Recent reviews by LeakyAbstraction

This game, even in its current early access state, was totally worth the wait! Genuinely the best new title I've played this year, and it feels like a work of art. I hope the devs won't take this the wrong way, and please keep working on the game, but I feel like I already got back what I paid.

I had concerns about Supraworld, given the disappointments we had with sequels in recent years, so I'm happy to conclude that Supraworld is a true successor to the amazing Supraland.

It feels genuinely supra, yet it doesn't feel like a DLC (as for example Grounded 2). It is a brand new experience with new tools, new abilities, new enemies, new mechanics, new environment, and lots and lots of new puzzles!

Even if you'd get only 20 hours out of this title (which will be way more most likely), I would argue it's a much more wholesome and memorable experience than spending hundreds of hours grinding in some survival game or online RPG. For me personally Supraland and Supraworld is totally on par in quality with - or even better than - much more popular titles like Subnautica or Grounded, and offers similar or superior world design and environment exploration experience.

I think the game is a mixed bag.

The visuals, sound effects, the environmental design, and the presentation in general are great, the items/drops also seem to be okay so far. And the skill tree with the configurable skills seem to be solid, interesting and well thought out. Now to the negatives...

Invisible walls galore: The super aggressive corridoring and invisible walls absolutely annoy the hell out of me; it should be wholly physically based instead of invisible walls. The minimap is disgusting looking - there is a beautifully designed world around me, meanwhile the minimap shows crude corridors, and I find myself looking at the minimap constantly to track the corridors and avoid the walls.

Control: None of the control schemes felt comfortable. And it's very annoying that all binding customizations are cleared when switching control schemes, especially because the default bindings contain some really weird ones, for example TAB for weapon switching.

Story dialogues: I find the dialogues cringe and even more stupid than in a typical diablo like game. I expected more here.

Progression and gameplay: I hate the gatekeeping or goalpost moving (or I don't know how to describe it) in the progression of the game... I felt like I'm just about to find the griffin for like half an hour, and then when I won, it turned out I just got into even more trouble after clicking on a random item, leading to a lengthy scripted event. Not to mention that where is a freaking town with a stash, will I ever find it? I think a starting town or camp would be much appreciated. Also, the fact that you cannot go back to the first island... It just feels like bad game design. I would generally want to feel significantly more player freedom in a modern game.

Game arguably badly needs camera rotation: I felt like wanting to rotate the camera constantly. Even though I have plenty of hours in games like D2R, Grim Dawn and POE2. In V Rising you can btw, and it feels really neat. I think the main reason why no camera rotation feels bad is that it makes WASD control jarring, since you can't align your character movement to the roads in the game, for example. I noticed this prominently when I finally found the town. But oddly enough, I also use WASD in POE2, and there I don't feel that much need for camera rotation (maybe they designed the map generator as such?).

Roadmap: The roadmap worries me, because it didn't give me the impression that the studio is thinking about the game in a deep and sophisticated way. In fact it feels highly simplistic and generic to me: "Content update", "Feature update", "System update", "Future updates". It makes me think that they struggled to come up even with this, they don't have a robust plan, and all they want is to just shovel some more content into the product and then call it a day.

Since I know that all positive reviews are ignored ("the game is perfect, we have nothing to do") and only the negatives are seen, I'll make it into a negative, and then later I'll recheck. But at the same time I think the game will probably worth the asking price, since 30 euros is not that much in this day and age. I would just really want to see it perfected.

It's easy to misjudge this game. When I went in, I spent 30 minutes trying to fix the horrendous anti-aliasing. Then I realized that physics and environmental interactivity are terrible, as most objects are static and unmovable, and even punching and kicking feel like they don't even try to interact with the environment. Not to mention that the inventory is excruciatingly small, and I LOVE to loot.

So, I was asking myself: "That's it? This is the game I paid 40 euros for?"

But, I made many assumptions about the game based on my experiences with other modern releases: I assumed that the story is crap and I won't be interested, I assumed that voice acting is cringe and I won't want to hear it, and I assumed that their "planned" experience is probably intellectually insulting so I will have to make my own fun with emergent gameplay elements via e.g. complex physics and destruction, rich interactivity and copious amount of looting.

However, as I invested more and more time, it started to give more and more back, and I realized that this is a really old-school title, in the best sense possible, similar to games like System Shock, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Prey. That the story is actually super interesting, there are a lot of fascinating investigative work to do, the voice acting is top quality, the characters are engaging and believable, and there is a tremendous amount of player freedom offered.

Plus the environmental design is amazing: many locations feel genuine and hand-crafted to perfection, and the map in general is arguably top quality, with the village serving as a highly appreciable and comforting safe spot to return to from the grim adventures, not to mention the Interchange with its many entrances that connect in such an organic way, supporting non-linear progression. I think it's simply an intelligently designed and made game that respects the players in many ways, which is sadly getting uncommon these days.

Also deserves bonus points for not having cheap jump scares and scripted events, as I passionately hate those in games. Atomfall doesn't mess with you, doesn't manipulate you; it's just a solid experience. So, for me personally, despite my initial frustrations, this game is definitely one of those rare games I'll always have fond memories of.

In a sense, this game is like getting to know an introverted person who doesn't boast, and seems to be awkward and limited at first sight, but as time goes by you're more and more intrigued about the qualities, intelligence and integrity they turn out to have.

