Recent reviews by Com_turtle

This game has a lot of potential.

to start its performence is almost amazing. It runs great and its only 10gb... But it also seems dependant of the fps?

The safehouse management and customization is really nice. Not many games let me just dump collecteed loot all over the place. Loot is common enough that I have not struggled to find most things.

Most of the guns feel good to use. The mosin and shotgun however... takes some time learning

with that said... There are various glaring issues.

Trading feels unfair and scamy. I need a full inventory of very valueable loot to trade for not much in return. Half the time I cant trade at all because I just dont have enough loot for things that I want. For example I can offer 5 assault rifles at over 70% quality, and it wont be enough to get a supressor, sight, or certain furnature. and another example I one time had to trade 7 near perfect assault rifles of various types to get 1 body armor plate.

without a gun you are utterly defenseless, If you die and have no backup weapons in the safehouse you will be in for a very rough time. (this has been my first 2 hours)

healing is not really an option, or well it is but healing items and the crafting stuff for basic healing is so rare that I basically never have anything to use to heal. If I end up bleeding I have to run back to the safehouse to drop everything before I bleed out.
Its only until several days worth of play time later where I have enough bandages to stop bleeding and also heal. But I am still vulnerable to some specific injuries that only end game medical stuff can heal, of which are more rare then anything In existence.

armor is so rare it effectively does not exist. while it also at the same time does not protect me very well and breaks after 1-2 shots usually. There is also no way to repair them as far as I can tell.

Some items are so rare I have either never seen them at all (saline) or are so rare I have only ever found 3-4 of said item in all of my playtime currently (water). There are many items that just.... dont exist? not even for the traders. I have been hardlocked on multiple quests because of this.

The map item has not been useful at all. It shows the wider region but it does not show local building/road layout, trader locations, or shelters.

I only have the starting cabin shelter and the tent. all other shelters I have not been able to find. and/or are unlocked through quests that I cant complete because of item rarity

AI is basic, which works in my favour since they shoot at me from very far away often. and make nearly no noise ever

I will update this review as I play the game more and as its updated.

Ok, so I like the idea of this game. And back in the earliest days following its early access release I was having a lot of fun with it. But as time goes on I am less and less certin of its future.

Because of the dev's constant effort to nerf us into being "not that guy" there is a never ending update loop of us being made weaker then wet paper and then them having to reverse course halfway to make the game more playable again, and it just happens over and over again.

Now to be fair, they do put a lot of effort into the game and making it good. So Im not going to say its forever bad and not worth playing. Because it absolutely is worth playing if it grabs your intrest. But I cant really recomend it because sometimes updates make it really not fun.

Just be ready to become part of that good-bad update loop. It hurts and rewards you at the same time. Thats it for my review, its just that one gripe. lots of other people already go in depth with the graphics and gameplay better then I could

The vast majority of my play time is waiting for tech to research at max game speed. Maybe if I was a more aggressive player I would have more to do, but the game punishes me when I do play aggressive.

Research is not random. But appears like that at first glance, there are so many tech options it’s painful for me to figure out what is obsolete as I unlock things. Most drives are traps and dead ends. What feels like at least half of the entire tech tree is useless or outright detrimental to you, it’s not clear what is good or bad until you find out the hard way.

It’s very difficult to get enough resources to build any ships. You effectively need all of the best planets and all the best asteroids to be able to build anything of value. The only viable play style is whatever the Meta is at the time, everything else is doomed to fail.

There are thousands of small systems designed only to punish you and make things worse. You are crippled if you unify countries. If you get too strong all other human factions automatically declare war on you and start helping the aliens, yes even the human supremacy faction. Aliens get extremely powerful and permanent buffs that also stack simply by being in orbit of earth; Factions can’t be killed outright, even if all their leaders are dead, they control nothing, and they have no support anywhere in the entire solar system. And so many more things I have likely not noticed yet.

The forgiving difficulty is not forgiving. I can’t imagine how horrible the rest of the options are. Custom campaign options also apply to both me and the AI, effectively making it useless, for example I could make it so I research faster. But since it also applies to the AI nothing really changes. Things will get faster but that’s it.

Most of my time has only been suffering as I was helpless to stop or even survive the aliens without absolute levels of game knowledge. I had to spoil myself on everything just to understand why it’s so hard; going in blind is an automatic game over..

There are what feels like severe balancing problems that massively favor the aliens and other factions, you have to almost cheat and game the system to fight back at all,

As time has gone on I find myself liking the game less. So much so that I now stay in 1.2 and older versions

The devs seem hellbent on railroading you into how they want you to play the game. You can only make one specific kind of base if you want to survive, you MUST progress from biome to biome in a specific order, level up in a specific order. get loot in a specific order. and if you find a way to play the game outside of that, the devs with patch the game to "fix" that. its open world, but they don't want it to be open world.

