Recent reviews by Lucabaduka

Definitely not my favourite game, but Kena absolutely has a number of S-tier ideas as far as world construction, theme ideas, and overall gameplay mechanics. It lands solidly within a positive recommendation from me, and I think everyone should try it. That said, I do have some disappointments and feedback about things that could have been done better, and aspects that were lacking.

The premise of the story is excellent: You’re basically a spiritual hazmat agent, sent to this dead town to recover the environment from the ill consequences of a disaster wrought by over-exploitation from humans. Kena has the same recognition as you do with the ruins of magical infrastructure that you need to interact with – unfamiliar but decipherable. You’re there to figure things out, and help or calm down what you can.

As far as the gameplay mechanics go, I really have no notes. Dodging, “bullet-time”, rot abilities, seamlessly transitioning from melee to ranged...it all handles really well, and that fluidity is the core of what keeps you interested. There are some specially designed challenge courses for how well you deal with all of these mechanics, and 100%ing all of them isn’t easy. This makes it feel like a real accomplishment if you can pull it off. You can have a go at these pretty much whenever you want, and use the cosmetic rewards as you move through the story, instead of some games which nonsensically require you to complete the game first.

The most pressing issue is probably optimisation. Kena is a beautiful game, being well-conceptualised with a distinct art style. It’s very pretty, but not the most impressive game I have. That’s not to say, “Oh I wish this were flashier or that had a higher resolution texture, etc”; it’s not about that. I have a variety of recently-released games that I run at their respective maximum graphics settings, but Kena is the only one where my computer’s fans start to sound like a jet taking off, and the temperature of the room notably increases. Other games can achieve the level of graphic effects that Kena has with fewer resources employed, because optimisation was important to them, and that clearly wasn’t the priority here.

My second critique is the intangible vibe of the art and animation. The environments are visually stunning, but the Disney-like art style of the characters rub me the wrong way because of how soulless and corporate that type of medium tends to be in. The representation of the rot, in particular, fits rather seamlessly into that model of Star Wars porgs -- specifically created and animated to best sell merch. And a cursory glance of the game developer’s website shows that they do indeed sell pins, models, and t-shirts of the rot. I’m a little more miffed about that than I am the game’s price point (which I think is fine), but it’s ultimately up to you how you feel about both.

The last note I’d give is similar to what others have said before: The world is kinda empty. This could be considered “working as intended” in that the whole town has been destroyed. Personally, however, in these types of environments, I’d rather be rewarded for exploration with lore and finding out about the people and their lives. Instead, Kena is a much truer console game, where the only reward is power-ups and shop-money, and any additional lore you’d get is done through the mailbox side quests, where you get a couple sentences at most.

It’s perplexing that there isn’t a more lore-heavy element since they’ve created these elaborate environments and it seems like they even have some degree of their own written conlang, but that’s where it both starts and ends. There’s nothing to read or discover. We learn very little about Kena, herself, aside that she’s from a slightly different culture with different traditions, and she uses her father’s spirit staff. She has no real insights, history, personality, or opinions aside from wanting to complete her mission, and this is disappointing because she is in the best position to tell us more about this world.

Still, the game remains unique, compelling, and a generally good time all around.

"Well I hope they don't want me to do *that*, because that would be copying a method instead of referencing a fi- oh they *do* want me to do that. That's...an unfortunate choice."

This game was pretty rough, but not for the reasons that the devs really *really* want it to be. One Dreamer is a game about a programmer who used to work for 25 hours a day on passion projects before the weight of capitalistic profiteering and vicious people on the internet reduced them to a broken, shell of a person, depressed, bunt out, and now disconnected from society. A state in which we are all presumably in at this point in history.

Maybe the biggest issue with this game is that the premise *is* rather relatable and reasonable, but the plot devices which have created the player character's circumstances are not.

You are someone who played an MMO as a kid and found that it was impactful, transformative, and offered social connections that you previously didn't have. You resolved to make a better game when that one shut down, even though people in your life said that programming was very silly. Alright, sounds reasonable. Not sure the timeline of "MMOs existing" intersects with "people think programming is a useless field", but let's continue.

