Recent reviews by Fingusa of the East

So, Mewgenics.

I have to say that the first couple of hours were actually fun and enjoyable.

Would not be surprised if Edmund made it so that the first 3-4 runs have better RNG than usual in order for people to not be able to refund.

Anyway, to the point of me giving the game a negative review.

I have played a lot of rogue-likes, rogue-lites or whatever you wanna call them. Love me some tactical strategy games like the Fire Emblem series, Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics etc. I have even enjoyed some of the previous games of these developers, like Binding of Isaac. This game should have really fit me like a glove.

The problem is that this game has problems. Be them terrible RNG, unbalanced combat, insane grind, bugs or even basic quality of life features.

For the RNG, I get it. It is a rogue-lite. You are supposed to have good runs and bad runs.

But after the first 3-4 runs it seems like the game just gives you bad ones. There is also this weird thing where every time you pick a build for your cats, the game just happens to always throw enemies and events that counter your builds.

Got a Burn build going? Game will 100% throw rain at you.
Got a high movement and battlefield control build? Oh boy, webs and mines everywhere.
Got a build focused on debuffs? Bosses and enemies randomly clear their debuffs for no reason.

And let’s not even talk about the fact that abilities on cats are random, rerolls are rare and there’s too many useless abilities on each class.

It is rough. It is unfun.

All of that is happening ontop of a combat that kinda just blows. Enemies can usually cross the entire map where you are stuck with at most 6-8 tiles of movement. Almost every enemy has like 3-4 actions where most of the time you are happy if you manage to pull off two per cat. Shark enemies are the worst in this where I have once watched them take 60+ actions before I could act.

Man can take an entire bathroom break before those turns are done.

Every enemy after the first area also seems to be extremely cheesy and it feels like you are not fighting AI enemies in a game but instead some guy with 3k hours in Advance Wars competitive.

We are talking perfectly staying out of your range so you can’t do anything. Enemies moving the environment in ways so they can attack you and you cannot attack them. Or just enemies with abilities that can easily burst down your 40+ HP tank in a single turn before you even had control of your cats.

It is as if Edmund went out of his way to make the most unfun version of Final Fantasy Tactics humanly possible.

Like I know the guy has basically sucked all fun out of Binding of Isaac in the last few years, nerfing any fun item combination and generally making one of my beloved games rather unfun but I was hoping that fun may have been a priority here instead of catering to the Dark Souls git gud crowd.

Then we get to the grind.

In the game, after your cats are done with their adventure, they become incapable of running missions. Missions is how you progress the game, how you get food to feed your cats and money to buy stuff for your house.

This would have been ok if you got more than 2 cats per night at best and sometimes you get none.

I have skipped 4 days before, hoping to get a cat in any way, only to start running out of food with no mission capable cat on the horizon.

Then the cats you actually do get are completely useless and can’t really handle the game’s difficulty.

Add to this the fact that you have to give cats away to progress the meta progression of the game. A run takes about 2-3 hours depending on how far you are going.

And this giving away cats needs, at least on the level I have seen so far, anywhere between 10 to 25 cats.

Yes. The game fully expects you to put in at least 13 hours for a single meta progression item. And there are MANY meta progression items, all of which are 100% necessary to even have a chance. We are talking about having to spend hundreds of hours to have the smallest chances of fully finishing a run cause of necessary meta progression.

And we are not even talking about having to find and stockpile insane amounts of items in order to make RNG cats work.

This might just be the single grindiest rogue-lite game I have ever played.

I have also encountered strange bugs like Vsync not working correctly, game being weirdly GPU demanding considering what it is, bosses and enemies randomly clearing their DoT stacks like poison and bleed or even clearing debuffs or being immune to certain debuffs even though their tooltips say nothing about such an ability or weird ability interactions especially when wanting to target your own allies instead of enemies or free-aiming.

It is a bit rough, as you can see.

The final part here would be for basic quality of life features.

Like, why are we not able to choose an exact path of movement for moving around? Your cats will decide to go through poison, fire and literal traps even if there is a logical safe route around them. This really runs me up the wall. Waypoint movement has been invented since the original X-Com. Drag movement has been around for over a decade now. Edmund, I know you are a boomer but man, fix this. It is actually shameful.