The devs are extremely petty about it.

If you still want to get the game I recommend going to either the 1.2 version or earlier. If you decide to play the most up to date version you should be weary since this game can change drastically from update to update. and updates tend to break saves anyways, (or at least make them unstable). So long term it might actually be a good idea to use old versions if you want to make significant progress.

They marketed this game since the very beginning as not shying away from anything. Yet its now been watered down. Yes in the grand scheme its not significantly watered down, but if they were willing to do it for a console release they are willing to water it down even more down the line imo.

The AI still cheats like crazy, seeing you instantly at impossible angles and microscopic openings in the maps. They always shoot around your body armor or just directly in your face, they can usually see through the dark, and power through cs gas and pepper-ball/spray (ignoring the ones who are well trained or wearing gas masks). I don't remember the rest but I know the list goes on.

I liked it back in early access. But with all the changes to how missions work, the campaign in general, removal of various weapons. removal of doing different missions for each map, and more. This game stopped being fun for me.

At least the world building is amazing. Tried to refund the game but steam doesn't allow refunds past 2 hours, and I played far more then that before the game changed.

So I figured its time I finally made a review for space engineers. Since to keep it short space engineers was the reason I started using steam in the first place.

To preface this. if you do not like making and building things on your own. You will most likely hate this game. As creation is both its strong point, and also its only point really. It gains other aspects with multiplayer but personally I wouldn't recommend 100% relying on MP for all your enjoyment, but its up to you.

Modding is the only reason why this game and its studio are still around. without mods it would have died a long time ago. its possible to play without mods... But unless you only like building ships you will be let down,

Because there is 0 reason to explore anywhere at all. Other then maybe an initial self goal of leaving or reaching a planet, or building something specific. Then again those self goals also apply to modded space engineers as well from my experience. There are random ships and locations that spawn, plus the missions you can do for some outposts. But they are not all that special imo.

scenarios are usually pretty good, and the ones in the steam workshop can be even better. But they all have the downside of ending abruptly/ anti-climatically. Leaving you in the sandbox wondering what to do next, or if you should keep going at all.

Space engineers has a lot of dlc. Early on it wasn't that many dlc, and they were very cheap. But that has long since changed, and honestly I can no longer remember what blocks are dlc or not other then the obvious ones. Most blueprints on the workshop use dlc blocks. But I can understand that since is really hard making nice looking things without them. Its sorta reached the point where the dlc is now a detriment to the game, since an ever increasing pool of options are behind a paywall. But on the rare occasion the dlc goes on sale, so I recommend putting the ones you want into your wish-list and then waiting.

I want to say the game is worth it since I have played it for so long and I still hold it close to me. But you must think about it long and hard on if its a game you will truly enjoy before you buy and play it.

I wanted to love this game, especially since it cost 100$ for me. But its just painfully average, generic, simple. Only character I cared about was that ex pirate guy that mans the eye. All other characters were either completely uninteresting or even downright annoying and irritating, And I found myself skipping the dialog very often which is something I had never really done before unless I had lost progress in something and had to get back to where I was at. Despite skipping most of the dialog the story was still simple enough to understand. most of the quests in the game are radiant quests on planets with copy paste landmarks (or no landmarks).

The crimson fleet story-line was the only one that I think is of any value. Its highlights are better then the main story that much is sure.

terramorph story-line was alright, had one nice location, though I went there by accident early on and killed the mini boss for its midway point.

Some of the side quests were good. Most were not.

I didn't bother with companions, I didn't find any of them even remotely interesting

The story wasn't impressive, save for one part that copies something from titanfall 2, though even then they did not make a good copy. Reaching the ending completely killed my desire to continue playing the game, since finishing it means you wipe all of your progress, you only keep your perks and one other gameplay mechanic.

It can be hard to unlock the next level for perks, and each level is an exponential increase in the amount of required xp, so after roughly level 60-70 you will need xp farms to level at a reasonable rate. Up to you if thats a negative or not.

ship customization was somewhat fun but also frustrating, and also has a lot of hard limits that make things very difficult to get how I want. You will need mods if you really want to explore the ship building to its fullest extant. otherwise you are limited to meta builds or something less then capable with anything.

space combat is too hard early game and too easy late game, or too hard/easy in general depending on your ship loadout.

outposts in every single capacity are significantly worse then how settlements worked in fallout4. They are not worth the effort, especially when you finish the main story. their only benefit is as crude resource generators that you quickly fly to, or as a storage lot, the controls for building outposts is clunky and frustrating, object/structure auto snapping is so bad that anything you want to space away from each-other have to either be placed very far from each-other, or built and deconstructed in a specific order. The outposts work very poorly as main bases, but they do work.

