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"One must think the Baron is happy, for he must push the manor up the hill using nothing more than his bare hands, no regional trading, and no soldiers for hire after year three." - Lord Farquad 1102

I looked at this game, slowly learned of its deficiencies and many many missing features at the present moment and said "All right, bet" and won a map using whatever it currently it has. I wouldn't recommend the game at the moment if you are looking to play it once and win it for the features. However, there are many signs in the game that point that it will be much more impressive down the line.

Will that be in one or two patches in the future? No, there are many things missing, in particular, UX related to quality of life for knowing your deployed troops consume food based on the region they are walking on, more unit types, useless archers, different buildings (larger presumably), and other things that probably should be there just because of the time period. Bizarrely, despite flooding the global market with your wares, you cannot purchase them back at a lower cost.

At times I didn't even use the trading buffs because I didn't need them. Plate armor is pointless to produce because once you reach a certain wealth level with your towns, you just tax and buy out the plate armor. There should be the option for a larger manor and options for it but again, it's all limited at the present moment.

Now with my current game done with the state of the game at basically day 0 patch levels of gameplay, I am satisfied for now. I could see myself returning to it in a year or two once all the speculated features come to be or somehow it is modded into it.

- The "I can't read text wall" summary

+ Good location scenery and art direction
+ Thoughtful nature evolution
+ Somewhat good story

- General direction is different from the first game (For returning players)
- Challenges can be nulled through various given items/modules (Now present in Below Zero)
- Somewhat questionable storyline vs the reality of the game

8/10 Enjoy at your leisure if you want to have fun in this world. Sales are frequent if you're strapped for cash.


- Introduction

After finishing the game, both the first one and the second one, I feel ready to say my comments on the game. The second game builds on top of the previous game, both in gameplay and story. It plays well, any one having played the first one would notice that many small bugs are fixed such as the Prawler's walking soft-locks. It was very refreshing to go into the deep using the prawler for most locations. With that being said, it is understandable why the reviews below are pointing why the game has gone into a different direction - either by external influences or because the developers are aiming to a different demographic.

- Subnautica Summary

Subnautica 1 has a distinct atmosphere of mystery at sea. For most of the game you will spend time below sea and also have to manage to survive multiple simultaneous pressures such as water/food management and leviathan attacks. There's also the need to persistently know where things are, despite the lack of maps. Caves were made with coherence - one area connects with the next easily and you generally didn't feel lost most of the time and if you were, you would try to learn the area better to find a better entrance. Your workhorse ship, the Cyclops, was sufficiently able to navigate the caves and borderline effective against leviathan attacks. You were not overpowered, but had to be brave enough to get through leviathan attacks and move past them to your destination.

- Subnautica: Below Zero Summary

The contrast with Below Zero is that most of the time, the environment dictates the art direction, the possibilities of creatures, and also what would likely show in the game. As the environment is cold, most items are cold-themed and the environment as well. As in real-life, some of the possible creatures portrayed are parallel to them. One notable was the lower quantity of leviathans - only appearing in certain locations and and the edge of world. This is compensated with more mid-level creatures that annoy but are not total dangers to the player. As gameplay goes, this is a sharp contrast to returning players and a welcomed addition to casual players. Notably, players would find that the only ship in the game can be equipped with something that essentially cancels out the dangers of the deep and since the game doesn't offer anything else to counter leviathans or creatures, it becomes the only way to navigate and counter them when navigating the lower layers.

- The cost of challenge

The case where the Cyclops in the first game becomes a machine that you have to learn to use against the environment, the seatruck becomes the singular ship to cancel the dangers and any challenge thereafter. The other case of challenge in the game comes on the ground areas but its similarly countered with a simple strategy. The suggested vehicle - the snowfox - feels inadequate despite using upgrades so it can be passed with the prawler. Again, I feel that to a certain level the challenge of Subnautica is held between managing your machine in the depths and the environment. However, Below Zero changed this to fit the level of challenge to someone that is a very casual player.

Keep in mind too that to some extent the game is not a short one - players would probably take 20 - 40 hours to get through all locations and collect resources. Base building is very enjoyable as well and could a position to learn/take more time. The concern here is that players will have more time to learn and drive their machine better and if they were limited in the capability of having a "over powered ship", they could learn to do things differently. If the seatruck were to retained, toxic or warp torpedoes can be mounted, decoys could be mounted, and other non-leathal strategies could be implemented. Despite the mention of the game being non-lethal in terms of defense equipment, I find the sea truck harms wildlife more than the Cyclops.

