Recent reviews by dunbaratu

I can't stand the UI for how you manipulate items. Half the time the reason I couldn't get a thing done is because I couldn't figure out how to tell the game "put item A in item B", only to find out that was the right answer all along but the UI was a PITA and too fiddly to accomplish it so I incorrectly assumed that wasn't the right thing to do.

Also, items clipping through furniture or the floor so you can't pick them up was a big problem. The first time we opened the briefcase, a lot of notes fell through the floor so we had to reset the room, assuming those notes are important.

All in all, the puzzles might have been fine but the item manipulation UI is quite handicapping, making the game not fun.

Also, no invert Y axis on the mouse is annoying. Not a game-breaker on its own, but combined with the other UI problems it's just a big "no" from me.

Gameplay:

Pros: Good game. The gameplay is a bit like The Talos Principle and Portal (but closer to Talos). Nice graphics, nice puzzle logic, and a refreshing lack of any annoying zero-tolerance perfect speed timing puzzles (which I really hate in a puzzler game, which should be about smarts not how dexterous you are at the game.)

Cons: I'd say the difficulty was slightly too easy, though. I mean there were some tough puzzles but they weren't that hard to work out, but I was able to get through in just 2 sittings, where games like Portal 2 and Talos took me a lot longer to figure out some of the puzzles. It's just barely on the lower edge of how many hours of gameplay I'd expect out of a $19.99 game. It's just barely long enough to be worth it, but if it was slightly shorter it wouldn't have been. If you expect a very high ratio of hours of play per money spent, you might have more misgivings about this.

Plot:

Pro: Super neat. And unfortunately it's impossible to describe without massive spoilers. I just want to say there's a big twist halfway through that makes it all *click* and helps make the title of the game fit perfectly.

Con: It does present one of those sort of ethical dillemas that feels totally fake (fake in that it pretends there's only two possible choices, both bad, when there actually are more.)

I like the game, but at $25 it's at the upper bound of what it's worth paying for. It's got some problems but also has some seriously nifty mechanics that make me willing to put up with the problems.

Pro:
-Very maleable world where the game tolerates you doing very unexpected things

Associated Con:
- The 3rd-person camera is kind of derpy, and doesn't know how to avoid objects obstructing your vision., probably because their positions aren't set in stone You'll have to manually move the camera around a lot to see what's going on.


Pro:
- Does the concept of "the matrix" right. You don't alter the universe by just staring at an object and saying "there is no spoon". You do it by actually having the power to alter the game's scripting code that defines how the spoon works, in-character.

Associated Con:
- It's nearly impossible for the developer to think of everything a player might do to hack the game in-character, and thus you can do stuff that breaks assumptions and makes bugs surface.


Pro:
- Unique gameplay mechanic that doesn't just talk about your character being a hacker, but actually has YOU, the player, doing the hacking, and not in a stupid "movie OS" sort of way, but in a way that actually feels like really programming - you actually type script code in-character, using a scripting language the game invented for its universe.

Associated Con:
- The game doesn't let you get access to this aspect of itself until a few hours of gameplay. The apparent plot at first, the pure "dating sim", is kind of lame. Especially since you apparently are a "salesman" selling soda by literally selling it one can at a time to random strangers you converse with, rather than by, say, selling it by the crate to restaurants like you'd expect. That doesn't seem very viable as a job and feels like the sort of plot intended for an 8-year-old player. But you have to go through that a while before the actual gameplay surfaces and the game suddenly gets a lot more mature and smart than it seemed at first.

Pro:
- You are expected to crack the mysteries of how to do powerful hacks yourself, and it is possible once you are given the tools to get started. The universe's objects behave logically and consistently making it possible to reverse-engineer things to learn the system naturally in-character.

Associated Con:
- The game is VERY vulnerable to spoilers. The primary challenge of the game is learning the names of things so you can hack them, so it probably won't have good replay value unless someone starts making mods that add new plots.

(WARNING: This review is after having played only about 2 hours in.)

Geeky puzzle solving fun - super special interest though. Given a very simple assembly language with an instruction set of only about 12 kinds of opcode, but with a message-queuing parallel archetecture, and little cpu's running your small programs that pass each other data, solve the given problem.

It's basically like Talos Principle or Portal, but for computer nerds.

And if you're a programmer who only ever played a little bit with programming and never did any assembly, it's a good basic intro to the concept.

But again, sadly, it will probably only ever have a very niche market.

