Recent reviews by Pie_Savvy

Fallout 76 is the go to, realistic Appalachia simulator where you and friends get drunk on salamander venom moonshine and hunt Cryptids in the hills as cultists try and stop you.

Also every now and then the games offers you the chance to fight against aliens trying to steal your brainwaves or go and get high on neurotoxins. Or just have a nice Barbecue.

A great successor to the original Evil Genius 2, I highly recommend it to those who played the first game.

And while it isnt the perfect game, what issues there are is simply Quality of life flaws with the game
while the early game can be pretty tough, as soon as you get to grips with the games mechanics you will have a great time.


So for any newbies playing the game for the first time, here is my top tips:

1. Research everything you can before you unlock the technicians. Also dont be afraid to restart the game, chances are your first lair will be terrible.

2. Focus on building up your crime network in one continent, and set up and destroy other crime networks when you have missions outside of it.
And ANY mission taking place when a super agent is present on that crime network will cause them to appear at your lair, if you start a mission and then realise they are there, you can cancel that mission and not attract the super agent.

3. Traps work well against investigators, but not super agents. Super agents will also mostly appear through the entrance to the helipad, so move your vault away from it as soon as you can.

4. Guards at the security tables respond to TAGGED enemies within view of a camera, so setting up a distract tag all over your main base will cover most enemies. (enemies will most likely fight your minions anyway, so other tag types arent as important)

5. Start off doing loot side quests, leave the agent/crime lord ones to later. You also cant cancel a side mission when you've started one.

6. There is a hard cap of minions, so dont waste time putting down more lockers when you hit it (300 minions)

7. Turn off lab equipment that isnt being used, you'll save a lot of power.




8. Have a dedicated bees corridor in your casino, you'll thank me later.

I really want to love this game, it's got great style and character and it's a delightfully simple game (you suck things up and you shoot things) but at the same time it sorely lacks the depth other games of the "farming" genre has.
At the end of the day, everything you do boils down to selling slime poop (plorts) for money with no real grand mid-end game goals in sight and gosh does it get repetitive. (I'm at 14 hours playtime)


When I first started it up I was really enjoying it, got a grand island to explore and gather all different types of cutesy slimes and run a nice ranch but as time got on I found myself already maxing out all the plot upgrades within a few small hours and any difficulty in rearing different types of slimes can be solved by simply feeding them another type of 'plort' and solving their weakness.
Got a tabby slime and it's annoying rearing chickens? just give them a rock plort and now they eat both meat and veggies. They grow into big slimes and so they can bounce higher, but at the same time you've got a fully maxed out corral so it doesn't matter at all.
Mixing slimes (with plorts) doesn't create new interesting slimes, just a hybrid of the two that poops out two 'plorts' to sell.

Exploration is your standard overworld exploring affair, there isn't any puzzle type "dungeons" to explore. The most complex it gets is feeding giant slimes to reveal keys/teleports and just jetpacking everywhere, there is very little difficulty and challenge in exploring, or reward even unless its unlocking a new area to find 2 new slimes.
Also any enemies can just be pushed into the sea or blasted with water twice to be defeated, there's no challange in it at all as soon as you unlock the water container (which is available to buy straight away).

And slime science isn't about creating new wild slime types, it's about being able to collect resources from machines that allow you to sell plorts easier, which isn't a tedious task in the first place even with a fully upgraded & expanded ranch.


What this game really needs is more depth in what it's got, at 14 hours in all that I can really do now is just use my money to buy more cosmetic looks for my house, exploring feels tiring after the first look around the place and any reason to go to a new area boils down to "you can earn a bit more money with nothing to spend it on!" There's no collectathon to try and get all the slimes / find all the resources / find the secret treasures of the island, it just boils down to selling easily obtained slime poop to buy colours for your house.
I really want to be able to recommend the game, but as of it's current state (0.6) it just gets boring and you feel like you've done nearly everything within a short time (me being within 14 hours.)

MGSV is a game I'd recommend people to get in a sale, which is something I wasn't expecting to say from a Metal Gear game. The gameplay is great but everything else kinda falls flat.

(detailed review ahead, no spoilers)

The gameplay itself is great, it's the best thing about this game and it's redeeming factor, but the sandbox element doesn't really work to it's advantage. So the game becomes hit and miss.
The freedom to inflitrate (or fight) a base from multiple angles works really well, but the exploring and travelling part ends up being dull and lifeless and you'll end up just calling the chopper to travel around.
Also you will get really sick of the enemy introductions at the beginning of EVERY mission ruining any element of surprise.

The world itself has no real indication of life at all throughout the map besides birds, solider outposts and the odd travelling truck. There's also pratically zero indoor spaces besides the odd room (usually a building will consist of one room with a lot of reused props)
As example there features both a powerplant and an airport base in the game and it really falls victim to this, I found that places in past games like the Granin Design Bureau in MGS3 feels miles bigger than them due to the indoor spaces.

The story itself isn't gripping at all, If you're expecting a grand revenge story and Big Boss' fall into villiany then this isn't what you'll get.
Plot twists or retcons added for no real reason besides a need for plot twists, characters feel barely present (ocassionally popping in on mandatory cutscenes to say "HEY REMEMBER I'M HERE!") and interactions are kinda dotted inbetween missions, I had ended up with literally zero motivation to get through it half way through the first chapter. It's worrying when Peacewalker had a more gripping story and gave me more motivation to play through it than MGSV. Also to note: Snake barely says anything about anything at all, besides just ocassionally having a repetition question, things he should have at least some reaction to doesn't get a responce at all from him.


Most of the flaws I feel are connected with the sandbox element, The studio giving up a finely crafted linear approach for a huge sandbox feels like a mistake to me, if it was a more linear experience with open "arena" areas of infiltration on the major bases, featuring a lot more indoor areas it would have probably succeeded a lot better, as is the opinion I get from Peace Walker & Ground Zeroes. There is also a lot of menu hopping too to do a lot of base orientated things and research, as much as it is disguised as being "ingame" through the Helicopter & iDroid.
The only blaring problem to me is the lack of Co-op, this game almost seems built to support 2 player sneaking antics.

But the gameplay itself is pretty fun, I'm not going to deny it that. I may have 1001 problems with it but the stealth is pretty much perfect in it and doesn't feel like the AI is cheating you and there's some bonus fun when you unlock gun customisation and things start getting a bit silly. Also the noticably massive cut in the amount of cutscenes is always welcome.


So my thoughts are get it if you really want a good stealth game and/or are an MGS fan, but do wait for it to go on a decent sale first. Fans should expect more of a Sandbox Peace Walker game than anything else.