Recent reviews by Fabulous Wizard

The details of the game says "Online Co-Op", so I downloaded it with my wife to play while it was advertised as free/for sale. Come to find out, no co-op for missions, just for the open world aspect of it. That's like, a quarter of the game, what's the point of calling it co-op if we can't do missions together? That's more like hanging out in a lobby between missions together. Make real co-op and maybe it's worth playing, IDK, didn't get that far.

slay the spire but it's rimworld with aliens and also everyone talks like it's the 1981 Caveman movie withh Ringo Starr
worth a play

It's alright I guess. Don't spend money on it.

It's like DotA except it takes three matches to get decent at it instead of 200 hours.

It took 13.2 hours of playtime to get 100% of the achievements on normal difficulty. There are no achievements tied to difficulty.

The first half of those 13 hours were the most fun. "Easy" difficulty would probably make the game no fun at all, around the third year in I wanted to turn the difficulty up, I never found a way to do so.

There's no single screen where you can view all of your workers at once, so there's no quick and easy way to get a sense of your skill distribution of workers. No mechanic for sequels, though the auto-generated titles will avoid repeating a title (I.e. "Dead" becomes "Dead 2" automatically; nothing special happens though).

It seems like the devs didn't playtest the lategame much, Large games make about the same number of fans per game as Medium for some reason until well after you've won, despite them having over twice the level of quality. The table required to make a Large game is comically huge and yet the workers only use half of it, half the team doesn't work during that phase. Post-production is useless, Large games will already make around $300,000,000/yr with max marketing and no polish, and post-production seems to require 16 of your pawns sit idle while 4 do all of the work, dragging a game's release out four more days for no reason. You could technically probably get the billion dollars achievement by rushing five Large games with over 10,000 quality and then firing all of your staff to save money on wages, LOL.

Master workstations and whiteboards aren't explained by the game at all (used for post-production) and it'd be nice if their use were more clear in-game.

Over all this is a very solid 6.75/10 game. Fun, but I'm glad I'll never play it again because it got old before I finished. It was pretty cool to get 100% achievements in a game though, and the only ones that didn't come up organically through playing the game were the ones for naming games stuff like "Half-Life 3" etc. It's satisfying having a game where you can actually get all the achievements without having to dedicate over a week to a single game.

This game is hard but also easy?
Once you've played the game for a bit, finding different ways to "break" it by using skill combos together is easy, and retraining skills is relatively cheap.
The early game is the only difficult part... And playing a character with the invis spell is borderline required because there's no penalty to it and it's the only way to easily get large sums early on (levels 1-4). It's a kind of busy work that doesn't fit the RP very well and honestly shouldn't be required.
This game is really like a 6/10 in hindsight too because by mid/late game you're absolutely crushing every encounter even if you're just building "good" characters. There's no need to ultra minmax because even on heroic, the game is just... Easy. If you do minmax, you'll be destroying encounters in a single turn and combat will be a joke. It's really somewhat jarring because the early game is quite challenging, up to around level 7, by the time you're on the second map the game has really ramped down in challenge.
To be fair, it is quite satisfying after starting out so weak to be rewarded so heavily for rising to the challenge, and canonically the bosses you're fighting are quite powerful, it makes sense that your character would be such a beast.
Just, don't go into it expecting a smooth challenge scale the whole way through. I'm personally used to games that start out easy and increase in challenge over time. Having a game where the hardest level is level 3 is a strange experience.
(Note, currently on level 14, haven't beat the game yet)
ETA: It's really tempting to turn this into a meme-review and make it a negative review. This is a legitimate criticism though. Be careful about playing this game with a significant other. My girlfriend and I broke up 50 hours into this game and I was given the choice to restart completely or play the most painful-to-load save file in existence and finish alone. Buyer beware.

Dude, this game is amazing. I started playing it long before it came to steam, with Alpha 4, so add around 200 hours to my playtime from the development period pre-Steam. I've followed it closely, and it's become a true diamond in the rough among modern games which tend towards repetitive dross. The art style might be cartoony to some (and for those who notice the similarity, the author got permission from the devs of Prison Architect to use their art style), but it makes for a wonderful contrast with the dark themes this game allows you to explore. Cannibalism is a common option in the northern hemisphere, making raiders into something more than kindling, and you can even harvest organs if you're a sadist. Using the scenario editor, you can even make it so that all of your starting pawns (characters) are bloodlust-filled cannibals who have no remorse (it's up to you if you also set it so that new pawns arriving are of a similar mindset), or you can suffer the penalties of eating cooked human flesh. Mods have been well-supported since the start of Rimworld (the dev got his programming start with modding), and plenty of mod content has eventually worked its way into the game somehow. Lists of 100+ mods run very easily with no performance hit as well.