- Conclusion

Overall, I feel that the game is more polished than the first game. However this does not detract from the fact certain things could have been better or certain concepts used in the first game could have been directly applied. I was also annoyed heavily with the "low water/food" messages constantly. At some point you would like to shut those off but there was no option to disable that dialog. The final "decision" of the story was also sketchy at one point, especially with one relating with the reason the main character is on the planet, it somewhat felt forced but I won't mention to avoid spoilers. The final end chapter of the game didn't really have the same level of closure to that of the first game, but maybe they're speculating in making more games out of the series.

Prologue:
There have been a few games that I've played outside the mainstay flagship city builders. These include Simcity 4, Cities Skylines, and Cities XL. That being said, Surviving Mars is a survival manager sort of like Besiged with space elements. It would be easy to say "It's Besiged in space!" call it a day and see the 100hr review and say its good. The reality is that this game is a bag of ideas.

The Review:
Graphics: 9/10; it's a Unity-based game so it looks pretty especially in some cases where you drop it down to ground level.

Gameplay: 8/10 then drops to 2/10 after 20 hours or approximately 150 sol (In game time)

Sound: OST is one of the better in the genre but will be recycled after a few hours

Requirements for running: Mid-tier build to low tier; it's not very resource requiring.

Best value per hour; Purchase the game on sale with the Green cities DLC bundle and only if you want the extra buildings, with the new building set.

Grievances:
- Pop-ups for announcements; you can't stop them unless you use some mod and you'd wish they stopped after the colony stabilizes.

- Poor management of breakdown of resource usage; basically no way to delete X if it's become a poor producer/consumer..

- Idiotic worker management; it's a frequent problem that I see in the genre. There is the need for producing resources through NPCs then there are the cases where NPCs are ABSOLUTELY colony necessary. A case is when producing critical infrastructure items and needing to at least have one person working there or for power generation. The issue is you can't manually put someone there to make sure this doesn't happen and it ends up cutting off almost everything to death.

- End game; I am playing with the Green Mars DLC, and the best thing would be to green Mars all the way. However either by a poor development decision or a bug; you can't develop beyond 40% greening. This means grinding for approximately (rough estimate, 6 hours IRL) just to finish the game. Considering that you're at this point, there's nothing to do. All breakthroughs are done, all end-game buildings are done, the colony is stable forever. The game basically locks up in this mode for hours while you could have had fun in another game than micromanaging resources.

TLDR: The game is good for the first 40 hours, very addicting to micromanage and enjoyable once you stabilize the colony. However the game dies in enjoyment towards the end game. The game would technically end at 20 - 30 hours without the Green Planet DLC. I am sure people would enjoy the first hours of the game; which are the most enjoyable.


On a controversial note; This game is also a statement in the application of planning can be a complete disaster when applied haphazardly and incredibly boring in the long run. Everyone ends up working in useless workshops in the long run and wait for the inevitable end when the water resources on the map dry up and then the colony would perish shortly afterwards.

This is going to be a long and probably more top-down review than I would like to write within the limits of Steam review boxes. I am a long-term gamer in various games including city builders, RPGs, open-world games, and small indie games as well as many hours and effort into modding games into different games over the years.

Where to start? Skyrim I guess is the best analogy of Cyberpunk 2077, both in technical and marketing levels. Recalling from a long time ago, Skyrim was one of the most expensive games made at the time, part of the cost being incurred from marketing and relatively long development phase of 6 years. The end result at launch was a familiar-ly moddable engine, abysmal bugs at times, and an enjoyable experience for the layman. Overall it can be said "Not perfect, not bad" as an end-opinion of the game. You probably have a different opinion of the game in the years afterward but overall it can be said to be good experience.

Now where does Cy2077 start in this context? For one, marketing in recent years has been increasingly been getting better at drawing in crowds but horrible to understand the core product being offered. Cy2077 does not really offer "relationships like in real life" but it offers RPG standard dialog to get the same experience. Cy2077 does not offer all the features advertized, but what's there is playable, gameplay is solid, and I find myself adjusting to different strategies as the game story moves on. Cy2077 does not offer in-depth cyberpunk expectations that we have gotten used to over the years, instead it presents a future that is as realistic to humane expectation within the alleged development cycle.

Being in development I can understand how difficult these systems are to implement, even more when a core mechanic of the overall project fails and everything else seems to fail. Having taking some project management courses and reading into software construction, I understand that by having just one or two systems fails can delay and implicate the whole project. In Cy2077 you see this problem often.

