Recent reviews by Cirius

Silly. Incoherent. Nonsensical. 11/10

It's like Disney meets Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing. I'm not particularly a big Disney fan, but I know plenty of the characters and stories, plus I really enjoy games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley.

With 80 hours at the time of writing, it's safe to assume I've enjoyed this game even in its early access state.
There are plenty of bugs, but nothing game breaking. The bugs I've encountered are more minor inconveniences than anything. I expect these bugs will be ironed out soon; the devs seem rather proactive about bugs.

If you like games like Stardew Valley, absolutely pick up Littlewood.
My first time playing this game went roughly like so:
- Start game, make player character
- Suddenly it's 5AM holy crap better sleep!
It's cute. The gameplay is fun. It does get a little grindy after a bit, but doesn't every farming/life sim game?
The game has incredible charm. I love the minimalist style of the graphics.
I only wish I could use the mouse in build mode to place things rather than relying on the keyboard... Although I opted to play with my Xbox One controller anyway. lol

Since its rocky launch in August 2016, No Man's Sky has changed very drastically. In the beginning, there was very, very little to do. There was no narrative to speak of, except the tidbits of lore given by ruins, the Atlas, and Nada and Polo. Now, there is an actual story and narrative. There are many, many more biomes - interesting ones - to discover and explore. Crafting, base building, freighters, and ships have all been evolving since the beginning.

If you were ever considering No Man's Sky but didn't want to take the jump due to negative reviews or the lack of promised content, now is a great time to take the jump. I would still recommend waiting for a sale if you're on the fence. At 50% or more off, the game is well worth its price. (That being said, I'm happy with my $60 purchase - I got my money's worth before the first content update.)

I was looking forward to this game for many, many months following its announcement. The time I did spend playing Pixel Piracy, I really enjoyed it. So I thought, hey, the same sort of thing in space? Sounds great to me! Pixel Privateers is half of what Pixel Piracy was, while also being a lot more. In fact, Pixel Privateers is so much more than Pixel Piracy that it is actually bad for the game in my opinion.

Simply put, Pixel Privateers is basically Pixel Piracy in space with a 20x multiplier on the "what's going on" factor.


Pixel Privateers requires a massive amount of micromanagement due to the lack of any automation. Crew members do not attack anything automatically, requiring the player to right-click on every enemy to attack. Skills must be used manually, which is impractical for a few reasons.

I played Pixel Privateers only with my girlfriend, with four crew members each. This means a total of eight characters milling around, making it difficult to tell who is doing what and where at any given moment. Even when I had two crew members and she had three, it was difficult to sort through our crew members for our own characters. When in combat, it is especially difficult to see through the pixels flying. Next think we know, we're just sitting there doing nothing while being pummelled by enemies because we can't tell who is attacking what. With no auto-attack, this becomes frustrating and irritating quickly.

Because of the difficulty of telling what's going on or where our characters are, it can be difficult to select just one specific crew member to tell it to attack a specific target.


There are also some things that are left unexplained. In the science lab, there are icons for each class next to some of the tech (I don't remember what it's called). But then there are other strange icons which are not explained. Some look like guns, some look like toolboxes, some look like... I don't even know what... But none of these extra icons are explained.

The extensive tutorial is great, but it is a lot of reading. I personally can't stand long-winded tutorials. It probably took a half hour just for reading in the tutorial. The end of the tutorial was also confusing. I finished the advanced training, and the game told me I finished the tutorial. So when I clicked Main Menu to go back to the main menu to check out how the multiplayer works (more on that shortly), it told me I was leaving the tutorial and something else that I didn't quite get to read before I hit yes/ok. I loaded my save again to see if anything was lost, and I was greeted with a questionnaire similar to the one from Pixel Piracy. Everything was fine, but the message that popped up before I went back to the main menu lead me to believe I had lost all of my progress from the tutorial.


Now the multiplayer woes. The process of playing multiplayer is not very intuitive. It was not apparent (to me, anyway) that you had to be in-game (not at the main menu) for a friend to join you. There is no "host" button anywhere. My girlfriend and I spent a good 10 or 15 minutes trying to figure out why she couldn't join my game while I was playing.

