Recent reviews by Cheval Grand

The Devs here are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and have opted to go in the direction of supporting people who play this as their *only* game.

I could understand gear being reset each season because that's just how the treadmill works. i've played M+ on WoW. but talents? abilities? really? i didn't even unlock all the talents on *one* character because of the grind.
i don't expect them to have the foresight to make it all go back to exactly the way you had them set up (layout, keybindings) before either when the reset happens, so that's *another* barrier to reentry.

i give them props for accurately recreating the "healer and tank get 20 second queues, everyone else have a better game you can play in the meantime" waiting that all modern role-based games have, especially when they're smaller EA titles like this.

I am glad i got to try this for free, because to put it bluntly, my first 1 1/2hrs with this game were mostly me saying "what, why?" until i said "alright i'm done".
perhaps the most paint-by-number "we need this because other games have it" survival crafting game i've ever tried, and i've been playing them since Minecraft came out in 2011.

I'll break my issues down to bulletpoints, starting from character creation to gameplay.

~ The game has a character creator, but they don't really seem to care much about it, and of the options you get, a lot of them are seemingly meaningless or extremely minor. i'll break this down further.
* Naming your character! which is basically immediately discarded because this is LEN'S island, not <Name>'s island. i almost thought i made a mistake when i put in the name i wanted, advanced to the next page, and where i'd expect to see my character's name, there was Len's.
* Body Types. there are no body types. you get the choice of a "Masculine or Feminine" face, the latter of which is a minor change and still stuck onto a very male looking body, so the outfit choices just kind of look like "man in a dress" no matter what you try to do with the creator. Come on. i know it's a game where the camera is high above you but Valheim and even Runescape did better than this.
* Bizzare what-i-can-only-assume-to-be Early access community or Dev insider joke where TWICE before you even get into the game they make it extremely clear to you that this character you're playing likes to (as the kids put it) "have his dogs out all the time". and to be clear i mean shoeless. there is an actual question in character creation with two "no" options which asks if you want to wear shoes. even in the first in-game cutscene (where you are called Len btw, and NOT the name you chose) your character explicitly states they do not wear shoes. WHY??? there's not even a narrative reason like they have weird cloven hooves or anything??? they just don't like to??
* Origin Location. you get to choose where your character is "from". this has no explanation if it does anything mechanically, and only seems to serve as presets for various things like hair style and color, and skin color. all of which you can still edit freely later. totally meaningless options.

Moving on from character creation. [THE STORY]
~ the story as set up in the intro slideshow is nothing to really make any note about. it's the most generic "humanity discovered a rare resource that launched them into a golden age, but then they got too greedy and it corrupted a bunch of them into monsters and caused a dark age and also the DARKNESS is here!!!!" oh boy, a story where human greed was our downfall? wow.
it's basically just narrative setup for "here's why there are dungeons and ruins full of enemies for you to smash through"

GAMEPLAY and ART

~ Gameplay is.... well, it's there. honestly, i don't much care for it. i like the isometric camera style but you end up fighting the camera as much as you fight the enemies because it is constantly zooming in and out and moving up and down presumably because it's colliding with stuff around it. the timing minigame with swinging weapons is a neat idea but it's frustrating to line up attacks where you or the enemy don't just swing past eachother, and with tools it doesn't actually end up feeling worth bothering with most of the time, i just want to hold the mouse down and chop a tree or mine a rock. and you can still do that, but the game lets you know it's inefficient.

~ Tutorialization. It's kind of there. i guess. it's less of a tutorial and more of a checklist of stuff it wants you to do without actually telling you *how* to do it. you just kind of have to guess and press different buttons around the UI until a static image pops up with some instructions on how to use whatever button you just pressed was.

~ Continuing on with UI complaints from the previous bullet. it looks nice, but everything reeks of "we got this from an asset pack on the Unity store". it just has that mobile game look to it. like, there are town and workbench upgrades you can put resources to and i was almost surprised there wasn't a 18 real-time hours timer attached to any of them i could skip by paying $. if this game ever comes to phones it would slot right in perfectly.

