Recent reviews by Purple Fax Machine

Sony finally decided to recend their decision after watching the game go from overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative in 2 days. I'm editing my review now to a positive just to make sure Sony gets the idea that the community deserves better.

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Sony decided to bait and switch the community. They originally wanted the game to require PSN, but realized the game would bomb if it did. So, in their stupidity, decided to let the game go for several months, and are now going to force PSN logins at the end of May 2024.

This on top of going out of their way to say "They wont get in the way of their developers" not too long before the game's launch... yeah. No.

Despite having a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Ryzen R7 5800x, Sapphire 7900XT, 32gb of ram, and high end motherboard, the game hitches like hell every few seconds. If it doesn't hitch, it just flat out crashes to desktop and takes applications running on my GPU with it.

Its only this game that does this, other titles and applications don't even drop more than a few frames. I'm not seeing any issues in error logs, hardware or software level profile tools, or through the in-game benchmarking tool. It happens regardless what graphics settings I'm using hardware or in-game wise.

I suspect its the game itself not knowing what to do with newer hardware or drivers, which is frankly sad considering this is a newer game.

Heads up, my hours for some reason are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. I should have ~100 more hours, but for some reason Steam decided that I only have ~10 hours??

I used to play this game years ago, but stopped for some reason. My friends started to play again, so I decided to come back and see what I was missing- I wasnt missing anything.

The playerbase has a mindset of "get to the end as fast as possible," but don't seem to understand that "getting to the end as fast as possible" doesn't help with leveling up your weapons or frames as much as I don't know... PLAYING THE GAME. Trying to tell people this just makes them pissed off at you. Not bothering and just doing your own thing just gets you kicked from parties.

Oh, and because the planet maps keep getting reworked, my progress is so ungodly ruined, I would have to do days worth of grinding to complete the arbitrary content gates to get to other planets to get to the "fun" content... that requires more grinding to prepare for.

What if you took Baba is You, and instead of rewriting the rules, you used a higher plane of existence? This game uses levels as the blocks, yourself as the block, yourself as an immovable wall, levels that you push outside of itself to clone itself, and so much more absolutely mind-bending interactions with 2d projected onto 2.5d space.
Theres simply nothing like this game.

There is literally nothing like this game. If you played games like Powder Toy, and have played a lot of the "run and gun" levels, you might know what to expect.

Since I reviewed the game, it has since gone on to have even more gameplay and secrets. Pretty much everything a lot of older reviews have mentioned has been ironed out, but it sure hasnt changed difficulty wise. If anything, it has only gotten more difficult with the introduction of more "treechevements" that take you through the footsteps of others that came before you, much like the original base game did.

If you like the base building mechanics, upgrade system, and progression of Factorio, but dislike the combat, Shapez.io is for you.

The wires update only expanded the things you can do.

Easily one of my favorite games of all time, up there with Wandersong and Night in the Woods.

While you can easily burn through it in an hour or two, it is way better if you take it slow and take it in. The humor is on point, and the references while there, most certainly aren't in your face.

Edit 10/11/2023: A few friends roped me into playing the game again. Has anything changed since around March of 2022? No. Weapon balance is still worthless. New guns are overpowered as hell. Previous OP guns aren't looked at, so new guns have to be as overpowered. Servers are still unstable ♥♥♥♥, performance has gotten even worse, despite me now having a godlike PC. The playerbase has gotten sweatier across all "MMR" ranks. There is literally no reason to play this game anymore.

Originally when I made this review, this game came out in early access. A lot has changed, and most of the issues the game had were fixed. More ammo, less overall boss health, more routes to and from areas, and better understanding of what an actual PVP central game entails has been accomplished- to an extent.

So, why not recommend the game now if the game was properly polished? The terrible engine. This game is held together with electrical tape and a stern prayer. I put together a god tier PC since I got this game last, and performance has gone *down*. Im not just talking about the game being more graphically demanding, the entire server system seems to have lost it. Rubberbanding, massive packet loss, dysync in neither you or an enemy's favor, and pure stupidity when it comes to hit detection.

It hasnt been 48 hours, and this game ALREADY has low level Aimbots and lagswitch users.
Seriously, this is pethetic.

It's good to see the original Battle Royale genre starter finally get a standalone. Unlike DayZ, not much has been lost in the transition from the Arma series. The same excellent movement (leaning left/right, prone and crouch toggles with 3 speeds to move, vaulting and climbing to be added next monthly update), combined with a dynamic sound system makes combat amazing.