Recent reviews by BinarySplit

This game is amazing. I cannot assemble words worthy of describing how good it is, so let me direct you to RagnarRox's excellent video essay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSmZcN7AgHQ

I was having so much fun, and then this game turned into an absolute grindfest. The first ~6 maps were hand-crafted, they introduced a steady stream of new gameplay mechanics and story, and were a delight to play... And then the game became a boring slog of randomly-generated levels in search of ever-sparser rewards.

I'd like to quote the forum post that made me realize that it doesn't get better:

Originally posted by Doctor Fetus:

How long is this game and are there ways to speed up the process?

I spent more than 25 hours and I still feel very far away from beating the game. I Just gathered all lvl 2 chips and came to search for the first lvl 3, and Oh God, bases now have 10 floors and not 5.

Here I am sitting at 11 hours, still searching for the lvl 2 chips. There's no way I'm spending another 14 hours just to get to the next stage of exactly the same gameplay except twice as slow.

It's a huge shame, because the first 6 hours were fun. If they just got rid of the pointless, unnecessary padding in the middle, this would actually be a great game.

If you've read the store page, you probably already have a good idea of what sort of RPG Balrum is. It's well executed. I had fun playing it, and played it quite a lot, but I didn't finish it. I'd definitely recommend it.

RWS are solid developers that you can trust to deliver a fun game, but make no mistake, in its current state it feels like there's less of a demo worth of content. Buy it now if you want to support some awesome devs making an unforgettable game that's probably more than a year away. But if you want something to play today, go buy Postal 2 instead. It's still amazing.

TL;DR: It's pretty good if you like futuristic dystopian storylines, but wait for a sale - I would regret it if I had paid over US$15/€15.

The good:

• The environmental design is AMAZING. I probably spent at least 30 minutes wandering around environments admiring the art installations and architecture.
  
• It's one of Daedalic's most story-driven, least puzzle-driven games to date. You won't get stuck with pixel hunting or item combination puzzles. If you, like me, don't like getting stuck, then this is great.
  
• The story reasonably novel, which is pretty rare in sci-fi these days. I was somewhat invested in the characters and wasn't rolling my eyes at all the tropes, so that's better than average.

The bad:

• You often get the feeling that you've made a choice that matters, but actually your choices matter very little.
  
• Some cutscenes are unskippable
  
• Tedious achievements, which will require you to sit through many of those unskippable cutscenes several times to figure them out. I'm not even going to bother trying for 100% - it would just be hours of time down the drain.
  
• Sometimes awkward movement controls
  
• There's probably about an hour of padding through somewhat dull puzzle/minigame segments. They're not frustrating, but they just don't add anything to the experience.

The ugly:

• The ending. It's like Mass Effect 3 all over again - your choices during the last cutscene determine your ending, but no matter what you choose, you just get a slight variation on the same thing. There are 4 endings, and the only things that differ between them are a few lines of dialog and a few characters being present/absent in the ending montage
  
• The ending (again). It doesn't even wrap up some of the storylines - what happened with Simon, Jeff Kosowski, Kurtz Labs? Why, and how, was Stanley's MoveScan copied? How did the memory module get erased? I don't feel like my character actually came away the victor - he barely survived the crap thrown at him, and he still has a lot more crap ahead of him.
  
• The lack of merch. For some reason Daedalic didn't make any for this game. Seriously, I really want Richard's jacket.
  
• The price. I waited a year for them to bring it down to a reasonable price on sale. It really isn't worth €30.

Starbound has always tried to balance procedurally-made content with hand-made content, and while they've done great work, it just still doesn't come together well. The problem is that the procedurally-made content quickly becomes tedious and repetitive. The hand-made story line gives you a greater sense of purpose, but it seems like they went to every effort to do anything to avoid making a storyline themselves. The result is a bunch of scenarios that end with either nothing except a bit of worthless loot, or a new quest marker to start it over again in a slightly different place.

If you still want to play Starbound, just know that you won't get a satisfying ending - you'll just stop playing when the endless stream of randomly generated game stops being fun. Otherwise I'd recommend Terraria instead - it's the same gameplay style but most of the content is hand-made and actually gives you a sense of purpose.

Unplayable. At first the game just doesn't start. After 20 minutes of installing and configuring Locale Emulator so that the game thinks it's running on Chinese Windows, it starts, but the game has no text. Dialog boxes are just completely empty.

I'm not the first to have these problems. As I write this this there are 5 discussions in Steam - 4 are people complaining the game won't start, 2 are even in Chinese, so it's probably not just an OS language issue.

Mixed review.

On the positive side, Do Not Feed the Monkeys is a collection of short detective scenarios that are really well done and very engaging. I rarely finish games, let alone replay them, but I'm currently working through a second playthrough of DNFtM.

On the negative side, you have to deal with a mix of gameplay mechanics that will leave you with an adrenaline hangover. You have to constantly be on edge looking for yellow-highlighted clues to click, as they only appear for about a second and often won't reappear for ~10 minutes if you miss them. All the while you have to manage your hunger/sleep/money meters, and try to combine clues to get more clues when you have some downtime. Basically you'll spend the whole game on high alert, trying to make every second count and in a state of hypervigilence trying to make sure you catch the clues in time. Fun, but it quickly takes its toll on your brain and becomes quite unpleasant.

The gameplay seemed really interesting... but it crashes too often to actually enjoy it.

I had 10 enjoyable hours exploring the beautiful world of Tokyo 42 and completing a variety of stealth-focused missions. And then they started to wrap up the story by throwing several increasingly difficult combat missions at you. At the best of times aiming guns is awkward and the camera is mildly annoying, but once you've got the pressure of a firefight, having your gun suddenly start shooting at the sky because a hovercar flew in front of the camera is infuriating. You will die many times because of the terrible camera and terrible aiming.

The first 90% of the game is pretty good, but I'm not willing to waste hours and hours repeating the joyless last few fights until I manage to finish them without taking a hit. It ruins the experience to be denied the ending of the game due to unnecessarily awful controls.