Recent reviews by Bear

This is one of the most boring "simulator" style games I've played. It's just click through a defined sequence. There's no outlet for creativity or learning how things actually work, there are no comms or lines, and progress is incredibly slow. You click and wiggle until it hits 100%. You don't unlock improvements to what you do, just new tools for certain projects. You can't have multiple projects on the go, you can't walk away from processes and work on other things, there's no decision making around finances and career progression. I couldn't even play it at first because the tutorial was stuck on clicking something that was off-screen.

This could be more interesting, if there were more routes to completing a task at various qualities. If you could invest in speeding up or automating tasks, if you managed projects within a timeframe, etc. If painting was manual and you actually got some creative expression to display.

This is a nice, quite relaxing management sim, with a solid enough set of mechanics to have a bit of a puzzle to it. The levels offer a variety of tweaks on the system, providing different tools and paths needed to manage terrains.

It's not a perfect game; there are a few frustrating parts. The photos you take for the memory book aren't really a place for you to store your favourite photos. I didn't realise I needed to store 3 gold photos for each level until I had completed them, so when I wanted to complete the map fully I had to redo the whole level. Sometimes it's hard to see stuff behind other terrain, without the ability to rotate the view. There are a few times when wildlife behaves oddly, not expanding its territory to the desired tiles nearby. Also, the game doesn't prepare you for the first times you experience terrain types with specific climate requirements. I had done a bunch of terraforming in the first stage, and then had to spend a long time undoing it in the next to be able to create the right terrain!

But overall, it's enjoyable and satisfying to watch the terrain recover, and to find ways to earn enough resource to do what you want. It offers enough levels for a variety of things and doesn't drag itself out or overstay its welcome. You get to see a bunch of cute animals, and the climate goals are also very satisfying for fleshing out the map.

I'd like to see a little more of a sandbox, either with generating random/custom maps, or being granted more tools once a level is completed.

In theory it's a cute, relaxing zoo simulator. But in practice it's a tiring game of tedious micromanagement. You continuously have to move animals around between pens, add extra decorations, decide whether individual animals can breed or not, etc. There are almost no quality of life features, and your keepers can't really keep up with the job, so you're just stuck hiring a keeper per pen and manually assigning, moving things, etc etc. The animals' needs system is really basic, so the only real effort in meeting it is in actually setting the options.

The game has quite a bit going for it in terms of art, systems, decorations, progression. It's just a shame that the core loop is clicking through 50000 buttons.

I also think that the input for the game really let it down. Alerts keep popping up but don't take you to the relevant action, and switching to the right build menu takes quite a bit of clicking around. I was playing on the Steam Deck and tried creating a fully custom control scheme to help with menu switching, but some of the controller-specific radial menus disappear with mouse and keyboard input.

It's a game I tried to like, but unfortunately it just felt like I was battling it to achieve relatively simple things. And the bigger my zoo grew, the more tiresome it became to add another decoration into each pen, hire more staff, etc. Because the game doesn't really offer ways to do things at scale, and all your staff need to be micromanaged, it ends up getting more and more bogged down as you play.

It's tough, reimplementing a game that will be compared to the original. As a lover of the original, I really tried to enjoy this. I tried to treat it as a new game. But unfortunately it failed to deliver, and halfway through the missions I installed the original StarTopia and played that instead.

A major problem was that I couldn't finish a mission in one sitting without some serious memory leak making the game unplayable. Over a half hour it would slow down massively and the UI would bug out, failing to register clicks in the right place. I don't want to relaunch the game 3 times to finish one level.

The comedy is a big miss for me. Instead of a helpful but judgemental companion, you get charmless and annoying robot who just insults you all the time.

