Recent reviews by megaPerson

It's hard to recommend this game. It's buggy, unpolished, frustrating at times, and confused in its design. You have to watch tens of minutes of repetitive animations for "realism" or immersion purposes, but you can't walk around inside your ship even with the DLC -- there isn't even an animation for entering your ship. The LOD will mess up frequently, showing you ugly and low resolution graphics when what you're looking at is 50% of the game.

So why do i recommend it? Basically, there isn't anything else filling this niche. No Man's Sky is more focussed on player customization, and Eve Online.................

There ARE customization options in Elite: Dangerous, but they cost "ARX", the game's premium currency. You get up to 400 ARX for free each week just for logging in, but most customization packs cost around 10k ARX so you'll be playing a while for a single ship's worth of upgrades.

As I said, it's hard for me to recommend this game -- in fact i didn't when i first left this review -- but I can't in good conscience leave a bad review of a game I continue to put hundreds of hours into. There is fun here, but at least an equal amount of frustration. But if you're looking for a decent, in-depth space sim, this is one of your only options.

fun solo, very fun with friends

Recommended for building, survival mode is frustrating.

If you enjoy building machines for the sake of building, this game is like a more complicated legos, or simplified Space Engineers. If you need a reason to USE those machines, you may be disappointed, as survival mode is stupidly difficult. Enemies kill you in two or 3 hits, and you're frequently swarmed by them - I swear to god they've even spawned in directly behind me, which if so is a bizarre design choice for an otherwise competent game. If you want a complete building/survival experience, There are many better games out there.

An enjoyable disappointment that reeks of publisher meddling and not enough time in development. If you're coming into this expecting Skyrim, you will not be pleased.

the game takes a similar approach to its open world as Outer Worlds, with large open areas separated by loading screens, which you are free to travel between as you please once they're unlocked.

Graphics are a nice blend between realistic and stylized, and the world of Eora is vibrant and varied, even in the one small section we get to see.

The character creator almost feels token - your backstory and race are all but chosen for you aside from a few small details, and while the visuals are fun and interesting there aren't very many cosmetic choices either.

Combat is where the game truly shines, although not as brightly as I would have liked - and here we begin to get into the disappointments:
Overall, combat is enjoyable and fairly varied between magic, ranged, and melee, although different melee weapons all feel a little similar - though I haven't played with two-handed weapons in my current playthrough. The biggest hurdle that combat fails to clear is balancing, specifically where weapon tiers and upgrades are concerned. Weapons have a quality level, and each quality level must be upgraded 3 times before moving up to the next level. This is done with a Monster Hunter-style collection of monster parts and foraged materials, but the balance is skewed so that if you don't do most of the side content, you won't have enough to keep up with the story quest unless you enjoy frustratingly difficult encounters against hoards of enemies.
Non-magical ranged attacks take the form of bows and flintlock weaponry, and (provided they're upgraded enough) they feel very satisfying to use. You can be a in-the-thick-of-it archer, dodging blows and interrupting attackers with well timed headshots, or a swashbuckling pirate with a pistol and sword, breaking their guard with a bullet and following up with a few slashes. There's a parry mechanic as well, but it feels underwhelming and isn't always clear when you've done it successfully. I haven't touched magic much at all, but what I've seen does make me want to explore it on a second playthrough.

The writing is overall very good, by which I mean the overarching plot is interesting and decently paced, characters are well rounded, and there are some fun twists that you probably won't see coming. Side quests and flavor content such as notes found lying around aren't always worth reading - some of the attempts at humor got more of a sigh than a laugh from me - but the universe and lore are pretty interesting and unique.

Exploration is often rewarded, but almost always with upgrade materials - which you'll need, but I often find myself exploring out of necessity than excitement or interest.

I hope this game gets a sequel - with polish and more attention to detail, this could have been a really great game, but as it stands it's just OK. Worth checking out if you're a fan of the Pillars of Eternity series, or fantasy action/adventure in general, but I was hoping for more.

This game does certain things very well, and certain things so poorly that I almost stopped playing. Luckily, you can make just about any aspect of the game automated. 7/10

The good: character customization is INSANELY detailed, and not just at the beginning of the game: throughout the story you will be making choices that drastically effect outcomes later in the game - none of this "will the enemies be wearing red shirts or blue shirts", but rather, will you be an angelic paragon of good, a chaotic representation of dreams, a living swarm of locusts, and those are just the options I found on my first playthrough. If managing the nuts and bolts of your character isn't for you, you can automate the process as well, and you can opt out of automation at any time if you want to take your character in a different direction.

