Recent reviews by BigSilverHotdog

There are some great ideas in this game but until they fix the glaring balance/randomness issues it is never getting a positive review from me no matter what. The upgrade system requires 2 of the 3 towers used in the upgrade to be UNUSED in the bottom inventory bar (which is limited to 8 slots) and this is singularly the stupidest idea in a game I have ever seen in my entire life. Think about it: You want a tier 3 tower? You have to get 3 level 1 of the tower and then 3 level 2 of the tower, and you CANNOT USE 2 of the 3 in each upgrade, the MUST be in the bottom bar UNUSED, a bar which has only 8 slots. Are you getting the picture?

The art style is nice, the sounds are not too annoying, there are some GREAT roguelite concepts implemented to keep the rounds flowing, and the game is cheap. But the bad ideas are CRIPPLINGLY BAD. Avoid this one until these are addressed.

It's cute, it's addicting, it just isn't any fun to play. In 10 hours of play I never once had a single minute of fun. I never once sat back at the end of a game and said, "Wow, look at this nice city." All cities end up disjointed and look fake and wrong, even with tons of perfect matches, and there's no incentive to play at all beyond unlocking new cosmetic pieces.

And referring to this as any kind of "city builder" is flat out misrepresentation -- it's a puzzle edge matching game with city building pieces. No city building concepts exist in this barebones time waster, and it's a barebones time waster that contradicts its own rules constantly. I was repeatedly able to extend my current game on the last piece available by randomly placing the piece until the game invisibly and nonsensically decided I should get more new pieces because I placed that piece there. It doesn't make sense, even per its own rules and tutorial which I did fully play.

Maybe a patch or mods can help this one become something someday, but all I'll remember about this game going forward is how much time I wasted trying to like it.

Cute, addicting, tedious garbage.

If you frequently pretend to like things for the meme lolz then by all means pick this game up.

There are plenty of pointless details to pretend you appreciate the oldschoolness of. There are also several different repetitive chores you can do over and over forever while high fiving all your little "someone plz do this to me" black screen roulette Rickspankers.

And the references to Canada? HAHA!! SO FUNNY!!! REALLY SERIOUSLY CLASSIC HAVING A FRIDGE FULL OF MAPLE SYRUP AND POUTINE TO FILL YOUR MAPLE SYRUP AND POUTINE SURVIVAL METERS!! SEASON 23 KLAUS OF HEARTS CLASSIC BROMIGO!!!

I wasted almost an hour of my life on this rubbish, an hour I can never get back. Refunded and used the money to buy domestically produced fluffy discs of cake.

I really, really hated this, and I'm surprised, because I thought for sure I was the target market, considering I love Escher, psychedelica, and puzzle games.

But I disliked almost everything about this game aside from the music. The graphics are ugly and not even pleasing to the eye in a retro way. The controls are uncomfortable and never become intuitive. The puzzles are just dumb, tedious, predictable, and pointless. Like they were designed by a computer. An old computer. Probably using a tape drive.

Thank goodness the suck began at once, because I shall now recoup this conceptually interesting, functionally uninteresting nonsense with a refund.

Look at the rest of the publisher catalog if you want to know exactly what you're going to be dealing with here.

I knew all about this publisher before buying this game but I decided to give this specific title a chance (during a big sale) but even heavily discounted it's nowhere near worth buying. Constant glitches and bugs, unrealistic nonsense everywhere you look, and as many have already said, nowhere near what numerous other sub sims have already achieved, some many years ago. There are horrid design ideas and crippling bugs, some existing for years, literally everywhere you look, and like many other people, I found the tutorial impossible to complete.

I refunded after 30 minutes of "playing" this awful, awful mess of a game. Pity I can't also get a refund on those 30 utterly wasted minutes.

edit: And 37gb install space required? What the **** is that about? 37gb? For this ugly mess of a game? o_o

Reviewing this game based on the single player RPG-lite "story" mode is like reviewing IL2 Sturmovik based on the campaign. The meat of the game (at time of review) is the recently added Tournament mode, where picking and strategy are more streamlined, elegant, and addicting, especially on replays. See those 400 hours? 30 in RPG mode and gave this a negative review. Rest in Tournament mode over the next 6 weeks (after I only started it once to see what it was like) and you can begin to understand why so many people are "meh" or "not worth it" on this game. Yes, the game still needs more balancing, more ways to win, less ridiculous difficulty scaling in the end game, and there are some UI glitches that annoy the hell out of me (especially after this many hours), but these are mostly fairly simple things that can (and should) be fixed very soon.

If you like King's Bounty/HOMM style strategic battle tactics then you will probably like this a lot as well, even though this is an real time autobattler where you can only setup and watch. It isn't turn based, but it's good. Real good. With development it should get much better. I will update this review in 6 months or a year when the development path and pace is more apparent.

