Recent reviews by Faust

It's solid quality. Barring a number of clumsy typos, it's very competently done, reasonably paced, feels rewarding, and looks very pleasing to the eye. A lot of effort and care went into this.

I happen to be cursed with above-average pickiness. "Well Written" is not a title I'm willing to bestow lightly. I've heard that title passed around more haphazardly than a skunk weed joint, with my face contorting into increasingly anguished expressions as those words are paired with things like Dragon Age, or New Vegas (my favorite game, ironically), or Roadwarden, or, may the stars forgive me for uttering that name, B#ldur's G#te 3.

But for once, the sheer onslaught of fanatical praise is well earned. This really is well written. It's not just good prose, the author also nails the fact that you play as a different species with a fundamentally different psychological profile that perceives world in ways we cannot. It takes a special kind of skill to make something so alien feel so natural.

And it's not just the writing alone, either. The visuals and music are also superb, and I'm not talking fidelity or quality in-a-vacuum, I'm talking about how well the three are intertwined with each other and how they flow together in a joint, coherent, and compelling way. I can count on one hand the amount of games that have captivated me emotionally to such a degree.

I'm sitting here, about an hour after I finished my first run, still basking in the afterglow. I haven't felt that way for a very long time. This game has entered my top 10 of favorite games, and it's probably going to accompany me to the grave as a part of that list.

It looks beautiful, it has pleasant sound design, a nice relaxing soundtrack, and creating multilayered complex combos from the various modules at your disposal feels as satisfying as it should be. Many games of this kind tend to have trouble giving you enough content for unhinged synergies at the beginning, making earlygame feel slow and dull, but not this one. From the first few missions I already started getting parts that could drastically change my setup's behavior.

This is as it should be. This is competent design. It deserves acknowledgement.

As of right now - a begrudged recommendation, probably on sale.

The core systems are decent, the controls are surprisingly solid and smooth, the atmosphere is quite lovely, and I have it on reasonably good authority that the developers are very passionate about improving it and making it as good as they can as quickly as they can. But it currently falters in the "stuff to do" department. It's a nice looking place but furnished primarily with piles of scrap (some of those piles are vaguely outpost-shaped) and populated by randomly roaming enemies.

I don't regret my purchase. It'll get proper exploration eventually, and once it does - it will definitely be worth it, but right now I only recommend to buy it either if you have faith in the project's future or if the lack of wanderlust is compensated for by the pricetag being 10-15 dollars... Or, alternatively, if you're suffering through Fallen Earth withdrawal and badly need a fix. Boy does it fill me with hope seeing a potential singleplayer successor.

This game is twice as great as it is buggy, and it is very buggy.

There are a myriad of merited concerns about the stability of the game's code base. But for all these little visual glitches, translation mistakes, and UI errors it also offers metric tons of style, flair, action, fun, exploration, build depth, and variety of playstyles.

As a small personal anecdote, I'm not a big fan of the "It's the journey, not the destination" sentiment. I tend to shelve even my most beloved games after I complete everything I wanted in them. This game, meanwhile, I bought in EA, exhausted the available at the time content in 40 hours, and the remaining 320 hours you see at the time of this review being written is just me playing it over and over again for the hell of it.

A game being littered with bugs isn't something to be just hand-waved, but damn me to the abyss if the sheer quality of the content doesn't make up for it. Love this thing. Love it to death.

Very amateurish but very likeable. I like to call these "fingerpainting games". Their technique is unrefined, but they radiate earnest soul. I'm happy to have stumbled upon this one.

A fresh and extremely well executed concept with more than enough content for the price asked. It may sound overwhelming, having to keep track of two different characters at once, but it's nothing that a normal person can't do without a bit of practice. It's fun, it's cute, it's worthy of a lot more attention than what pathetically little it got.

This game works 60% of 20% of the time. Glitchy, buggy, unstable, with performance jumping all over the place... One could say "But it's in Early Access! That's par for the course!", and conventionally one would be correct, but not when the dev says s##t like, quote, "In the end it does not really make a big difference if you write a 1.0 at the start or not so I never found this to be super important as long as the updates are substancial"
(the typo in substantial was left in for authenticity's sake)

Speaking of the dev, he is so utterly german that I'm not even gonna capitalize the word. It's one thing to try and maintain the gayest and lamest moderation possible in your global chat as a man who owes 100% of his success to Sseth's audience, but it's an entirely different thing to issue autoshadowbans to people in the chats of their own PRIVATE multiplayer lobbies. Psychotic behavior. What other lame s##t are you gonna do next, Shrike? Lock the singleplayer out until the player enables the microphone and chants "Never forget the 6 trillion" three times?

Don't even get me started on the game still missing basic things from the first entry after all these years, like the ability to reduce the drop rates of undesirable items and weapons. Again, the dev claims to treat EA as just a label.

I'm probably still gonna occasionally play this hunk of sparking and smoking digital debris because the gameplay is more or less fine and I already paid my money for it, but I wouldn't have risked the purchase if I knew just how bad things really are under the surface.

The overall design is solid - Good artstyle, punchy combat, fun level design, and the chain gimmick is pretty fun to work around or with. Usually gimmicks like that are pretty tacky, but this one is very well integrated.

Oh, and don't let the store page fool you - it is entirely playable and a great time solo.

TL;DR: It's more than "Just Another One".

They started calling games of this kind "Friendslop" because most of them are lazily stitched together disjointed chimeras that you play with your friends for a couple evenings to simulate the feeling of watching a really bad horror movie with the lads, one that you won't even remember the plot of come next morning.

This one isn't like that. It boasts a consistent artstyle, a genuine atmosphere, a solid lighting system that greatly enhances said atmosphere, a complementing sound design, fairly thought out mechanics... It's a coherent and compelling experience that works to deliver a proper videogame to you rather than fodder that you just use as an excuse for a social gathering to prevent your friend group from drifting apart.

If I had a gun to my head and was told I'm only allowed one dedicated coop game in my library - it'd probably be this one.