Recent reviews by The Proto-Opossum

The bot problem has gotten too bad, Valve has continuously ignored us for years now, and the steam player-count is massively inflated due to botnets designed to make money at our expense. Listen to us Valve, save.tf 2.

20/10 have spent 1.6K hours and counting meticulously crafting colonies for them to end up in flames because somebody got pissed they couldn't eat at a table

I found this game through my queue for new releases. Looked fun and was only a few bucks. Bought it release day and finished it just last night.

I'll start with the things I didn't like. There were a few areas and reoccurring problems I'm not the biggest fan of that bring down the experience for me. Mainly towards the end, a lot of what felt like were barely possible without either dying a crapton of times losing all your points, or having developer insight. Some enemies were a little broken, mainly what looks like too small or too big of hitboxes. There were a few times where it felt like you couldn't have figured out what an object was until you died to it. I have more to say as somebody who is trying to develop games myself, and really looks hard analytically into games, but they're nothing that would ruin the experience for a vast majority of people, and didn't even do so for me. Nothing too severe, just wanted to point these out.

Now the things I did like!. I was very surprised by how fun of a logical progression of the old arcade game frogger this is. It has a lot of cool advancements as you progress through each world, I find the art style is very cute. The story isn't groundbreaking material by any means, but I feel like it fits in well with the simplistic and cute feel of the game. It was also a longer experience than I was expecting. Gameplay is compelling enough I definitely plan on going back through it trying to master it to get a much better final score than 1800 lmao. Oh and also, the music is very enjoyable. Kinda short music loops, but they are decent enough and never started to annoy me during my playthrough.

TLDR: Is it worth it? it has its flaws, but it's given me nearly 2 hours of enjoyment at $4, and probably will continue to at least a couple more with me planning on trying to master it. So I'd say yes!.

Okay, so, I did NOT purchase the second chapter. Anyone who thinks my opinion is invalid because of this, I'll adress in a second. First, I'm going to list the Pros and the cons of the game (in my own opinion).

Pros:
-Nice Art Style
-The Music
...
....
.....
Yeah, sorry. The music and art is the only things i found enjoyable in this game.

Cons:
-Weird Movment Controls
-First chapter doesn't pull you into the story
-Lackluster puzzle elements
-Horror Isn't scary

Okay, so, Weird movment controls is a minor nitpick, but it just doesn't feel right. But that's not my main problem with this game. No, the problems I have with this game is that it, well, feels more like a semi-interactive story. Gameplay elements is a small puzzle with you collecting items around the building. At least something like Five Nights at Freddy's had some sort of game mechanics. And the story of Bendy and the Ink Machine? I might not have played the second chapter, so maybe it gets better there, but here's the thing. The first chapter is supposed to draw you into the story of whatever. The first chapter didn't do that for me. It was quite shallow of a story, really. So even if it gets better, I'm not hooked into the world the creators of this game have made.

Kerbal Space Program is a rocket creation and flight simulator. You create a rocket or plane or some mix between the two, and can use this vehicle to deliver payloads and Kerbals (The little green aliens that run everything) to other worlds within the local star system of Kerbol.

As far as goals go, there isn't really any strict set end to things, you make up your own objectives. That can be something as small as "get x amount of Kerbals to the Mun and back", or something as insane as "explore every planet without refueling in one vehicle that weighs less than 3 tons, piloting from first person view only.". There is the career mode which has money and researching technologies involved, which does have a sense of progression. After 1400 hours, beginning a new save can be a little tedious, but I've found a good way to break the early game grind is to set unusual, more difficult goals until you get sufficiently interesting technologies. Both Science and Career modes have science points, which you get by activating experiments on different planets and moons. Career also has money and contracts, where companies will offer you money to keep the rockets launching in turn for completing some sort of goal. "save X Kerbal", or "send Kerbal to x body with y resources on-board".

The gameplay is very loose with how you can approach goals. Where parts and weight limits (especially in the early-game) can be challenging constraints, a creative enough approach can supersede these to varying degrees. Since goals are also mostly player set (even with contracts, you can set your own goals on top of them, such as getting two contracts in one mission, eg.) the difficulty is really only as hard as you want it to be.

The Physics engine is based on 2-body physics. It's not a super amazingly accurate simulation, but for most people starting out, the simplified rocket physics will be a sufficiently difficult challenge, especially if you aren't as familiar with these types of physics. That's okay! failing is a part of the fun. The first time you get into orbit, then land on a moon, then land on another planet and come back? it's such a satisfying feeling when you finally complete these goals. With that said, going through a few playthroughs, and achieving some higher skill self-set goals can make some of these previous acomplishments can feel tedious over time. So replayability dwindles as you do more. But the game provides so many possible goals, I have yet to run out of them in the vanilla game

Speaking of vanilla vs mods, the moddability of this game is insane. So many people have made so many different mods to cater to almost every specific ideas of what this game should strive to be. If you want more complexity such as life support systems, radiation, more types of unusual engines, and more realistic n-body physics, there's mods for all of those things and much, much more! Even once the base game and it's DLCs get stale, (I'd recommend Breaking Ground over Making History if you had to choose. It has much more interesting content imo) the modding community surrounding this game ensures there will never be a shortage of content for this game.

All in all, this game provides a peaceful calming singleplayer experience I can play for so many hours and not get tired of it. Mods will let this game live years after other games from this era have died out in popularity. My main critiques would be that there isn't enough planets, and the lack of things to do once you're actually at a planet. (Mods and the Breaking Ground DLC fix this decently enough, but I don't think the base game should rely on the community and DLC to fix core issues.)

If you enjoy flight sims, building spaceships in a 3d semi-realistic environment, exploration, or even just games that play around with physics, I would highly recommend Kerbal Space Program. 9/10.