The mid: First, the voice acting and writing can be hit or miss. Overall, it kept me entertained, but there were certain characters I decided I wanted nothing to do with despite the fact I liked their core concept. It's hard to pin this on the developers because there is A LOT of writing - see the numerous different character paths talked about above. Second, combat is not going to be for everybody. I am a huge fan of Baldur's Gate 3, and have even made a few attempts at playing through its "honor mode", but after a few dozen hours of Pathfinder: WOTR on normal mode, I essentially turned combat off with the thankfully generous difficulty options. It isn't a horrible system, but it demands constant attention to buffs, which you will be applying every few minutes with varying effects because for every buff you can apply the enemies have a counter buff and... I guess that could be fun for someone. not me.

The Bad: There are some serious, inexplicable design flaws. Don't feel bad if you occasionally need a guide, although you won't generally need one. The best example of this is when I was doing a quest which involved an NPC in disguise talking to other NPCs to discover the location of their hideout. Once discovered, they informed me it was "near the (area I was currently in)". So I set about exploring the surrounding area, found nothing, and eventually looked up a guide to find the location I was looking for was RIGHT BEHIND THE NPC. This sort of thing didn't happen often, but it happened more than once, which is understandable for a game on such a large scale but is still a major detractor from the experience.
I've also already mentioned the combat being mid, but it is also CONSTANT. In my opinion, the game would have benefitted from simply removing 30% or more. As I said earlier, you can effectively do this with the difficulty options, but it seemed worth mentioning that while I generally love tactical combat, I basically turned it off in this game.

tl;dr
Highly recommended despite a few frustrating bugs. 8/10 in current state, 9/10 with bugs fixed.

There's not much in HellDivers 2 that I haven't seen before, but everything here works together to create an experience that is somehow both mindless fun and desperately strategic. I haven't enjoyed a multiplayer game this much since the original Overwatch - although the comparisons end there, since there's no PvP in Helldivers 2. The community also deserves accolades, both the players and the developers: players are generally friendly, forgiving, and just out to have fun, while the developers are constantly listening to player feedback and implementing bug fixes, rebalancing mechanics that aren't fun, as well as adding new ones. Microtransactions are as well done as one could hope in a game that includes them: you truly don't need to spend any money beyond the purchase price - and that's not because you technically could grind for 100hrs to earn premium currency, you actually earn premium currency at a fairly decent rate (although it does taper off after you get enough to buy a couple premium packs, called "warbonds").

There are a few game-crashing bugs which are frustratingly frequent, specifically one which will leave your whole squad on a loading screen until you hard quit the game, but it's rare enough that i don't clutch my controller in worry every time I start a mission - and as I stated, the devs are constantly at work providing bug fixes. Overall, I'd highly recommend this game.

The hate centered around microtransactions is fine when directed at Capcom, but honestly unfair in regards to the game itself. I played through the entire game without even considering them, because I always had enough fast travel items, RC, etc for whatever it was I wanted to do. The game has its flaws, and I would by no means call it perfect, but it scratched the same itch that the first one did for me.

What is a finished game?

Does "finished" mean you can play to the end credits? does it mean fully animated cutscenes? 0 bugs?

You can find the first two in Cygnus Enterprises, although I'm only guessing at the end credits because I didn't beat the game.

TL;DR at bottom


The good:
Cygnus Enterprises has fun in it. Both combat and base management are well-balanced, and you switch between the two of them often enough that neither outstays its welcome. There is a broad tree of skills to invest in, and while it starts feeling a little grindy when unlocking the later skills, they usually provide something that changes the mechanics in a significant way: There are a few different types of drones you can unlock as passive buffs, you can alter your dodge to be a more effective dash rather than a roll, or unlock other new techniques such as a napalm grenade or calling down a DOT solar beam from space. Using skills feels good, and their tactical use in combat is necessary.

There are a variety of weapons to use when your skills are recharging, and each weapon type is associated with a different class. You can use any weapon type regardless of where you put your levels, but leveling the class associated with your weapon type will make you more effective with it. This matters, because enemies tend to come in hoards, some rushing at the player in waves, some standing at a distance to throw projectiles, and some tankier enemies switching between both tactics. There's a decent variety of enemies on the first continent, although I don't know about any of the others.