Another thing would be danger zones. When you hold the right mouse button over enemies, you can see their movement and attack tiles

This is good. But why can we not just right click and keep the highlight on?

Also, why does it lie like half of the time? I have seen many enemies, especially enemies like Werecats just completely get a million extra tiles of movement completely outside of what the game highlighted for me.

This definitely needs some work.

Another nice quality of life feature would be an actual real Borderless Window mode.

I cannot believe we are in the year of 2026 and we are still getting games that are either windowed or fullscreen. My OBS skips frames every time I alt-tab essentially signaling that fullscreen is not Borderless Window and on windowed… the game is windowed.

I bet content creators and people with more than one screen love this behavior. /s
I know I hate it.

So yeah, not a complete disappointment but definitely could have been way better.

I can see the effort that was put into the game.

So it kinda sucks that so many things that could have been easily prevented or fixed either slipped or Edmund just did not care.

The game already sold like hot cakes so it’s not like he has to care. Sold on the name and Binding of Isaac legacy alone.

I will watch if anything gets fixed. Cause when the game was fun, it was a lot of fun.
Just sucks that the fun part was maybe 10% after the first 4 hours of the game.

So, time to write a negative review for a product that I have nearly 5000 hours in.

I don’t enjoy doing this either, but here we go.

I have been using Tabletop Simulator for many years. Seen the good and the bad of it and have led many longtime players to it.

We have been using TTS primarily as a means of simple and usable form of a digital table for tabletop roleplaying. Most of the other options we have explored over the years involve things like monthly payment plans, or having to go through rather insane hoops in order to set things up.

Or most commonly, they are just for D&D or specific systems, which is not very useful for a group that plays some truly niche systems on a weekly basis.

Anyway, Tabletop Simulator usually worked for this.

There were some problems, like random table disconnects mid session. Or strange performance dips for no reason. Or that one time a couple of months ago when half of us could not move anything on the table and it kept moving to the middle of the table, which was eventually fixed.

There were problems. Yes. But generally TTS worked. Usually.

But now out of nowhere the developers released a 14.0 update which broke the game for a lot of people. Lots of people can’t even load the game anymore.

Devs have said network security was one of the most important reasons for the update and yet right after the update, MTG (Magic: The Gathering) tables are getting hacked and people’s computers are getting crashed and damaged via hackers. This was not happening before 14.0.

I have personally experienced weird interaction since the 14.0 update where OBS (recording software we have used for years) just randomly skips frames now, which it did not do before and doesn’t do if you force Steam to download the old version.

There is also a new terrible bug in the game that makes loading new music onto the table a game of Russian Roulette that can and will just randomly crash your table.

Now, we have dealt with stuff like this before. TTS devs are incredibly out of touch with the small community they still have. They have been deflecting any and all criticism of the 14.0 update and are even straight up lying about certain things.

Like how they said several times they cannot put up the old version on a beta branch for people who need it because it would not work online even though people can force Steam to download the old version and it works just fine.

I would also like to say that we have tried most of the recommended fixes. Updating drivers. Updating Windows. Reinstalling stuff. Making sure Firewall is not causing trouble. Antivirus stuff. You know, all of the stuff. And all of it was just wasted time.

No, they have overstepped a line in the sand, so to say.

TTS devs have recently announced their 2.0 Roadmap, which is heavily copy-pasted from the 14.0 update announcement. Which is already worrying as most people really do not like the 14.0 update and wish the devs would rollback the changes and do proper testing before releasing an undercooked update that destroys something a lot of people have paid for.

Like, how do you see your community say “we hate this, go back” and your response is “ah yes, more undercooked updates, that’s what we should do!”

Incredibly out of touch.

Honestly the communication with the devs has been absolutely terrible and most of the community before 14.0 was just kinda hoping the devs gave up on the game and focused on something else. Ironically, that would have made things objectively better.

The second part is the paid mods part of the 2.0 Roadmap.

Yes, the only thing that makes people use TTS over its competition. They wanna monetize it and split the already small community further.

Might wanna ask Bethesda how the whole paid mods thing worked out for them.