~ UI issues with the camera that i hopefully assume you can patch, where depending on how zoomed in with your camera you were, the boxes that would come up from interacting with NPCs or their wares were massive or way too small.

~ The World Map. it's extremely low res and annoying to use. why is there a giant red arrow pointing to where i am? it covers up a large portion of the immediate area around my character if i could even parse what was on the map. just have a dot or some kind of reticule or crosshair. it's also extremely easy to lose where your house is in the world because nothing gets automatically marked on the map like when you put down or a bed or a workstation or anything.


and the last thing which is probably more of a "skill issue" than a gameplay criticism, but a big frustrating moment was my first death wasn't to enemies or starving to death or getting hit by lightning. it was me accidentally walking over the fire pit in the little town and burning to death in like 2 seconds from full health.

it is very good. i "completed" it in a little over 2 hours, but i also only got 2 achievements. one for completing it, and another that i am sure i got by complete accident and have no idea how i got it. and that's only 2/14.

I will preface this review by saying DO NOT BUY if the concept of it being playable in VR is your main reason to buy it. it's potentially the worst implementation i've seen, like, ever. so don't buy it for that. it's great on flatscreen though. and i would recommend bringing friends because it's a lot like trying to play sea of thieves solo, there's A LOT of plates and minor logistics details you have to keep up with at all times, and it's easy to forget that you didn't set the right altitude flightpaths on some of your limited and precious drones and they end up getting shredded by hostile AA fire.

I really wanted to like this game. like really really did. but the puzzle-heavy aspect of this game is not anywhere near stressed enough.
the steam description and first trailer for the game are the complete opposite of what i expected and experienced playing the game.

what i experienced was dealing with garry's mod tier physics jank while trying to solve various puzzles. During those my brain was being fried by the constant hum throughout the whole game's background that does not ever let up, at times feeling like it was trying to drown out the music. imagine someone turned on some electric toothbrushes and held them to your ears, but lower pitch.


also, the trailer sets up the story to be super intriguing and made me want to know more. well, good luck on that part if you had the same feeling.
i'll paste a section from an Ars Technica review that can convey my frustration with that better than i can.

- "One particularly brutal reality of Boneworks is that its "plot" consists largely of mysterious, unclear graffiti. SL0 is clearly trying to recall Valve's glory days of plot nuggets scattered around the likes of Portal or Left 4 Dead, but this new game lacks the kind of running commentary or dialogue that might answer what the heck is going on or why we should care. An amusing opening level that revolves around a 'museum of virtual reality' is never paid forward with connections to specific characters or a plot that reaches beyond the sci-fi cliche of 'unfeeling corporation must be stopped.'" -


TLDR; do not buy if you got the impression the entirety of the game would be like the first trailer on the store page.
it is an obvious sizzle-reel that leaves out every half-hour I spent fighting the controls as my arms, legs, hands and feet constantly got caught in geometry trying to solve each puzzle.

good game solo, great game with friends!

they Completely screwed up what made the game good.

This game used to be the best. huge open world, doing things you couldnt find anywhere else. no P2W anywhere despite being free. I'll miss the enjoyment you used to bring me, Firefall.

It's fun for about half an hour or so depending on your speed before it's just mashing a single button over and over, trying to get battles overwith as fast as you can, along with occasionally healing members. loot system/drops is completely F*ked, being as you get some of the "highest" tier weapons and stuff within first couple hours. Adventurer Manager is more like grinding manager, you run through dungeons 10x or more with the same background and same music, with little to no change except some monsters that may take a little longer or little quicker to kill. I also prefer some actual worth to my loot, and not "get 1000000 pieces of loot from a random quest that are the highest quality because lol RNG" Wish i could get a refund.

New mode made it worse. i used to like the quick battles and no respawn