Recent reviews by Fitz

I feel like I'm usually very patient with early access games, and this is only the second time I can remember posting a negative review for one. Bottom line up front, this isn't worth anywhere near $40 right now and shows little promise that it will be any time soon. They feel comfortable advertising the game and asking me for $40 (or $100 if you have more money than brains), so I feel comfortable being direct with my review.

I find the similarity to a tutorial UE5 project deeply concerning, but forgivable. What I expected when I opened this game was a bunch of stock assets but with a significant amount of the custom systems already scaffolded out. I got the stock assets, but not the custom system scaffolding.

Opening without an auction house or player-vendor system in a player driven economy sandbox game is frankly unforgivable. This is the keystone system that would enable player interaction in your MMO while you build out other meaningful features. The lack of any way of transporting goods in bulk makes basic economic functions nearly impossible, and is probably why all resources can be found in small quantities everywhere rather than having e.g. ore-rich and wood-rich regions. The skill and crafting tree as it exists is entirely feasible for a single player to unlock and level everything, so there is no specialization and ultimately little reason to have an economy in the first place.

Placeholder combat is understandable, but after seeing enough tech demos released as EA games I doubt this placeholder gets changed any time in the next year. I'm so confident, that if it does get changed within one year from this post leave a comment and I'll gift a copy of this game to first person who mentions it. Again, this is a much bigger problem for a pvp-focused game than it would be other games.

The server and lag issues I completely forgive, the devs didn't have a good way to see how the game would perform for so many people. But it's worth noting that once the game became unplayable I stopped playing and found enough idle time to write this review.

With combat and economics being so central in this type of game, I was surprised to find how little focus had been given to those aspects of the game. It appeared that nearly all of the work had been on the graphics and visuals of the game. However, it quickly became clear that a lot of this graphical work came from the UE5 itself, which leaves me with the question: where did the actual work go?

I'm not so cynical to call this a ruthless cash grab. But I'm also not so naive to trust a new studio on blind faith after such an underwhelming EA promotion. The most concerning part is that this style of game is no longer a new concept. There has been enough prior art (both successful and otherwise) to know what works, what doesn't, what's important for EA and what isn't. It is not clear to me that the developers understand the experience of actually playing these games and what makes them work. So I have little faith that they will focus on anything except what helps make pretty trailers.

I have only a minor interest in the horror genre in general, and this probably colors my review. I was luke-warm about this DLC for most of my playthrough. If you're familiar with both Rimworld and horror tropes in media you will either find the new content entirely predictable or be comforted by the familiarity. I was able to predict the ending pretty accurately from the first tooltip in the DLC scenario. I don't think this fact alone robs the DLC of its value, but it's very much an homage to the horror genre more than a novel rethinking of horror.

Tynan mentioned wanting to explore themes of horror with this DLC. I can't say that I felt anything like fear, dread, or horror, in my playthrough but I'm an experienced player and was on normal difficulty. I can imagine a new player might experience those things, or they might feel more horrific on higher difficulties for experienced players. I did have a few moments where it felt like an unending nightmare, but more due to tedium and chaos than any sense of fear. Again, this might be a result of just knowing the tropes already and having a pretty good guess of what was coming next.

The new entities and events were novel enough but felt like a grab-bag of "hey look at this weird thing" more than meaningful story elements, and they lose their value after the first time you experience them. I find the content of the other DLCs are much more interesting in a lasting way than this one.

Still, this DLC does what it says on the tin. I felt that the ending redeemed it a bit. It's at the bottom of my list of the DLCs so far, but is probably worth the money for a true horror enthusiast or insatiable Rimworld fan. So I give it a thumbs-up with a half-hearted "meh, alright".

You should buy this game if:

- You like the visual style. You get what you see on the store page, and it's consistent and high quality throughout the game. It's sidescrolling Hades with Japanese animated fighting game style.
- You thought Hades was a bit too hard to get into. The baseline difficulty of BBEE is much easier than Hades, but you unlock a lot of difficulty tweaks pretty early on in the game. BBEE is also very generous in giving the player tools, skills, buffs, and heals compared to Hades.
- You find bad translations charming more than distracting. It's not the worst I've ever seen but it feels like google translate did most of the work. I feel bad for the voice actors forced to read the awkward and often silly voicelines, but ultimately thought of it as a cute quirk than a true flaw of the game.

I'd say theme and style are the biggest reasons to buy this game because that's really what it does best. In terms of mechanics and gameplay there are just a lot of games out there that do it better.

I was able to beat the final boss on my fifteenth run, but I would say the game's baseline difficulty is equivalent to an easy mode and you'll need to turn on the Entropy system (difficulty options) to play it at a more serious difficulty. Someone skilled with combat systems like this one could probably beat it sight unseen on their third or fifth run.

