Recent reviews by G.B.F

While it is by far the most stable release from BGS in recent years, and it looks good in a lot of ways, that is about all I can give it. I did everything in the game, every quest that was not randomly generated, went to every planet and did at least some adventuring.

First off you realize quickly that if you like the idea of exploring all those tantalizing planets, yeah they are mostly huge stretches of open ground you run through in order to get places of interest, only to find out that you start to see copy pasted "dungeons". As in the exact same layout, the same dead NPCs with the same notes on them describing the same story that apparently happens over and over on each planet. Now granted, not every planet has the same selection of locations, but it looks like a pool of 80 some locations. Now that may sound like a lot, but keep in mind this number includes things like, a pipeline people are working on, a singular habitat module that has been abandoned, or a civilian outpost with nothing good for sale and maybe an auto generated fetch or escort quest. I would estimate maybe 20 involved dungeons, 20 smaller locations that have hostile encounters that take less time to complete.

Speaking of repetition, I hope you like fighting standard human enemies, because they make up the majority of the games combat encounters. Alien life is limited to animals essentially, with little reason to fight them unless you want to go hard into the crafting systems, which is also the only use for the outpost mechanic. Exploiting flora and fauna on planets is also utterly pointless as a means to make money, when it is so much easier to just find something to fight and sell the gear you get for ten to hundreds of times more. Likewise charting a planet, scanning organic and inorganic data is somehow even more tedious that it was in No Mans Sky, all for a reward of credits that as with crafting, you could make doing something more interesting.

But the worst part of it for me, the most disappointing aspect, is that the writing has not improved since Fallout 4. That is the critical aspect that modern BGS is lacking, the systems they put in place to play with in their games are often solid, but without good writing, without interesting quests and choices and you know, Role-playing, what is the point engaging with those systems. I really hoped that with the long term negative response to FO4's weak narrative and clumsy dialog system they might actually try harder.

TLDR: A massive ocean of a game as deep as a puddle, littered with cookie-cutter content to justify its size.

Some of the worst DLC I have played, expert bonfires in particular has several layers of RNG in place to make sure most runs are impossible to get 3 stars on.

Horrible writing, cheap "art" for most of the story and after dozens of hours playing the main game with no crashes, I am well into the double digits for crashes in this DLC.

I knew it would be bad and only picked it up on sale so I could do all the challenges and such, but somehow it is even worse than I expected.

Great game.

Sadly Dev just recently decided to tell everyone he thinks statutory rape is an SJW term and does not count if the child enjoys it. Also outed himself as a transphobe I guess? ♥♥♥♥♥♥ week.

Game of the decade, now shut up and take my money for a sequel.

A game for those who like...
-Failure
-Violence
-Sadness
-Vulgar Humor
-Sincerity

Today you live.

And make sure you get the epilogue to fill in the blanks.

Rough one, fun when it is fun obviously, but right now my experience is "Win, Win, Win. (Team Game) Lose." When I am playing solo games I can place maybe 90% of the time and when its a team game, I lose around 60-70% of the time, only seen a final round 6-7 times out of 100+ because a team game almost always comes up for semi-final.

Also hackers and no way to report em, really? Watching people glide over the level at 150% speed of other players and nothing I can do to flag them. Hopefully it gets better eventually, still addictive but the flaws really ruin it.

Literally Game of the Year for me, recommended for anyone who has a soul and a sense of humor. 10 out of 10 for Animation, personality and humor.

A diamond in the rough, the world needs more games that provide what this one does.

-An open world where you can fiddle with almost everything, ala the Ultima franchise and the Elder Scrolls series.

-Isometric graphics, they really sell the vastness of the world, even if it is in reality, relatively compact.

-2d Games with varied building and crafting mechanics.

Sadly, as all games with small developers go, you can only do so much to make an ambitious idea perfect, so Balrum requires patience and a tolerance for some clunky bits.

I really enjoyed this game, right up until the first crash, then the slow revelation that the game crashes constantly with no error report or explanation. I only started playing it this week, and apparently these crashes are relatively new, following the 1.0 release. All I know is every time I dare not save every 15 minutes, which seems like it can only be done by hanging around your base, I lose a bunch of progress.

I can no longer take it, it has ruined my enjoyment of the game. I cannot find any support info where this problem has been addressed but hopefully a fix is incoming, at which point I will give the game a second chance.

<UPDATE 05/07/19>

Still crashing at random, just put 123 hours into Sekiro with the same computer, a top of the line AAA title and it never crashed once, why is this game so consistently unstable?