Recent reviews by Sausijj

Has issues with multi screen set ups.

Will not allow or even acknowledge screen selection (despite it being a menu option)

Does not register mice.

Limited resolution options.

I was going to refund this, but for the sakes of a couple of quid, I'm not, I'm just going to leave this negative review here.

While playing on the british board, it will still reference the american locations.

Overall its not "bad" but it is lacklustre. Might as well just play a hard copy in person with people rather than just having frustration imparted on only just yourself.

One benefit is, the AI atleast follows the proper rules for monopoly, but even those can be overridden with all the common "House Rules" every wants but then inevitably complains about.

I wrote about this on the other Skyrim Review; turns out bethesda are gluttons for punishment.

Paid Mods v2 is arriving. Sure theyre dressing it up and putting on make up, sure theyre throwing a coin out to the modders who make the content (which is a big improvement I guess over outright stealing them), but its still paid mods.

It still has all the grey area problems, the only difference now, is they can ignore reports of stolen content being uploaded and sold.

Also they KNOW this is a big middle finger to their fanbase https://youtu.be/XRkrascT_iM?t=33 33seconds into their video, theres an item entry listed HORSE ARMOR.

THEY KNOW WHAT THEYRE DOING.

Only gotten past the first Boss. But I am loving this game. The theme, the metroid style combat/platforming.
I'm wishing I bought it now.

For those who havent yet though; its free and well worth it eitherway.

Okay. So where to start. With one word; No.

Gameplay: 4/10
It plays like Catan. Its luck, hand management and risk mitigation. You can go entire games getting rubbish rolls unable to do anything, or if you figure out certain placements (especially on the Freeboard), win every time.
Trading is simplistic; theres no counter offers, theres no choosing which person you trade with. You throw out an offer (3:1 or w/e) and the first to click yes, gets it. Even if that person is someone you DONT want to trade with, as it may give the victory. The Timer forces you to play Blitz style, and if you have a good hand of cards and need a long turn (talking multiple trades, multiple roads, settlements, cities or Developments), you'll be ♥♥♥♥ out of luck with 90seconds. Especially when other players can wait out YOUR timer, during trades.

Graphics: 7/10
Nothing to scoff at, but simple enough, could do with more intuitive "obviousness", you can highlight a segment to build off board or you can highlight a space. The latter isn't made clearly possible until you spot it by chance.
Trade window takes up too much room on the board and hides things like unbuilt pieces, but you can click off and return to the trade if need be.

Sound: 4/10
Repetetive music. Mute it after an hour and stick your own on. Piece soundsare as you expect.

Cost: 5/10
The cost to buy the game out right WOULD be considered respectable, especially in comparison to the actual board game (£15 vs £50) IF it included all the necessities you get from the board game. But a lot of it is cut down and limited (see Gameplay;Trading).

Monetisation/DLC: 2/10
On the F2P side, its bad. Mostly because of one thing; ONE UNCHANGING BOARD.
Because theres one singular board, there IS a few preset ways to win everytime. Notably, sheep abuse. 3/5/8 + sheep port breaks the freeboard and it becomes a mad rush for a player to nab one this spot. Its bad because its sheep on 3/8 and grain on 5. This gives you almost everything you need to 2:1 trade at the port for ANYTHING and if anyone robs from you theyre liable to get nothing but worthless sheep. It removes any need to trade and opens up the ability to solo any build requirement, Developments, Roads, Settlements and cities become trifling. There are a few other similar spots, but this is the biggest offender especially when paired with any other 6/8. (6/stone/wood or 8/brick).

Thats just how its affected gameplay. Money wise on the Scrolls and cosmetics, scrolls are the only way for Freebies to play with friends Free Match is with random people only.

Totals: 4,7,4,5,2.

GRAND SCORE: 4.4 BELOW AVERAGE - Would Not Recommend.

How to Improve:
1 of these: Give Free 2 Play the option to play with friends who are also F2P or Give PAID players the option to invite Free Players (meaning only one person in a group has to pay) but maintain the Free limitations.

This for certain: Randomised Board.

Reccomended: Tentative Yes.

