressing. This especially proves true if you have high acc/speed players.

7. The AI harassing you about wanting your players is okay, in FM however this gets taken to entirely new level and you can hear about it every single week throughout an entire season how much X club wants half of your team. When it comes to the bidding however .... they try to buy your players for peanuts. Aston Villa would probably receiving 3-5 bids every week of about 20 million euros in FM in 2037 on a relative comparison, he is worth about 50 million I believe.

8. You get asked the same questions from the press every single week, one would think they would have had the time to develop interviews to be diverse, it´s like a loop that never ends.

9. The training schedules from the ass. manager are horrendous, they may work if you can´t be bothered to change them but results on the pitch definitely improve vastly with a lot of tweaking. This becomes especially true when you are involved in all competitions and the schedule has heavy duty training the day before a match.

FM offers no explanation to why your very happy bunch playing short passing with no long shots misses one chance after the other while the opponents score on every single chance.

The news feed tells me about my worried strikers who are for some reason still extremely happy but none of them can find the back of the net missing "one on ones" one after the other, chances even I could score on with a blindfold.

The game proceeds to have it´s good moments where games are fairly balanced, it´s when it feels like the AI has no idea what to do with your tactics then it just pulls rabbits of a weird shaped hat. All goalkeeper ratings seem to be static regardless of how many fantastic saves they make in a match, my goalkeeper never saves a ball and has a 6,7 rating regardless.

The game wants you to fiddle with some settings to gain the upper hand, it´s however hard to know what your are doing wrong when statistics far exceed that of a normal Barcelona vs Drunken Tards game, the latter will score on their only chance while Barcelona will have to quit after missing some 10 clear cut chances, that happens every single game when things aren´t going your way.

It happens to me too when I play friendlies against big teams with my Vanarama North side, I always score on the few chances I have. Just played Celtic and drew 3-3 ... I had 3 chances, Celtic had about 35.

Total War: Warhammer II is not perfect but it has pretty much ruined all other Total War games for me, the diversity in army compositions, the magic, the intrigues and simple diplomacy come together in a beautiful symphony of exhilarating game play.

The only two aspects failing Warhammer II is it´s diplomatic inaccuracy/ shallowness and while the AI in battle can be competent at times it fails miserably during certain battles.

The constant support from CA, great DLC´s and engaged community in the forums reassures you the development is far from over in this game, it´s a gem that will forever stay engraved in my mind.