They did try a few changes that I think were well intentioned, and a few QoL features, like the biodeck harvesting itself. They mostly dropped the money=power system. But the trading and cargo bays don't work together and slow things down, the crafting and mech systems are a slog, and some easy UI features that improve hiring and promoting staff are missing. The blueprints system doesn't save across games, making it pretty useless, and the merging of sleep, food and cleaning systems felt unnecessary. Either drop it all and just have one system, or keep the separate buildings. The rooms all feel clunky, and it's much harder to customise with small decorations due to the large equipment.

Combat was probably the worst part of the old game, so trying to replace it with a new system was in theory a good move. But the new system is buggy and hard to control, and mostly comes down to just lining up all your mechs (assuming they can navigate correctly) and letting them duke it out. There might be a little more to get out of it, but with the play issues it was pretty basic.

Ultimately, it felt like it was trying to be StarTopia without the love or understanding of what was (and wasn't) fun about it. It fails as a remake, and it's not really good enough to succeed as its own game, so I'd say stay away!

A few weeks ago I bought Against the Storm to play on my Steam Deck for a flight, and now I have over 120 hours in it! Surprisingly this runs really well on the Deck. There are a few minor inconveniences with the keyboard, trading, etc as the UI is a little small, but it manages to fit all of its features. I think I've played more than I would have on PC just being able to chill out on the sofa.

I won't say a lot about the core gameplay loop as plenty of other people have covered it, but it does a pretty good job of introducing things a bit at a time and letting you discover mechanics and strategies while unlocking things.

There's interesting variety between settlements and cycles, and the game is nicely designed to encourage you to keep trying harder difficulties to get a little more without forcing it on you.

There are a few flaws that are mostly inconveniences rather than gameplay issues. It's a bit micro-heavy when you're trying to get the most out of your villagers. You can set some detailed parameters around production but can't reconfigure a whole recipe or ingredient, or can't say "use whatever we have the most of". It would be nice to have seasonal profiles e.g. avoid glade during storm, make a woodcutter go and work in the rain collector. I also wouldn't mind seasonal autosaves and being able to reload them slightly easier, or just auto-pause - there are a number of times I've had to recover from not pausing in time when the season changes to manage hostility which could have been avoided easily! But that's an ADHD problem, not specifically this game :D

It also feels like the meta progression is very staggered. You typically earn about one upgrade per settlement, which doesn't feel bad, but I've played 100 hours and completed the gold seal (first credits play) and I feel like I've still got most of the upgrade tree to go! I don't massively mind this, but it does mean there are a decent number of features I probably won't reach in the time I play it.

I see the game's been out for a while and the team are still pushing updates. Unlocking decorations is fun and I'm looking forward to the new QOL update letting you mirror buildings!

I've been playing on and off since the initial release, and 1.0 has added some features and quality of life that really made it fun to play through to the end. For me, a lot of factory-style games start to get tedious around the second half, with scores of items to pay attention to, a lot of fiddling with the inventory, and a bunch of inconveniences.

Firstly, movement is a lot of fun. Between sliding, launching yourself with a bunch of tubes, and jetpacking around, the game offers a progression of freedom of movement that continues to feel better each time you upgrade something.

The multiplayer works quite well. Since I had the game twice, my wife could play on my Epic account and joined for the 1.0 release. I wasn't sure if it would be her kind of game, but even though the detailed factory design wasn't her thing, she still had a bunch of fun exploring and taking charge of the tech tree.

That's one of the ways that Satisfactory has managed to remain welcome for me when other games in the genre peter out. If starting the next project is a bit daunting, I can take a break and explore interesting landscapes, and find actually worthwhile rewards. In other games, I just save and quit, and at some point I just don't come back to them.

I did have to learn not to care too much about getting it all perfect all the time, which can be paralysing. But because nodes don't run out and there are lots of ways to expand, you don't really have to go and redo previous machinery unless you want to. It's easy to add an extra floor for a machine you don't have space for!

I'm also a huge fan of the ambient wildlife, the birds and balloon-bois as much as the lizard doggos! It's fun when they hitch a ride on a train!