Anyway, with all of that, I really cannot recommend Tabletop Simulator in the current state it is in.

What I do recommend is looking for an alternative to TTS. I know me and my players are going to be looking for one.

Cause the writing is right there on the wall.

And to the devs who are probably not gonna read it.

Maybe start listening to your community while you still have one.

You have hundreds of people asking for help on Steam forums, Reddit, FB and Discord. Moreso people who don’t speak up anymore cause they are used to you mistreating them. Start doing your job.

So yeah, Silksong.

How many years was it? Seven or so of waiting?

Anyway, I love Hollow Knight, I have finished the game several times here on PC and quite a lot of times on Switch. It is honestly one of my favorite games of all time.

So it really hurts to say that Silksong is, so far, everything I did not want it to be.

Hollow Knight is a balanced game. It starts pretty easy all things considered and ends pretty difficult. After Greenpath (second area of the game) you actually have a whole bunch of options of where to go and most areas give you movement abilities that function as defacto keys to other areas. The further you go through the world of Hallownest, slowly, the challenge escalates.

It is one of those games that I compare other games to because it is just so great. All games I play need to somehow answer a difficult question of “why not just play Hollow Knight”.

And I wish Silksong was like that as well.

At the moment of writing this I have about 7 hours in the game and I have hit the wall of Greymoor in which I cannot progress.

In Hollow Knight, you can access a blacksmith that increases your melee damage pretty early on. In Silksong I am 7 hours in and I have yet to even hear of such a feature. Add into this that bosses have pretty ridiculous HP pools and we have a recipe for disaster. I have fought the Fourth Chorus for nearly 15 minutes. At this point we are fighting World of Warcraft bosses.

In Hollow Knight, you can gain extra HP via Lifeblood before boss fights in order to give yourself a little bit of breathing room. There is no such feature in Silksong as far as I can tell.

In Hollow Knight, by the time you reach the fourth area of the game, The City of Tears (the aforementioned area with the blacksmith), you have unlocked 4 different vendors who sell charms, all of which are giving you a lot of room to build your character in a way you wanna play, be it summoning, melee damage, improved survival and even better movement options. In Silksong at the 7 hour mark and fifth area unlocked, I have six charms, none of which really help me in combat except for tool charms which do next to no damage.

In Hollow Knight, most enemies and bosses do 1 HP of damage per hit. In Silksong, most enemies and bosses do 2 HP of damage, essentially cutting your HP pool in half for no good reason. This also makes exploration nearly pointless because only two new masks actually translate to an increase in survival. Have I mentioned I have not even found more than three shards in 7 hours and a lot of exploration?

There’s a lot of other problems, like how charms are divided between three types so that you cannot pick and choose or how most of them are charms from Hollow Knight, but much worse. Or how a lot of enemies can completely disregard laws of physics that you adhere to. Or the sheer amount of flying and digging enemies, with the latter being pretty rare in Hollow Knight.

Generally, the game is not a good time and is a massive fall in quality in comparison to Hollow Knight.

This is what we were waiting for 7 years?

Honestly, I kinda wish it never came out cause the possibility of it actually being good would have been better than the reality.

Edit 26/09/2025

So I have played a little bit more of the game and I have to say that I have reached my personal breaking point.

Not a single moment of this game is enjoyable except maybe the first hour or so.

Every boss I have faced since the original review has not been fun.

I have pushed myself through a completely unenjoyable slop just to maybe find something, ANYTHING, of worth in this terrible game.

Made it to ACT 2 and pushed through the Citadel. Again, nothing of worth here, just more enemies with way too much HP, softlock inducing random savepoints and uninspired damage sponge bosses that do way too much damage.

Areas of poison that denies your already terrible healing? Yup, we’ve got that. Infinitely spawning enemies? Of course.

But the thing that broke me is when they put Path of Pain in the middle of the game, locked Double Jump behind it and gave it a death timer in the form of a cold mechanic. 22 minutes of frame-perfect inputs.

It is called Mount Fay.

Not into Celest level platforming? Team Cherry says screw you. They probably hated that most people skipped Path of Pain in the original so they made it 100% needed to do. Thanks for terrible game design.