For now this is all the review you're gonna get from me. I can't stop playing it long enough to write more.

Garbage. Refunded in 20 minutes. Like The Long Dark except it sucks. Bad UI. Bad graphics. Tons of glitches and bugs. Idiotic wildlife. Not immersive. Just bad. Really bad.

edit: The gameplay mechanics are bad too. The first time I lit a fire I literally sighed and hit ALT-F4. I wanted this one to be good, or at the very least decent. I really did. I love survival games. But this is like Savage Lands bad.

edit2: To developer response:

1. Are you sure that you want to argue that people playing your game means it isn't garbage? Especially with your player numbers and the fact that your overall score is "Mixed"?

2. I realized it draws heavily from The Long Dark by screenshots, reviews, the title screen of the game, the game setting, the game environment, the game sounds, the game's enemy animals, and the game's attempt to tell a survival story. You made all of that, not me, and attacking me for comparing to the most obvious influence is amateurish. Try again.

3. I don't have to list the bugs, UI problems, or gameplay mechanics that I think "suck". You really think I'm going to help you fix your awful game for free? The onus is not on the buyer to justify why they think your game is bad. I simply don't have time to write a sweeping critique of your extremely low quality game... and certainly not for free. No, the only thing you get for free is my warning to other people not to waste their time and money on this donkeypile. That's all. They can believe me (and all the other critical reviews of this game that I weighed carefully before buying and giving the game a chance anyway) or they can check it out for themselves in the years to come.

After all, I'm sure it'll still be here, still an empty, ugly, useless Savage Lands-like sandbox, with you still here arguing with your many negative Steam reviews. Maybe at some point fix all those clipping and alpha texture transparency issues with fires in stoves, allow bears to see more than 2 feet behind them on maximum difficulty, synchronize weather sounds with the actual weather, and scale the UI properly to resolution, hmmm? I'm sure you'll do a great job.

edit2: lol dev thinks insulting his game is the same thing as insulting him. I don't even know you Mr. Claudiu, how could I personally insult you? I love you as a person anyway! Even though I don't know you and the only thing I know about you is that your game is bad and you can't take criticism, I love you anyway! REALLY! <3

Most micromanagement orgies are disgusting but this one is hawt.

Cliff Empire has a bunch of annoying issues (and does a poor job of explaining itself to the player) but most people dissing this game are clearly too spoiled (and/or impatient) to appreciate a flawed classic. There's so much more good here than there is bad, and the full experience is vast, unique, and special. If you love city builder games with survival elements then there is no reason you shouldn't love Cliff Empire, flaws and all. I followed this game for years, waited for a recent sale after the game was nearly in its final version, and I still went in with middling expectations.

Those expectations were far, FAR surpassed.

It's an extremely, EXTREMELY poor pixel graphics Dungeon Warfare ripoff. The visuals are ugly (even for pixel art), the soundtrack is very poor (and releasing it separately to "seem" like a bonus/DLC is a sham), and yet... the gameplay is still the worst part.

It's just bad.

To even say a game like this has been "designed" is an insult to the very concept of game design. Some jackbutt did a bunch of number crunching to determine what was possible and then structured all of the monsters, towers, and waves based on that. It's like the Defender's Quest system but even worse... which is just gross. Really, really, REALLY gross.

I paid 2 dollars and 50 cents for this, the only game I got on this year's Steam Summer Sale, and I still refunded after half an hour when I realized what kind of tower defense "game" this was.

It's pure garbage, and it is hard to believe I'm the market for this kind of game (retro, tower defense, "hardcore" difficulty, etc).

I award this rubbish no points. Not even for effort, because there wasn't any. Even Super Sanctum TD seems Legendary by comparison.

Wow this really sucks. I expected an average TD ported from mobile and I thought it would be a safe bet for a TD fan like me since it was on sale for less than 2 dollars but there is no way I could possibly imagine playing this game for one more minute once I saw how insanely awful it was.

It's just bad. It's a bad port from mobile, bad balance and design, incredibly annoying sound, almost nothing in the way of even the most basic of setup options, and it is the only TD I've ever played that requires you to mouse cursor here, there, and everywhere, dozens of times per level, just to collect the resources that almost every other strategy game in existence, OF ANY KIND, simply goes directly to your resource supply.

Why in the gobsmacking Superhell do I have to mouse over a mine to pick up each and every ****ing load the mine produces? With many mines per level, and the resource interval being something like 20 seconds, you can imagine how quickly this becomes enraging.

The sound and music are just so incredibly bad and annoying I had to turn both off after about 4 minutes. No kidding.

Overall this was way worse than I expected, and way worse than is reasonable for any modern computer game of any genre. The awfulness of Ancient Planet transcends genres. It's just bad. Really, really, REALLY bad.