The game rewards experimentation without forcing your hand. You could do everything with conveyors if you wanted, or in my last play through I didn't make much use of vehicles. But I did decide to actually figure out trains this time, and even though the tracks were a mess, the whole network ran excellently with quite a simple signal system once you get used to it.

Finally, I was really impressed by how much they made the alien artifacts meaningful in 1.0. The rarer sloops let you patch supply issues when you don't feel like changing it for one project, and just get on with the bit you care about, or prop up your power network. The mercer spheres are probably the biggest improvement for me. By allowing you to be constantly supplied, without really impacting the need to build factories, you suddenly lose the need to do a bunch of boring inventory management. And after a session, I could usually dump most of my inventory into a sink!

Overall, my experience of Satisfactory has been great. Of games in its niche, I feel it offers the best balance of things that are fun or refreshing for different players, while allowing lots of freedom and creativity in making cool or efficient constructions. The devs have really put a lot of thought into what parts of the game are worth spending time on, and what's going to be enjoyable or annoying.

One last piece of advice - sink stuff early, and use sloops to get more DNA capsules from alien bits to get lots of tickets! They unlock nice tools for building different-looking structures. Also, buy the boombox and listen to the Absolute Ficsit tape.

I'm often a big fan of simulation games. I like playing around with the system, figuring out different ways to do things, setting things up to be good at different tasks.

This is an extremely narrow, dull simulation game. From the way the controls are set up, you plod around. The game wouldn't let me bind the run button to the same button as move forward, nor would it allow me to remove the turn speed limit that makes it feel like there's input lag.

The tasks you have to do are also extremely narrow. You interact with things in exactly the intended way, within the intended slots. You stand at the right part of the boat to throw your crabs. You stand at the right part of the boat to drop your bucket.

You go out to sea, set your crew to do everything, and watch. You can't helpfully do anything other than keep an eye on the boat movement and occasionally shove bait in, because you'll get in their way and they'll stop working. You can't help sort crabs because the giant table only has room for one person to sort crabs. And when you're sorting crabs, the game doesn't teach you what to look for. You awkwardly rotate a 3D model until the dials are filled.

The map seems largely superfluous - the game gives you some parameters to find crabs and then you go there and dump all your cages. Spreading cages out didn't seem to be worth the time, fuel or effort.

It's a tedious game that's mostly about waiting. You wait for the crew to deploy the cages. You skip time. You wait for them to gather the cages. You skip time. You sell, you buy upgrades, you go again. It's a bit of a shame, because there's the framework of something that could be a bit more fun. But it seems like the game exists to meet the minimal amount of support to "be a crab fishing simulator".

A lot of other reviews talk about bugs - I didn't hit any bugs that interrupted my experience, it's just a big, empty game.

For a cheap little hentai game, I wasn't expecting much, but this really lowers the bar on how little effort can be put into a game.

At first, I tried to play it on the deck, and couldn't do anything in the combat. I decided to try it on the PC to give it a chance. It turns out that the game, which doesn't have resolution options, is built pretty much around a fixed resolution setting. The buttons for actions in combat literally don't appear on the screen. And on the PC, the screen is too big, so things like the game border are fixed in the middle.

The gameplay is a sloppily put-together slugfest with no introduction or guidance. Each level awards you a points-buy budget to hire your team, with various abilities and stats. The stats aren't explained, and while they're not exactly difficult to work out, it's annoying. In combat, you can't even see the numbers for what's happening. This leads to things like learning that the speed stat (approx 2-12) is linearly tied to how often you take turns, meaning that characters with low speed will be taking one turn for every 3 enemy turns. And it's not like the character is strong to make up for it.

Things like "what your spells do" for the few characters that have them, or how much mana they cost, or their range, etc. can only be figured out with trial and error. Similarly, ranged attacks (at least some of them) get blocked by terrain. However, since you're usually doing about 5% of an enemy's health with an attack, and you can't see damage or health numbers, I only realised this after a while when trying to use cheat engine to lower enemy health pools and speed up the game.

