Скорошни рецензии на Pave

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The Pro / Positive "Recommendation" is purely only for the air-hockey-like gameplay itself.

But otherwise right from get-go this game pulls every no-nos which caused me to uninstall this game:
- Right after choosing the player-name (which can be changed later in profile-section),
the game immediately loads into the Tutorial which cannot be skipped.
You cannot even open the options / setting-menu!
At least, not normally:
I relaunched the game and turbofire'd Esc(ape)-key on my keyboard and I was able to open the main plus options-menu for a split second before the game auto-resumed to load the tutorial. This is glitched me the possibility to adjust the setting while inside the tutorial. Finished it, and then encountered the rest of no-nos...

- There is content locked behind forced socialization,
E.G. one needs to play (and win) several games / matches with their "friends".

- Matching "region-roulette",
I.E. one can only queue to a singular region at time (and there is more than five of those).
And the region-selection is put behind option menu somewhere "in the middle",
in other words region-selection has been made as cumbersome as possible.

Needless to say, no matches after long queuing (over minutes each region I queued for).

We've had matchmaking systems allowing to queue for all servers and all games modes under a single button push for more than two decades...


Just, no.
On a positive side, even the in-game-store / cash-shop was locked behind a "missions",
so at least there was no accidental cash being burned by me into this application.
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"Unlock The Feeling" is a different take on "Mastermind" with "Bulls and Cows"-mixed in.

Each row requires a "theme" to be guessed which is build up of different "emotions".

It initially takes a bit to get used to read the colour / correctness-coding and teh controls. But after few practice-rounds, the game is very enjoyable in small sessions.
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Worth noting I am recommending this game in terms of "Give it a try"-way:
The demo / free-to-play-limitation doesn't prevent experiencing the main-mechanics of this game,
E.G. at the moment no quest-map is locked behind the "High-Roller"-difficulty.

Currently the studio seems to have been very open with their communications when it comes to development of this game.


But, there is one important question one should be aware of:
"Is there content locked behind player-vs-player-combat?"

Answer is "Yes!", and is extremely luck dependant.

There are many quests where players are required to last-hit-kill specific player-classes a number of times, and/or players in specific maps. And (as of posting this) these quests are handed early far before any boss-kill-quests, or even trivial interaction-quests
( E.G. interacting with specific types of chests on particular maps ).

Why completing quests is important?
Not only to unlock more inventory for merchants alongside (crafting-)services.
But perhaps more importantly this unlocks more and better "base-kit"-gear which are supplied via "Squire".
At the beginning, players cannot even get supplied with plate-armours until reaching 25-affinity with "Armourer";
no worries, the first quest gives the required affinity.
Increasing this affinity allows getting better quality equipments, and not all quests give affinity.


Newbie-wise it's very odd to not to have a possibility to view the map full-sized;
mini-map is nice when using external maps, but otherwise it isn't too much of a help currently due to how zoomed-in it is.


Otherwise there at least appears to be replay / demo-files being recorded and saved on the gamedev-side;
here is to hope players could also have a "theatre-mode" in future.
Also being able to spectate players who are still alive, and watching a replay own last moment / death camera is a nice extra.
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Some quick random bullet-points of mine:

- Procedurally generated maps.
Sure, there are predictable "patterns"
( like a "connecting-tunnels" between each cavers ).
But all things considered I have yet encounter a cave-system which wouldn't engage me into exploring all the nooks-and-granny especially when it comes larger "room".
Full exploring the cavers is well rewarded so even a single mission-session can take more than 60-minutes.

- Mission-type and side-activity variety.
From your basic "mine x-amount this mineral" ro escrding a big drill, there is a good enough amount of variations alongside the secondary objectives.
Random encounters with various hazards (E.G. meteorites) also provide extra source of income.

- Tools and creative freedom
Especially "On-site Refining"-missions showcase the amount of creative-freedom players are allowed to have:
Dig a path up to the roof? You do that!
Create pipelines that rival the "Rollercoaster Tycoon"-building? Feel free to do so!