It's implied the player character was abused as a child and your mother (who may or may not have been an accessory to that) is on death's door with some manner of degenerative illness or stroke. This doesn't advance the plot in any meaningful way; just thought you should know. Environmental storytelling says you sacrificed your time, money, education, friends and family, etc to pursue making a VR game.

There is a streamer who is doing a world record for most hours spent in VR, raising a million dollars to charity if he breaks the record. For God knows what reason, you decide that your early access alpha that you rushed together with minimal skills should be in the streamer's game lineup. It naturally crashes during the stream and this somehow causes the VR streamer to fail (even though switching games apparently didn't), and people start issuing you death threats. (What?)

Time goes on, you get swatted and fired from your job as a result (What?). You get doxxed and can no longer pickup freelance work contracts as a result (What?). You are now forced to eat nothing but ramen in your three-bedroom, two story house (What?).

That one is probably the most bothersome. There was a time in my life when I was living off of ramen, saltines, and peanut butter, but I also lived in a 240sqft studio in the basement of a poor building in a poor district of a big city. You're telling me this guy can't afford anything but rehydrated wheat, but he also has a place that would be $3,000 monthly rent, with Netflix? I don't really want to defend the cost-of-living price gouging that 2023 sees, but this really seems like a "spend less on candles" situation.

The narration seems to resolve itself by demonstrating that success in the games industry can be yours if you carry the endorsement of a YouTuber and your developer's father gives you a small loan of a million dollars. I mean, "lots of work" is definitely the primary idea, but with the aspect of "one of the developer's family is loaded and that's what got you through your darkest days", it's hard to figure out what exactly Aesop is trying to tell us here.

Regarding Gameplay:

A key component of the game's problem solving is that you can't change most variables to what they should be, directly. You need to find some object in the environment that contains a variable value which you can then copy and paste as a reference in the thing you want to adjust. This would be a maddening spaghetti practice in actual coding. It would be like going to your stovetop, seeing that you can't turn on the burners for some reason, so you build a wood fire on the top of the burner to cook your food in approximately the same location and with approximately similar methods but now with a lot more risk, liability, and weird dependencies. In gameplay terms, it basically means a lot of running back and forth to copy-paste a variable reference.

One Dreamer suffers a lot from its object arrangement and decision to be a two-dimensional side-scroller that uses depth for 3D space instead of height. This was pretty cumbersome, because the game is rife with areas where you only have a couple metres to walk forward before needing to transition a staircase, walk another two metres, and transition back to the same level for no real reason. The stairs are slow, often obstructed by objects overlayed on top of them, making it more frustrating to find when and how you needed to ascend or descend an area. Nearly all of my problems navigating through an area, failing to locate mandatory objective, or trying to find the exit could be attributed to this bizarre depth system.

The game is incredibly short, though it's unclear whether or not that's a blessing. You can clear this game in about four hours, 50% of which are cutscenes. The first of which is long, dramatic, and begins immediately. There are a few problems with games like this which take themselves very seriously. At ten seconds into the game, I don't know any of these characters and haven't been given a reason to care about them yet. So when there's intense, tragic, or inspirational music behind a bright white shock scene, trying to make me sad about a stranger dying, I'm just kinda irritated. The game thinks it's being genuinely profound with too much glow/bloom, looking for an emotional cashout for an investment that hasn't yet been made.

That Hallmark-brand, overly dramatic moment, was almost every single cutscene. Every single line of dialogue was overtly complaining that everyone these devs had ever talked to in their entire lives were negative, pessimistic, or randomly hostile. Even the voice acting was desperately retreading over the same pity-party.

After a certain point, you know, Jesus Christ? I know it's your literal only plot theme, but we've all done risky things in our lives. We've all encounter pessimists and we may be depressive, ourselves. But at some point, you've got to learn to cope and get something else going in your narration than playing the same note for hours upon hours.

It was an interesting game, but the above issues really took out any enjoyment I think I would have gotten from it. So my review is negative and, if any devs read it, hopefully they'll take some constructive element out from this feedback and not like a threat or emotional stab to the chest as they've exaggerated negative reviews to be, in-game.

When a $50 game going for $20 is enough to compete with the red flag of being 60% off, six months after release, you may be at an impasse of what to do. Not to fear, Gearbox has arrived to remind you that making a poor financial decision is always an option on the table.

