Recent reviews by Ben Machine

Detroit: Become Human is a beautiful choose your own adventure movie.
I have only a couple of minor gripes with it; the controls feel like they're optomised for a controller, and the story loves the cringe woke trope from the 2010's of black male/white female relationships which makes the game feel a bit dated. But of course, the game was built in the 2010's released 2020 after all.
Apart from those very minor gripes, the story is well written and captivating, the characters feel real and each scene and level is a stunning work of art.
As an aditional bonus, I'm a bit of an achievement hunter and getting 100% was actually an enjoyable experience, replaying and watching how different choices affected the outcomes was far better than a slog grindfest that many games demand.
This game is perfect for anyone who wants to relax and watch a movie, but wants to feel a little more engaged at the same time.

Truly one of the games of all time.

Albion markets it's self as a game where you can play it how you want, that's not the case.

Don't like pvp? Or can't do pvp because of poor connection? you'll be stuck doing low level content.
Solo player? Locked out of most of the games content.
Casual players who want to join and play a couple times a month? This is not for you.
Your only choice past level 4 is 'learn to PVP, join some shady discord group of skrubs and get gud'.

I like the player run side of things, it can be quite cool to find a deal on the market where someone's selling for far cheaper than they should, and I like the lack of moderation, chat can be quite chaotic, like a CoD lobby from 2010 at times, refreshing compared to some modern games that use AI to censor everything.

However there's plenty of problems that seem easy to solve:
- I first started playing back when there was one server, currently there's three servers, it's impossible to migrate your character over servers, I can see how it first made sense when the servers came out to have everyone starting fresh, however now years later it makes no sense.
- For some reason, paying for membership is only for one character, not over your whole account.
- Referral markets it's self as get rewards from referring a couple of your friends, the fine print is you only get something if your friends buy membership in their first couple months. If they don't? you get nothing. In other games that's called a partnership program and you get cold hard cash for referrals who use your link not just some silly skin.
Typically if I refer my friends, half won't even enter in the referral correctly, half will never buy membership, so the chance of me getting anything for referring friends to Albion is basically 0.

Over all Albion is a fine game. however steam asks me if I would recommend it? No I wouldn't, not even for some silly skin.

Easily one of my favourite board games and strategy games, it's fun, challenging and makes me dream about colonising mars in the future.

The devs should consider adding a feature that kicks people who are exploiting the fact you can just AFK for up to 2 hours and let your timer run out hoping that the other players leave.

As of Dec 2024 seems like the bugs have been fixed.

Beautiful story and game, still love playing around it's world years later, could well be single player game of its decade.