Recent reviews by nixx

Unlike the first game, I do recommend this as a coop experience.

Going over my complaints from the first game:
1. The second character’s move set is more like a temporary power boost than a full time job; more damage in melee but with less HP.
In this game, both characters have the same amount of HP. They also both have unique combat abilities that makes them equally fun to play at the same time.

2. The abilities the second character unlocks seem to be more “utility” than fun.
Abilities have transformed into sub-weapons in this game, and what you would consider "utility" in this game, rare though they are, are shared. Both characters get unique sub-weapons that are both fun in their own ways.

3. Death pits kill one of the characters until the next checkpoint, leaving the fallen player with nothing to do. The death pits get especially numerous starting with stage 3.
Death pits are no longer a situation where the second player has to put down the controller for 10 minutes while waiting for their turn to play, which is much appreciated.

4. There is a system where you can jump on the other character to reach higher places. This is always active, which means you frequently accidentally jump onto your coop partner mid combat (and then sometimes continuing into the death pits mentioned above)
This is still the case, but rarely an issue in this game, because of the aforementioned death pit changes.

5. Boss HP is not scaled for both characters to be doing damage at the same time. They die incredibly quickly.
This doesn't feel so egregious this time.

Overall, the game is much more forgiving than the first one, but in some ways this was necessary.
Going away from strict comparison, there are some new things to consider.

The map is truly sprawling, where almost every room spreads to an alternate path or a hidden treasure. This can be overwhelming at times, but it's not something to complain about in my mind. Progression wasn't really an issue, except for a puzzle involving freezing water where I'm still not sure what the intended solution is.

The combat feels great throughout, although not really challenging on the Veteran mode. There is a harder difficulty I did not try. The only combat-related complaint I can think of is that the final boss flashes red across the entire screen when hurt, which is almost seizure-worthy.

The biggest downside with the game is that it seems like it's 90% finished. There are some red herring treasures, the secrets are poorly explained, and some NPCs feel quite useless. The first game had multiple post-game treasure hunts, which may have been a necessity because of the minimal amount of content, but it still feels weird when it's gone in this sequel.

As for annoying bugs; when you move through room transitions, sometimes the coop player will be put in a crazy position. As some platforming stretches across room boundaries, this can be a source of frustration.

All in all, I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to more. Keep up the good work.

Another Hazelight coop adventure, still brimming with great ideas.

There is one downgrade from It takes two though: The side characters. The story focuses almost completely on Mio and Zoe and there are no memorable side characters like the book, the taxi frogs, the flower, the arena beetle, the elephant...

Very imaginative and actually somewhat difficult. I enjoyed playing it.

If I had to raise a criticism, it would be that the rhythm segments can be quite hard sometimes, because the music does not play an easy to follow rhythm 100% of the time. However, you are not really penalized for failing at them, so it's just a minor concern.

It's good.

I do not recommend this as a coop game.

The existence of a coop mode is nothing more than a footnote on the store page, and it’s a footnote in game as well, it is designed to be played solo.

1. The second character’s move set is more like a temporary power boost than a full time job; more damage in melee but with less HP.
2. The abilities the second character unlocks seem to be more “utility” than fun.
3. Death pits kill one of the characters until the next checkpoint, leaving the fallen player with nothing to do. The death pits get especially numerous starting with stage 3.
4. There is a system where you can jump on the other character to reach higher places. This is always active, which means you frequently accidentally jump onto your coop partner mid combat (and then sometimes continuing into the death pits mentioned above)
5. Boss HP is not scaled for both characters to be doing damage at the same time. They die incredibly quickly.

Short version: I would not recommend this game if you plan to play singleplayer.

I have just about 1000 hours in Factorio as of writing, mostly in vanilla but also in the Space Exploration mod.
I learned about Satisfactory by their announcement trailer ages ago and decided to wait until the full release to play it (just like I didn't play Factorio until 1.0).

While I don't want to harp on about the differences between this and Factorio, I do want to talk about the most important difference: Loaders vs Inserters.
Factorio is a game based around inserters. They pick things up from one object and put it on another. Through debug options you may access what is known as "loaders" in that game, which function like the conveyor connections on Satisfactory buildings, and so I'm calling them loaders here too.