Right after you leave the elevator from the main start area, the first bug I saw out the door were improperly textured trees, allegedly the texture did not use the correct LOD texture, or was not marked to despawn when not in view of the player. This situation repeats itself a lot throughout the game, not in term of clipping trees, despawning cars and people, but problems with a modern feature in video games called render clipping (If memory serves right). where a scene is rendered only up to what the player can see within their field of view. Everything outside this view is either downscaled, removed from scene, or compressed to save resources. What can be seen as the frequent culprit, even on console is the failure of this mechanic where things either show up or they show up with the wrong LOD model. The next one is the physics engine fighting itself with objects, either through LOD models being rushed and not properly closed to avoid clipping. Another frequent issue that either might be or not are FPS-tied events, but occasionally things fail to act when they are needed.

All of these problems reek of rushed development. Unsurprisingly these problems would have at least added 6 months of development and also depend on the "one man army" developer to have the patience to fix this. Seeing these problems however, from my personal point of view and opinion did not affect my opinion of the game greatly, in fact it's probably something of the message that cyberpunk wants us to know in some fashion.

Where Cy2077 is good at is its story and the pacing of what your decisions do. I don't feel like if I backtrack a save three or 4 saves ago I would be getting the same ending, at least the details will be different. The story really drives it through at times, and well you can have more fun on side quests as well as locating the rare legendary items to make the experience better. There's also the appreciated mechanic where if you really like a particular weapon or item, you can upgrade it and retain its usabilty for a longer time than in other RPG games. I detested Borderlands 2's RNG mechanics since it felt more of an artifical means of generating more weapon variants at the expense of the idea of the game. "Let's farm more DPS!" does not correlate to gameplay when I go out in the real world, and unless that was the core idea of a RPG game shouldn't be universally applicable.

In the end, Cy2077 does want to do one thing in the end, that's everywhere when we bring the antagonist (and side-kick?) Johnny in the picture in an explanation of what is really going on in the world of Cy2077, weeds really do grow back. Unfortunately as of the time of this review it becomes a somewhat sad fact that some of the events that happen in the game that led to its misery in creation, literally and in-game, are present in the real world.

In conclusion, the average layman would probably not enjoy their game having frustrating problems done by a questionable upper management. Maybe it's not worth the $60 that it goes for, but neither should it be thrown in the trash for items clipping through. There is an experience to be had, however you have to work through to get it. Either find guides on fixing the issues it has or waiting a few months until they fix it. Nothing in life doesn't seem to come for free, and Cy2077 might take that a bit too literally.

As of the moment I have not gotten an ending, presumably my 30FPS (With 10 FPS lows) is slowing down my progress. I will update this review if I have a chance if the ending did bring the story to a satisfying close.

Feel free to rage and throw @#$% at this review, either way I believe some discussion is required, nothing is really ever set in stone anyway.

I've played the OST a long time before the actual gameplay of Mirrors Edge and always found it interesting to match it up to the gameplay now. While a departure from the first game in terms of what you can do, the open world mechanics is something new to play around with.

I've seen the positives through my current overview of the game, you parkour, go from place to place, and can optionally speedrun through them should the occasion appear. Users can drop off some challenges as well. I see nothing wrong here but it somewhat underminds the size of the map at times.

What should be noted was the emphasis of story and atmosphere. I find this more interesting in games nowadays where you are expected to uncover it by yourself.

The story is a boiler-plate standard story of the protagonist leaving jail after some prior mischeif. While the specifics aren't noted early in the story, I found it a bit of a departure from the old story. In the old game (Mirror's edge 1), the story is about accomplishing goals to save your sister and defeat the baddies from getting to her. In this version, your sister doesn't appear to be the goal or relevant at the start. Confusingly it seems some time passed while you were in jail and still no mention so far. New characters were added and faces given to characters but it seems that it was all hashed out in a bit of a rush state. This is more evident when I get to graphics.

Graphics-wise, this game stands on its own. Its a cyberpunk dystopic-ish utopia. Megacorporations with stakes on everything and direct citizens with a caste system. Nothing new here from the story. Each of the buildings have different styles while jumping across the different districts and the level of wealth is indicated by the amount of people that live there and the amount of square footage they can afford to have literally empty. You would think that rich people in the future would have more time to fill up spaces with elegant furniture, in here there is a departure from the previous game in terms of its environments.

The previous game focused a lot on bleaching and clearly marking the line between things. It worked and its own style has held up against time. In here, with a dynamic lighting system, the level of textures and post processing makes it fall short at times. This is the first game in the series where a long field of vision is required to view buildings from distances and unfortunately, either due to console optimizations or the Frostbite engine, the Level of detail from buildings is affected over long distances, even with max textures and LOD levels.