Don't get me wrong, Ultimate Chicken Horse is a great game, but there are still some bugs floating around it (invisible players that cannot do anything, crashing on level load). Its also a tentative yes because ideally you need a controller to play well and its one of those games where youre best off playing in private sessions with friends.

Public sessions can and do often work fine, but you'll also have to occassionally sift through AFK Hosts and Troll Players who join.

The negativity for this game is undeserved.

Sure its not HYPER interesting but its a simulator. The initial instructions you receive tell you EXACTLY what to do, how to do it and when to do it, but will only do so in a manner where you will succeed "averagely".
It is then up to the player to optimise their workforce to increase production speed, reduce costs and maximise profits when renting and choosing the opportune time to sell the building.

It has a similar play style to KSP in that, its all about your prep work. If you don't prepare well, you will fail.

The complaints about bugs are again, undeserved. The only major one I had was that I had to change my system audio quality from 24bit 48khz to 16bit (this is common for older simulator games), and even this is stated in a pinned topic on discussion, yet there are still regular complaint threads cropping up because the pinned material is not read.

Unfortunately, the "casual" core of gamers have managed to perpetuate the myth that all these simulator games are ALWAYS buggy and ALWAYS boring and the staple of germans everywhere, but then the kind of people who say that generally aren't the audience for these simulators and probably picked them up cheap or because their "favorite youtuber" did an episode on Farming Simulator 2013 and think Lolcats are still funny.

The game is NOT recommended if you are expecting a simulator where you can constantly tweak stuff, it is NOT recommended if you think this is anything like those simulators which are not simulators *Cough* Goat Sim*Cough* and it is NOT recommended if you have the patience of a 6 year old.

If you want something to play while you stick on some tunes or chat to some mates in TS/Voip this is for you, if you want something where you can spend time minmaxing staff and finding an "optimal" method, this is for you.

2017 Update:

Tried Robocraft out again for a few hours. To see where progress has been made or lost.
As predicted, most changes are made due to the dwindling playerbase. This explains why in the past they removed barriers to matchmaking like Tier Divisions, Level affected matching, reducing the amount of players per team etc.

I joined now to find that they've further made changes that exacerbate imbalanced matches by removing level requirement to unlock CPU, giving everyone the same CPU allotment at maximum and allowing bots of any CPU mixture to play together. It simply totals up the CPU on a team and makes it match up on the other team. The problem with this is, it inevitably ends up where you'll have one team with CPU evenly spread among them ranging from 1.4k to the maximum and the other team will be full of scouts with a single person at maximum cpu.

The game still suffers mobmentality wipeouts and favors it to be played as so. As much as there are cries of tactics are valid, nothing still beats team rushing.

Sadly though, these changes have done nothing to help new players, against old hats like myself and even older hats who understand Triforcing and damage mitigation, which is near gone, most resorting to either sheer bricks upon bricks or mobility evasion (read; drones). Only played a dozen matches today, lost one and thats because I decided to use a stupid bot you'd expect a noob to (one megaleg, rocket launcher, shield gen, thats it.) and even then, it was a close loss.

The ultimate kick to the teeth though, is the changes to the Battle Arena mode, specifically, the "Imbalance Detected" system, where it will cause Protonium to spawn on the map. If the enemy destroy it, they instantly equal the progress the winning team has made.

All this serves to do is infuriate the winning team and delay the match even further, as the losing team may have now equalised, but is still on a losing footing control point wise. If the losing team choose to ignore the Protonium and focus on the control points, again.. theyre still on a losing footing.

As it stands Robocraft has an average weekly player base of 3,000 spiking 6,000. In 2014 it was 14,000 spiking 25,000.

Lets see how you fare in 2018 Freejam. If youre even still around.

2016 Update: FJ are now trying to censor negative reviews as "abusive" even if they are not.
https://twitter.com/TomCat__86/status/746665833414332420

I give up with Robocraft.


TLDR; Robocraft devs don't know what they want their game to be. They've tried DM/TDM, E-Sports, Creative Building, MOBA, Player Choice Progression, Forced progression, bland progression. Each and every update drastically changing how the game plays and nullifying ANY work players have put in to creating their bots.
They establish one set of rules only to change them a few months down the line under the guise of "Balancing" or enabling "player creativity" and doing the complete opposite.