Kerbal Space Program version 1.0.2. I've been playing the early access game for over 2 years, but now that it became official I thought I'd write a review. My review is very positive. (But see the caveat about version 1.0 below at the bottom).

(Full disclosure: I don't work for SQUAD but I do help write one of the mods for the game, so I am personally invested in this.)

Get This Game. For once a sci-fi game that is actual sci-fi and not science fantasy. It doesn't insult the intelligence of the player, and it speculates what-if, in a relatively reasonable way, only breaking a few laws of physics here and there where needed for gameplay, rather than breaking ALL of them constantly like most space video games do.

Kerbal Space Program as history:
Although the solar system in the game is artificially smaller than would realistically be possible (so it doesn't take as long to get things done as it really would), it still has all the parts and the right places to emulate historical real-world space programs. Don't be fooled by the cute derpy-looking Kerbals - you can use the game to see what it would be like to emulate historical actual space missions - space stations in low orbit, docking maneuvers, performing an Apollo-style "Mun" landing, send rover probes to "Duna" (which is Mars-like), and so on. All from gluing together parts and having fun.

(And if you really want to go all-out, there are user community mods out there that replace the game's solar system with the real thing, so you can really try these missions out in full size).

Kerbal Space Program as a 'tycoon' style game:

If you like the old style 'tycoon' games where you have to come up with a means of keeping your business afloat and research new technologies to do interesting things as you move on to bigger and more ambitious projects, then Kerbal Space Program Career Mode is for you. Start up a new game, pick "career mode", set Normal or Easy difficulty (do NOT use Hard until you've played a while), and you'll have the fun of trying to balance funding (for making better space center buildings, and for making the rockets themselves), reputation (for making future offers you see be better for you), and science points (for buying your way up the tech tree). Accept contracts, and try to fufill them cheaply so your space agency makes money from them to fund the other stuff you want to do. Don't fail them or else you'll lose funds and rep for it.

Kerbal Space Program as a mod platform:

From it's early access days, a user community of modders has grown, such that you can do just about anything you can think of with the game. As of this writing, because KSP 1.0.2 is relatively new, some of those mods won't work just yet, but they will after only a week or two. If past use is anything to go by that's about how long it takes for the modders to catch up to a new release. As Steam is not the only means of obtaining the game, and not even the first means of obtaining it, the company, SQUAD, has chosen not to support Steam Workshop for mods due to the way it would open up the chance for people to make Steam-only mods that would be unfair to those who bought the game in its early days and supported the company before the game was even on Steam. I support this decision, but it does mean you'll have to take a few extra steps to find the mods and install them. Look up "KSP" on curse.com and look for Kerbalstuff.com. most mods are in both places.

Kerbal Space Program as "edutainment":

The game is quite educational, but in that good sneaky fun way, where you don't realize you're learning - you're just trying to get stuff done in the game and in so doing learning stuff along the way. If you've got a teenager or pre-teen at home, give this to them. It does something that is really hard to do - it *demonstrates* though gameplay how a mathematical concept works, visually, without revealing the actual formulas, in such a way that the hard math can come *after* the intuitive understanding. Usually what makes math hard is that the understanding and 'feel' can't happen until *after* you understand the numbers. But here, it lets you play with the phenomenon first, and understand it later after its behavior has becomine intuitive to you, rather than the other way around.

Get. This. Game.

A caveat:

My review refers to the 1.0.2 version of KSP and emphatically NOT to the 1.0 initial release that came out a week before and had a critical re-entry bug. Had I written the review about the 1.0 version, it would not have been as kind. The 1.0 release was rushed by about a week. The 1.0.2 release from a week later was MUCH better, and is probably what should have been the 1.0 release.

R.E. The KSP 1.0 re-entry bug: You may read reviews by people complaining about re-entry being broken when 1.0 game out. Those reviews weren't wrong *at the time* they were written. KSP 1.0 was rushed out with a re-entry bug that was very unfair, and importantly, really obvious so it's hard to imagine how they missed it. Adding a heat shield actually *caused* the ship to blow up on re-entry because adding it made the vessel flip nose-first, rendering the heat shield worse than useless as a part. If you see reviews complaining about this behavior, be aware that they are stale and referring to an old version.

Loved the Boardgame, hate the incompetent QA on this computer game though. The UI bugs break the rules of the game.


Lots of games have a few bugs here and there. And there are some bugs that are only slightly annoying - or make you have to perform workarounds - but after just 2 days I'm encountering bugs in *THIS* game that actually cause the game to cheat the player out of their win. Not in the usual sense, but in the sense that the user interface breaks and fails to let you take the actions the rules say you're supposed to be able to take.