Inventory weight limit is abysmal. your personal and ship inventory will be full or nearly full practically all of the time. pretty much forcing you to make a outpost that is dedicated entirely for storage and crafting. But there is a bug where crafting stations will not work every time you visit that outpost, so you have to save and load constantly to fix them. there is no point to collecting misc objects other then as memento's to your exploration.

customization in general is significantly worse then older Bethesda games, Other then some small visual changes for weapons like scopes and barrels, everything looks the same. suits have no visual changes to speak of when upgrading them.

melee weapons and melee in general is a waste of time.

Starfield has the most loading screens out of all Bethesda games combined by far, there are loading screens constantly and for nearly everything you do, and ship landing animations only play once per location, Ill leave that up to you if a ship landing animation happening only once per location is a negative or not

It might be realistic for planets to all look the same, but its not fun at all. Other the a small number of locations specific to the main story or side quests, all locations are literally perfectly identical to each other, all the way down to EXACT item and body placement, and there is only one type of alien structure that has only one room. Once you have been to one temple you have been to them all. I mean that literally, all the alien temples are the exact same both inside and out.

Even the earth which I expected more of, is even MORE generic and boring then other random moons. earth has 3-4 ish landmarks that you have to discover in books first, otherwise dont bother going to earth as there is literally nothing there other then sand and rock, there is no interesting terrain either, its all flat with the odd crater or indent. It doesn't have any worthwhile resources to make it useful for an outpost as there are a large number of nicer planets that offer nearly every resource you could ever need.

you are better off going to stations and derelicts, those are all actually unique and interesting, though one or two of those derelict ships are deathtraps even in end game (not deathtraps in a fun way)

combat is ok, its passable but isn't any more impressive then other Bethesda games, honestly if anything its less impressive then their older games. There is no dismemberment or gibbing for anyone or anything as far as I can tell, if thats something you care about.

The game demands FAR too much storage space and performance in comparison to what it gives, its visually and to an extant functionally a last gen game. people and effects overall look better then they had in the past, but thats it.

For what it is was I enjoyed it, but I did not get my money's worth out of it and I would not have gotten it had I known in advance what I was getting. but thats my own fault for getting it a few days before release and avoiding almost all spoilers. Also personally I would recommend not trusting the advertisements for starfield

Just not very enjoyable, at least to me.

Its a good game. But its far shorter then I wanted it to be (I finished it in about 5 hours, I expected something closer to at least 10 hours in length). The story/plot I didn't really like two thirds through the game, though maybe thats because I dont find body horror interesting.

Specifically my least favorite part was that creature that melds with you so early on in the game, it feels tacked on and I think it downright ruins the last 10ish minutes of the game, especially the ending considering how much the poor guy goes through in the end. Or maybe I'm just jaded it stole the ending from me.

overall I liked the game, but it feels like it gets progressively less interesting as it goes on. But not enough to make me downright stop playing the game. Scorns world itself I find fascinating, and I was far more invested in wanting to see what happened to it, or how it fell apart/died. I wanted to explore its world and learn more about it but was instead railroaded by the game into the exclusively body horror themes by the end, I'm not angry about it but I am a little disappointed.

I really liked the puzzles, some did take a long time to understand and solve, but it never felt unfair or painfully hard.

Gunplay/weapons were fine. Ammo is very limited but honestly I never thought there was enough enemies in any given area to make that a problem, which is good I think?

-Dont use melee unless you have no other options.
-The shotgun feels great and does what feels like the proper amount of damage, and it sounds great. In spite of its very limited ammo.
-The pistol is ok, It feels like it takes one shot more to kill enemies then it should be. sound is fine.

-Grenade launcher honestly is downright pathetic, and is nothing like the one presented in the store page videos. Once you get it before the end, the plot locks you to it for the rest of the game, which I didn't like. and it also sounded sad compared to the one in the store page videos, and the visuals of the grenade explosions was in a similar sad state.

Despite it being on sale I ended up paying around 44$ for it (Canada eh), and honestly after only getting 5 hours from it, it does not feel worth the price in exchange for the amount of time it takes to beat it, it feels closer to a 20$ game, and in addition to its experiences it provides I just barely cannot recommend it.

(review update) I stopped my 2nd playthrough after act 2, you could probably beat the entire game in only 3 hours or less. Its as linear as it gets and you are railroaded the entire time from start to end, and there are a very large number of invisible walls. It has no replay value, and the secret achievement is just from doing something different in the first act, which is also the only choice you can make in the entire game.

Its like a perfect extension of FAR: Lone sails and for that I love it