Recent reviews by Purple-Smart Heart

Excellent Souls-Like!

A little poorly marketed by game journalists, this is not a "light-hearted" game. I'd call it more of a super-satire, kind of like Helldivers. You are hit over the head over and over with human trash hurting the ocean. And yeah, ♥♥♥♥ is sad, it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SUCKS. And much like any proper Souls inspired game, the game is unambiguously bleak at times.

But these are themes very much worth making art of and ACT is an excellent representative of the niche of this art form!

I will say, it's a great argument for the Dark Souls version of difficulty scaling! When I got frustrated I gave some of those "accessibility options" a try, and other than the gun just being really amusing, I don't think any of them were especially helpful? It could just be the fact that I've played so dang many of these games, but I genuinely got better scaling down of the difficulty for my playstyle by switching to a different archetype. I started using a Resilience build and the difficulty dropped by half without making any animations jank or dropping the framerate to a hard 20. So your sorceries in Dark Souls/bleed in Elden Ring etc. easy mode rather than just cutting hp by a certain percent.

That all is really just the nitty gritty, though. I really liked the game! And I think if you like any Soulsish game, Subnautica, Terra Nil, or anything of the like, you should give it a try!

Yes I recommend it, no don't buy it. You WILL lose track of your life for one more turn...

One more turn.

One

More..

All the crafting and exploration of Subnautica with none of the thalassophobia!

I'd been looking for a new surv/craft game and The Planet Crafter REALLY scratches the itch. I've had the game for 3 days and played for over 1 of those days in hours LOL.

It's really fun! And looks like the devs are dead set on keeping the updates rolling which is always a good sign for EA games.

Can't wait to see what it looks like in full release!

Tried it for the free weekend.

It was okay for a couple hundred turns, but it is just too obtuse, even for a Civ-like to get that real "just one more turn just one more turn" play until you haven't slept and you have to get ready for work in an hour kind of addictive gameplay that I really expect from the genre.

Worth trying for free, definitely won't be buying it personally.

It's Monster Hunter.

If you like Monster Hunter, it's more Monster Hunter!

If you don't know if you like Monster Hunter yet, go play World first. The solo progression is much longer and you'll get a better idea of whether or not you'll like it.

Then hey, if you like it, Rise is more Monster Hunter!

Happy Hunting <3

There's a lot that I see good about this game. The worldbuilding is great, the RPG elements are unique.. but the game systems are just entirely too draconian and punishing.

This game isn't fun.

It's definitely an interesting challenge, and I can see how a lot of people have gotten some enjoyment out of conquering it, but the gameplay just is not enjoyable, and I already have too many games in my library that require 5 wiki pages and 2 YouTube guides just to get through a few hours of the game.

Very much not recommended unless you challenging games that are actively unfun and punishing to play.

I imagine it's absolutely excellent to fantasize as a regular ass person living in a fantasy world!

This is the best classic RPG.

Period.

Sorry Baldur's Gate, sorry Icewind Dale, sorry Planescape and Pillars, DOS2 is the best one.

It's the only one on this list that has genuinely tactical combat, it's the only one that has excellent progression for every archetype of character.

Genuinely the weakest point compared to those other games is the fact that there's relatively little you can impact the story. However I'd still put it on par with, say, Fallout 2, which is quite good.

The dialogue and worldbuilding are top notch as well.

Buy this game, support Larian, between them and Obsidian this genre we love so much is in fabulous hands.

Day 3 after Launch: Scratch is best boy goty 10/10
But seriously I think even with some of the design decisions that detract from trap encounters, and some relatively serious optimization issues, it's pretty easy for me at this point to go ahead and say BG3 is absolutely worth it. I still haven't even started Chapter 2 and the new content compared to EA is so fleshed out. I've been brought to tears at least twice! I recommend this game so much we're buying a copy for my wife so we can play co-op!

Launch day Edit: A lot of fanboys are whingeing about my negative review so I figured I should post an update.

I'm playing on launch, I'm mostly having a good time. I say mostly because while a lot of my concerns have been dealt with, some new ones have already popped up, particularly in the space of graphics.

I have a really beefy computer. i7 processor, 32 GB of RAM, GEForce 2080 Super, the game's installed on my 2 TB NVMi, and yet I can't keep 30 fps consistently on anything higher than Medium settings. This same PC was running Remnant 2 at more than 60 FPS on High settings during the run-up to BG3's release. That is.. unacceptable to be perfectly honest. This kind of optimization failure needs to be fixed ASAP. I was getting much better framerates during Early Access at much higher graphical fidelity as recently as the Paladin patch earlier this year.

I know Larian can do better, and I expect them to. I'm probably going to give it another couple hours of trying, but if it doesn't smooth out I guess I'll be waiting for an optimization patch.

I am leaving the rest of my old review after this point, unedited for posterity:

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My "No" recommendation is with the caveat of *not right now.*

The game's first (and only) chapter is currently very unfinished despite being released for Early Access for some time now.

Movement is sticky, slow, and buggy. Your AI companions will frequently take the absolute worst path possible given any geometry that isn't simply a flat plane, and will frequently make jumps that hurt or even kill them without any input on your part.

Speaking of jumps, some gaps and other kinds of terrain that were meant to be "interesting" instead become deadly traps that require a quicksave before every attempt.

The game also suffers from some design decisions that clearly come off of people that were obviously working on DOS2 before they moved to BG3. The sheer number of traps and trigger plates VASTLY outstrips either your number of disarming kits, or hp to deal with it. Once those options are exhausted, your only option is to force turn based "combat" with the traps and move each character past the trap one at a time.

The kind of abstraction that is no doubt meant to mimic a group around a D&D table trying to deal with a trap, brings the actual video game you're playing to an utter *crawl.*

I brought up DOS2 because the design space for THAT game gave you the ability to *craft* more lockpicks and trap disarming kits, to the point where once you have a decent amount of money and access to traders, you can get as many as you're willing to invest in. And even if you don't, the absolutely *superb* number of movement and defensive options with the game's huge library of spells and abilities gives you many avenues to defeat traps and locks. And if all else fails? Resting is not a finite resource, and is also instant, rather than taking several minutes of load screens and cut scenes.

I think it's possible that at some point in the future Baldur's Gate 3 will be really fun, if somewhat handcuffed to it's D&D abstraction. But right now I can't in good conscience recommend a game that feels very much in Alpha, but charging full price.
You should go play Divinity Original Sin 2: Definitive Edition instead. Or if you already have it, buy it for a friend and play a campaign with them. Your money and time will be significantly better spent that way!

This game has awesome parts to it.

It regularly sucks me in for literal days at a time.

But it's plagued by all the worst culprits of "Free-to-Play"itis, and has one of the highest barriers of entry of any video game ever made.

Path of Exile requires more depth of knowledge and more third-party programs just to function at its most basically playable level than any huge MMO.

Back when it was run by like 6 guys in a garage in New Zealand that was excusable. Now that they're a multi-million dollar development company backed by a multi-billion dollar publishing company, that is no longer excusable.

At all.

Go buy Last Epoch. And Grim Dawn. And all of the other competitors.

Then maybe someday Path of Exile will be worth something because it has to compete with someone other than Activision.

I recommend with a big ol caveat:

This game crashes a lot.

A WHOLE lot.

Hopefully they make it more stable, because it's an awesome game.