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I recommend Outer Wilds begrudgingly. It's a great concept, with mostly great execution, marred by loose ends and a weak ending.
Outer Wilds is a "Groundhog's Day" time-loop game on the scale of a small solar system. Over the course of 22 minutes, you explore and learn about the system, its past, and its inevitable fate before starting again. At times, this can be annoying, cutting exploration short just as it gets interesting. Other times, it provides a unique evolving world that you can watch unravel. All of this was very well done and wrapped up in a package of space exploration and alien sci-fi technology. However, you don't get much control over the environment. and the ending is a bit more than I would have liked, but that's a personal preference.
The worst part of Outer Wilds is how it abandons its best mechanics (). The final 22-minute cycle didn't require any of these mechanics, and barely required complete knowledge of the world. There's no feeling like you pulled off the ultimate heist through your mastery of the solar system. The game's world and mechanics could've come together in a much more elegant way, requiring full understanding of Outer Worlds' systems and 22-minute timeline. It made much of my exploration feel pointless, were it not for some easter eggs, joke endings, and extra story tidbits.
I'd recommend Outer Wilds to fans of time-loops, casual exploration titles, and maybe even immersive-sim fans. I hope we see more titles like it in the future.
Outer Wilds is a "Groundhog's Day" time-loop game on the scale of a small solar system. Over the course of 22 minutes, you explore and learn about the system, its past, and its inevitable fate before starting again. At times, this can be annoying, cutting exploration short just as it gets interesting. Other times, it provides a unique evolving world that you can watch unravel. All of this was very well done and wrapped up in a package of space exploration and alien sci-fi technology. However, you don't get much control over the environment. and the ending is a bit more than I would have liked, but that's a personal preference.
The worst part of Outer Wilds is how it abandons its best mechanics (). The final 22-minute cycle didn't require any of these mechanics, and barely required complete knowledge of the world. There's no feeling like you pulled off the ultimate heist through your mastery of the solar system. The game's world and mechanics could've come together in a much more elegant way, requiring full understanding of Outer Worlds' systems and 22-minute timeline. It made much of my exploration feel pointless, were it not for some easter eggs, joke endings, and extra story tidbits.
I'd recommend Outer Wilds to fans of time-loops, casual exploration titles, and maybe even immersive-sim fans. I hope we see more titles like it in the future.
I initially had a lot of fun with this on the website shapez.io. If you're interested in this game, check it out there first. It's free and you can transfer your save to Steam if you want to purchase it.
shapez.io is a minimalist take on Factorio, where you aren't restricted by resources, but rather only by your imagination. There's a certain zen to its simplicity. You build factories that chop up, paint, stack, and piece together various shapes. You start with only a few options for building, but quickly unlock more as your deliver the required materials. Many are direct upgrades, allowing you to retrofit or rebuild old factories with new technologies. Eventually you unlock circuits that allow you to automate things further, creating completely independent factories.
At a certain point, Shapez's simple premise takes a turn for the worse, adding in unintuitive puzzle-like mechanics to the previously simple shapebuilding. Floating parts, empty layers, and a weird set of logic behind it all makes it more frustrating than rewarding. It doesn't help that the system for stacking shapes is bug-ridden, sometimes locking you out of progressing if you happen to have made a mistake in a stacking formula. This system is purposefully obtuse, with prominent community members claiming these puzzle-like aspects "make the game worth playing." To me, they keep it from being something I want to continue playing.
It's cheap, so I still recommend it. If you enjoy what you played online, and you're okay with some bad design choices and bugs, it's worth the $5 pricetag.
shapez.io is a minimalist take on Factorio, where you aren't restricted by resources, but rather only by your imagination. There's a certain zen to its simplicity. You build factories that chop up, paint, stack, and piece together various shapes. You start with only a few options for building, but quickly unlock more as your deliver the required materials. Many are direct upgrades, allowing you to retrofit or rebuild old factories with new technologies. Eventually you unlock circuits that allow you to automate things further, creating completely independent factories.
At a certain point, Shapez's simple premise takes a turn for the worse, adding in unintuitive puzzle-like mechanics to the previously simple shapebuilding. Floating parts, empty layers, and a weird set of logic behind it all makes it more frustrating than rewarding. It doesn't help that the system for stacking shapes is bug-ridden, sometimes locking you out of progressing if you happen to have made a mistake in a stacking formula. This system is purposefully obtuse, with prominent community members claiming these puzzle-like aspects "make the game worth playing." To me, they keep it from being something I want to continue playing.
It's cheap, so I still recommend it. If you enjoy what you played online, and you're okay with some bad design choices and bugs, it's worth the $5 pricetag.
Neon Abyss is a side-scrolling rogue-like platformer that shamelessly rips off The Binding of Isaac. And that's exactly what makes it worth playing.
It has similar itemization, similar room types, floor layouts, health system, followers, pickups, and characters. Unfortunately, it's not executed as well as Isaac. It does a poor job at rewarding the player's game knowledge, some questionably useful items, poor transformations, and less variety in room layouts, floor types, enemies, bosses, and characters.
All that said, I still recommend this to fans of rogue-likes. Don't expect anything ground breaking and enjoy the cyberpunk atmosphere.
