Recent reviews by kycaver

My first impression is, the game has the potential to be lots of fun, and it has been interesting to explore the world. So far, though, the UI seems to be pretty poor. Every little task seems to require clicking on a button, rotating a selection wheel, holding down a button, doing one or two other things, and after all that, yea, I built a bed.

My pal is hungry. I built a feed box, put bread in the feed box, and yet my pal is still walking around saying it is hungry, and showing the icon for bread over his head. I once accidentally picked up a pal while I was trying to build something, and just then I was attacked by a roving pal. I could not seem to put the pal down so that I could defend myself no matter how many buttons I pushed.

This is certainly early access, and I hope they put most of their work into improving the UI. There is a lot of fun to be had here, but they make it awful hard to have that fun.

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2/11/24

So, after more hours in the game I am updating my review, with reservations, to a RECOMMEND. After I had reached the 10 or 12 hour mark of playing, I had started getting used to the poorly designed UI, and was having more fun with the game. There are still problems to be had. Early access games come in two shapes and sizes. You get some like Hades or Against the Storm that are very well polished, with very few bugs, and the only reason they are early access is that there is more content to be added. What is there works well.

And then there are games with a number of glitches and problems that can pop up at anytime. PalWorld falls into this latter category. I have had one full freeze of the game where it locked up completely. I have had some bugs like having a bunch of spheres in my inventory, but when I try to throw them to capture a pal, I get the message I have no spheres. Lately, I have sometimes had a problem when I try to throw a sphere, instead of showing me the color the sphere is my hand would just flash all the colors so I had no idea what sphere I would throw. I am sure these glitches will all get patched at some point, but they can be annoying.

Many things in the game are not intuitive, and I have often had to exit the game and go into the forums or watch a YouTube video tho find out how to do something.

I don't know if we can ever expect the UI to get a complete overhaul. It is one thing to patch bugs or add new content. Fixing the UI may be more than the devs are prepared to do.

Still, with a few hours of playing, you get somewhat used to the UI, and the game is fun and I feel I certainly got my moneys worth.

I began playing DYSMANTLE & DREDGE a few weeks back, and I have to say, I have really enjoyed playing DREDGE, but have not had nearly the same fun playing DYSMANTLE.

Both of these games could be considered having a lot of grinding, but if the game play loop is enjoyable than this is not a grind, it’s fun. I started off the first couple of hours having fun with DYSMANTLE, but then the fun dried up. A game like this needs to reward your efforts to keep the player’s interest.

I was trying to collect ceramics to upgrade my crowbar, and on three separate occasions I had the game glitch out on me. On one occasion, after killing a bunch of zombies and collecting some ceramics, my character stopped swinging his crowbar. As the zombies attacked I would press my mouse button, and nothing would happen. There was another time where five times out of six, when I hit the button to swing at the zombie, my character would seem to put the crowbar into his backpack instead. Result, lose all supplies collected. And the last occasion, I would press the button to swing, and sometimes it would work, and sometimes it would not.

Problem was, when I respawned, all the zombies also respawned, but none of the supplies would respawn. Not really a lot of incentive to go back and fight the zombies again when the houses were now cleaned out of supplies.

I understand there is a way to stop zombie respawns, but how I would get to that point with melee weapons that only worked when they want to is a problem. I will probably give the game a try again in the future, but for the moment I am having too much fun playing DREDGE, and Against the Storm is high on my list to start playing. Sometimes a game only gets one chance to make a good impression.

I started playing DREDGE & DYSMANTLE a couple of weeks ago, and I love DREDGE. (DYSMANTLE not so much). The fun I am having in DREDGE reminds me of when I was playing Slime Rancher a couple of years ago. It is a fun game of building up your boat, fishing to earn money, exploring all the islands, and there is a dark mystery underneath the surface. (of both the game & the water).

Now games like this can often be described as grindy. But I don’t consider it grindy if you are having fun. And DREDGE, like Slime Rancher before it kept me very entertained, and are both fun to play. Now, DYSMANTLE, that felt like a grind.

I also enjoyed the graphics in DREDGE. This can be a problem in some indie games. DREDGE is in a bundle with a game called Dave the Diver that I had heard a lot of good things about. However, when I saw the ugly pixel graphics of Dave, I could not imagine looking at those horrible images for hours while playing that game. C’mon guys, make an effort. DREDGE has graphics that the Devs clearly spent a lot of time getting just right.

I am twenty hours in now, and I look forward to many more hours playing this fun game.

First impression is this is an enjoyable, cozy game. Often, chess puzzle style games are a bit lacking in the graphics department, but this game seems very well polished, with cute graphics that are just right for this kind of game.

This is a relaxing game that you can jump into for 15 or 20 minutes, solve a few puzzles, and then move on to something else.

As I unlock more features of the game I will update my review.

When Slay the Spire first came out, I hesitated to buy it because of the terrible graphics. That stupid large whale that is shown on the main Steam page turned me off completely. Finally I broke down and bought it, and I enjoyed it, but I still hated the graphics. I remember thinking, "If only this game looked like, say, Darkest Dungeon. That would be so much better".

Well, my prayers have been answered because this game plays like Slay the Spire, but looks like Darkest Dungeon.

I will leave a longer review as I play it some more, but so far....so good.