I actually found the skill system to be more interesting than Hades, maybe just as a result of having a lot more interplay between different trees and synergies between character skillsets and acquired skills. The other side of that is that once you find a couple of strong combos you can pretty easily build a god run to steamroll through the game. The Legacy systems lets you pick and keep up to four skills from previous runs to start as many new runs as you like with.

The game does a good job of rewarding you for learning enemy attack patterns and is very generous with iframes so if you're locked in you will feel invincible. The downside is that the game is extremely visually busy, which means that even though enemies give you three different telegraphs sometimes you'll still miss the warning and take a hit if you can't see through the visual effects soup covering your screen.

The character design is exactly what it looks like. A smattering of fighting game-style Anime characters fitting some common character tropes. One thing I appreciated was that female characters are modestly dressed (for a video game) and well voiced so it doesn't look or sound like you're playing a hentai when play as a female character.

Overall the game has a clear idea of what it wants to be and what's important to it, and I definitely feel a sense of care and quality put into by the developers. It falls short here and there, and it's not going to win game of the year, but if you like what you see you are very likely to get more of it and the experience will be overall worth your time.

I just started playing this game after the controversial update, and it's actually so good.

The suppression mechanics add a level of tactical realism that won't sit well with COD run-and-gunners. Oh well.

I definitely wouldn't play this game without.

I've played DF for about seven years, since well before the Steam release was even a twinkle in Toady's eye. I'll give it three reviews, one for people who've never tried it, one for people who tried the original version and bounced off of it, and one for old players like me.

**Brand New Players**
If you've never played it, DF is a deeply complex colony sim. The closest thing to compare would be rimworld. You can think of DF like rimworld with a less friendly interface but tremendously more detailed simulation. For example, in rimworld you build abstract "trap" objects and sometimes kill rooms. In DF you build much more specific "trap" objects like trap doors and spike traps, or engineer complex traps of your own design. For example, one of my favorites is to divert a nearby river to make a contraption which floods the breezeway entrance of my fortress, drowning invaders and sweeping them out a waterfall. Another favorite is make a series of trapdoors, activated on cue by a lever, which drops the invaders into a pit of captive creatures from deep underground.

The flip side is that this complexity carries over into things which would otherwise be simple in most games. Getting your dwarves to make things at workshops is pretty unintuitive, and because of how complexly things are simulated you need to make a ton of individual things. For example to make a well you need to first make a crafter workshop, mechanic workshop, and potentially a weaver or farmer's workshop or blacksmith (to make rope or chain). Then you need to have your dwarves craft the rope, blocks, bucket, and mechanism to operate and construct the well. Then you need to know to dig out a space under the well if you're trying to make it on a brook. And even then the well may have a surprise in store for you... Compare this to rimworld where the need for drinking isn't even addressed in the game. This applies over and over and over throughout DF, and it's common to need to watch a couple hours of videos to be able to meaningfully play the game.

Overall I would recommend it to someone who either likes extremely detailed games and doesn't mind wrestling with a UI, or who played other colony sims and wished for excruciating detail.

**Players who tried the old version**
The steam release has done a very impressive job of making the UI more... usable. You no longer have to install a bunch of tilesets and third party programs to make the game ergonomic. If you know what you're doing then a lot of the tedious UI stuff has been greatly improved. It does still suffer from the deeply-wrought weirdness of DF UI, but additions like tabbed menus, mouse integration, and an honestly gorgeous tileset out of the box have made huge improvements.

If you bounced off of the old dwarf fortress because of how it looked or how the menus worked, this version very much addresses that.

**Experienced DF Players**
Just buy it. It's so much better than the original version. It supports Toady and Kitfox who both did a tremendous job of repackaging a more digestible version of the game. There is one thing to note though, adventure mode is not currently in the release and I don't see a way to play it even in its old state. It's listed as "coming soon" so clearly there are plans to add it. Personally I dearly miss adventure mode, and eagerly await it coming to the Steam release. If you love Dwarf Fortress this one is a no-brainer.

Take Divinity: Original Sin, rip out all the guts, and stuff Darkest Dungeon inside of it. That's this game in a nutshell.

There is an overwhelming sense of quality to this game, from the gameplay feel to the skill design. It takes the best parts of both of those games and delivers an extremely tactical RPG filled with difficult choices.

My only gripe is that it suffers from one negative element of both of those games. Like Darkest Dungeon, it's easy on your first couple runs to enter what feels like catastrophic fail states where your best option seems to be restarting the game. Like Divinity, you'll make narrative choices that come back later without clear indications of the consequences at the time you made them. Honestly though that's a minor gripe, if you like divinity and/or darkest dungeon odds are you will love this game.

Updates have been frequent and there is a surprising amount of new stuff being added at an impressive pace. I think this one has the makings of something incredible.

Like most Zachtronics games, it's not just a puzzle game. It's a thinking game.