And of course modding is buggy, corrupts your saves and is potentially dangerous to your computer cause BepInEx devs may have put a cryptominer in it.

Perfect. Nice. Wonderful.

Just get the original Hollow Knight. Silksong is worse in every possible way.

So, this review is going to be written from the point of view of someone who has played a fair bit of Factorio and who enjoys games with automation in them.

Long story short, it is rather similar to Factorio except for a couple differences.

Them being:

-> It has a story
-> It has actual humor
-> The community is not very toxic
-> It has meaningful exploration
-> The automation starts being annoying way earlier but not early enough for a refund
-> Weirdly enough the netcode for the game is way better than Factorio even though it is 3D
-> No base defense focus

Essentially this game is 3D Factorio with a story, that looks incredibly beautiful in which everything but actually building a factory is way better than in Factorio. Heck from my experience the 3D aspect doesn’t really add anything interesting to the table as the game puts A LOT of arbitrary limits to the 3D aspect.

Honestly I wish Factorio would have more to do than just building. Some kind of exploration aspect.

But to sacrifice the whole point of the game for the said exploration is not the way.

Even if Factorio never goes on sale, it is a bit more worth your money. There are games out there that do fun and meaningful exploration better than Satisfactory.

So I cannot believe I am about to leave a negative review to one of my beloved games from way back but Gearbox has, after a decade, changed the ToS in an extremely predatory way.

These changes include:

• Mods are a bannable offense
• Display of Cheats/Exploits is bannable
• Forced arbitration clause and a waiver of class action and jury trial rights for all users residing in the United States and any other territory other than Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, or The Territories of The European Economic Area
• You can be banned for using a VPN while connecting to online servers
• Cannot access game content on a Virtual PC
• Best for last, they reserve the right to modify this Agreement, in whole or in part, at any time

And many more.

This should be an illegal practice as it is happening to quite a lot of games lately.

Something something doing my part.

I have played and beaten all kinds of games of this genre, be it oldies like Castlevania or Megaman, or more modern games like Rain World or Hollow Knight.

I've even played and beaten games that very obviously inspired this game like Dark Souls, with the first one being my favorite.

I love challenge. I love it a lot.

The problem is that Tails of Iron fails on a fundamental level.

I have only played about two hours of the game not cause of the refund policy, I am too late on that one, but actually because I could not take more than two hours.

Where something like Hollow Knight has fluent, extremely tight controls, Tails of Iron feels like drowning in a swamp. You character takes ages to turn, he takes ages to prepare his shield and his attacks are so slow I can probably write this review before he can pull off some of the slower attacks in the game.

That is joke but you kinda get my point.

And of course enemies do not follow this whatsoever. Enemies are fast, numerous and have completely random amount of damage per attack.

Speaking of attacks, hit boxes are terrible. Hell, general hit detection is one of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer game. I think that the only games that match are some really terrible NES games I played as a kid that I prefer to not remember as much as possible.

The amount of time I got hit by stuff that was nowhere near me, or when an enemy essentially teleported across the arena to hit me for most of my HP with next to no possible reaction time makes me wonder if this game was even tested. I highly doubt it.

Enemies generally do one of three types of colored attacks in this game, ala Sekiro, the problem is that while in Sekiro you can entirely depend on these colored attacks in Tails of Iron you can't.

Why?

Well because the enemies often don't actually show the color of their attack, skip animations, or show one type of attack only to perform an entire different attack.

This makes a lot of damage in the game not really the fault of the player.

While the game looked pretty nice, you kinda need the gameplay to be good as well and that sadly wasn't true at all.

Just buy Hollow Knight or Rain World, please.

Oh boy time to get hated on for saying negative things about Rain World.

So, I have completed all of the Slugcat campaigns between base Rain World and Downpour. Seen all of the endings, done most of the Challenges (missing a couple) and finished almost all Expedition quests and missions.

At the time of writing this I have nearly 260 hours in Rain World, which is pretty crazy for a game with no major multiplayer features.

I have taken part of the ARG that was made for The Watcher and have enjoyed the collective treasure hunt that it was. It was fun.

So let me tell you why am I leaving a negative review on The Watcher DLC even though I obviously love Rain World very much.

