Recent reviews by alo

I owe it to this game for the many friends I've found and stayed in touch with for years and over a decade now, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this game in its current state.

Public server matchmaking, one of the "latest" major features added to it, has been infested with bot accounts that ruin this experience for any casual player, whether through blatant aimbot hacks, chat spam, mic spam, by ejecting you out of a match with votekicks, or by everything of what was mentioned above.

Valve have been neglecting the severity of this issue for years, despite still frequently adding cosmetic items to their in-game store, thus profiting from the game as a product. And even though community servers are still there, available in the server browser like they have been long before matchmaking was implemented, I do not want to spend my time looking for such server, just to have a quick 30-minute quick match to entertain myself. Not to mention any of the potential issues that could come from community servers in forms of gigabytes of content being required to download at awfully low speed, dealing with community elitism or moderators with superiority complex, or abundance of confusing plugins filling the screen. But this isn't about community servers right now, I just wanted to quickly get into a game, and start playing, just like the game offers me to do in their own main menu.

Team Fortress 2 was what could have been considered a classic for its genre, and the matchmaking, while not perfect in practice (team imbalances etc), was still enough to scratch the itch for a quick fun game with people of varying skill degrees and backgrounds. Sure, Valve doesn't owe me or anybody else their time to deal with this problem (although highly debatable, since people are still buying and trading items on the regular, including the marketplace), there is a massive playerbase who's been begging, pleading for them to permanently deal with the ongoing bot crisis in their beloved game.

"TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things."

Valve said this in their official TF2 Twitter statement on May 27, 2022.[x.com] It has been two years since then, and whatever they've done has only temporarily stifled bot activity, for a very short time.

Dedicated fans will know that Valve are not a company of many words, but if those are going to be their last words towards the public plea to take action against what could be considered a rampantly increasing artificial plague within their own product, then I have no other option but to leave a negative recommendation and move on.

https://save.tf/

Gridless and goofy building puzzle sandbox.

Some folks call it a mix between Besiege and Human Fall Flat, and I agree - it's a really fun combination (if you enjoy building of course).
It's got a lot of solid "story mode" puzzles to solve, and solutions for those are technically endless.

If you don't like puzzle missions, then there's a sandbox to explore just as well, and a lot of folks have been building crazy things with it so far. Takes me back to the old days of vanilla Garry's Mod.

Visually very minimalistic (lowpoly graphics), not only as an optimization feature, but also for the sake of building simplicity. More focus on the quality of the functional features that way.

The soundtrack is medieval lo-fi, which is not just fitting for this genre of the game, but an absolute bop to listen to even outside of playing the game.

Awesome and really friendly developers who openly chat with players on their Discord, whether small talk, feature suggestions, answering questions, or just rating your builds. Absolute chads, and IRL engineers themselves.

Definitely worth the price, even during Early Access because this game is a work of passion.