Recent reviews by Ricotez

tired of 1000 different launchers
tired of creating and connecting 1000 different accounts
stop it pLEASE

game is fun though, obvious comparisons with Factorio but that also means that what you learned in FIO translates directly over except you can build in three dimensions

basically if you like this kind of automation game you'll probably like this

It's currently my third-most played game on Steam, and one of the few games I've consistently come back to over the past decade. It has a lot of flaws but at its core is just so strong at telling emergent stories that I keep coming back to it.

But as someone who has bought most DLCs on the day they were released, I really think that the old DLCs need to either be bundled into a cheap catch-up bundle, or just made baseline to the game itself. Right now the DLC situation massively gatekeeps people who want to get into the game. Please fix that problem, I want to recommend this game to everyone I know!

I didn't want to leave a negative review on Helldivers 2, because I love this game. But since Sony is a faceless megacorporate entity that has systematically inserted so many layers of obfuscation between the humans making decisions and the corporate brand carrying them out that there is no way to have any kind of conversation with them, it is the most effective way to voice my concerns.

Why do you keep removing countries that the game is for sale in? This just makes the decision to not roll out the PSN account linking sound incredibly insincere, like you are going to change this decision at any moment.

I hate this stupid industry.

All right so it took me almost two hours of troubleshooting to get the game to run properly. That is very disappointing for a game that has been in live service for over six years, but at least once I got it to run properly there haven't been any more major technical issues.

So, I decided to change my review to positive after several evenings where I realized I couldn't wait to get back to playing it. The writing is good, the world is like a more fantastical take on Fallout with a greater variety in enemies and environments, and I enjoy exploring and looting places. The game still has its bugs but it's a lot better than it used to be. It's definitely slop, but like the good kind of slop. It's just fun to hop in and explore around to see what you run into.

I haven't engaged with any of the end-game gameplay loops yet. From what I have seen and heard, they're your standard MMO fare of daily and weekly lock-outs to grind currencies to unlock better gear. Look, I play FFXIV, I understand the purpose of such systems so I don't think they would have affected my opinion anyway even if I had reached them before writing this review. At least it looks like you can unlock cooler stuff than just an ilvl increase.

There is a lot about the game to love, and a lot to hate, but right now for me the pluses outweigh the minuses and it's just a good old time messing around in Appalachia. And when I grow bored I'll just go play other games until the second season of the show comes out and FO76 has had a few new updates.

Okay look, I think it is unfair to call a new game "already existing game but with X" right off the bat instead of letting it stand on its own legs. But it's kind of inevitable sometimes, especially in this case. Even the soundtrack in New Cycle sounds inspired by Piotr Musial's soundtrack for Frostpunk. So I thought it was "Frostpunk but with junk instead of steampunk and solar flares instead of a new ice age".

But the more I play of it, the more I realize the devs set out to create a game that may be similar to Frostpunk at the surface, but offers much deeper gameplay beyond that. I am totally on board for this - I love Frostpunk, but the simulation isn't actually super complicated and is more of a vessel to carry the narrative scenarios of that game.

New Cycle also has a progressing narrative, but it is obviously still in development, and much more slowly paced because a savegame lasts a lot longer than in Frostpunk. There was one major narrative twist that actually posed an interesting decision for me (and challenging consequences to manage), but other than that it is still kind of slowly building up.

The game also tries to do something with laws that change how your city works, similar to Frostpunk. However there is no real system for these laws in place yet. The way that they work right now is that you will get a prompt every now and then with your citizens making a new demand, and then you have to make a decision right there. For example your citizens might demand that you start incorporating linen in clothes, and if you accept this will give them a health bonus but also change the recipe for basic clothes to require linen. I feel like this would benefit from a system that's a bit closer to Frostpunk, where you can see all laws in a nice overview and they won't come out of nowhere and catch you off-guard. Maybe tied into the Cycle system that the game already has?

At the same time the game has a deep and intricate morale system with a bunch of different gauges that you can tweak to increase/decrease morale of groups of people by giving them certain amounts/higher quality of certain resources, and a separate work force system linked to this morale system that determines how efficient your workspaces are. I was pleasantly surprised by this, although it feels like it needs to be balanced a bit better. The workforce system also desperately needs a tutorial.

I had a bit of trouble putting my overall feelings of the game in words, but I think that the best way to describe it is that the parts are all there to make a really interesting survival city builder. They just don't quite fit together yet, and as a result the game lacks a real identity.

But that's okay, because the game was released in Early Access only a few days ago. And I think that if the developers manage to pull it all together, this game is going to be an amazing addition to the genre.

Until then, what you have here is a rough but fun survival city builder with a lot of smaller glitches but nothing so bad that reloading your save won't fix it (at least so far). If you love the genre everything is there to have a satisfying experience, and if you're on the fence it might be worth it to put off your purchase until the game has had a few major updates and its final shape is starting to become visible.

Dunno if I would recommend it for its current price, but I did have a lot of fun with it. Maybe it should've had a bit more complexity towards the end, more reason to optimize your production chains. As it stands there is no reason to use conveyor belts inside of mines because of how expensive and inconvenient to place they are, and once you unlock teleporters, a prospector is going to be able to vastly outpace belts. It's just missing something to spice up the last few milestones, making the game run out of steam before the end.

You know what, I do recommend it for its current price because I was so charmed by the game, but be aware of these flaws.

FOR THE EMPRAH

This game showed up randomly in my recommendations and damn is it straight up my alley. It brings back warm memories of Paper Mario and Undertale, and is chock-full of jokes about rock and metal. Just the first hour had me genuinely laugh out loud several times, especially the jokes about progressive rock.

The writing is solid, the art style is bright and effective, the music is a bop, and the combat system is fun and engaging. It's just a jolly good time. What more do you want from an indie RPG?

The bunnies are cute, fluffy, and they outsmart me at every turn.

Factorio used to be groundbreaking, but everything it does is now done better by other games that aren't restricted by the flat 2D plane. You can get everything this game does and more out of games like Dyson Sphere Program and Satisfactory, that allows you much more freedom with your constructions and build on a much grander scale, even though both are still in early access.

Also its business model appears to be reversed. Never going on sale is a dev decision that I fully support. But instead, this fully released game becomes more expensive over time, without any more content patches to the base game. The devs ask you to pay more for an aging game that has not changed since it was released, while there are better successors on the market.

The army that defends this are, of course, 99% people who bought the game for the old price or even less than that.