There is one thing I miss, a feature that was removed back in one of the earlier alphas, somewhere around Alpha 6; there used to be a "Fear" mechanic, which I felt showed a lot of promise but has since been removed. I hope that a morale system makes a return in the future, as I've always felt it would make sense to reward a brutal/savage approach with panicked enemies who are afraid to go up against you. The original idea of the fear mechanic was that it was an alternative way of maintaining loyalty rather than keeping colonists happy. The feature would definitely need to be tweaked heavily to come back to the game as it is now.

One major downside to this game is that it's very easy to fall into "perfect start paralysis", where you keep rerolling colonists and start locations looking for that elusive "perfect start". The way I solved this was to simply allow myself to cheat. Using the debug menu, you can place your own steam vents to make an adequate start ideal, the prepare carefully mod gives you access to customized, better starting colonists to avoid imbalanced starts. Of course, some people would argue that having to adapt to weaker circumstances is part of the fun, but that's the great thing about Rimworld: It gives you the tools to have the type of game you want to play. There's technically 15 standard difficulty options (3 storytellers, 5 challenge scales for each), with the ability to easily add a custom storyteller if you wish.

Overall a solid 9.5/10 game, the only real failings are the amount of quality of life mods that become "necessary" to install and really ought to be part of the base game. Some of these "required" mods are:
- Prepare Carefully
- Random Plus (allows rerolling with prerequisite stats, so 100s of rerolls instead of one, a good alternative to Prepare Carefully if that feels too cheaty because it allows total customization)
- Level Up! (shows a notification when pawns level up in skills)
- Everybody Gets One (creates a "X per Colonist" bill type, very useful for meals or parkas in the tundra)
- RimFridge (Adds fridges, so you can have a walk-in freezer for raw goods and a small fridge in the dining room with prepared meals)
- Room Food
- Skilled Stonecutting (Stonecutting gives crafting XP; it used to, they removed it, this mod adds it back)
- QualityBuilder (set a quality level in options, items with quality levels (such as beds, chairs, recreation items, etc.) will be deconstructed and reconstructed until one is made with the minimum quality level indicated; this mimics a behavior possible in vanilla, simply automating it; you still lose a percentage of resources each time it is deconstructed, as you would in vanilla)
- Realistic Smokeleaf (sorry I just like my colonists being able to get stoned without becoming total idiots)
- Realistic Rooms Lite (the default room size requirements require frankly ridiculous sizes to create bedrooms the colonists consider adequately sized, this mod makes it so that your large rooms aren't 50% empty space)
- Priority Clean (adds a separate work type for cleaning sterile floors, meaning your hospital gets cleaned first)
- What Is My Purpose (shows you icons indicating what job a colonist is performing when they are selected)
- No Random Breakdowns + No Random Shortcircuit (The events this mod removes are simply unfun)
- Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering (the most gamechanging mod I recommend, this mod massively expands your ability to re-engineer damaged colonists or upgrade them immensely in the late game, at a heavy resource cost)
- Pick up and Haul (Your colonists will now use their carry capacity to determine how much they can haul, rather than only one stack at a time; light stuff is easy to carry)
- Hospitality (Guests actually stay in your base and interact with your colony, you can provide beds for them, they'll even leave you gifts behind if they're treated greatly and if you want, you can recruit happy guests at a the cost of a faction relationship penalty)
- Wall Light (Standing floor lamps can look ugly in some base layouts, this adds an aesthetic wall light that is otherwise statistically identical; sure it doesn't use up a space, but by nature you're getting half the light out of it as a floor lamp, so it's pretty balanced)
- Soul Clarifier (Slightly alters the vanilla textures so the difference between rich and poor soil is more obvious)
- Tilled Soil (Frankly OP but very pleasing mod that allows for aesthetic tilled soil to be constructed that is equal to fertile soil in quality; it probably should be locked behind a tech and added to vanilla)

When you first try playing it, your initial reaction might be that the game is smarter than the player. At the end of the day though, the game is actually pretty straightforward, it's just very unique:

You are playing a roguelite game whose setting could be roughly understood as a 4X game. Imagine a game like stellaris or civilization being run automatically in the background while you play your roguelite spaceship game on top of it. The two bubbles mostly operate distinctly, you can only slightly effect the simulation that's running on the planets in the background.

Given this, the game has a bit of a learning curve just because it is not a goal that any other game I know of has in common. That said, after you get a feel for it, the game is pretty straightforward. The game is in some ways a bit spreadsheety, so part of what's overwhelming about picking it up is learning what numbers you should care about and how to make money in the first few years ("property development" and build buildings, focus on the "attitude" ones that let you sway how the races feel about each other).

