Recent reviews by CatalystParadox

Listen I'm too busy playing this to write a recommendation. It's great, okay?

An impressively successful attempt to create Artificial Imagination. Literally generates imaginary worlds with unique, deep, and myriad stories. Will not be surpassed in procedurally-generated-stories for quite some time.

What more do you want, !!☼Adamantine Socks☼!!?

Seriously, this review is for everyone who hasn't tried DF yet -- now is the time. Come take a look at this decades-spanning masterwork, this legendary artifact of a game. Give this weird little wambler a chance to blow your mind and steal your heart.

I've been playing this for years on the tabletop. It's a game that does not get old, and it's nearly as much fun to play solo as in a group.

The Steam version is beautifully done, a pleasure to play, and honestly a steal at the price. Buy it for yourself and a friend across the country you wish you could have over for a board game night.

It took me several frustrating hours to get the hang of this b*tch but that was 2015 and now it accounts for less than 1% of my total play time. The rest is sheer joy, and maybe a little bit of ravenous addiction.

This cost me 12 bucks, but at a base price of $25 as of this review I still consider it a steal. Catch it on sale and you're getting a deal so good it can only be called unholy.

7 Days to Die is one of my very favorite games. Look at the play time (1337 as of this writing, lol) and do your own math. I have probably spent a bit over $100 all told, though, because I keep gifting the game to friends, and I still feel I got my money's worth easily. While there's some roughness around the edges, even now (it IS still *technically* an alpha, though that is easy to forget) the amount of content this game offers is absolutely staggering. Beyond that, as of Alpha 19.3 at least, they've reached a place where it's very balanced, relatively newcomer-friendly, and well-paced.

Partly because of the ongoing dev cycle, but also in no small part due to the nature of the game, 7D2D retains a glorious ability to surprise me, even after thousands of hours of play. You just never know when you might get trapped in a barn loft one night with a ravening wandering horde around that notices the campfire you made to char up that little bit of meat you got from the lone pig downstairs because you're starving, and to boil a little water because you were in danger of dehydrating. Suddenly there's a cacophony everywhere and you clutch your pathetic sharp-rock-on-a-stick and hunker down, knowing you can't fight them, not at this point. But you put the fire out and hold very very still, and they'll eventually go away, right?

Wrong.

The building collapses under you. At least the fall killed you before the zombies could.

Hard 10/10, recommend this even to people who don't like zombies/crafting/survival. But most of all I recommend it to people who do like those things but have been left cold by other entries in that bloated genre. 7 Days is the one you've been looking for.

Aged five years in 40 minutes, picked up hundreds of handfuls of grass and twigs and rocks, then returned this boring as hell game and reclaimed my life.

Normally I love intricate crafting and excessive detail. But in this game it isn't meaningful. For example, I had to craft sticks and grass through two or three different levels of other items first in order to make a stone axe at the beginning - but those other itermediate items, fiber, thread, pole... whatever they were, didn't actually require any different materials, just navigating through a bunch of menus, pushing buttons, and time. So basically if you like pushing buttons and waiting, this game is for you.

There are plenty of other criticisms I could level at it (clunky animations, random crashes or freeze-ups, when I crafted shoes they made my feet disappear) but the bottom line for me was this game just isn't fun. It may indeed be possible that I didn't get far enough in to properly enjoy it, but the next step in the main quest was literally "gather 1000 tier 1 ingredients" and that would have taken at least another hour that I just didn't care to spend. Much, much too grindy without enough payoff.

Lonely, surreal, haunting. This one is well worth picking up.

The positive reviews for this game are a sad indication of how many absolute stinkers there are in this genre. It's better than many, I guess, and impressive considering there's no real team or resources behind it. Still, at this time at least, free seems like the right price.

Haven't slept in about two days, so not entirely sure whether I played this game or hallucinated it.

The way shooters should be. My biggest complaint about CS:GO is a lack of alternative scenarios and game modes, I'd really like to play a more extended and involved game using this basic template, whether campaign, co-op, or simply the same PvP format but in a more expansive and ongoing setting. All other tactical FPSes tend to leave me wishing they were more like CS:GO.