*****

Updated Feb. 28/2024.

It is a good sign the the dev has been very active since launch in releasing updates and patches.

So, I saw the success of Vampire Survivors, and I wanted to try out This genre of game, but the graphics of that game are so bad that I had to look around for alternatives. I recently tried out 5 games in the same style, Army of Ruin, Brotato, Soulstone Survivors, Spirit Hunters & Yet Another Zombie Survivors. These games are all $10 or less, and I got them all on sale. (Brotato is on sale for $3.99 at the time of this review).

All of these games provided enough fun to justify their purchase, but the two that stuck out to me were SoulStone Survivors & Yet Another Zombie Survivors. Both of these games were easier to jump right into and start having fun with. YAZS was not as polished as some of the others, but I think it has great potential for the future, and is a lot of fun to play right now.

I really like the aesthetics of the game. While a lot of other Vampire style games go for a fantasy setting, I enjoy the military commando style the game utilizes. I got the game on sale, and it is certainly worth the small amount of money I spent on it.

Edit: Nov. 22 2023- I'm glad to see this game is getting lots of nice upgrades, making a very good game even better.

So, I saw the success of Vampire Survivors, and I wanted to try out This genre of game, but the graphics of that game are so bad that I had to look around for alternatives. I recently tried out 5 games in the same style, Army of Ruin, Brotato, Soulstone Survivors, Spirit Hunters & Yet Another Zombie Survivors. These games are all $10 or less, and I got them all on sale. (Brotato is on sale for $3.99 at the time of this review).

All of these games provided enough fun to justify their purchase, but the two that stuck out to me were SoulStone Survivors & Yet Another Zombie Survivors. Both of these games were easier to jump right into and start having fun with. SoulStone felt like the most polished of the bunch, while YAZS felt like the rawest of the bunch for now, but maybe the most fun and with the best future potential.

Hey, wait for the Steam Fall or Christmas sale, and you could probably pick up all five for $20 or less. (and maybe one or two more).

But if you want to dip your toe in the water just to try your first one out, I would recommend Soulstone Survivors as my top pick, with YAZS being my second choice.

I was unable to get the sprint button to work on the game. I tried some of the suggestions found on the forums, deleting all the controller settings, turning the sprint toggle off. No luck. People mention unplugging all USB peripherals, but my wireless headphones need to be plugged in to the USB port or I will have no sound in the game. Can't play without sound, can't play without sprinting. Guess I will have to refund. I also have an external SSD drive plugged into the back of my computer, and don't really want to have to unplug and re-plug that every time I play the game. Dead Space has been out for awhile now, so you would think the devs could have fixed this by now.

So, I have played Way of the Hunter for 3 hours and my 1st impression is to give it a thumbs up, but a mild thumbs up for the moment.

My 1st hunting game was Call of the Wild, which I picked up two months ago. I have about 100 hours in it now, and though I have enjoyed it, the game has plenty of jank, and I could see there was plenty of room for improvement.

Reading early reviews, there were two things that concerned me about WoTH. One, was that many reviews said they had a very hard time finding animals, and that the animals spooked very easily, so they felt it was very unsatisfying to hunt them. In my brief time playing so far, I didn’t find this to be the case. I found animals, and was able to sneak up on them close enough to get a good shot. Maybe the problems that people had earlier have been patched out of the game, or maybe they were just exaggerating the difficulty.

The second thing that had me worried was that many reviews said it was hard to track animals, and this I did find to be a real problem. Of the 1st six deer I shot, I was only able to find blood to track on two of them. Of those two, I found one because he did not go very far before dropping, and I lost the other one. With four of the deer, I did not find any blood trail at all.

Then, recently, I shot a buck from on top of a hill, and I watched him run across a field and saw him drop dead. I had put a marker down before I shot him, so instead of going straight to him, I went to where he was when shot, and looked for blood. I looked all around, and found nothing. I went to the fallen deer, and then looked back at my marker. He had run about 70 or 80 meters in a straight line before falling. I walked back from his body toward the original marker, and was only able to find a couple of small patches of blood near the body.

Now he had been shot thru the lungs, a kill shot that dropped him within a short distance, but left very little blood to track. If I had not seen him fall in a open field, I probably would have lost him like so many other deer I had shot.

I hope they can improve the ability to track wounded animals. It is no fun to spend a lot of time to line up a shot, and then have the quarry just vanish.

I know some players complain that COTW is too easy, and they want WoTH to remain hardcore. Well, that is what difficulty levels are for. Hunting games are already a niche genre, and if this game only offers hardcore levels, you are making the already small player base even smaller.

I will probably play this game for a couple of more sessions, but if it continues to have this much difficulty in tracking after about 10 hours of play time, I will probably set it aside and see if future updates change anything. Playing a game is supposed to be fun, and the more people that find it to be fun, the more copies you can sell.

I think the game has a great deal of potential, and I am hoping for the best.

Not only was I looking for aliens, but I found some!

If you enjoyed Hidden Folks, then you will enjoy this game. I have seen a few games now try and copy Hidden Folks, but they usually fall short in the graphics, sound effects, and just plain fun. This game has all the polish that Hidden Folks displays, and also just as much fun. Many of the objects on screen are interactive, just like with HF. I have played for 3 hours now, and I still have plenty of levels to go.