Now, with that massive preface out of the way, the bottom line: The game's fun after you figure it out, and it isn't that hard. There are two difficulty settings, "combat" and "strategy", I played on Normal / Normal and won my second game without the dlc active. It honestly was pretty straightforward even with some flailing to figure it out towards the start, I beat most ship encounters without paying much attention to the power distribution mechanic (either max guns or some extra in engines), though it does work pretty well and I imagine would be very important on the higher combat difficulties.

I think a fair amount of the difficulty in the game stems from the number of possible victory conditions. Going for a perfect 8 man federation is going to be much more challenging than exterminating the solar system alongside one power species (though both are probably among the harder choices, for different reasons). I've only played two rounds and won by doing what I feel is probably the easiest choice: Piss off one of the two warmonger races and unite the galaxy destroying them, then crush the remaining evil hive race for refusing to assimilate. As far as the game is concerned this victory is no different from working to convince them both to join the federation, but it would've been much harder and I would have needed to play the game completely differently. (There are specific achievements for various victory conditions and alliances that can occur over the course of gameplay, for what it's worth).

For this reason, though I recommend the game and think it's a great example of a unique idea executed well, it definitely requires a certain mindset to play it. Only pick this game up if you're okay with an open-ended win condition. The difficulty (at least on Normal, this probably changes at the higher difficulties) means you will probably win somehow or another. It's more about the story of how you tried to get an alliance working before it fell apart due to a war, so you formed a different alliance instead to force a peace, or something akin to that. Or the alliance that formed without your planning and started to take over the galaxy before you could react. You have a plan and things go wrong and in the end you either have a galaxy under your control (in other races names) or not under your control (in other races names), the end is basically the same either way (because as I said, the background setting of the game is basically a game of Civilization or any other 4X... In the end someone gets one of the victory conditions whetherit's diplomacy or conquest). At the end of the game you're still just one person in a spaceship and your species is dead, so even though you "win" in the end, it's really the story of those other races and what happened to them.

I haven't played the DLC yet but so far I recommend the vanilla game for a fun game about being "the man behind the curtain" and pushing much more powerful empires around with careful nudges. If you want a game about fighting or winning wars, this is not the game for you. This is very much so a game about influencing wars. Maybe through orbital bombing support killing 2 billion people over the course of 20 months while someone else does the real fighting, but that's about as extreme as it gets.

So I'm a "try before you buy" type of guy. You know what I mean.

This is one of those games that I tried, bought, then bought again. And again. And again. Because I looked at my "time played" statistic in game and realized I was getting close to 100 hours without giving the developers a dime. So I gave the devs money for copies for myself and several friends who I knew would like it. Whenever a friend has some money and is looking for a game to play, it's one of the games I recommend.

Now, how's it play? Well, it's a roguelike (or as the devs have called it, a "rogue-lite"). There's a set series of events you can run into (which is large) and a semi-randomly generated layout of sectors (which is itself part of a semi-randomly generated layout of systems). There are a lot of different events you can run into. As I said, I had around 85 hours of gameplay in this game before I bought it on steam. At the time of this review, I have 47 on steam. When they added Advanced Edition, I still hadn't run into all of the vanilla events. I still haven't run into a few (namely the crystal sector ones, which if you buy the game, you'll learn to hate the elusiveness of), never mind all of the ones AE added.

A fair splash of the events are neutral. A small selection of them are outright-beneficial (sometimes if you're really lucky, and the gods smile on you, you can even find a random weapon floating around in space, but don't count on it). A lot of them are hostile encounters. What's a wonderful touch are the "blue options" that can show up if you meet certain requirements. Have some powerful weapons and a pirate is trying to extort you? Flash them at him and make him turn tail without a fight. Unsure if an empty station is free loot or a dangerous trap? Use your advanced scanners to scout the way instead of going in blind. Sometimes there will be multiple blue options, some with better results: The station with defective turrets would prefer you EMP'd them to repair them than blast them outright, afterall.

