Recent reviews by Deathifier

An interesting mix of player-centric game play from earlier Starpoint games that is combined fairly decently with empire building and management along with fleet command.

The empire building is quite nice and some of the equipment that you can produce greatly enhances the capabilities of your own ship, eventually turning it into a powerhouse.

The fleet command aspect is somewhat mixed as the ships that are part of your own fleet are tricky to effectively manage. However as general support ships they do come in useful and, particularly for some specific encounters, having a sizeable fleet is quite useful to keep attention off your personal ship.

The original campaign I found to be quite well done if a bit slow in the later stages.
As for the various DLC:
- Deadly Dozen adds additional bounties and some very difficult fights with nice rewards.
- Titans Return adds titans and a fairly neat yet compact storyline to follow, eventually giving you access to Titan class ships of considerable power.
- Cycle of Warfare adds a range of additional sandbox starts and I particularly liked the A'shriari and Pirate challenge campaigns.
- Rise of Numibia adds more sandbox starts and some new ships, decent enough for a change of scenery due to the different map however little change to how the game plays out generally.
- Endpoint is its own campaign with some new ships. The campaign has its moments yet also seems to be lacking refinement. If you do play through it I suggest going through the entire campaign first, before exploring the map, as I ran into an issue where the campaign wanted me to visit a jail that I had already cleared and the campaign promptly broke. This is avoidable if you don't clear the jail before the campaign sends you to it, and the campaign then continues on to completion.

Overall I enjoyed Starpoint Gemini Warlords and its DLC and I recommend it to anyone looking for a game that combines action-oriented space flight, empire building, and fleet management.

Just Cause 4, particularly after the DLC and updates since release, is a decent entry in the series but one that is a bit of a mixed bag.

The sandbox still shines strongly with a wide variety of environments along with plenty of vehicles, weapons, upgrades, and tools in general with which to cause chaos, mayhem, and set up (or escape from) absurd situations.

The story is mixed, with a confusing start to the plot and a clunky army management system that has you taking over regions rather than specific targets within each region. This simultaneously streamlines progression (as you typically deal with only one primarily mission per region), but also often makes it feel like your actions are somewhat detached from what is portrayed as a large scale conflict.

This is often compared to the mechanic of taking over individual locations in previous Just Cause games. I found that both approaches work out fine in the end and the main loss is of the mechanic that lets a location be reset and thus used to get a substantive fight going. Without this it can be hard to cause a good fight, particularly after the entire map is under your control.

On the plus side, almost all the destructible structures are rebuilt when a game is loaded so there is rarely a shortage of things to destroy. That said, once you take over an area the structures still award points when destroyed and this creates a contrived situation where you are rewarded for blowing up your own stuff.

Still, the story has its highs and lows along the way and does come to a neat conclusion whilst granting you access to some potent weather-altering tools that, unfortunately, are hard to put to good use in the sandbox due to their fixed start points and slow movement. What could have been a truly awesome contribution to the series instead ends up hidden away (they don’t even show on the map for some reason) and hard to use.

The side-missions and tasks do a better job of telling a tale, are typically fairly easy, and have some fun toys as rewards.

I found most of the side-challenges fairly easy. The wingsuit challenges for example are much simpler than Just Cause 3. There is also free goal-oriented content that has been added post-release in the form of general challenges. The Solis Pro Tour in particular was one I quite liked as it was a rare time I felt the game actually challenged your creative use of the tools you have available, with precisely flying a monster truck up the side of a skyscraper being one of the more memorable moments.

The DLC is also a mixed bag.

Dare Devils of Destruction was interesting, had a reasonable difficulty (when considering earning all the rewards) and has nifty rewards (like vehicle mounted wind cannons) that give you more options for fun in the sandbox.

Los Demonios was just odd and, I felt, unreasonably difficult and arbitrarily constrictive as most of the tools and toys you have earned simply can’t be used, and it was highly repetitive. The rewards, whilst in theory good for causing multi-party fights, have yet to live up to my expectations.

Danger Rising has a decent story and progresses the overall story of the series. The hoverboard is really cool, the new weapons are decent, the locations are a guaranteed place to go for a fight even after clearing, and the enemies are fun and different to deal with. The missions are somewhat repetitive though.

The rest of the DLC (as of this review) just adds new toys to play with and even though I do not have every single DLC, I have enough (and enough past experience with the series) to be able to say that they are a nice but certainly not necessary to enjoy the game.