While I am still playing this game, it's something to experience on your own. I suggest to avoid walkthroughs, and experiencing as an out-of-the-box game. There are some gameplay mechanics you can disable such as the "Runners vision" which helps you find the shortest route or places to parkour through. I've disabled this however, as it is interesting to see the wolrd of ME without the red flashes (Although there were some instances where I had to occasionally enable it).

Overrall, I'd suggest playing this one. More onto if you like cyberpunk environments to look for yourself. I might even pick up Cyberpunk 2077 and see how it levels up with this one in terms of visuals.

Factorio is for those:

>Willing to invest some time into understanding the game
>Try again and again with new ideas for your factory line
>Able to not get bored

Factorio is not for:

>Those with short temper
>Trying to win it all in 10 hours

World End ECONOMiCA Ep.1
Genre: VN - Visal Novel/Reading Storytelling

Rating:

___________

Gameplay:
Having played several other VNs where the player can choose the fate and ending of the story, this one is compleatly linear. No gameplay at all. If you were looking for action or plot twists, look away, you will be reading a lot.

Rating - 8/10
Other - 5/10

___________

Graphics:
Grahpics are okish, capped normally at 1024 x 600 and fullscreened with little damage to the image of the storyplay. Anime style is a diffrence from S&W, more bold and less simple.

Rating - 7/10
___________

Instructions:

Need say more? Just click spam or right click to see the image, scroll button does something too, such as text history. No story reversal such as in Sunraider or other similar VNs however.

Rating 8/10

___________

Bugs/Glitches:

Despite being on Early Acess for about 4 months, they had several bugs on their story. Sometimes I will notice that a room was not painted dark but a filter was doing it, how did I know? Because the filter was misalined and so I saw that the regular room was underneath. Several english typos are seen throught the story, I didn't take pictures and report those typos because I was reading AND steam photo taker barely works(and when it does, it only works on the main screen). Some other bugs include repetition of entire sentences, it becomes more evident at the end of the story when Hal repeats some sentences over and over meaninglessly.

____________

Story:

Going down to the story (no spoilers I promise), Hal is a enterperneur trying to strike it rich in the stockmarket bussiness. While this does follow the theme of S&W of economy, the economy in WEE is much more larger than it would have been on S&W, which makes it diffrent than it. Story telling is engaging at times, but sometimes it can get very depressingly slow or anguishing at Hal's faliures.

__________

The ending of WEE is indiffrent for me, I didn't like it, I don't say I like it, its more of an attempt to make it better on Ep.2, perhaps it could have ended diffrently but thats how it was made. The story going more or less reading can take from 20 hours to 10 hours. I have 30 hours because I used to leave the game on for some particular soundtracks, not that many that memorable however.

I would probably had wished it had taken a route such as S&W, however it seems it won't be like that. I would probably buy Ep.2 to satisfy craving but meh.

Rating 7/10
Other 6/10

Thanks for reading these otherwise useless pixels and bytes. If you don't feel my review is good enough, search other similar reviews. Thanks.

Space Engineers - 2014 Pre-release - BETA
Genre: Space Simulator - FPS/Building

Rating:

Gameplay:
For a space simulator that has pretty dynamic enviorments, asteroird mining, and ship block damage, I really like it. The controls are a bit hap-hazzard to use, the included instructions don't explain everything right away, and production UIs can be confusing and tedious at times. Building is relatively easy, survival or creative, highlight, right click or left click. In survival you have to actually put together the blocks as you put them, making building more interesting

Rating - 9/10

Graphics:
I run on a 660M, I don't notice FPS drops unless I do something such as spawing a massive ship, undo which my FPS tanks a bit, not to the point of ragequit, but just enough to rant a bit. Probably a future patch will fix this. Aesthetically its beautiful when set to higher levels of details. the block mechanic seems to dissapear entirely as you go more into the game.

7/10

Instructions

The game tries to explain its mechanics via community guides. This is ok, but video tutorials are a bit odd for a person like me who prefers to view and learn the mechanics. Sometimes the instructions fail alltogether to explain how to disengage the brakes on a ship and would result on embarassing moments. New people would almost rage at the unexplained landing gear button. Eventually you get used to it and learn fast about the game.

4/10

Bugs/glitches
Not so many game breaking glitches, the only bugs I've seen is the way of getting through a door using a jetpack, and an infinite loading screen. Nothing much as of 6/30/14.

8/10

Overview:
Reccomened if you like to break free from the minecrafty world of MC.

One does not simply go into COD without playing DOOM.

Do you like anime girls?

Do you like to be mind-blown?

Do you like to be forced by an AI without being forced by to buy the sequel?

Even Hyun-ae escaped the game...


Why did I buy this... I think I need help.