- Modding / houserule-freecom
There is a slew of white-listed / "Approved"-modifications that allows to progress the main-game with various houserules
( E.G. disabling Friendly-fire ).
Anything else is counted as "Sandbox" which is a separate save-file.
Note: Any non-cosmetic / "Verified"-mods disable Steam-achievements.


Eventually it would be nice to have replay-/demo-file-support or some other archive-system to save player history of cave-map that has been played.
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So, what if QP, a hyperactive pomeranian kemonomimi-girl with an addiction to (giga-)pudding and video-games was to break out in a song?
You get a single something like this!

Absolutely captures the spirit of QP (and Poppo) in one of the most perfect ways of possible (so far).

Just like the "Ultimate Weapons Girl", this DLC also contains the lyrics in PDF-file
( though no romaji-version out-of-the-box ).

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EDIT: Some typo-fixing.

I foremost want to emphasis that my dis-recommendation is specifically for the question:
"Should I sink money into this game?"
Well, since this is a dis-recommendation, obviously the answer is a "no".

Now while the "Season Passes" itself aren't all that expensive ranging from currently-live of 5€ to archive/legacy-passes of 7,5€ both which you can "stamp" anytime simultaneously alongside another pass/stamp-book,
the rest of the cash-shop is yet another "Fear of Missing Out"-exploitation with rotating selection and "for the maximum-profits!"-money grubbing.

For reference,
there is a "wiki"-page article named "S.A.W. Shop" which lists all the items:
Single most expensive example ("Sunflower Bundle" ) costs whopping 13€
(or 1260 "S.A.W Tickets") with a supposed 40%-off applied even though you cannot buy any of these items separate in the first place
( or least none of the items hasn't been listed on the wiki-page ).

Bare in mind that this is a full on 2D-game with "rigged" swappable 2D-("flash"-player-)character ("vector"-)template:
For those unaware,
yes you can indeed give "bones" and "joints" to a 2D-drawings on "unity" and other game-engines;
In essence you'd be paying top-dollars/euros/currency for a copy-paste of a JPEG/PNG-image
( especially the case with 7,5€ "mini animal (pets )").


And of course, because the
"expensive aesthetics over expenses-spared functionalities"-bingo-card wouldn't complete, this game includes all the "essentials":
- Client-side-authored gameplay
( an "everything goes buffet" for cheater )
- No replay/demo-file-system
- Convoluted and otherwise unintuitive player-reporting "tool";
extra points because you can only use at your death / at the end of the match;
you cannot even choose who you report;
and it's time-limited because as soon as the game-session-lobby closes, you're booted straight into the main-menu
- Completely off-the-balance AI/CPU-fillers;
majority of times you'll be teamed with bots that walk in straight line while opposing team has "GODLIKE-UBER-DûBER"-bots with buffed movement speed and bullets travelling across the whole map


Like I wrote at start, I mainly concentrated on the money-spending aspect here;
in this review I won't be going into details about the gameplay and such, since there is nothing new I could tell.

Main takeaway here is that for the "tech" and such, the amount you would need to spend money in this "game" is ludicrously high;
heck to even enjoy of the "full-free-to-play"-elements in this game, you'd still need to spend 15€ from the get-to into the
"Super Edition"-package which, yes, in essence is like buying 1K-tickets and you also get exclusive cosmetics...
...Except that 1K-tickets costs only 10€...

Meanwhile "Starter Pack" costs 5€ and gives 500+100-tickets alongside the exclusive cosmetics
( and "naturally" since the devs/studio does not want more money, there no possibility to purchase the previous "season-starters" nor there is no other way to get the cosmetics even when there is demand for these... ).


So yeah, maybe give the gameplay few tries; perhaps you'll enjoy the experience.
But the sake of your finances, do not spend any them here!
(( For the record, I personally have no idea why I had the "Super Edition"-unlocked; maybe I got as a gift or something; that's my defense. ))

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Random-pointers to give this game a try especially if you get everything for a good discount:

Before buying this game, I highly recommend giving the first "Endless Space" a try get a little taste of the "feeling" of this game;
if you connect your Steam-account to their " Games2Gether Platform" you get the game without any extra payments needed.