Overall if you enjoy the Just Cause series, or you just like sandbox-style environments that let you send tanks (and anything else not bolted down) to space, play barely controlled bowling with monster rocks, hijack the artillery on a hostile train to bombard random targets with, perform acrobatics in a cargo jet loaded with exotic cars (note: no guarantee the cars will survive, particularly if you leave the door open), and/or like a game that is somewhat lenient so that when you forget that your giant transport boat is in fact, giant, and dropping it at the docks has just resulted in the destruction of said docks (and your boat) whilst leaving you barely alive, then Just Cause 4 is worth looking at.

A surprisingly well polished experience that is great fun to play cooperatively with others.

Update for 2023: The ongoing updates continue to be impressive, particularly considering the age of the game.

Update for 2021: Another impressive year of new features and improvements. I found the expeditions to be quite interesting and at times a bit challenging, and the rewards from them are quite helpful both in the expeditions and in normal play.

Original review: I pre-ordered No Man's Sky over two years ago and have been following it through the various updates and enhancements since.

I'm pleased to be able to honestly state that the game has become an interesting, engaging, and entertaining experience.

Whether it is exploring the innumerable, and highly variable, worlds, building bases on land, sea, and in space, forming a space fleet and having it assist (albeit limitedly) in space combat, or seeking out resources and upgrades for your equipment and vehicles - there is now a wide variety of activities to take part in.

Still, not every activity has great depth and over many hours various aspects of the game can become repetitive and boring. Thankfully the mechanics for advancement (e.g. upgrades) alleviate some of this so that you can focus on what you enjoy.

It is also great to see Hello Games continuing to support their product and I look forward to seeing where they take the game in the future.

A Global strategy game that gives the player control over many facets of the country they choose to play as.

The various campaigns and scenarios provide an interesting goal-driven experience and a few "what if" situations covering various actual and hypothetical conflicts.

The sandboxes each have a wide array of customisable settings and an immense selection of countries to play as - from the largest world power, to smallest having little more than a single city.

Once in control of your country you have full control over just about everything. Land, Air, and Naval forces are present letting you conduct everything from static-front wars of attrition to amphibious assaults, bombing campaigns, artillery duels, and more.

On the economic front you have budget choices, goods production, goods import / export, military production, research, and more to manage directly or step back and assign some (or all) of the responsibilities to the generally useful AI assistants.

Diplomacy is a bit of a weak point as whilst alliances and spheres (essentially large alliances) exist, as do various pacts, nothing really binds the player to a given path of action nor is the AI required to act in response to the pacts being invoked (e.g. if someone declares war on your, your allies may not do anything and similarly, if someone declares war on your allies you don't have to do anything). There are penalties for inaction however they do not have much of an impact outside of diplomacy.

The ultimate version of Supreme Ruler builds on years of development of previous editions (2020, Cold War, 1936) resulting in an extensive tech tree, unit selection (including country specific and generic units) and maps that reflect fairly well the state of development of the world at their given points in time. This allows you to play fairly far in to the future regardless of when you start.

There still remain some rough edges however the developers have shown a long term commitment to providing updates, fixes, and minor improvements as well as an interest in using the ultimate version as a platform for building future editions on, such as the Great War standalone / DLC product.

Finally whilst the military and country development aspects are fairly easy to understand the economic side can be somewhat obscure even on the medium (normal) difficulty.
I recommend anyone who experiences frustration with the economics impeding your desire to blow things up to turn the economic difficulty down one step at a time until you find a nice balance between needing to consider economic development and its impact on your plans and not having the economy hold you back.

Avadon is from a studio that has spent years refining their specific style of RPG that is heavily focussed on story and game play rather than fancy graphics.

The game will appeal to those who like to immerse themselves in a well-developed plot with multiple side-quests along with choices that have a variety of short and long term impacts on your character and the game world.

FTL is a game that pits you against a very hostile universe.
During your (likely to be attempted repeatedly) journey your ship and its valiant crew will face disaster after disaster punctuated by brief rests and the occasional period of near-invulnerability.

All along you'll be enjoying the nail-biting ride as you endeavour to keep the ship is sufficiently good condition to carry on with badly injured crew, breaches in the hull, and pesky fires, whilst your pilot attempts to drive intruders out of the cockpit and others try to bring the oxygen system, weapons and shields back online.

Overall if you don't mind setbacks and outright losing due to your mistakes (the universe is not very forgiving of those) and sometimes a little too much bad luck, then FTL is actually quite a lot of fun!

Lead nations both large and small through hundreds of years of development.
With so many concepts and nuances to learn it can take some time to really get in to it.

However once you're up to speed there is great fun to be had in ruling mighty nations, waging massive wars, colonising the new world, fighting off Nomadic hordes or surviving as an Asian empire or American tribe.

Getting the expansions and DLC is highly recommended for the best experience.

If you like flying around in space mixed with strategy, planning, and a flexible approach to tackling any given situation, the X series is worth a look.