Loaders are easy to program, but they make it more difficult for the player to do anything harder than "connect 1 thing to another thing".
Inserters are harder to program (especially in 3D, jeez) but they make long chains of buildings much easier to build. Sure, you need to build "extra" inserters per every building, but you already need to build splitters and mergers with the loader model that would be superfluous in the other way.

I'm 37 hours deep into a multiplayer game with 2 other friends at the moment. I'd say we've made it about halfway through but I don't know for sure because I am doing a blind playthrough.
The short version above was "don't play alone", and I say that because I don't know if I would still be playing this if I was alone. Having friends along to split up work and contribute to eachother makes it enjoyable, but that's true for any game.

Here are a list of random thoughts I've jotted down over the course of play. I may format them into a coherent review at some point.

Editing builds is a pain in the ass, no shifting of existing buildings.
Can't replace catwalks with similar type, have to destroy and rebuild.
Despite being 1.0, still pretty buggy.
Blueprint desyncs. (Building stuff around blueprinted segments regularly caused client-server desyncs for me which required reconnects to fix)
Street light night mode not being respected.
A dozen crashes vs 0 in Factorio.
Ziplines are smart. A little awkward to use, but you can get good at it.
Depots are a great solution to logistics for construction.

No circuit network limits a lot of options, like only letting a single truck travel a distance at a time.
Can't wire up depot for automatic refilling, requires many of magic item. This becomes less of an issue, but it would still be nice if there was an option for smarter gameplay over just placing depots everywhere.
Can't wire up fuel power for overflow.

Weird distinction between elevated belts and building belts on top of eachother.
Unlimited resources sound weird, but it works out. AWESOME Sinks are a great solution to deal with overflow from unlimited production.
Great performance despite Unreal Engine.
Plays well, worms itself into your brain. 3D building usually works well, which is not a given.
Movement feels good.
Research reeks of "todo" (3 second research time)
Industrial storage outputs aren't balanced.
Deleting a truck path while nodes are visible leaves them visible forever, meaning you have to find and delete them all manually (very slowly)
Upgrading pipes breaks very often. (Pipes filled with "None")
The writing is bad throughout the entire game.

Finally, some nice to haves I'd like to see:
- First person in vehicles.
- Transfer stack in inventory with no other building should transfer to depot. It's weird because the opposite works.
- Chat messages are lost upon reconnecting, in comparison with Factorio. Having the backlog is useful.
- An undo button.
- Seeing (big) powerlines on the map
- Seeing railways on the map

The "free" version should be more aptly labeled as a demo.
With the new monetization changes, this game actually costs 20 dollars a year.

The multiplayer in this game remains an afterthought despite being 5 years past release (and how many past early access launch?).
It's floaty, janky and way too buggy to do any kind of combat in it, and when you build an entire game on combat challenges you're building an entire mountain on top of a broken foundation.

I really have no interest in dungeon crawling or roguelites, and I only picked this up because I saw woolies in the trailer so I was interested in finding out what kind of game it was firsthand.

My initial impressions were positive, it's cute, the music is nice, and the combat was challenging enough.

At a certain point I hit what felt like a wall of progression. I was either going to need to grind or to git really gud to progress.
So, I decided to interact with the game's selling point: switching characters mid-dungeon. It even provides buffs for doing it as much as possible, but there's a problem.

All your characters need gear, and they can't even share items that aren't class restricted, like accessories. As gear is very important, this puts a big focus on the crafting. Sadly, the crafting is not only barebanes compared to Rune Factory, it's also gated by the main currency in the game.

Faced with the wall of grind ahead of me, my feelings toward the game immediately cooled off. I might see how the game goes but I've already lost the initial spark.

The game itself has no technical issues. It even supports Steam Input controller glyphs, as far as I can tell. There are 2 things I've noticed that irk me:
- When you're going through the menus and crafting stuff, you can't input a dialog before it has fully transitioned into view. This means there's a small input delay between every action.
- When you're going to quit the game from your main camp, there is no save button and it warns you of unsaved progress. Why can't it just save when you're quitting?

I'm giving this a negative review for now. If the game really turns me around, I'll change it.

I played a private lobby with friends and it was fun but there was no music in the actual match itself.

After I got on YouTube and started playing the NHL 99 soundtrack the experience improved immensely.
If you're going to play this, I suggest you do the same.