Godfall is a weapon-porn simulator created by a California company where none of their 75 staff members ever stopped to ask if this was a good idea. You follow a character named Orrin, who leads a Vodyani-like civilization of people who only seem to exist in suits of armour and take on the characteristics of them. Your arch-nemesis is your bother and the narration is constantly floored that it has come to this.

It becomes increasingly clear that the people that came to work on this game from Destiny 2 were limited to the design and graphics staff, as characters’ one-dimensional lines perpetually embed a question of whether or not you’re playing a satire. Can the lines really be this bad? Surely it will pick up in the next dialogue!

Despite being the supreme military leader, you will never command your people in battle. Indeed, the entire war effort relies exclusively on your personal combat and resource-gathering prowess to sustain the faction. The function of your underlings is exclusively to cry at all hours how amazing it is to bask in your very presence, just in case staring at gleaming weapons wasn’t your kink after all.

Combat is interesting, and really it has to be because there’s nothing else holding this game together. The controls are a bit contrived and the commands seem sluggish to respond. I feel like a lot of games really focus the dodge tactic, a la Dark Souls, Hyper Light, etc. This one really focuses on blocking. Enemies always run faster than you and there’s an excellent chance that if you dodge laterally or diagonally, they will rotate with magical magnetic-gravity to whatever your position becomes, irrespective of physics. So, while dodging is a mechanic that exists, it’s unfeasible to use it most of the time.

This is similarly mirrored in weapons, of which a variety exist, though most are unfeasible to use. Each weapon type is accompanied by the same special attack, but they certainly aren’t all created equal. While dual swords are enjoyable to me in most games, in this one their special attacks do not passively charge, and only provide a grapple when it’s finally ready. Contrast this with a single sword type, which auto-charges two dash attacks, one of which has a four-auto-hit combo, or a polearm type where you can area-effect a ground slam. To use anything other than an effective weapon class would be self-sabotage, so why do they exist?

Levels are nonsensical and probably the biggest knife in the chest of this game. When you kill enemies, you recover weapons (or you buy them), those weapons have a damage and a rarity. At great expense, you can increase their rarity or improve their stats within the rarity to make them more effective. Weapons, no matter how improved, will always be rooted to the level you were when you bought or found them. Hold that thought for a moment.

You can play missions on low, medium, or hard difficulties. All this means is whether the enemies spawn slightly below your level (which they call the traditional experience (what?)), at your level, or slightly above your level. If you use a profoundly improved weapon, enemies at your level will be a cakewalk, but they will net you experience which will eventually make your weapon obsolete. At that point, you should just as well use almost anything you can find as a replacement.

In order to improve a weapon again, you’ll need money and resources, which you could gather in easy missions, but doing so will still increase your level and make more things obsolete. Like Oblivion, it’s really not in your interest to level up, as it results in power *regression* and not *progression* relative to everyone else. You cannot improve weapons as fast as they will become ineffective, so unless you’re heading out to do a one-off major thing, there’s really no point to investing in any item at all. Certainly don’t get attached to any weapons you find, you won’t be using them long and you can’t save their skins.

You can, indeed, change skins for your weapons and armour; however, 90% of the time, those skins are locked to areas that you only open up after beating the game. Meaning that if there is a look you quite like for your character or weapons, chances are you will need to play the entire game, without customisation, only to be able to use the skins for a few minutes after doing everything there was to do and turning the game off forever.

If the question is whether you should get this game for twenty bucks or a nice sandwich and dill spear,

My review is negative.

Sometimes I feel like people sit in high-backed chairs with tufted turtlenecks overlooking the countryside, full of aspirations and carcinogenic particulate. Tapping their Google Glass to close the W3 Schools landing page for C#, they loudly exclaim “I’m going to create art!” They set off to buy rights to twenty-five minutes of abstract inspirational orchestral tracks, and proceed towards the most powerful tool in their arsenal: The saturation slider.

Flower is a walking simulator, created in 2009 for the PlayStation 3 with the express purpose of campaigning for underground power lines in southern California. This game was then ported to four other platforms because why not get more money for the same code?