The combat itseslf is a beautiful blend of frustrating, rewarding and deep. On the surface, it's pause-based realtime combat. Your weapons charge up, fire at their targets, pop their shields, then continue on their merry way to their systems. Missiles require ammo and penetrate shields, beams can hit multiple systems but can't get through shields at all, lasers can usually fire multiple rounds, but have to hit each layer of shield before they can go through. But there are dozens of small ways that the system gets complicated: Boarding the ship (or using mind control systems) can have fights breaking out between crew even as the lasers and missiles are flying. If you're confident in your shield-operator's skills, you can drop the shields to let a single laser get through to give them time to recharge and stop the more-devestating beam weapon. Light a fire in their hold and keep them occupied, and you could starve them of oxygen and pick their intact ship clean, netting better loot than if you destroyed it completely. Combined with environmental hazards like asteroid belts and solar flares, you'll eventually come to the point where you're deciding if it's worth sticking around to fight, or if maybe you should jump out and leave the crew that boarded the enemy ship behind.

The combat also relies on a power-to-systems setup that will quickly make you feel like Captain Picard (presumably, I never watched much Star Trek). Systems have a maximum power capacity, but so does your reactor. An oft-overlooked mechanic in the game is that the difficulty is scaled based on your reactor's total power output, rather than your system strength. Which is to say: You're meant to be unable to play the game with full power to all systems (save for towards the very end). Do you push more power into your shields, forcing you to deactivate one of your lasers? Or do you maximize power to your engines, in the hopes of dodging their intimidating missiles? Maybe you're better off battering down their shields and taking out their systems before they can retaliate. In practice, you'll have to use a mixture of all of these if you want to make it to fight the rebel flagship at the end (and good luck once you get there, for the record).

There's a pretty wide variety of ships in the game, too. Advanced Edition changed the unlock system to be slightly more forgiving, by beating the game with one ship you unlock the next one (which isn't necessarily an easy task), you can also unlock them with specific event-based quests (which was previously the only method, and is also not an easy task). The game does a good job of making each ship feel unique. They each start with varied system capacities, weapon/drone layouts and crew, and though they can (and depending on RNG, will) fill the role of nearly any form of ship, they each tailor themselves to a specific style of play. The mantis ships are all clearly designed for a boarding approach over weapons, whereas the engi ships are meant to focus primarily on drones. The federation cruiser soaks up punishment until it can unleash its artillery beam and annihilate the enemy, and so on. The different races/crew each have specific benefits (even humans, the normally boring-template race, get a bonus in that they learn skills faster), and though you may start up with a sparse selection, you can theoretically attain any crew on any ship (though some are harder to get than others, such as the elusive Lanius).

Because of the random nature of the game, sometimes the game will throw up moments that can make you tear your hair out, an hourlong run ended because of an opponent whose shields you couldn't quite break through who wore you down before you realized you should've jumped away, or a fire breaking out in your engine (or life support) room from a missile battery that refused to let up for just a few seconds. There's a reason that until AE, the game only had "Easy" and "Normal" difficulties.

But similarly, the random nature of the game can make it that much more rewarding when you overcome ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ odds and emerge victorious despite everything that stood in your way. Two sectors without a chance to repair, a dozen fights with automated scouts that dropped next to nothing for loot, slugmen trying to swindle you out of your hard-won scrap and trying to burn your crew alive for saying no? It's all just a day in the life of a Federation pilot on the run from rebel scum.

You'll hate yourself for playing this game. You really will. You see, this entire game revolves around using an annoying UI to control villagers with an intensely annoying AI to handle logistics poorly and theoretically command them to eventually get around to doing the things you'd like to do. Sort of like Majesty, if you had to build your buildings from scratch, the only part of them that was technically necessary outside of aesthetics was the floor and your kingdom had a rule of law that all new citizens born in the nation must be dropped on their head.

You start out with about 11 morons to shepherd around, gradually kit them out in safety harnesses and protective helmets so that they'll be safe when you shove them out the door and hope that you'll lose as few as possible. Eventually you start getting heroes and such that you can use to explore the dungeons that extend deeper and deeper into the map and who protect your village from the increasingly difficult sieges laid by enemies, which can feel satisfying as hell to watch them fight after getting used to your moron brigade's perpetual failure.

This is also one of those games where you open a wiki while you play, just so you know. Otherwise your village will completely and totally fail because the only way to get new villagers depends on the happiness of the village, which is designed in a way that either you intentionally build your village with them in mind, or else you die and start over.

I dumped about thirty hours into it over the course of a week, then didn't touch it again afterward. That's pretty much the type of game this is.

EDIT: About a year later, coming back to this review I'm changing my review to negative and adjusting the sarcastic-praise slightly. The game is still fun (and from playing it a bit more, the AI is less moronic than I recalled), and the UI is tolerable now that I remember how it works (though it's still not good). That said, you shouldn't buy this game. Buying it supports the developer, and he abandoned it without shame. If you want to play it, by all means do so, just don't give the developer money in order to do that. I'll leave figuring out how to obtain the game without paying the absent dev up to you, but that's my suggestion.