Recent reviews by HarbingerDawn

I bought this knowing ahead of time about the game's imperfections and shortcomings – even visually in some cases – compared to the 2007 release, and I set my expectations accordingly.

It is way worse than I thought it would be.

In the half-hour or so that I spent playing, I encountered numerous bugs and deficits that made the game too frustrating to play given that I can play the original any time without dealing with those issues.

A few examples:

• Trying to "sprint" while prone just makes your character stand up, rather than causing them to crawl faster like in the original game
  
• Playing with classic suit controls + suit shortcuts straight up doesn't work, the shortcut keybinds do nothing when pressed
  
• Changing the HUD color setting has almost no effect; it makes maybe 80% of the menu screen change to your chosen color, and has no effect on the in-game HUD
  
• The footstep sound when using armor mode (which will generally be the case) makes it sound like you're 3x heavier and made of stone, it sounds obnoxious and makes no sense, why is it a thing...
  
• At least in the very beginning of the game (the part I got to see before refunding), the visuals are either similar to or worse than the original. Character skin looks worse, clouds look worse, and the nanosuit vaporization effect in the second cutscene is almost entirely missing. Most other visual elements didn't look noticeably better than using a modded version of the original game.

I know that in areas that are indirectly lit (interior spaces, shaded areas) the lighting is massively ahead of the original, and transparent and reflective surfaces must look better too. But I didn't get to see any of that before I quit, so I can't give my impression. All I know is it doesn't make up for the cost of buying the game, especially in light of all the bugs and other frustrating elements that dragged the game down considerably from the original.

If after watching the Digital Foundry videos on this game you're not bothered by the shortcomings they list, nor bothered by any of the ones I shared above, then sure, it might be worth getting if it's on sale for 50% off or more. But I personally wouldn't recommend spending any more than $5 unless they significantly improve the game via patches, which seems unlikely at this point.

Ah yes, the Making History expansion... well, let's start with the list of pros, as it's a short one:

PROS:
- New Mission Builder which allows the creation of custom scenarios with extensive options for creating triggers, restricting parts, requiring parts, restricting vehicle mass, creating target waypoints and orbits, providing mission text to the player through pop-up dialogs presented by Kerbal characters, and more. These missions can include scoring systems and can be shared with others.
- The new parts are among the best-looking in the game, and most have variant models/textures to choose from.
- New engine plate parts that finally make it easy to have multiple engines clustered at the bottom of a stage other than the first one.
- New launch site

CONS:
- The new missions supplied by Squad in the expansion are very poorly designed and don't very well fit the theme of the expansion. Mission briefings don't exist; instead, you just see a snapshot of the mission's internal logic tree. Much of the text presented in the mission is riddled with typographical and grammatical errors. There are also places where mission text should have been provided to make sense of the situation, but wasn't (even though it would have taken just 2 minutes of time, as I demonstrated when I went in and did it myself in the editor).
- Many of the missions are multi-part - you must create and fly multiple vehicles over the course of the mission - but a failure during *any* part of the mission forces you to restart the mission from the very beginning, not just the beginning of the part you are on. Manual management of saves can get around this for the most part, but it's very unintuitive and inconvenient.
- The Mission Builder itself is limited to creating self-contained scenarios, and is not integrated with career mode. A bit disappointing for people like me (and I've heard this echoed by many others) who were hoping to use it to create missions as a part of career progression, though I can live with this.
- Some of the new parts can be buggy; for example, the decoupler on the new Voskhod-like pod clips through the pod itself when decoupled, and either knocks it around or doesn't separate properly.
- The new parts (especially the engines) are balanced very poorly against the existing parts.
- Most of the parts included in the expansion have already existed for years - for free and usually in better quality - as part of fan-made mods.
- The new launch site consists only of a rather minimal launch pad - and that's it. No other buildings. No VAB, SPH, etc. Just a small launch pad sitting in the middle of nowhere. Just where exactly is the vehicle supposed to be built when launched from this pad, and how is it transported there? And why doesn't it have a runway? We may never know.

THOUGHTS:

It's woefully clear that very little - if any - QA testing was done prior to the release of this expansion. The issues it has are so numerous - and so hard to miss - that either no one tested it, or no one cared about the issues the testers found. Neither is acceptable. The very poor quality of the included missions, the lack of any career integration with the Mission Builder, and the issues and poor balance with the new parts - coupled with the long-time existence of better free alternatives in the form of mods - means that this expansion isn't worth any money at all, in my opinion, considering the relatively high price of the base game compared to its content and quality. It certainly isn't worth $15. Save your money and spend it elsewhere, and go download some of the many amazing part mods out there instead. Maybe donate to the modders for all the amazing things they've done over the years. Don't spend it on this.

TL;DR: 2/10 - Not worth $15, and IMO not worth any money at all. Save your cash for something worthwhile.

(product recieved for free due to being early adopter of KSP)

One of the best and most original immersive puzzle games ever made. The psychological aspects are awesome. Only downside is that it's relatively short.

An absolutely lovely set of logic puzzles. Graphical and sound design approaches perfection. I recommend buying the full series.

An absolutely lovely set of logic puzzles. Graphical and sound design approaches perfection. I recommend buying the full series.

An absolutely lovely set of logic puzzles. Graphical and sound design approaches perfection. The ability to play a billion extra procedurally generated puzzles, with the option of manually inputting the seed, is a nice plus.

Fun and challenging, hilarious and satirical, and (in some ways) disturbingly prescient, this pre-Trump-election game has you taking advantage of its amusing character behavior and destructible environments in your quest to save a certain Presidential Candidate from meeting his demise on the campaign trail.

The little details in this game are great, and the nonsensical wrestling side missions culminate in you taking control of Rump himself and deporting imigrants from the ring. 100% game completion can be achieved in 3 hours or so.

If you like physics/ragdoll challenges and political satire, you'll probably enjoy this. It's often on sale, so you can pick it up cheap.

1787/1776, would make America great again, again

Pros:
- Purchased at 1% off. AMAZING DISCOUNT!
- LOOT BOXES! Loot boxes are cool, right?
- Great feeling of pride and accomplishment

Cons:
- No real microtransactions, so I can't keep throwing unlimited money at it
- Loot box rewards are cosmetic only, so you can't pay to win :(

Other thoughts:
This is parody done right. Funny and simple, and plenty of specific references to industry shenanigans. Somewhat addictive. It's clear that actual effort was put into this game. Absolutely worth the $0.98 I paid for it.

Game crashes on startup every time, haven't found any way around it, so I can't say whether it's any good.

Will update my review if/when I get get it to run.

UPDATE: Bethesda has refused to offer support to a couple of us who have this problem because they say that our GTX 980 Ti's don't meet the specs, while recommending that we use GTX 1070's, UTTERLY IGNORING the fact that the 980 Ti and 1070 are equivalent in performance, support the same APIs, use the same drivers, etc.

Sod off, Bethesda.

I got this game for free when I purchased a GTX 480 a few years ago. I'm not a Duke fan and have no history with the franchise, and I'd heard some negative things about the game so I wasn't expecting much.

Even so, it managed to deliver even less than the "not much" I had expected. It was so uninspired and boring that I couldn't be bothered to even finish it.

Would not recommend wasting your time on it, even if you get it for free.