Rain World is extremely well-known for its "ecosystem" in which, in theory, you are just a small part of a greater whole, where creatures like lizards and vultures kinda go about their business trying to survive from cycle to cycle. Now, in practice it doesn't exactly work like that, you are the only one trying to survive but the idea is sorta there.

You are kinda supposed to explore this crazy inter-connected world of a million and one platforming challenges while dealing with a very random set of circumstances that lead to, quite often, unfair death of your Slugcat.

This is normal. This is Rain World. This is why the community loves Rain World.

So it was a really big surprise when I played Watcher for the first time and most of the new creatures are not really part of the "ecosystem" if anything they are completely distanced from it.

It was also a really big surprise when I tried to go to places like Pipeyard, Farm Arrays, Exterior or Sky Islands and I found my way blocked by Rot. Gone is the exploration, we are led down a very specific path, which doesn't feel very Rain World.

I was even more surprised when I started to realize that the lore in The Watcher makes no sense, considering that it was apparently made by the original developers. It not only disregards both the lore of the original game and Downpour lore, it straight up dunks on it with what little lore there is in this DLC.

I bet the people who hated Downpour due to its changes to the lore, who kept saying things like "The Watcher is gonna be so cool cause the story is written by the OG devs and its going to be so lore accurate and respectful!" are feeling rather silly right now. Cause the worst Downpour did were a couple errors here and there and maybe an overpowered Slugcat that doesn't entirely fit in the lore.

I also have to say that Watcher's invisibility is way too finicky, doesn't work properly half of the time (I've had creatures literally beeline towards me while invisible) and when it does work, it is straight up overpowered, making Rivulet and Saint look weak and feeble in comparison.

I have not gotten through too much of The Watcher, kinda waiting on some mods or updates to maybe fix some problems like softlocks and weird problems but right now, this DLC doesn't feel like Rain World. It feels like an entirely different game.

It feels like a mod made by someone who doesn't understand what makes Rain World tick. Like someone tried to do a corridor shooter in Rain World engine.

Cause most of the decisions made in this DLC are literally anti-Rain World.

That is all, I will update the review if anything jumps at me as a redeeming quality but right now, it would have to be pretty darn amazing.

Edit 7th April 2025

SPOILERS

So I have played the DLC for a little bit, unlocked the portals and started teleporting around.

Some of the areas are pretty alright, like Torrid Desert or Coral Caves but there are, so far, certain terrible ones that I just gotta mention.

Badlands is beyond terrible due to it having essentially no food and the instant kill locusts can, for some reason, see you through your invisibility power, just to add to the many reasons why that ability sucks. They also completely ignore anything but you, yet again making Watcher feel like he is not part of the ecosystem whatsoever. Very disappointing. Had to eventually solve the locusts by downloading a mod that makes your invisibility work against them, as it should.

Then we have the Aether Ridge, which is way too big, confusing, the wind mechanic makes no sense due to its randomness and the corridors of this area do not allow for much movement and methods of dodging predators.

Finally the Outer Rim, I got there after this amazing section in a place called Unfortunate Evolution only to be met with an area that has the wind mechanic from Aether Ridge but now there are hundreds of literally pixel perfect jumps, for some of which you need to have two items on you to be able to make them. It also has no food except for corrupted food that's really not good for you and a single non-corrupted berry.

Generally, I don't believe this game was tested whatsoever and I am incredibly disappointed in what Videocult has done here.

Drought was made by fans and it does Rain World way better than The Watcher which had two years of development, actual budget and costs actual money.

Again, will edit if I find out more but man, I wish I was not a conduit for these people getting money for terrible work.

Edit 6th of October 2025

So, 1.5 came out. After many months of work Videocult has finally finished and fixed their magnum opus, right?

Wrong.

They added a whole bunch of regions, two more endings a couple new creatures and create a plethora of new bugs, made the game more unstable and of course, they broke all of the mods again.

Now, first things first, I have since my last edit actually finished Watcher and honestly just didn't feel like editing my review cause the ending was meh and getting to it was even more meh.

Anyway, back to 1.5 update.

What are some of the common problems with Watcher that people had?