The ranged enemies attack with either projectiles, or AOE attacks which you are warned about by a red circle on the ground. Later levels can start to feel a bit like a bullet hell in tougher segments, although compared to most bullet hells the combat here is pretty mild. Overall, I would say combat is the best part of the game, although it's not good enough to carry the game alone.

The less good:
The visuals are pleasant and the art direction is consistent, although not really notable beyond that. Biomes feel spread far too thin, and while procedural generation keeps you from memorizing map layouts, this often means never knowing whether you're exploring, or just running towards the end of the level before completing all of the objectives. Doing so means running all the way back to your current objective, then following the objectives until you've reached the end a second time. It's not the worst thing, but every mission I went on had about a 50/50 chance of this happening. The frustrating thing is, exploration IS rewarded consistently enough to make it worth it, netting the player a number of extra crafting materials or even new weapons and armor.

The game seems to be fully voice acted, although the quality varies from "meh" to "never done VA before, but owns a streaming mic". I wouldn't necessarily blame the voice actors though, because they weren't given much to work with.

The not good:

The game features an epic story - literally, in my 13 hours of pretty heavily focusing on progressing I barely scratched the surface. This is not good because the story itself is not good - at best it's extremely derivative, it's often edgy to the point of being corny, and being forced to endure that for tens of hours just to unlock the games basic features does not make the heart grow fonder. It genuinely feels like it was written by ChatGPT or some other LLM. Still, you can't just ignore the story because that's how you unlock new buildings for-

oh right, there's base management in this game.

I'm a huge fan of base-building in games - I won't waste your time introducing myself if you've already read this far, but I will say that I have close to 1,500 hours in RimWorld. My next most-played game has about 500. Despite this, I could not enjoy Cygnus Enterprises' base building.
While resource costs are well balanced with how easy they are to obtain, building your base quickly becomes a chore that simply enables you to do better in combat. Your employees have zero personality beyond a happiness meter that determines how effective they are, and keeping your employees happy is painfully easy because all it requires is farming materials and managing crafting queues.
You can only farm and craft so much in a single day, but a day can be as short at a couple minutes depending on what mission you choose to do at the end. This means you could be refilling the same info into your crafting queues every couple of minutes, which involves running across your base to each building each time as there's no central console that lets you access all of them at once. Some of these can be automated by assigning an employee to them, but they'll only automatically make the items your employees and guests want.
Finally, there's controller support: The store page doesn't claim to have controller support, which is both true and false. There IS native controller support, but it is BAD. In combat, your mouse cursor is locked into a certain distance from your character, but it still mouses over UI elements on the screen so when you try to fire, nothing happens. Throwing grenades is a total shot in the dark as they're programmed to land on the ground beneath the mouse cursor even when using controller, so you sort of just have to hope the object collides with an enemy mid air and doesn't go soaring off to the edge of the screen when you throw one.
Oh yeah, and there is NO DODGE BUTTON ON CONTROLLER. Not only that, but you can't edit keybindings for controller - at first I thought there just wasn't an option to edit keybindings, but it turns out it just gets removed from the menu when you have a controller connected. So why not use Steam's controller support? Because Cygnus will still try to use it's own controller support, making the game utterly unplayable. Use keyboard and mouse if you're going to play this, but honestly, you're probably better off getting something else.

TL;DR
I have more to say about this game, but this review is long enough. I don't recommend it, but if you find it on sale for $15 or less, it might be worth considering.

Overall, this game is a fantastic RP experience with action mechanics that manage not to ruin it.

Dialogue is believable and intriguing, environmental storytelling is on point, and the stories overall are some of the best you can find in an RPG. Combined with all of that, decisions you make -- from dialogue choices, to character building, to who you choose to kill -- have noticeable effects on the story and gameplay.
The game is old, however, and this really shows in the combat and graphics department. That being said, the graphics are fine, even by today's standards, and the combat is still fun.

It's hard to explain the appeal of Rimworld. If you love systemic games no matter what, you will absolutely love this game; Losing is just as fun as any other part of the game, and how to win is ultimately up to you -- especially if you dip into the extensive mod selection.
Watch any number of crash-landed colonists survive in any terrain/climate, with whatever supplies you think they should start out with. Start a tribe of nature-loving primitives, or even cannibalistic savages. Trade, make alliances, or dominate your neighbors, but will your colonists' mental health be able to take the strain of surviving such harsh conditions? Push them too far, and they just might set fire to the whole colony.

There are few games as open-ended as Rimworld, and it's a great way to both relax and challenge yourself depending on the settings you choose. I cannot recommend this game enough.