Recent reviews by Gardener

As an aspiring game developer, this game embodies the sort of studio and project I'd love to work at one day. Seeing the amount of passion poured into the writing, character development, art style, level design, programming and how Larian has blended these into an uncompromising narrative-rich experience is truly mind-blowing.

Would love to see a post-mortem of this project to see how challenges were overcome and compromises made to try and strive for this level of shine.

If you're after a game where you can truly choose your own adventure, this is the game for you. Each playthrough is different, giving you different perspectives on various characters and arcs than pan out throughout the game.

I just wish I had more free time to play this.

Thanks Larian!

In it's current public build state, I cannot honestly recommend this game. The progression is painfully slow and interacts poorly with the survival aspects as food and water sources are sparse, and as a hatchling, you're forced to walk everywhere.

I kept getting to 50-80% of the first age bracket before dying of starvation. The first time was due to spawning on an island in the middle of no-where - with three mushrooms to choose from. I decided to try and swim, and alt f4'd as I was not prepared to spend 15 minutes swimming with no guarantee of survival.
The other subsequent times were due to the scarcity of "bugs" - or when I found the bigger bugs, they were too quick, and too difficult to kill.

The dev news updates are cool and all, but a publicly viewable roadmap/issue tracker that's actually updated with the project management aspects of your game is really, really important, and something that is also missing from this project. Your roadmap hasn't been updated since August 16, and the latest dev vlog is from October 7. Did no development happen between then and now? (~2 months at the time of this review).

From one game dev to another - I know it's annoying and boring having to document everything - but it at least tells your community what's being worked on, who's doing what, and when.

If you're prepared to pay lots of money in order to win, this game is for you.

Driving a truck for a living isn't my kind of dream job, but if I'm happy enough to spend 36 hours pretending to, then maybe driving trucks is something I have started to dream about.

ETS2 is a fun game to spend time playing, the environment is scenic, the trucks are well modelled and have detailed textures.
Driving on the road accompanied by radio or music is a pretty decent way to de-stress, though all that time chilling out can often come undone if you have to reverse a trailer into a tricky to get spot.
Additional content, including solutions to some of the games more frustrating issues can be improved with mods.

This game was once fun to play, the class balancing is atrocious. When all the characters were on a level playing field when skill was involved to outwit your opponent, that is when the game was fun.

Now all you need to do is pick one character and spam the same attack over and over again, as fast as you can.

Seeing that it's free now? Get ready for microtransactions.

what wasted potential

Whilst this game is still in development, the gameplay is undeniably fun. Space Engineers transports players to an all new and original approach to sandbox based block-building games in a way that none other has achieved thus far. With a similar flavor to Minecraft and a space-like approach to Star Trek and Star Warsand other fictional sci-fi fantasies this makes the construction of ships and stations all the more fun, and the flying of created space-craft even more fun.