Think about the designs, sure. But then think about the setting, the characters, the story. And then think about your own job and what you really want to do. Odds are if this game is appealing to you, you'll have the opportunity in life to make the world better, or make the world worse, or ignore all of that and just shovel bits of code for thirty+ years. It's your call, but be sure to make a call of your own.

On the puzzle side, it's certainly more puzzle than simulation. Plus side is you don't need an EE degree to play it. Down side is if you have an EE degree you might be underwhelmed if you're expecting a fully simulated CAD and MC IDE. Come in expecting a game with a thoughtful story element and you'll be perfectly satisfied.

Alright, I came back in a fit of pure spite to finish this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. I thought it only fair to update my review afterward.

In short, this game is fun in the way that dental surgery is fun. I never looked forward to it, was miserable while it happened, and mostly was glad when it was over. I persevered on the ever-looming promise that eventually I would git gud enough that it would become fun. That never happened for me.

I love difficult, punishing games. I have 5000 hours of dota playing solo queue hard support in ranked games. I've ascended every class in nethack. I have a dozen perma-death you-lose-everything games in my library and I've beaten them all, several on new game+. I think the thing that pissed me off so much about this one was the boss fighting loop.

I've never played a souls game before, and what got me interested in this one was the promise of skill reward. The bosses were unforgivingly difficult, but you could learn their attack patterns, adjust your playstyle, and overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges by mechanical execution and game knowledge. Perfect, that's my jam dude.

I've since learned that this game breaks that contract. There are design differences in the boss fights between this and other souls games, most frustratingly that bosses will modify their combos to punish your attempts at punishing them. Which net-net means that you have to wait out the combo itself but also the potential optional tail of these combos. It seems to punish you for learning the bosses. And it means that optimal play means not engaging with boss mechanics, but waiting them out.

I know, sounds like a skill issue. But I've played against you ♥♥♥♥♥ in the pvp mode. You all suck. Without any souls pvp experience I've won 80% of my fights, including the mages, including the moonveilers. So if I need to git gud I wonder what that means about the playerbase in general.

In fact I know what it means. It means, in order to get past the content, they spent dozens of hours in an offline game grinding levels like it was an MMO. Which more or less seems to be what the game tells you to do. And god help me, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I slammed my head against the brick wall, dozens and dozens of times. Blood pouring from my forehead, skull fragments pooling around my feet, until eventually the wall gave way.

I assumed, that was what playing a souls game was supposed to be like. And afterall, if the skill issue was needing to git gud surely that's what I was supposed to do. Nope, you're supposed to get mimic tear from nokron, moonveil from caelid, and farm 150 levels (something like 7,000,000 souls). ♥♥♥♥ that, I beat this game with only great hammers and 20% under-leveled the entire way.

And that sucks, because the motif of this game is absolutely my thing. If Elden Ring was a movie, or a graphic novel, or a series of paintings, it would be one my top 10 pieces of art of all time. But it's a video game, which means that unfortunately you have to play it. I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone. It never got better.

Original review below:

Being hard doesn't make a game good. Being hard is a privilege that a game can earn *after* being good. If you already like dark souls (for some reason) then sure, get this game. But if you're not already a fan of the formula try some other game that will be difficult in interesting ways and only after providing interesting core gameplay.

This is, I think, the best 4X game ever made. It does a good job of centering the economic and political aspects of empire management. Combat is also important but is pretty unobtrusive compared to other 4X games. In fact it has a really nice design where you can kind of autopilot it to upgrade your fleet doctrine and you just get a number that represent fleet strength, and the bigger number usually wins, but also gives the option of very granular ship design where you can identify and exploit weaknesses in your opponents designs or specialize in certain weapon types to take advantage of empire-wide edict bonuses for those types.

I do have two complaints: one of course is the totally bonkers price for all of the expansions. I bought them all because I love the game and I feel like every one has gotten my money's worth. But we're over $200 for the full deal which is a lot to ask for access to all of the game's content. I recommend buying just the base game, seeing how you feel, then buying just the DLCs that are interesting to you if you like the game. The base game is still very good on its own, DLCs just extend it further.

The second gripe is the endgame slog. After 300 hours of playing it still seems like my endgame always 100% of the time turns into galactic whack-a-mole as I send fleets out to handle the crisis forces. This combined with the massive difficulty spike of crisis factions versus normal empires makes the end game an unavoidable wall of tedium. I don't have any solutions, I either grit my teeth and muddle through it or just start another playthrough when the slog gets to be too much.

100% recommend a buy if you like grand strategy games.

You have a ton of these games in your library already. Space engineers, E:GS, Elite Dangerous, Avorion, maybe you've played some Dual Universe. But somehow none of these had enough to keep you interesting. Either the pvp was bad, or the systems weren't fleshed out well enough, or you couldn't walk around your ship, or there wasn't any reason to have a crew.

This is the one you've been looking for. Come to NA PVP let's fly together.