The problem is that the PC port did not seem to get quite as much attention as it should have. It took a half dozen tries (and waiting through 30 seconds of blinding and unskippable logos) to get anything more than “[Options] [Quit to Desktop]” after loading the game up, making me wonder if it were playable at all.

Entering the actual game, you are taken to a world in somewhat of a fisheye perspective with extremely jerky movement and limited control of your camera. You lose that control, entirely, whenever you do something that the game thinks is rather significant. This means that most of the opening level might as well be a straight up cinematic with the number of times control is lost for a wide shot. This decreases in later levels, although not by too much, and the last level is nearly as bad as the first.

The comment that the game is “relaxing” is also lost on me, as I typically think of the concept in games like this in terms of free exploration, few to no objectives, and mostly dealing with travel. In Flower, you need to activate flowers or other objectives (often times all of the available objects) to proceed to the next area. With the frustrating controls, you spend a lot of time just missing, spinning quickly, missing again, and it starts to become clear why people complain of motion sickness.

There’s nothing else you can do than chase after these items, because the playable area is quite narrow. There are limited places you can go except to your objectives, and often there’s a required path to get there. The last level is the closest thing to an open-ish area, and even then you are required to follow specific directional paths to get there, or go through great difficulty fighting the current to get where you want.

After a while, it’s not so much of a relaxing experience as it is completing required tasks that feel like required tasks. With an overly-intense orchestra track and long cinematic shots of mundane things, it is clear in no uncertain terms that you’re intended to see this game as being undeniably deep and artful. In such a world, it becomes all the more clear why satire products like The looker were made.

There is roughly 1.5 hours of content, possibly two if you spend time looking for the secret flowers. Although I’m keenly aware that the game is $8 CAD, I’m having trouble coming up with any answer about what the game’s real appeal is.

My review is negative.

Disclaimer: This isn't my usual content and you might not get much out of this post.

Hyperlight Drifter is the best game of 2016, and I don't actually know if that's the opinion that I had at the time or what sort of rankings I gave to games that year; but the longer it's been between then and now and the more time that I've had to stop and consider this game and all that it stands for, the more firmly I find myself aligning with that position. There aren't any words to this game, and there aren't any outright explanations of what's happening or how it's supposed to be significant to you or the character. Either you get it or you don't and there isn't a lot of middle ground. For the same reason, though, it also opens itself up to interpretation. This happens to be mine.

You are alone.
Not through any fault of character or the choices that you made in the past. You are alone because you made the mistake of living too long. Through conflict and violence that didn't need to happen, through something that took place without your consent. What remains of the world is a wreckage that you can walk, but one that doesn't support you anymore. And all of that is you. All of that is the ideas of the people that you were born into and a life you found yourself in. But all that remains are the ruins and artefacts from that past that now do more harm than good. You know that well.

You are the last.
There's a certain fortitude that you need when you know that you're the of last of your kind. The responsibility to, at least, uphold the parts of who you are that mean the world good, even if there's an internal and external conflict to wrestle with the parts that don't. Hyperlight follows the story of someone who needs to battle with the remnants of a devastating war and the weapons and creatures that resulted from it. The buildings are beautiful, the infrastructure is a technological marvel. Fighting your way through the monsters and rogue defences, your goal is to make it down to the superweapon that your people made, the same one that whose last use haunts your dreams, and destroy it so it can never be used again.

You have power.
The prevalence of the flashbacks to the last conflict, seeing the superweapon through your dreams again and again, nightmares about how the creature that inhabits it will destroy you, and spending your waking time walking through a world that has already been wrecked by those deepest fears. What use is it? It's already done. You lost. That's it. And there's no reason for anyone to fight against dual forces of entropy: the rest of your relics warring with the forces of nature that are here to reclaim them. It's a force that's stronger than any single person.

But you do. YOU gave YOURself the mission, because YOU still believe that you can make an impact. And you do. You have to fight against a world that explicitly does not want you in it anymore. And you do. And through all of work and for all of that struggle what reward is left for you in the end? That things are better now.
Because you were around.

Hyperlight Drifter is the best game of 2016. With an intuitive interface and a game play format that relies on your own personal ability and dexterity instead of value inflation level-based combat. The environments are superb, the soundtrack is superb, and the experience is worth replaying, even if you've already beaten it before.

