Recent reviews by BoxDroppingManApe

This is a busted-ass piece of ♥♥♥♥ game. I love it.

It's a good visual novel.

Beautiful environments, but the story mode is incredibly short, and the gameplay is clumsy.

Kingdom: Two Crowns is the third iteration of a game that came out in 2015. With that in mind, it really has no business being as buggy as it is.I have to restart the game every hour or two in order to get past some game breaking bug or another. A non-exhaustive list of bugs I've encountered:

Invisible coins.
Coins falling out of a non-full bag.
Banker refusing to give money to one of the two players, even with an empty bag and a hefty amount in the bank.
Farmers refusing to harvest berry bushes that are nowhere near a portal.
Mount abilities failing to function.
Eternal blood moon nights
Builders and farmers ignoring orders until the game restarts.
Farmers starting new plots of land instead of maintaining plots of land where the crops are dying.
Builders, archers, and farmers, after getting their tool knocked away by Greed, not picking the tool back up the next day.

In addition, there are plenty of obtuse gameplay decisions, like inability to cancel orders, builders and farmers running to their death (or stopping outside the kingdom walls), the banker only remaining open for a couple of hours and spewing coins whenever I look at him.

It's a shame, because the pixel art is beautiful, and the basic gameplay is good. Actually playing the game is an exercise in frustration.

It's alright.

Not bad. Kind of threadbare though. The choices don't matter all that much (you can basically fail everything and say anything and still get any ending you want [edit: and turns out two of the three endings are exactly the same]). The drink system is novel, but doesn't affect anything except having one of the protagonists say something wacky (which gets unacknowledged). Very buggy, despite having been out on EGS since March (including a bug that forces you to start over if you stop playing at the wrong place).

However, the characters are entertaining. The dialog is almost as engaging as Oxenfree, though the buggyness undercuts it (some audio clips fail to play, or get significantly delayed). The setting is cool, if somewhat underrealized. The concept is strong, this game just doesn't manage to fully realize its potential.

This game is unfairly difficult, but that's consistent with the Bible - Noah was 600 years old at this point, and prone to be killed if a Camel so much as shoots him a rapid-fire stern look from across the room. What isn't consistent, though, is the hundreds of goats running around the ship. And why aren't Shem, Ham, and Japheth helping?

Excellent photogrammetry software, trapped within one of the most consumer-hostile business models I've ever seen outside of an MMO.

Let me start by saying that RealityCapture is the best photogrammetry software on the market. Full stop. I've tried plenty of other solutions (Zephyr, Metashape, COLMAP, meshroom), and none of them match the quality that RealityCapture can produce. However, that praise is overshadowed by how actively hostile their business model is to subscribers.

To give some background, there are two ways to pay for using RealityCapture. The first is on steam, as a 40 USD/Month subscription. The other is their PPI model, usable if you use the demo version, where you pay roughly 1 USD per 357 megapixels of data. That's about 30 images on your average cell phone, or a little over a second of video. That is a reasonable price for anyone looking to only make a model or two, but it's absurd for anyone who wants to make more models than that. That's where a subscription model would be ideal, if RealityCapture didn't treat its subscription customers with nothing but contempt.

Don't try to process anything with the demo. The demo only works for the PPI model. Attempting to open a demo file using the subscription model fails, because they want to make sure they slow you down as much as possible during your 1-3 months. There is nothing useful you can transfer from a file made using the demo/PPI version to the subscription version. The word demo is a misnomer - the "demo" is the fully featured version of the program, while the subscription version is limited.

Do you have coded control points in your dataset? The PPI version has the ability to automatically detect them, but the subscription version doesn't - again, purely to slow you down.

Speaking of arbitrary limits, you can't use more than 1000 images on a model under the subscription plan, and you can't use more than 24 megapixels per image. With limits like that, you'd think you were using an online service, but no such luck - these limitations are all on you and your CPU.

By using the subscription model, you automatically agree to send any and all usage telemetry to Capturing Reality (the company that makes this program) and there's no way to opt out of that or block that telemetry, because in their eyes you're basically using a free to play version of their program. They make sure to remind you of that too each time you export a model - they want to make sure you know you're a "freeloader". Ubisoft, Activision, Bethesda, and EA could only dream of treating their paying customers this poorly.

I wish I could recommend this software, I really do. It's amazing, and I'd be happy to pay any subscription they asked for. However, Capturing Reality makes it plenty clear that they absolutely do not want to sell their product on Steam. Fair enough, Capturing Reality. If you don't want anyone to use your service on Steam, then I won't recommend it.

Edit: The insults continue. If you export too many models in too short a period (I don't know how many, I did 5 within like an hour) it hits you with a capcha for using your own computer resources.

This has all the makings of a very strong Act 1, but rushes to tie all its strands together shortly after the wall. Combined with a near-progression blocking bug, I can't really recommend this game.

This is a game that tries hard to be The Room, and it comes close, but the plot, puzzles, gameplay, and environments aren't quiet well thought out enough to pull it off. I'd be interested to see what, if anything, comes next from this developer, but I can't quite recommend this game.