"Endless Space 2" is a generally the first game full-on fixed and improved:
- No longer "guarding / sieging" disables a system
( or at least this was the very reason I never got finish a session in the first game since I couldn't build any counter-fleets on my lone-home-system )

- "Alliance / Co-Operative"-victory is big game-changer in this market since "everyone" in an alliance can win the game;
of course this has occasionally lead to abrupt victories when members have left the alliance for a reason or another.

- Although "stack-of-dooms" are prevalent in this game, there is fortunately less than ten (10) ship-base-designs players are allowed to retrofit with module-choices, even if the smaller-ships eventually become pretty much completely obsolete later on.

- On the relevant nore, warmongering can be super-expensive to uphold for the most part especially if the "influence"-generation of the player is low.
This is of course if one is one influential enough to even declare a war to begin with especially against players that are able to forcefully up-keep the peace between players.

- "Senate" or the internal-politics are somewhat difficult to min-max around since this all depends not only on the action of the player
( E.G. boosting technology research which increases the support to the "Scientist"-party )
but also what your population of your empire consists of.
Different "government-types" can having more influence over the laws players wants to pass.
But this can also limit the flexibility players have in overall gameplay also
( E.G. being locked into Military-government rarely helps with non-warmongering-players ).


Fair warning:
Due occasionally requirement to some serious "micro-management", a singular turn can take up an hour if your happen have more than 20-systems occupied, especially if player with a (Hissho or Custom-)faction with the "Resource Recovers"-faction-trait
( which in practice gives and increasing "FIDS"-penalty the more "over-colonization" you have ).


I personally also recommend of ignoring the "tutorial" and instead play a "live"-session with all the tutorial-pop-ups:
The "[Beginner]"-session doesn't have any of the expansions and basically is the "vanilla without the vanilla"-version of this game which can actually break even more features and fixes implemented.
"[Beginner]"-sessions also are not "whitelisted" therefore are not counted as "official"-sessions to be listed to on the gameplay-history-section called "Empire Chronicles"


"Together to the Stars!"

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After almost a decade, seemingly nothing of like "Dead Island Epidemic (DIE)" has surfaced in the video-game market.

Before they introduced the "desync/rubberbanding-kill-bug" and left it running for almost 6-moths till the very abrupt shutdown, this game really was one of its kind and had done tiny'ish but hugely impactful improvements to the general nature of the game to far less toxic
( most important being
"Patch v0.8" on March 12th 2015
in which they turned "Kills" into "Takedowns" that combined both last-hit-player-kills and assistances, plus the additions of "Damage (done)" and "Healing (done)" ).

Aside for "Planetside 2" most notably, seemingly no one even dares to try to make asymmetrical un-even team-battles anymore:
In "Scavenger" which was the PvP-mode here, there was three (3) four-player-teams
(I.E. 4 vs 4 vs 4 )
trying to gather crates and fill-up their home-truck.

Capturing "supply-drop-zones" allowed passive gain of crates up until a point after which rest of the crates had to be manually loaded into the home-base.

Other teams were allowed to steal from the base, which crated end-game situation where both of the other teams had to team-up in order to prevent the leading-team winning too easily.
Or as m,any times happened, the two leading teams might have been outsmarted by the underdog-team who gathered the "wild-crates" during the tussle between the lead-teams.

This was a very dynamic game with loads of turnabout without the need to being "uber-l33t-master" either:
Just putting the basics into practice while also playing cautiously / not being suicidal won the game many times also.

The randomized PvE-mode "Crossroads" was a very good replacement for the dull-linear "Horde"-mode.


Character-variations was nicely refreshing too, especially the "Armored" and "Mutated"-variants.


The option of characters being able to most a melee and a ranged-weapons gave enough freedom to try out all the available characters without the need of worrying about being able to excel in long and/or close-quarters-combat.

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It is very unfortunate this game was a victim of yet another "Uwe Boll / The Producers"-insurance-scheme...