It has similar itemization, similar room types, floor layouts, health system, followers, pickups, and characters. Unfortunately, it's not executed as well as Isaac. It does a poor job at rewarding the player's game knowledge, some questionably useful items, poor transformations, and less variety in room layouts, floor types, enemies, bosses, and characters.
All that said, I still recommend this to fans of rogue-likes. Don't expect anything ground breaking and enjoy the cyberpunk atmosphere.
Cloudpunk has great potential. It's aesthetic, it's atmospheric, and it's got absolutely godawful writing/voice acting that is really overtly and overly fixated on gender, women's rights, and slavery. If it weren't for its simple gameplay loop of "pretending I'm a taxi driver from The 5th Element", this game would have nothing of substance to offer besides screenshots.
I would pay money for a Crazy Taxi arcade game in this style.
I would pay money for a Crazy Taxi arcade game in this style.
I had my expectations set low and this still let me down. I'll be shelving this for a few weeks while I wait for CDPR to (hopefully) fix their broken game.
Negatives:
-No support for standard virtual surround sound. I had to uninstall my audio driver and install Dolby Atmos to fix it.
-Awful performance, poor optimization, texture quality option is hidden once in game, extremely poor looking for how difficult it is to run. Reaching 60fps is impossible on my hardware (GTX 970)
-Information overload, awful visual clarity
-Poor UI design, clearly designed for consoles, character creator is particularly bad with strange mouse sensitivity issues
-Unremarkable city, GTA but with neon lights
-Key bindings can be changed, but not all of them. Notably, you can't change the "Use" key from F to anything else. It's stuck there. -Extreme lack of polish.
-Highlighting and selecting objects in the environment fails when they are close together.
-Poor gunplay, bullet sponges and no impact
-Poor stealth mechanics
-Poor driving mechanics
Positives:
-There's some degree of effort put into the characters and voice acting so far.
-In depth augment system
Negatives:
-No support for standard virtual surround sound. I had to uninstall my audio driver and install Dolby Atmos to fix it.
-Awful performance, poor optimization, texture quality option is hidden once in game, extremely poor looking for how difficult it is to run. Reaching 60fps is impossible on my hardware (GTX 970)
-Information overload, awful visual clarity
-Poor UI design, clearly designed for consoles, character creator is particularly bad with strange mouse sensitivity issues
-Unremarkable city, GTA but with neon lights
-Key bindings can be changed, but not all of them. Notably, you can't change the "Use" key from F to anything else. It's stuck there. -Extreme lack of polish.
-Highlighting and selecting objects in the environment fails when they are close together.
-Poor gunplay, bullet sponges and no impact
-Poor stealth mechanics
-Poor driving mechanics
Positives:
-There's some degree of effort put into the characters and voice acting so far.
-In depth augment system
The cultural insights are interesting and the Foxtales DLC was actually good (cute story with a genuinely scary antagonist) but wow the base game was genuinely frustrating and way too short. The movement is so slow and the controls are really clunky; having to constantly switch between characters (rather than be able to control them simultaneously) was annoying and bogs the gameplay down. It's less of a problem in the Foxtales DC, which is focused more on puzzles and is slower-paced, but in the main game, with so many enemies that you have to watch out for and platforms that will fall apart if you're not quick enough, it's a bit of an issue.
If you want to support Indigenous creators go ahead and give it a try, but otherwise go play Raji: An Ancient Epic for an indie game about a lesser known pantheon, or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons for a game that masterfully tells a story with gameplay that actually lets you control two characters at once.
If you want to support Indigenous creators go ahead and give it a try, but otherwise go play Raji: An Ancient Epic for an indie game about a lesser known pantheon, or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons for a game that masterfully tells a story with gameplay that actually lets you control two characters at once.
«Buggy as hell»
Fun little game. Chill and pretty. It reminded me of Katamari Damaci. Fresh dialogues keep you interested but it feels like they could have done more with the characters.
Absolutely excellent, I honestly have never had such an experience when playing a game, it gives you a feeling of cold and unknown, it gives you jump scares, but no FNAF jump scares, actual jump scares, this game is both a horror and a beautiful work of art, I absolutely rate this game 10/10
«Blew my mind»
Good game, just a shame I played WotW first and I think the sequel is superior.
The first Last of Us was one of my favorite games of all time. TLOU2 sas Visually incredible, great mechanics. However, the writer for the story and characters went extremely far out of their way to make everything full blown SJW(in exchange for making less seemingly realistic situations) and dragged everything out more than it needed to be. I was excited in the beginning, by the end I was begging for it to end.
«Boooring»
«Game over at last!»
just a glorified demo i guess. still cool for the 6 mins i spent on it
short game. the sound track was in sync with the environment. soothing experience but i stopped at 77 percent completed as i couldn't get to the next red button. good game to chill to.
«OST on repeat»
«SIT BACK AND RELAX»
*Prince Zuko voice* That can't be it. Where's the rest of it?
Cool game. The arkanoid 2020
This game is fun until the latter half when the NES hardware limitations really start to kick in. The sprite flickering is almost unbearable and so are the massive FPS drops when there are a lot of particles on screen. Just really wasn't optimized well at the time.
Tried it and played couple of times. I'm usually into these types of FPS games but this seemed odd, too over the top. Got really repetitive and boring really quick.
«Boooring»