My recommendation is positive.

This is a game that I have actually played or seen played, from sharing my library, four times now, so I've probably had long enough to think about it and, simultaneously, have no idea if I've had enough time yet. Is such a thing knowable? Life is Strange comes across as something that can't really be filed as good or bad, just something that is. Which is probably because there's so much diversity between the different chapters. Some of which I was amazed by and some of which I didn't care for at all. But I'm still interested in looking at the game as a whole while not spoiling it for someone thinking about buying it.

Life is Strange is kind of a third person mystery adventure game where you play as Max Caulfield, a socially awkward super-hipster, going to some kind of weird private secondary school in Oregon that you attend your senior year only, apparently. She discovers that she has a short-capacity time rewind power which serves as the base mechanic for the game.

After the first five minutes of semi-tutorial out of the way, the game basically plays as a three dimensional Choose Your Own Adventure book. You are occasionally confronted by large, epilepsy-inducing either/or prompts which mildly or markedly adjust the storyline from there on. Additionally, there are minor events along the way that very *slightly* adjust the story and your relationships which you can choose to participate in or not, depending on what your aim is. All of these actions add up and there are many different ways the story can go.

At few different places in the game, it definitely has the point-and-click genre's "Oh my god! I am completely thwarted by this exceptionally mundane situation. Let me find the one item hidden in this room that will help me take the laziest possible way out" trope that absolutely drives me up the wall. On the other hand, there is sometimes more than one way to complete a puzzle, or puzzles that need some innovative way to get through. Mostly, as long as you remind yourself that the game is centred around time rewind powers, you'll probably get through. Don't think about how objects can stay on your person through the time travel, or how it looks like you're teleporting to the outside observer or your brain will explode.

There's a lot of visual and atmospheric beauty to the game, both in terms of the presentation and tone, as well as things as simple as lighting and colour scheme. You'll find points at which your character can just sit and look around, admiring the scenery and looking for some kind of beauty in the environment, while you listen to the soundtrack and watch them contemplate what's going on in their life. There's such a good presentation of these moments, particularly when the episodes start, that it isn't immediately clear that it's not actually a cutscene, and you can get up any time you like. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned.

The episodes essentially go as follows:

Episode One: Well, that was fine. I guess I can get into this character.

Episode Two: That got a lot more interesting. Neat!

Episode Three: Every action that you make is wrong and you will be made to feel bad about it...Which is also my assessment of Fable III.

Episode Four: Welp, that got dark REAL fast.

Episode Five: Here are the assets of the Unreal Development Kit / The increasingly bad things that happen to Alyssa.

From those brief tag lines, you can kinda see how I feel about it. It starts extremely slow, then takes off in a hurry until the very last episode, which is mostly a bizarre LSD trip that goes on way too long. But I guess that's to help you get the authentic Oregon experience. Either way, you need to get through the end to make it to the final epilepsy prompt to conclude the game. Easily, you can play it twice and go with all of the other options that you didn't pick before and try to talk to different people to see if you can form different relationships and affect parts of the outcome. I'm not sure there's more than two good playthroughs, but there's about fifteen to twenty hours of content for each run, depending on how many journal entries you read and how many non-essential NPCs you talk to along the way. So two of those have an appropriate level of content, I think.

I would definitely recommend this game as an interesting story for absolutely any player and any level of dexterity or no dexterity at all can get you through. In the end, you may think about how different your relationships would be if certain events were changed, and those closest to you, for a brief moment, knew you only as a stranger. Would you still get along with them through intrinsic similarities? Or is it based on a culmination of fortunate events that have carried you to this point?

My recommendation is positive.

I really don't think that price point is the direction to go on a review about this content, nor do I agree with the strategy of solely talking about Paradox's DLC practices, nor do I agree with the strategy of just saying "crap" and voting it down, because I feel like this lures people into thinking that users are just bandwagoning and this content could actually be good.

It is truly not.

Ruler Designer is a DLC for CKII that allows you to design the traits and appearances of the first ruler that you select when starting a game. Like a good old RPG, you can adjust your desired characteristics with your trait points, which happen to be measured by age here. You start out at 16 and can select any traits, positive ones that cost years or negative ones that give some back, and end up with any combination you fancy, so long as it totals 50 years or less. You also have the option to set your family crest, which is useful if you play a character where you are not the top liege. You can also set your culture and religion if you would like to do something very unhistorical.

