Recent reviews by Entity325

The game has plenty of polish and looks nice. Performance is good, and bugs are few if not nonexistent.

The game isn't fun. There's no sense of accomplishment, it's just a lot of waiting. Waiting to unload resources from the rocket, waiting to acquire resources for a new build, waiting for research to unlock a new technology, waiting for the sun to set, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for a rover to arrive at a destination, waiting for a scan to complete, waiting for a rocket to arrive, waiting for a child to be born, waiting for a child to grow up, waiting for a colonist to grow old and die.

The game wants to be a city sim like Cities: Skylines, but there's not enough focus on infrastructure for that. You can lay out your domes and they'll be more or less self-sufficient while you direct the robots to gather more resources to support the colonists. Maybe you'll move a colonist from one dome to another for minor bonuses, but ultimately there's very little to do in the realm of a city simulator.

The game also wants to be a colony simulator, like Rimworld, but it lacks anything approaching the kind of depth required to do something like that. There are a handfull of mechanics and most of them don't really interact with each other. You won't find any of the chaotic stories and developments that make colony simulators appealing, just a bunch of moving robots and resources from place to place, and slowly unlocking more robots to move and more places to put them.

The "tech tree" isn't a tree so much as a 5-lane road and you get to pick which lane is advancing at an ever slower pace. The world map is a sandbox ringed by impassable mountain ranges. Points of interest and resources on the map take only a handful of potential forms, and it won't take long before you've seen all of them. I think I found the same long-lost probe 6 times on a single map.

If you just want an activity to do, it's not terrible. The game isn't bad by any means, but there's no excitement or sense of accomplishment to be found, no puzzles to really make you work your brain, just a lot of waiting for things to happen.

It's like the least interesting parts of Gang Beasts and Little Big Planet mixed together, with terrible pacing and a fist full of Valium. I got the game for free and I still feel like I paid too much.

It's a good game, very atmospheric, and I personally bought most of the copies that my friends have, but the developers have taken a stance that you don't own the game you purchased from them. I will not be supporting this developer in the future.

For a free game, really good. The cooperative "escape room" aspect is a lot of fun. The only downside is that there's not much replay value, so going through the game a second time to see the other player's perspective is less interesting than it could have been.

For less than $3 US, you can soar at breakneck speed through gorgeous procedurally-generated worlds, careen around and through exciting and unique quasi-geological structures, and crash into them. If you ever wanted a game that gets all of the dynamics just right, this is the game for you.

Game looks fun, but I bought it to play with friends online, and the devs have made it clear that while they have teased online multiplayer multiple times, they are never going to add the feature. Returned the game.

This is the worst controller I gave ever laid hands on, and I hate it.

The haptics work, the analog stick feels better than most of the ones I have tried, saving configurations to the controller is convenient, and the fact that it works out of the box as an Xbox controller for any game with full controller support is nice.

The whole point of the dual trackpads was versatility and customizability, however the controller has neither. Configurations can only be tweaked through Steam's Living Room mode, and who ever used that? The trackpads can be configured to use a "button" or "directional pad" mapping, but in practice, can only be mapped to mouse or keyboard commands, which is worthless for most gaming needs. I want to reconfigure my gamepad settings. If I wanted to use mouse or keyboard commands, I already have a far superior set of peripherals for those purposes.

Additionally, while I will admit that I am unconventional in preferring the PlayStation button layout to the Xbox, he layout on the Steam controller is the worst of both worlds, with your hands stretching to reach the most often used controls, and shoulder buttons running together confusingly so that you have to think about whether you're pulling the right bumper or right trigger.

Finally, there is no documentation of use. The setup guide tells you everything you already know: plug in the dongle, turn the controller on by pressing the "steam" button. The controller actually can be paired with additional dongles, but the only reason I know this is because Valve sells them separately. this functionality is not documented anywhere in the instructional materials, not the configuration utilities.

Ultimately, the Steam controller is an overall vastly inferior experience to using an Xbox or Playstation controller running on 3rd-party drivers (when necessary), both of which are also more ergonomic, and what your software will be expecting to take orders from anyway.

Good presentation is better than fancy graphics.
Great writing is better than abundant voice work.
Solid focus is better than massive budget.
12 is better than 6.

"A remake of The Incredible Machine? Aw man, I always wanted to play that when I was young!"

In short, Contraption Maker is a puzzle game about making Rube Goldberg-type machines to solve some sort of problem. Put the basketball in the box, get the tool guy home safely, feed the dog, break the lamp, fire the rocket. Simple enough, right?

Well, it falls into one of the problems you typically run into when making a sandbox puzzle game: Each puzzle typically has either one blindingly obvious solution, because all of the other possibilities have been prevented at great effort, or it has several solutions, each more convoluted than the last, and the player is likely to come up with a solution which is radically different from what the puzzle designer intended. Often a solution which doesn't resemble the intended one, and which typically doesn't use most of the parts made available, or which exploits something the designers never considered.

All fine and good, right? The whole point of games like this is to come up with a creative solution. The game even includes a video recording feature so that you can make a video of your favorite solutions and upload them to Youtube.

Well, except that sometimes the "solution" is not entirely clear, and because of this, the player may end up spending time solving the puzzle only to find out that what they thought was a "solved" state is... not? And there aren't any hints of any sort available in-game to help guide players towards the expected goal.

I play puzzle games for the sense of accomplishment I get when I figure something out. Or to learn new tricks when I'm forced to give up and check what the "official" solution was supposed to be. After completing most of the puzzles in this game, I never once got that sense of satisfaction. I always felt like I was fighting against the puzzle designers, not figuring things out on my own, and as a result I found myself more and more prone to using cheap tricks and underhanded techniques to bypass what the puzzle designer no doubt thought would be clever contraptions. I viewed playing the game as less "What's the next puzzle I get to solve?" and more "Well, I paid the money for it, I should probably finish it."

Finally, of course, I mentioned inexact objectives and that I only finished most of the levels? Well I ran into one level in particular which stated a fairly simple goal(put a pair of jack-o-lanterns in a cardboard box), but upon completing the objective, I found that the simulation continued running, refusing to give me credit for solving the puzzle. There's also one puzzle I was only able to solve using a glitch in the physics engine, and consiquentially my solution worked exactly once and was not reproducible(since each simulation run is subject to some randomness). I've come to expect a higher level of quality from the free puzzle games I play, let alone the ones that I'm willing to lay down cash for. Physics glitches should never be valid solutions.

Also one of the songs sounds like an old west saloon remix of Maralyn Manson's "The Beautiful People," which I thought was hilarious.

[edit]As of April, 2019, this game collects and transmits user data to a 3rd party data collection service, regardless of user consent and even if the user has expressly denied consent, in direct violation of EU law (the developer is located in Prague). They have made aware that we know this, and have refused to take action to comply with the laws which their jurisdiction is subject to.
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Backwards development plan, no organization, design systems which barely work, and a tendency to fix symptoms rather than problems. The ideal of a "realistic space simulation" is lofty enough, but several quirks will quickly show that those are just words with no meaning. When legitimate objections are voiced, the response is to silence dissenters, rather than address problems.

The update schedule ensures that new features are pushed out well before they're ready and take a few more update cycles before they're stable, and the developers focus on visible updates and changes over a solid code foundation. Band-aid fixes are used which break integral portions of the game in lieu of properly tuning the underlying parameters, and features are even introduced with no consideration as to how they affect gameplay.

I have been sceptical of early access for some time now, but it was this game which finally ruined it for me. Thanks to Space Engineers, I will never be purchasing another early access title again. There's a reason studios like this can't go through a legitimate publisher.