With respect to the length of the game, I was surprised to hear that many players complete it in 12-13 hours. I'm well over 20 hours currently, and I genuinely think one could easily put 40 or even 50 hours into this game, just by thoroughly exploring the areas and following up on the leads. I suspect that people who complete it very fast might miss plenty, as the game doesn't force-feed or advertise everything it has to offer; far from it.

BUT please developers, put some work into your engine too! It really should have functioning anti-aliasing, and the HDR should work on Steam Deck (for me it doesn't even work on my Lunar Lake laptop despite the game running great).

I don't even really play car games in general, but I love this so far!

I think it provides a lot of fun and freedom, and it has a surprising amount of details and possibilities for getting various vehicles, customizing them, and doing jobs with them. And the graphics is surprisingly detail-rich and realistic in its own low-poly way.

Of course, it's also rough around the edges, and it feels like one of those one-man games.

If you expect to have some fun and relaxing experience driving vehicles to transport goods or people, or deliver pizzas, while earning money and then spending it on trying out some larger vehicles, I think it's hard to go wrong with this game.

The most annoying thing I experienced was the tutorial quest marks that I couldn't remove from the map, and I constantly confused them with the delivery targets. Plus the UI is certainly not refined, and one might say it's primitive, but at the same time somehow it didn't actively upset me like a lot of other games.

As someone who was there during SE1 early access, I like it! It does feel like a properly big step up, and it alleviates the problems I had with the aging SE1 engine.

For me personally the game looks visually better than what I assumed based on the videos. It's much more detailed, crisp and shiny compared to SE1, and what I love the most is that it appears to have a significantly improved lighting system. No weird light level shifting that constantly annoyed me in SE1.

The building system is also lightyears ahead of SE1. I think this will be super nice finally for creating finer details and more intricate shapes. And FINALLY, no ugly armor edges, no mod needed for it, and actually the edges look nicely rounded.

I'm pleasantly surprised with the damage mechanics: It feels much more realistic, and armor feels more like armor, instead of feeling like cardboard, which was pretty much plaguing SE1.

This overall makes me happy and excited for the future of the game, which is frankly sorely needed in these dark times in the West. Even with this initial alpha state, I would be already able to spend tens of hours exploring ship building and experimenting with shapes.

(It's important to know what you get, though. The developers were emphasizing with posts and videos that this initial release only includes creative building with a limited selection of blocks + the new engine of course. It's totally not intended to compete in its current form with other games in terms of value, but instead it's meant to allow players to be part of the development of the game right from a relatively early stage.)

My only negative feedback is that the pre-built classic red and blue ships could be much better, haha. They feel very blocky, especially the interior, even though we have a lot more power now to create more granular shapes.

Barely any updates that I can personally relate to. Sad state for an early access game. All they care about is the endgame for their hardcore players. But I won't even get to the endgame if many of the bosses are so horribly imbalanced that they feel like hitting a wall suddenly.

Also:
- Drop rates are horrible, you often open fancy chests and nothing drops pretty much.
- Items are super imbalanced 1: All uniques I got so far were thoroughly useless.
- Items are super imbalanced 2: All boots are useless unless they have increased movement speed.
- Items are super imbalanced 3: Runes are horrible imbalanced. Everybody just spams Iron because all other are crap.

It started really well, but after this short amount of time I feel no desire to play, so I couldn't give it a positive review.

It's incredible that even this day HL2 feels better and more interesting to play, with a higher quality atmosphere, than most new games. And the sound effects are legendary! It does feel like that the game is taking place in a pretty corridor, while modern gamers generally expect a larger degree of freedom, but still it's a superb experience.

First I wanted to write a positive joke review of "it's a factory game". But after playing it I found it to be incredibly well polished, and the overall gameplay experience is astonishingly good, especially for an Early Access title.

There are plenty of factory games out there that feel sloppy or not too well thought out, or they completely lack the polish or gameplay loop which is needed for an enjoyable experience.

But here, everything is top notch and brilliantly polished! And it's super satisfying how easy and natural it is to modularize our builds in this game. It's an experience which truly feels close to working with program code, building and combining units of work... just in a much more visual and fun way.

My only "issue" with the game was that the beginning was very slow, and tasks were super easy to complete (making them more of a chore than a challenge), but I understand that they had to accommodate people new to factory games, or people who aren't e.g. software engineers in daily life.

It still has game-breaking bugs that force you to reload a save, but even with that it's still a much better crafted and more enjoyable game than Starfield. How sad is that.

Why would you buy this game in addition to owning other building games like Satisfactory? Naturally, because you're a degenerate who has to buy pretty much all building games on release day.

But seriously, Foundry has a lot of content already, and the fact that you have a procedurally generated terrain you can mine, like in Minecraft, provides an interesting foundation for the game.

I think the graphics is great actually. And as I mentioned there seems to be a ton to unlock and build. But the game does indeed feel Early Access and unfinished.

The weakest aspect currently is, I think, the sound design. I found the music depressing, so I turned it off. And there are barely any sound effects - some machines have sounds, but other than that it feels like you're in the vacuum of space, and this hurts the feeling of engagement and presence.

The second weakest aspect is the UI, it's quite ugly and barebones.

Other than that what annoyed me so far is the research tree. I see that completely basic things like power poles and cables are very far down, which feels like unnecessary torture. And you have to unlock piping as a prerequisite, which makes absolutely no sense. They should really rethink stuff like that...

Also, the constant power draw of the loaders (even when they're idle) will annoy me really badly for sure.