Lack of shelters in most regions? Not fixed.
Lack of food in most regions? Not fixed and made actually worse.
Not knowing what to do and having to look up guides to make any form of progress? Even worse now!
Having to use mods to make basic quality of life things that should have been part of the DLC? Even worse cause now most mods are gonna be broken for months.
Fix Badlands locusts mechanics? Not fixed and instead they added them to several areas.
Fix Aether Ridge? Nope. Not fixed.

Basically, 1.5 somehow made the game even worse. And this time it is not just The Watcher DLC that was affected by also Downpour and base game.

A lot of people can't even boot up the game at the point of writing this. I have personally experienced enemies falling through floors, my slugcats falling through floors and generally the game being much more prone to crashing.

And yes that is after the usual fixes. And yes, this happens on two entirely different computers.

I don't understand how they did it, but somehow, Watcher is even worse now.

Congratulations.

Dinkum is what happens when someone looks at all the possible problems with Animal Crossing and thinks to themselves "yeah that aspect is bad, let's make it worse".

The inventory is incredibly limited. For some reason you cannot put bugs in storage boxes. And since in the early game they are really the only way to make any semblance of money, you will be filling your limited inventory with bugs especially cause you need one of each in your inventory cause you gotta save them for the museum that's not built yet.

The energy/stamina system is beyond terrible. You go through your entire stamina bar to cut down a single tree but then it takes about 3-4 minutes for the bar to regenerate.

This is supposed to be solved by cooking and eating food but most recipes are straight up end game Stardew Valley level complicated and gathering their ingredients is extremely costly in both aforementioned energy and time.

Tools, for some reason, have durability. Your axe will break after like four trees and you gotta cut down quite a lot of trees. Same with the bug net and other tools. You will need to catch hundreds of bugs to repay your first debt, means you will go through quite a lot of bug nets, each costing money, pushing you back on your debt.

Speaking of the debt, where making gold in Stardew or bells in Animal Crossing is actually a pretty easy task, in Dinkum your first debt is 75k. It takes several hours of grinding bugs to make that kinda money.

All in all even with just about two hours I can see that the developers have not looked at Animal Crossing and asked themselves "how could we innovate on this?" No, instead they asked themselves "how can we waste the most time possible of our players?"

And as such, I am leaving a negative reviews.

If you have a Switch, buy Animal Crossing, it is better in every possible way.
If you don't, get Stardew Valley, it is also better in every possible way.

TLDR: RNG-heavy puzzle card game with good presentation and story, suffering from insane gameplay decisions, ridiculous grind and lack of explanations for anything actually important.

Oh boy how much I wanted this one to be actually good.

Library of Ruina is a card playing puzzle game by Project Moon, a direct sequel to their previous game Lobotomy Corporation. They don’t share too much between themselves except for certain characters and background lore.

Starting with the good, the game's presentation is rather stylish and so far is the only card video game I have ever played that actually creates any form of excitement during animations. Characters slashing each other, explosive effects for staggers, on-screen effects like words and shadows creeping from the corners. Everything is wonderfully put together graphically and aesthetically. Most card games could learn from Library of Ruina at least in this regard.

Story is the usual Project Moon deal, rather grimdark, only takes about two hours for characters in the game to start talking about eating other humans. Very well-written. Roland is the best character of the ones I could experience. He wins my based character award of 2024.

Sounds and music are wonderful as well, much better than in Lobotomy Corporation.

One can learn that the developers have had more of a budget this time around and have learned a lot, at least for the audio-visual aspect of game making.

Similar to Lobotomy Corporation which was a puzzle game hiding behind the guise of an eldritch abomination containment simulator, Library of Ruina is a card playing puzzle game hiding behind the guise of a deck-building game.

You see, in most deck-building games, several to many different deck combinations are viable for success due to the inherent random nature of most card games. In a good deck-building game, one can beat the RNG with proper deck construction, mitigation and synergy.

The Library of Ruina is not like this. Like at all.

During my blind stream playthrough at several points I have hit a wall where any deck I have been able to construct was not viable at all until I have either found one magical combination that works, or more likely, looked it up online.