Obviously the "balance" and mechanical choices could be one thing, but it's just so slow. Fights are clogged and tiresome, the AI is terrible (if you surround a goblin, it will skip a turn because they always move before attacking), and it takes about 20 mind-numbingly slow turns to take a basic enemy down.

Then, every couple of fights, you might earn a heart with a character you brought along. This allows you to get a small dialogue scene with a hentai image. Fair enough.

My main problem is that every part of the game is lazy and unfun. It feels like somebody has put in the absolute minimum effort to get the game on the store, including using barely-curated repetitive AI art for everything. I don't have an inherent problem with the use of AI art, but it was done with so little effort that the characters are almost indistinguishable. Every character, whether a soldier, knight, priest, mage or assassin, wears pretty much the same suit of chestless armour.

The writing in the scenes is pretty much unedited, too. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this entire game was an exercise in seeing whether you could use AI tools to shortcut every element.

So in summary, there's literally nothing going for this game. Even as an enjoyer of silly, time-wasting games, I see no redeeming features in this game.

I recommend this game but with some caveats. It's pretty fun, and cool, and consistently styled, but also technically lacking. There were a few things I had to get over before actually being able to enjoy the game. It throws a bunch of decisions at you with basically no context to decide whether you want to make them one way or another. It's a choices-matter game, but those choices will be broadly uninformed, and there's a lot of guesswork as to whether you should do one thing or another, even when you know the outcome you want. Maybe that sounds like a good thing to you, and if so, the game is probably for you!

As everyone's saying, the game is very comparable to Papers Please. You're given a game mechanic, and you make most of your choices by playing with it. The tools you use to actually play are simple minigames, but you have limited time in a day and pay money every day, so getting fast (and maybe sacrificing accuracy) might be necessary to make the money you need. Are you going to spend extra time to make sure you can complete the job safely, or risk harming the patient to make sure it's done today? For some reason people require more minigames to cure as the game goes on, but whatever! They get a little tedious, but the stress of going fast and picking the next tool to use makes it less so.

I have two main problems with this game. One: it's verified for the Steam Deck, and it's pretty much a perfect game for the Steam Deck. It's beautiful and would be perfectly suited to playing on that, either with controller or the touch screen. The problem is that it doesn't make use of these properly, and it just shouldn't be verified. The Steam version of the game doesn't have proper controller support, and the touch screen is hard to be accurate with and requires double tapping for any mouse input, so it's very inconvenient. I gave up and played on PC, and had a much better time.

The other main problem I had with the game is the extremely limited set of game options to tweak it mechanically. Similar to how the controller isn't supported, there's just a dearth of configurable settings, especially around controls and graphics.

Finally, and this may be very much a me thing, I quickly gave up on trying to see and explore a bunch of options and endings, just decided I was going to see the story through, and stopped worrying about other outcomes. This let me enjoy it, and despite a rocky start for the previous couple of reasons, I ended up having fun with a light story.

The game isn't a masterpiece that I'll be talking about for years to come, but it's good, and it's clearly been made by people who were actually interested in making it! If you enjoy this kind of experience and think the game sounds interesting, you won't regret picking it up and playing through.

It took me a little bit to get into Carto, because I approached it as a puzzle game. It has some puzzles, but nothing that you won't solve right away.

Once I realised this was a fun, cute chillout game, I got on board for the ride and I really enjoyed the experience. There are a bunch of varied environments and funny characters. It's relaxing and enjoyable, and I spent quite a bit of time just rearranging my maps for my own amusement.

The game is excellently put together and well-paced. Progress is steady, and there's no pressure to suggest you shouldn't be playing around when you want to. The main upgrade you get is move speed so you can run around faster, but you can often skip around quicker by moving the map pieces you're on anyway.

The main thing I'd like to see near the end is the ability to conjure some extra pieces, just so I can play around with the final map layouts to my satisfaction!