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I decided to take a look if the earlier "Yager Development GmbH"-game(s) had the same issues as their current one(s);
yup!
(( Granted, I've yet to play the year-2003 "Yager", though that is a space-shooter-thing instead of just a cookie-cutter'ish / typical'ish Unreal-Engine-third/first-person-shooter. ))

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I am not going into the story or anything else in relation;
for those one can simply watch the Youtube-videos or read the other summaries.

Though in some fairness'ish, if you already are familiar with primarily "Apocalypse Now" or anything else heavily inspired by the year-1899 novella "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, then you for the most part have already have "read/watched" this game already.
Well, aside for maybe not experiencing the "waving index-finger of guilt" which this all pretty much boils down to
( yes, that "trope" is a reference to "Nostalgia Critic - Avatar (2009)"-episode ).


(( And to clarify once again:
I do not mind same stories being told over and over again;
all it needs to is to tell the story well or otherwise entertainingly enough. ))


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The biggest gripe with this game right from get-go is that it is made home-consoles in mind, specifically to "Xbox 360":
Even when playing full-on with keyboard & mouse, all the prompts are in gamepad-format;
I do not have the luxury of constantly re-plugging my gamepad whenever I am not playing this game...

The "one-button-to-context-them"-approach is taken to the extreme here
(in this case, "cover/sprint/context-actions" are under one button),
while confusingly enough melee and "vaulting" are the same button and same goes with the (gun) reload and pick-up-button
(so with same button you pick up both intel and the dropped guns);
why they decided to reinvent the "wheel" instead of copy-paste the control-scheme from say "Gears of War" is beyond my comprehension.

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If you get this game without paying anything extra and you have the patience to get through the control-scheme and other wonky-game-mechanics, then all power to you.
But otherwise if you're only here for the story, there is (as of writing this) more than enough 3rd-party material to watch/read through this mess.

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Previous-version(s) here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16iz4UvvX_WJA_kmyKX6oP6vFlKSblj5B5C5kB7LMmQg/

“Highlights” of the season 3:
This is the most broken version since Beta-1.
And it is no surprise, since (supposedly) they actually went back to season-1-version of this game but broke it even further than what it was during pre-Season-1-moment.

This is especially noticeable with the re-skinned / remaster-build’ish maps to have slew of collision problems alongside layered objects
( like cosmetic-objects and interactables on top of each other, E.G. many civilian-lockers ):
- Biggest problem being the “mis-aligned” Bluetails / “noise-birds” since they’re still using the old spawn-spot-data which makes them spawn inside ground on far too numerous spots.
- The skyrocketed amount of mineral-resource-nodes ( Veltecite, Titan, etc. ) spawning inside bedrocks and therefore are not possible to collect

- Probably the most important “change” is the mobs / PvE-creature no longer doing the line-of-sight or hearing / noise-checks before agro’ign. This means there is no longer a possibility to sneak past the mobs unnoticed, which especially descending “Tharis Island” silently impossible.

- Like before, specifically Rattlers are as broken as they used to be.
But now all the creature “ghost”-hits are no longer hidden.
In facts, all creature-projectiles clearly are shown aiming way above the foreheads of the player-models revealing that there is a invisible extended hitbox to which all their attacks gravitate towards to even when facing opposite direction;
this is most obvious with the “beam”-attack of Rattlers tepping right behind them when they wind-up their attack.
The example here isn’t the most clear, but you can see the “beam” being shop straight upwards instead of forward:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970893490


- Yes, Tharis Island no longer requires player-killing to be accessed;
2/3rd of the “campaign” still is locked away very early on if one refuses to do player killing.

The Season-pass grind has been increased while daily-cap has been lowered:
- Final rank required 2849-points instead of 1.5K
- Most importantly the max-point per 23-hours from “Jobs” is now limited to 1.5K instead of 10K.

Still managed to complete the “pass” while refusing to do any player-damage yet once again.
You can find all the related screenshots here:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/PaveMentman/screenshots/?appid=868270


Oh and, this game is obviously still in “authoritative client”-architecture without the replay / demo-files activated.
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