One downside is that this is obviously a custom character generator and, therefore, does not fit into Paradox's very strict set of circumstances to where you can earn achievements. But more importantly, it does not allow you to have an extended family. You can expend some points to have a wife and child, which are easy enough to come by in gameplay unless you are setting yourself past childbearing age. But still yet, if anything happens to you, the game ends. This is not the case in most situations normally. You typically have siblings or extended relatives who can take the throne if someone happens to assassinate you and your household; however, that's not the case here. Instead of simply replacing the character you selected and giving you their family, it inserts you into their territory as a new family since you are, yourself, a different person now.

Since I've personally seen two people, who are new to this game and received DLC as a part of a bundle, leap immediately into using this on their first game, I can't possibly recommend it. Without the ability to continue playing after you die, it adds a pointless amount of difficulty for players who don't know any better. Surely the odds of survival get better when you're more experienced, but when you're not, you could go decades without adding anyone to your family. And, unless you are playing one of those theoretical playthroughs that asks "how would Norse culture be treated in India?", I'm not sure what benefit it gives to more experienced players either. Best to just play the game normally with that goal in mind, so you can at least get the achievement.

My review is negative.

The is a game that I didn't actually intend to criticise or at least write a negative mark on. I didn't expect, after playing this game for free for some period of time, that I would get burned on its early access that I decided to donate to, yet now I'm writing about exactly that.

Starmade is the hotly anticipated sequel to the Minecraft Archimedes mod, developed by highly educated parakeets in the South of Germany. It's goal has been to take the Icarus or Artemis concepts of piloting your own starship and combine it with creative capacity of Minecraft, two (now five) years after voxelmania effectively died off. You had the ability to explore a multitude of worlds and what procedural, lifeless wasteland awaited being discovered (read: mined) and use those resources to make your own ship. Additionally, if you were not gifted in the field of starship design, you could simply download cool schematics made by the community and toss resources into them for a fast build, the trade-off is that they may appear as pirate ships as well. There were a few issues with this game when I first started playing it. So I'll do those first and make the obvious point that they're still broken.

The first issue that you'll likely notice is that travel is very slowly. Ships are equipped with sublight engines and can conveniently travel from a planet's surface to an area beyond its gravity well, since orbit isn't a thing, but that's about it. If you want to travel from planet to planet, it absolutely takes *ages*. There is no such thing as a warp drive, instead, there is a jump drive, allowing you to effectively teleport to the centre of the map grid coordinate of your choosing. The issue with this is that you still have to get around and maneuver with your sublight engines to do anything and there's a moderate chance that your turrets will detach or you will arrive at some weird pocket-dimension of space where you move forward a few hundred metres and are instantly teleported back to where you started. Objects will be seen near you, that do not appear on at those locations on the map, including whether or not the planet you jumped to is on your left or in front of you. These objects assume their correct locations at the moment you teleport back to the original jump landing, and remain correct until you begin to move again. This issue will remain until you go somewhere else and keep looking for landing locations without this bug.

The second issue is with planets. Like Minecraft, things in the game are not loaded until you are there, which is great because the game is horribly optimised. The issue is mostly related to encouraging them to *start* loading as, on approach only the planets' molten cores are able to be loaded. Sometimes even as you continue to approach and land. If you are, indeed, on or near the planet's surface when the real crust is loaded, and a block of land loads over your ship, it will propel your ship in random directions at the speed light, glitching all around you forever or until it lodges itself deep within the planet's crust. Depending on where or if it stops, which may well be within the planet's core, your ship could be permanently unreachable.