It turns out, the "friends, invite only" online mode simply doesn't work. There is no way to invite a friend to play with you. Using the Steam overlay, or accessing the friends list from the main Steam interface, does not offer an "invite to game" option for friends, so the "invite only" mode is utterly pointless. Even if I set the online mode to the friends option that's not invite only, I don't have the option to invite a friend to the game until someone joins my game from the Multiplayer section of the main menu. Again, the invite function is utterly pointless as it doesn't exist until someone is in your game.


My girlfriend and I ultimately ended up requesting a refund for the game. I really wanted to enjoy this game, but I simply cannot. We spent the majority of our time with the game managing our inventories, selling/destroying items, training crew, messing about in the science lab, trying to figure out this that and the other thing... Basically everything except actually playing the game. Perhaps we'll check it out again in the future after it has had some updates and polish, but for now, our collective $24 could be spent better elsewhere.

WorldCreator is an okay tool. It has some issues which make it very difficult to use. The biggest problem is it's quite crash-prone. For seemingly no reason, the program will crash, and your work is lost.

The image overlay also cannot be made transparent. You can't see your isolines through the overlay image. There is no shortcut for toggling overlay image visibility; you are forced to move your mouse to the menus and select "hide" or "show."

WorldCreator is quite clunky. It's often difficult to tell if the render is even working. When you click generate, the progress bar may remain blank and it will appear as though nothing is happening for varying periods of time dependent upon the map size, isolines, post-processing operations, etc.

Generally speaking, I don't recommend WorldCreator. There is a better alternative - WorldMachine. It is not on Steam, but it is a superior product overall. I have never had it crash, even when working with a lot of different operators and a large resolution heightmap.

ARK: Survival Evolved does many things right, and a few things wrong. This is an early access game, however. Therefore you should expect some of these points to change or improve with time.

ARK has great graphics at the cost of a very severe framerate decrease. Don't expect to get great visuals in this game with a decent framerate even if your rig can run other intensive games at high or even ultra settings. I can run The Witcher 3 at all the highest settings except Hairworks, and still my FPS tanks in ARK with the highest settings.

ARK has a "resolution scale" slider; what this does is it scales the render resolution up or down. What this means is, even if you run the game at a 1920x1080 resolution, it will render an image at a lower resolution than that if you drag the slider down. Obviously, a lower render resolution will increase performance at the cost of visual fidelity. There will be a lot of aliasing, even with AA set to epic. When using a low resolution scale, don't expect to be able to use your map very well at all even with all of your other settings at maximum.

The controls of ARK aren't bad. I haven't found myself fussing with the controls at all so far. The biggest fus has been getting a stable framerate, which is not going to happen until optimizations are put into place.

The controls are all customizable to your likings, but they are all displayed in one enormous section under options. There is not a dedicated controls screen, so the options screen is extremely cluttered and may be difficult to look at for some.

Here we go, the hardest part of the game. The game is not very well optimized at this point. Even with the lowest settings, many players will and are experiencing poor performance even on high end rigs. So far, the biggest step to getting a stable, decent framerate is setting resolution scale as low as possible!

For seemingly no reason, the game will hang, sometimes multiple times in quick succession. I find this happens most during high-action scenarios such as trying to get away from a raging carbonemys after I hit it with a slingshot, brandishing my spear back at it occasionally to stave it off. Hanging also appears to occur more frequently in multiplayer.

The ARK Dev Kit on Steam is a lie. Do not trust it. Installing it through Steam will force you to download nearly 40 gigabytes of data just for a pair of batch files that open a webpage on how to install the dev kit through the Epic Games Launcher. I'll save you the time, bandwidth, HDD/SSD/SSHD space, and frustration: PlayArk.com Workshop Instructions[www.playark.com]

If you don't mind early access...
... then by all means, go ahead! The game is enjoyable and challenging. If you enjoy The Forest or other open world survival games, you should enjoy ARK. There will be bugs, as is to be expected of Early Access titles. Optimizations, fixes and improvements will come!

If you don't want the hassle of early access...
... then avoid this like the plague until it is released! Keep an eye on the game and get it when it's out of early access!

