Recent reviews by Demiurge

It's ok

Bone Totem (heh) feels like a very classic point and click adventure game, it has all the pitfalls and easy deaths of early classics but doesn't punish the player with the use of a good checkpoint system.

A very good horror theme elevates it and the voice acting and visuals are top notch.

It's real.

The base problem with this DLC is that it doesn't do anything interesting or really add to the overall game experience. The caves are tacked on and exist in their own map layer that doesn't interact with the surface level in any way that doesn't need direct player input, and so the elevators become micromanagement hell.

The interesting problems of the game haven't been solved, you get 2-3 static entrances to the underground scattered around the surface but traversing it isn't useful on its own and there's nothing down there you couldn't get from the surface. By the time you're running into a resource crunch from depleted surface deposits you probably have a Mohole anyway. There was an opportunity to implement a transport system to rival the surface shuttles (trains!) but instead the underground just uses... An underground shuttle variant.

You also can't do anything in the caves until well into the midgame, because while you can drop an explorer on day 1, you won't find more than 2-3 anomalies down there before all avenues are blocked by cave-ins. The game tells you that you can use a dozer rover to clear the cave-ins but in fact you also need a technology that is well into the middle of the tech tree so if you fall for it you've just dumped an explorer down there until you can set up an elevator.

By far the funniest thing about the DLC though, is that they had so much faith in it they included a game rule to turn it all off.

This game is very cool, there's nothing else quite like it.

This is the best game I've played since Planescape: Torment.

Stardrive is a series of disappointments and unfulfilled promises, where if you would just pay up again then it's totally fixed this time you guys.

Promise.

Abandoned.

Quite enjoy the compexity. But for a game that relies so much on numbers it could really use a central resource for statistics (timeline graphs especially) to be less obtuse, there's a lot of clicking between screens but it's also incredibly satisfying when you finally fix a province.

Do recommend this if you're into complex systems.

Fun game, fairly decent but I have to give it a negative because it's woefully incomplete and development has been stopped. You could have done better, DoubleFine.