Another issue is the idea of scaling. What I've said about loading planets is also true of loading large ships. After you exceed a certain, honestly moderate, size, the game becomes unable to readily recognise what is in itself, which is an incredibly important aspect, given its mechanics. If you want your ship to move faster, simply add more thruster blocks. If you don't want it to drain power as fast, add more reactor blocks. Shields are near-useless if you don't have 1000 shield capacitor blocks and an additional 500 shield recharge blocks. All of these things have to go somewhere and end up making you half the size of a planet itself. And, honestly, this is okay because I like amazing capital ships that you and a small village can live on, Voyager-style, as you propel yourself through space, exploring. If the planets were a bit bigger, it would be fine in theory. But just like the Archimedes mod in Minecraft, the game is super glitchy even turning a large ship like that, let alone trying to manage traveling at sublight for ages until you get across the solar system, with the weird ghost objects-teleportation bug from earlier. The ships that the game can effectively run are about the same size you could afford in real life doing whatever it is that you do. Oh well, it's for the best considering that schematic you installed for the largest capital ship in the universe can be randomly spawned by pirates.

The strain on your computer's poor CPU is so obviously visible even if the game does not shut down under its own instability. And the most pressing reason this is an issue is that the game's theory is built on the idea that a successful Starmade adventure takes place with 500 of your closest friends who are out there mining the respawning asteroids, EVE Online style, all working to create and manage civilization. But even with the three players I tried it with and a server dedicated to doing games exactly like this one, it was entirely too much and needed to be reset every hour or so, else it would crash or be effectively unplayable due to lag. I cannot possibly conceive of what supercomputer would be needed to run a server like the theoretical one presented in the trailers, but I surely could not afford it.

The final major issue I consider is that... there's simply no one here. There's no one...anywhere. At least in No Man's Sky, there was at least one terrible alien somewhere. Shops are entirely automated after of TutorialMan, there is no wildlife on even temperate planets and the only thing you'll find on space stations, even hostile ones shooting you, are small mechanical spiders. Even the pirate ships that harass you *constantly* with settings that say they shouldn't exist at all, do not actually have anyone on them. I imagine, similarly to how it must look on your ship where you literally dive into your ship's one-block core, there's a core on the enemy ship and no obvious signs of life. The enemy ship will behave strangely while you're on it and not supposed to be there, and are immediately vanquished when you enter their ship's core, yourself. What a weird world this is.

So.
Naturally, I binged this game for 75ish hours, counting the ones in the free version, and I thought it was great. Not especially, but this was an early access that had such great potential and ideas waiting to be developed. They are...still...waiting to be developed. And not really so much in the Starforge Alpha sense, where it was effectively abandoned, idling for years before being published as-is with all of its features missing. Development on Starmade is still occuring. It's occurring the same way that South America is still drifting away from Africa, with each month bringing essential nothing of note.

I bought this game on December 9th, 2014, exactly twelve days after it came out on Steam and over three years ago, now. And even though things like Starbound and Rimworld have demonstrative proof that not all early access games will fill you with dread and regret in the end, I will surely never again buy a game in this manner.

My review is negative.

This is probably the least popular Spiderweb game that exists, after Avadon, a reputation that seems very strange and ill-deserved to me. But poll after poll, this game consistently rates as not only the worst of the Geneforges, but also one of the worst of all SW games. So, here is a block of text about why that seems very silly to me.

Geneforge 3 takes place a few years after the sequel where again, one of the many possible endings for the last game was selected as canon and the effects of that sparked the begining of a powerful splinter cell of separatists that begin the game by attacking your school. It's up to you and your half-baked training to find companions (or not, I'm not your supervisor) and make your way through the Ashen Isles, choosing to help the Shapers or work to destroy them as you gain more of their power to create and destroy.

This summary also effectively encompasses why this game was so unpopular, because although the choices you make are all your own, you essentially have the run of two possible routes and follow a moderately linear path along them. Among Spiderweb games, this is outrageous. Not only for the Geneforge series, but even the Avernum series features a wide, sprawling selection of factions and individual choices you can make along the way which will affect the ending. To move from such wide freedom to something that feels more like it's on rails is something I can understand and relate to at a certain level.

My rebuttal of that idea is a subtle reminder that it's still a Spiderweb Geneforge game. It is still a gorgeous piece of storytelling in the Geneforge universe with a variety of interesting ideas on a topic and characters in a theme that I'm personally dedicated to and fascinated by. As linear as it might be and as dated as it might be, creative, original stories don't get old. For that reason, I still find that it plays the same as it did when it was released- and entire level of depth and role playing greater than any competitor, most especially at it's current and, frankly, underserved price point of $4 within the Geneforge Saga bundle on Steam.