Funtime Stupid Review:
At last, I can fulfill my lifelong dream of riding a skateboard on my journey to become toast. My crust grows moist with pleasure!

Srstime Review:
This is so stupid. It's even more stupid than Goat Simulator. But you know what? I personally believe gaming needs these kinds of games. They're fresh, interesting as hell, and super fun. Not to mention, stupid funny. Surgeon Simulator is built to challenge your (virtual) hand-eye coordination and dexterity with a keyboard and mouse. I Am Bread takes this a mile further.

It's very challenging to control the bread at first. As you play more nad more, it begins to become second nature, much like controlling the fingers on Surgeon Simulator. I Am Bread challenges your coordination in order to take control of the slice of bread.

I haven't tried this game with a gamepad, but I imagine it would be a bit easier with a gamepad. The keyboard and mosue work fine, but it is a great challenge at first. For users who are not as used to using a keyboard and mouse as dedicated PC users and veteran PC gamers, this game would be even more challenging to get the hang of.


I Am Bread is challenging, stupid, and fun. That's what gaming needs, in my opinion. The creative freedom of games like Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread is a much needed breath of fresh air and an enjoyable step away from super serious titles like Assassin's Creed, Borderlands, and other really serious titles.

If I were to describe Lichdom: Battle made in one word, it would be "interesting."

Lichdom: Battlemage is unlike any other game I've played. No other game I've played with a mage gives the mage such tremendous power. I love RPGs, and I love Skyrim, but none of the RPGs I've played really give the mage much to work with. Yeah, you have many spells on Skyrim to play with. But you can't do anything interesting as a mage, really, so I don't tend to use magic at all.

Overall, I think Lichdom: Battlemage is a really interesting experience to which not many games can be compared. It isn't so much that this game is "better" than others; it's more that this game is interesting and different in its own rite.


This game puts your mage in the ultimate seat of power. There is no real penalty for death, that I can tell. You are free to do as you please, mostly. See a ledge? Wonder what's at the bottom? Jump off and see! If you die, you just respawn with no penalty.

The game really does reward exploration quite well. There are various areas throughout that your "spirit eagle" would have you miss. So don't just blindly follow where the game tells you to go! Explore the path less traveled and you might find yourself quickly gathering strong and/or rare components for spell crafting.

The crafting system is also interesting. I started the game twice. The first time, I didn't touch the "Custom Inventory" and just stuck with the "Smart Inventory" as I just wanted to play the game and see what it was like. I stopped after I completed the first mission. The second time, however, I jumped into the Custom Inventory as soon as I could to see what I could do with it. I soon found myself trying every possible combination of components and spells to see what I could craft. The crafting system alone adds a whole new level of depth to the game, and it is quite enjoyable. It's a bit of a learning curve, though, so be prepared.


The controls might be a bit difficult to get used to. At first, you might not realize you can't jump. I found myself trying to jump and crouch as soon as I was able to move around, but found I could not. But don't worry, the spacebar allows you to zip forward in space a little. This becomes a bit difficult as you try out different shield types. Timing is very easy to mess up with the jump.

Spellcasting feels a little slow at times. When you tap your mouse button to cast a fireball, you don't expect it to charge up a little bit before casting, you expect it to just do it. You quickly learn this is not the case, and learn to lead your shots. Missile shots appear to home in on targets, though, so it isn't that big a deal unless the target moved behind an obstacle and obstructed the path.

The tutorial videos showcase various abilities as you go along, and some of them use spells that you don't have. An early example is the use of the ice sigil, which showcases an ice missile spell which you don't receive when you unlock the ice sigil. Instead, you receive an ice "ray" spell, which you must continuously cast similar to the frost and flame spells from Skyrim. These spells you have to craft in order to use.


This game is very interesting. It's made more for "guts and glory" than anything else. You're given such a badass mage role so you can finally tear things up as a mage instead of swinging around your weapons wildly. Have fun with your spells. Throw fireballs all over the place and see what happens. You might be surprised! I certainly was when I realized you could burn the grass. :)

Worth the money. It's so stupid and so silly, you have to at least give it a shot. Seriously. Plus, the workshop is kind of a deal maker. Make your own content, download new fan-made content... It's great!

The goat is strong with this one.