For 2 whole months there was a longstanding bug that if any AI player tries to cast the Weakness spell, the UI freezes and gets caught in a loop unable to continue the game so you have to start a new game. And if you have the Weakness spell in the deck, and are playing against 3 AI players, then the chance of this happening at some point during the game is actually pretty high. They had this problem reported for over 2 months and didn't fix it until just yesterday.

So now I try again. And run into another rules-cheating bug that stole my shot at winning the game away. The HERMIT (the guy who gives a talisman to the first player to land on him) appeared in the Plain of Peril. I open the Portal of Power, which puts me on the Plain of Peril where I'm planning to interact with the Hermit and get that talisman (a necessary item to be allowed to win the game), and the user interface doesn't have a provision for how to let you interact with cards on that space - it doesn't let you. So the hermit is effectively a dead card when it appears there, which is definitely not how it's supposed to work. By this point in the game other means of getting talismans were too far away and I wasn't going to be able to get one in time before another AI player would win. Had I known the game was lying when it said the HERMIT would give a talisman to the first player who landed there, I might have tried a different tactic. As it was, in this game it was too late.

The game was basicaly too buggy and not ready for release yet.

I'm only *just* barely edging on the side of recommending the game. It would be a wonderful $10 game. But it's being sold for $15. The game engine is great. The graphics are pretty and smooth. The crafting aspect is fun. The survival aspect is fun. It just doesn't have enough length of play, and it's not early-access where you can expect to get more content later. The developers have decided that this short game is the finished product.

You can finish through in about 8 hours of play (or less, depending on skill, but it definitely won't take more than that. I finished in 4.5 hours first time but that was with constant nonstop play. If I'd put it down and come back later I suspect it would have taken longer overall as I'd not have kept the player skills as fresh in my head.)

It also has a sandboxy survival mode which I haven't tried yet, but the main adventure game is a bit short.

Don't get me wrong. The shortness of play is the only thing about it that's not so great. Other than the duration, everything else about it is wonderful. It's defnitely very pretty. Visually it's great to look at, especially in the late game as you go deeper and see lots of bioluminescent life forms. It's a bit like minecraft but without the ability to alter the terrain - you just gather things and build stuff to add on top of the terrain, trying to make the necessary equipment to survive the adventure. (For example you'll have to go down deep to finish, but your starting scuba suit can't go deep enough to get to the lower layers, so you'll have to construct a better scuba suit to be able to finish, as well as making better weaponry to survive the monstrous stuff down deep.)

This has one very dissapointing thing compared to the original series:

When you encounter a challenge to surpass, does it feel like you're **inventing your own** solution to the challenge, or does it feel like you're **discovering** the pre-made solution to the challenge that the level designer put there?

This new game makes it feel like your job is to discover the solution that was implemented by the level designer. In the original games, it felt more like you were inventing the soluton yourself by applying the tools in your theiving skillset. Even though you can turn the hints off that still doesn't change the feeling that there's a single solution hardcoded by the level designer - it just takes the clues away to help find it but in the end you're still following the method intended for you.

This isn't about the plot, the graphics, or the glitches. This is about the basic game engine design. In the older games, Looking Glass studios hooked your thieving abilities directly into the low level behavior of the game's engine. Whether or not the environment allows you to peek around corners, shoot a rope arrow, or jump, were all the responsibility of the game engine to decide. If the person designing the level wants to make a jump possible, they have to abide by the rules of the game engine and make the jump the right length to make it possible. If they want to prevent a rope arrow from working they have to abide by the rules of the game engine and make sure no surfaces are made from shootable materials. In the newer game, however, they took the lazier design of doing that all backward. They made it the responsibility of the level designer to TELL the game engine where those abilities work and where they don't. The game engine isn't in control. The person who wrote the level is.

And that means inventing your own solution to the challenge isn't possible anymore because there is no such thing as "the rules of the universe" that you can work with to create your solution. Every solution that works works because the level designer allowed it to work at that location.

And that ruins a lot of the feel of the game for me. Eidos Montreal got the rights to the game's name but ignored the entire design philosophy that made it good, and stole control away from the player.

It's a shame because using modern computer hardware you could have made a game with the "game engine in charge" design and gotten something a lot cooler than what Looking Glass did with 1999's limitations. But instead they ignored that part of the game design and managed to make a game that was somehow worse despite using modern technology that makes everything prettier.