It's not easy to make a game more visually appealing to a new audience that would have otherwise been turned off by the classic art style while also not annoying oldbie players that would find the new version too alien and hipster. And almost every long running game series I can readily think of goes through this awkward phase at some point. For Geneforge, it is surely this game. The new graphics do not sit well with me personally, and I made that known at the time it released. However, on looking back, I realise that it was a necessary step to bring a more semi-modern style and interface that four and five would later have perfected. So, in a way, I've come to be more tolerant of it. I also recognise that I'm a bit of an outlier and, if you've made it this far in the series, the changes would likely be very welcome to you.

It's a game that I've already replayed once on Steam and, obviously, one that I feel strongly enough to write an uncharacteristically positive review on eight years after the first time I played it (oh my god, I'm old). But, since I still feel that way and still plan on playing it again after all this time, it must be good, right?

My recommendation is positive.

Finally, a game that I have hundreds of hours in that I won't be voting down at the end of my time. Certainly Daybreak has done a number to try to ruin Planetside but, fortunately, their gross incompetence has allowed the game to be preserved, for the only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Planetside 2 is a first person MMO/shooter, developed by Sony, and later sold to a small sticker and decal manufacturing company from San Diego. Within the game you can join the armies of one of three factions: spandex liberals, punk rock libertarians, or mecha-hitler. The game takes place on a choice of three and a half continents and, when you launch your character, you can select from deployment locations near the site of battle or at your faction's headquarters. From there, you can take a vehicle, take an aircraft, or simply travel on foot to the location of your choosing. The nature of the game is to capture counties on the continent and add them to your territory until the continent is fully locked down.

In my opinion, the most amazing part about this game is that you can be in, or travel through, any location in the game, whether you own it or not. You can sabotage enemy bases for upcoming attacks, restore your own base after previous attacks, repair and get ready for future ones, or simply travel through your own realm and experience what these places are like in times of peace. This kind of freedom to break out of the mold of small, confining maps in the Halo or Call of Duty style is both interesting and fascinating for me. I like having the ability to take the time and look around ability to take the time and look around almost as much as I like being in places that I'm not supposed to.

Naturally, as a shooter game, you have a variety of classes that should be familiar to you, or easy to understand: The heavy soldier class, the engineering and repair class, the light assault, as well as the superheavy MAX. But, by far, the infiltrator class is the most interesting in this game, simply because of the intrinsic nature of having an open map. You can explore enemy territory and take out enemy units getting ready to set out, stay hidden and provide support to a battle taking place below you, or covertly take out turrets and weapon stations, providing help in less flashy ways, staying hidden as an entire army rolls by you unaware. The simple availability to use stealth in order to provide a formidable advantage is only really possible in a game with such an open concept.

Vehicles and aircraft, as well as the max suit, are all generated by resources that accumulate over time from territories already conquered. It lends itself to be taken advantage of by steamrolling, but the important aspect is that it's generated by patience and strategy instead of real life currency. In fact, some of the most powerful weapons in the game are able to be acquired simply by using your own skill and wits. The most powerful sniper rifle can be acquired in about 20 hours of gameplay, and will stay with you forever. High class weapons for the engineer and the soldier have the same training time.

Even though it is a time-honored tradition to blame games like these for pay-to-win the advantages, most of the combat that takes place in the game is decided by numbers and the ability to aim down your sights. If you're doing poorly, you simply need more practice. The most effective aircraft pilots in the game use nothing more than free equipment and an incredible amount of skill for flying with a simple keyboard and mouse. I have an incredible amount of respect for that situation in the game, and it's surely what has allowed it to retain its popularity over such a long period of time.

Battles will look familiar after a while, for example, if you have a fight in a bio lab, you know what you're going to be in for. But even then, it's not wholly unpleasant to be in, and you can certainly stick to areas you know and like. Conflicts will still rely on individual strategy, unless they reach a critical mass and become a zerg rush, where you simply have to flee and live to fight another day.

In spite of its flaws, I would still rate this game highly and technically excellent with a mild disclaimer that it can be extremely stressful. My recommendation is positive.