I have been playing deck-building games for over three decades now, either in real life or through video games. I have more than enough experience with this sorta thing and I have to say that the RNG is so stacked against the player in this game that it feels like the developer is straight up taking a cudgel to my head for daring to give them money and playing their game.

You see, in this game there is this book burning mechanic which is just a gacha opening simulator connected to a ridiculous amount of grind. Through this book burning mechanic, you gain cards and key books.

Cards are obvious, you put them in your deck and play them in combat.

Cards have different stats, three different damage values, two different defensive values, cost in mana that you randomly regain and randomly gain more for some reason (seriously, there is no mention in the game on how this works) and special abilities of the card.

Key books are actually rather interesting. They are essentially classes that you put on your librarians (playable characters) and you gain most of your stats through these key books. Things like resistances, speed, HP/Armor, passive abilities and many other things.

The problem is that most cards you have access to are worse than those used by the enemy that you currently need to defeat in order to progress the story.

Outside of the first two hours (perfectly paced for you to not be able to refund the game, by the way) you will always be outnumbered and outgunned by every single enemy in the game.

This means that in the vast majority of fights you need to figure out an extremely specific deck for every character on your team in order to have a chance to win. Then you have to pray the enemy gimmick doesn’t activate too many times. And on top of all of that all cards are arrays for damage and defense with things like Blunt 1-6 etc. Defensive cards also, for unknown reason, sometimes get completely disregarded. Enemies sometimes beat your clashes (a sorta duel between damage die values) even if you are rolling double the value of what the opponent can even roll. And of course if you start losing, there is essentially no way to crawl your way out of a bind. No safety nets, no quick restarts, nothing.

Also, in order to get more units in the field for your side of the combat, you have to clear Abnormalities, which are gimmick boss fights where nothing makes sense, all rules are out of the window and you might as well be programming a bot to play the game for you considering how many times you have to pull the slot machine in order to maybe win.

As you can see, the combat is quite messy, grindy, under-explained and random.

And 95% of the game is this combat.

Considering the sheer grind you have to go through, you would think there would be some kind of permanent upgrade mechanic where you could give a key book or even a character some kind of small boost but sadly no. Most cards earned through book burning become pointless about one millisecond after the next story fight shows up, making the grind both annoyingly necessary but also incredibly pointless, at the same time.

It is a bit rough, which is a pity cause there is absolutely a good game hidden somewhere here but at this point I would recommend watching a playthrough on Youtube rather than playing the game yourself.

Speaking of Youtube, for any content creators out there, your video will get claimed by this developer. And every time you trim things a new claim gets placed on a random spot in your video. Good luck with that. Developers obviously don’t enjoy the idea of people spreading the word about their game.

Another thing of note is that the community for this game is rather toxic.

You see, I get it is the current year and people love being awful to other people for no reason but the sheer amount of trolls I had to deal with in two stream sessions of the game is rather ridiculous. Nothing as bad as Rain World, I have not gotten any death threats yet, but I am fairly certain content creators should be aware of this. Quite the bog in this community.

I am also aware of the modding possibility, but modding both disables achievements (sign of a horrible developer btw) and apparently the game is not well-suited to modding and has a high chance of file corruptions. Yay…

All in all, if you are truly a gaming masochist with way too much time on your hands and willingness to deal with the most RNG heavy card game I have ever experienced in decades, then you will experience a wonderful story about machines more human than the actual humans you keep butchering in the library.

Like I said before, there is good here.

It is just stuck in a toxic bog.

Warning to potential buyers.

Space Age DLC for Factorio is endgame content. Nothing new has been added to the early game where it was extremely needed and almost nothing was added to the mid game.

Due to the slowness of the base game, it will take you hundreds of hours to see any of the new content added in the DLC on a new save.

This is a DLC made for less than 1% of the community and most positive reviews do not mention this fact.

If anything even the store page for the DLC obfuscates this.

Means if you are not a diehard fan of Factorio with hundreds of hours under your belt, there is literally nothing in this DLC for you. The developers do not care about you.

This DLC is the equivalent of going to a car shop, being told you can get a freaking Lambo for the price of your Civic and then the car salesman gives you the same Civic you came in with saying "in ten years it will become a Lambo, I promise!"

That is all.