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Recent reviews by Mayhemic

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1 person found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
55.2 hrs on record (11.2 hrs at review time)
It takes more than ramen, anime girls, anime boys, high school, good graphics, great music, and an urban fantasy story with a second-year transfer student awakening to mysterious powers to make a good JRPG. Fortunately, there are also dad jokes and ambient cats. In ATLUS we trust.


Also, someone (several someones) spent a *really* long time fiddling with camera motion and blur and probably some other things to make it look good when the character stops running, and I think they need to be called out for their incredible work.
Posted February 2. Last edited February 3.
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84 people found this review helpful
4 people found this review funny
31.5 hrs on record (8.9 hrs at review time)
Just going to start out by saying that, from my experience, this is not a normal hex-based strategy game. If you are looking for something resembling, say, Advance Wars or Civ, then this game is not for you. If you are looking for something consistent and easy in which you can figure out the rules in ten minutes and breeze through the rest of the game, then you should spam the back button until you reach something completely different. This game has a lot of less-than-obvious mechanics and an absurdly steep learning curve for at least the first few hours (or, dare I say it, days) of play, and to top it off, the tutorial is honestly not that great. You will spend your first few sessions replaying the same mission over and over again, quite possibly screaming, trying to figure out how your main battle tanks were destroyed by a company of infantry at what the computer claimed were 10-1 odds in your favor, and then you will move on to the second mission and try to figure out how you're supposed to beat an enemy with about 3 or 4 times as many troops as you, but I will tell you that it is possible.

Once you get past the complete insanity of trying to figure out how this game works, you will actually (miraculously) discover an amazingly intricate, engaging, and still almost stupidly hard strategy game, because you will be going up with 6 squads against 18 squads of tanks, but if you literally play your cards right, deploy your forces well, and have just a bit of luck, you will find that there are subtle patterns and rules that you can use to hold the line and push the enemy back. The dice system adds a pleasant element of chance which you can and must use to think about where you'll need power which interacts well (if peculiarly and not necessarily nicely) with the defensive support mechanic and the different unit types in order to force you to think about what you're doing on the battlefield.

Again, if I didn't say it strongly enough in the first paragraph, if you are looking for an easy, simple, lazy, or idle game which you can pick up on Friday afternoon and master by lunch on Saturday, you would be better off dropping your money on the sidewalk in the rain, because this isn't that type of game. It's hard to learn and harder to "master," and if you're not interested in committing a lot of time to learn a game then you will not enjoy yourself. If, however, you are a slightly obsessive person who likes challenges and is interested in analyzing systems, then I can say that I've never encountered a better game for it and that you might be worse off donating your money to a charity.
Posted August 22, 2014.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
55.1 hrs on record (13.0 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
Amazingly good for an early access game. I haven't played through the entire story mode yet, and haven't messed around with the build or survival modes yet, but Planetary Explorers currently looks and feels like it could be a fully developed game. It has good graphics and a well thought-out, if very loose, beginning to a story so far with a very imaginative setting and good mechanics. I definitely like the crafting system better than games like minecraft, and the voxel mining system looks very natural relative to a lot of other games I've played, although I wish the camera didn't track the character's motions quite so precisely. The environment is wonderful and fairly varied once you venture beyond your starting area

My biggest complaints for the game so far are that A) there needs to be a bit more detail in the starting missions or at least a more in-depth help screen to describe some of the controls (such as that you can toggle running with "r" or that, yes, those ARE herbs that you can harvest by facing them and right-clicking) and B) that the game becomes exponentially more memory-intensive as you progress and begin actually exploring the island. The second one is by far the most serious, because so far I've explored less than a tenth of the massive continent you start on but have encountered the error that my fairly high-quality, memory-rich expensive laptop has run out of memory to run the game on. At the moment, the game is trying to store too much awesome for my computer to handle at the same time. Much as I am in favor and awe of the good graphics and incredibly huge open map, I would settle for a bit less of it if it meant I could finish the game.

That said, the game shows great promise and I would definitely buy it again just for what I've seen so far.
Posted July 29, 2014.
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Showing 1-3 of 3 entries