Not to mention the game has flaws from years ago still not fixed and now being hidden by new changes. For example MM being broken turning it into "Who has the most medics, wins"and hiding the poor matchmaking by removing robot classification "because not all bots were classified correctly" (translation, 1 in maybe 100 were wrong, and "its haaaard.")

Edit to include the latest update (Max Loadout) - Again FJ don't understand normal development practices. They threw in MASSIVE changes all at once and are no sat scratching their heads wondering why it broke. Flak is bugged (DMG), Nano is bugged (LMB+RMB = superspeed heal), MSMGs are bugged (free aim firing, without LOS), matchmaking is atrocious (still), Blink and DSM are stupidly expensive (Both RP/GC and CPU). They should have done a slow implement of these changes one by one to iron each minor kink, instead of this.


-------------------------------

Too many wild changes, one step forward two steps back is this developers motto.

Robocraft initially had a sensible mixture of Creativity and Function. There was also a sensible mix of Grind, Progression and sense of achievement. It was a little lacklustre in places.

For example, the RP system allowed you to choose what you unlocked and the level system determined how "effective" those unlocks were. As you progressed in Level and CPU, your bots got bigger, your weapons better.

This has now been swapped out for a system where equipment is unlocked in order, over time with no player input. Once you unlock an item, that is it, theres no improvement. Everything is by default "Tier 10".

This in turn made building robots boring, no more balancing weaponry vs armor vs mobility. If you chose to go cosmetic-bot there was a challenge to making a bot functional but in "theme".
Now sure you can build a bot "exactly" as you want, as long as you like Yellow, Pink, White, Grey & Brown as your color palette. The other colours are locked to premium (Note they touted this "flattening" of tiers as an 'improvement' to creative robot building).

Then theres the slew of problems with actual Gameplay mechanics.

Initially there were balancing issues as expected, they kind of balanced themselves out up until Unleashed/Legendary update and the devs got stuck in a nerf cycle on everything except SMGs.

This last update saw them add the near useless flak, severely nerf the Medics Nano and turned it into SMGcraft again.
They also did away with many of the useful gameplay information elements.
Spotting now just says "Enemy Spotted" with no indication of flier, hover, walker, they claimed this is because bots were "complicated to classify" yet for the most they were classified correctly. This means you find it far harder to prioritise the right targets.

This also affects your own team negatively as you can no longer easily see if a friendly medic is nearby or if a push block is Rail Heavy and needs more SMG or plasma.

The game has also suffered Match making issues from day one. Resulting in differing metas.
The latest of which is "The Team who has the most medics, wins".

The hiding of Bot Type and spotting call outs I think was done to merely hide how bad the matchmaking is, especially as in the past when we could see the team makeups we would see matches where it was 6 rails and two plasmas vs say 6 SMGs and two medics.

Put simple, the devs have taken this game in far too many directions, too rapidly and with no forethought.

Initially it was a DM/TDM game, then they opened it up to the Creative Block Builders, then expanded to Boss Battles (removed, was one Megabot vs lots of little bots quite fun), then switching to try their hand at MOBA-like Tower matches, then trying to create some kind of bespoke "Robot Market" where players can sell their bots, but their currency system is too expensive to support.

Its like they saw all these good ideas from other games and tried to cram it into their own, trying to snap up a bit of another niche in gaming and half assing it so badly that it introduces more problems than it gains in players.

This is likely the reason why they "flattened" their game down to basic progression.

Do not buy. Developers have abandoned the game.

They are also banning people from both the Star Forge Forums and Reign of Kings forums for criticising this behaviour.

They have also locked their discussion boards unless you purchased the game.

Do not give them your money.

Edit ; Oh and to make it clear. I didn't cheap out on "supporting" this ♥♥♥♥♥ either. I bought a 4xFounders pack for me and my group. - My name still isn't in the credits.

Dominoes falling.
Riots in the streets.
Baby this time theres no retreat.

Don't retreat from this film. Cheesy, sure. But its 80s cheesy baby! And unashamedly so!