Recent reviews by Forgefist

As much as I would love to give Ideology a positive review, I cannot. Rimworld is my most played game on Steam, I have spent hundreds of hours building colonies and watching them collapse with time, only to start again. But after the release of Ideology, I found myself enjoying it far less.

To start with, I love the concept of Ideology, it seems to open the game up to a lot more storytelling in terms of your colony's culture, with rituals, belief systems and quirks that can be applied to your people, but as you play and compare it to the base game, you tend to find it's far more stifling than it is freeing in terms of gameplay.

Now, at the start of a game, you will choose your ideology for your colony, and these memes will rigidly be applied to the psychology of each character who follows this ideology. They will love mushrooms but hate other plants, they will hate comfort, or love being under a mountain, etc... but every single follower will have these same opinions and thoughts. Traits are now secondary, and in many cases do not even need to apply. If everyone loves the dark and being in a mountain home, what point does undergrounder have for a colonist? It just detracts from the individual colonists as people, now they are simply all cut from the same cultist cloth, and will adhere rigidly to the doctrine you've set at the start of a game.

Diplomacy, recruitment and faction relations may as well be tossed out the window with ideology too, because the fact that other people have different belief systems giving such harsh penalties to how they view each other is so extreme that it's just punishing rather than opening storytelling opportunities. You got attacked, took a prisoner and want to recruit them? Well now you need to spend more than double the time converting them to your ideology first, otherwise they'll hate everyone in your colony and will eventually just revolt... or you build a separate section of a base for their beliefs and split your resources, but they'll still hate everyone's guts. Someone wants to join? Sure, come right in... but oh... you don't believe that trees are actually divine entities that need our protection? Well now we need to convert you, except you now need to play the arduous game of waiting for your chosen special character to use their skills every week or so to chip away at the new colonists belief, or use rituals you can only do once every twenty days (without penalties) just to bring them in line with your colony, and make them another lifeless husk of a character, just to be able to keep everything flowing in your stale, stagnant colony.

I really love the concept, I love many of the features, they have just been implemented in such a way that it no longer feels like an organic evolution of the identity of a colony, and now has become about making sure every colonist is exactly the same, so they all have the same thoughts, same goals. If I wanted to watch a colony that is comprised entirely of identical drones, I'd just buy an ant farm. I do have hope things will improve, because honestly I think this expansion definitely has great potential, but right now it just ruins the immersion and enjoyment I'd get from playing when I am bogged down by the restrictions of an ideology.

Subscription model, as someone who bought this a while back, this is very disappointing. Wish I could go back and tell myself not to bother learning anything with the engine.

It is with no small amount of sadness that I have to say I can't recommend this game right now. There are a number of issues that I personally have with the game, perhaps due in part to the nostalgia and fondness I hold for the first Evil Genius, but it is as many have said about this game already; it has no heart.

The game feels overly simplified from the first, with every aspect boiled down into its basic components and shovelled into the game with a thin coat of paint to resemble the first title. Factions are named as the first, but all personality is gone, they all dress the same and act the same, no flavour at all. Research is dead, no longer do your scientists wander the base looking at your existing technology and research it, or look at loot and gain ideas from it, now it's just been replaced with the most basic of basic tech trees from any other strategy-like game... and the game stalls your progression with research behind ever increasingly mundane missions.

The missions, the global map... these are a whole issue in and of themselves. No longer do you send minions out to gather money while they generate heat so you have to balance it, and then pile up the minions in an area so you can take on missions and then recall them so you aren't bringing on stronger enemies. Now you build a criminal network, it generates money AND heat passively, and the missions are braindead... your minions are now a resource. I understand the concept is that you're an evil megalomaniac and your minions are meant to mean nothing to you, but it removes a lot of the complexity from the game, something that made it fun.

The side stories are dull as heck, and more often than not result in micromanaging those boring missions where you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not keeping track of them, all for a reward a fifth of the size of the amount you'd lose for missing a single scheme against you. The global map and schemes just feel flat, and almost unnecessary if you're getting passive benefits of criminal networks anyway, if you're going to change something this much anyway, don't try to shoehorn in a much worse imitation and go all the way with it, come up with something entirely new, it would have worked better than this.

I can't even tell the differences between the geniuses themselves, they all have flavour text, different voice lines, animations and such, but their special skills just look like variations on the same form, I don't get the point. At that point, just let me make my own character, because you've sucked all the life out of the older characters anyway.

It just feels like the original was looked at merely at face value, and then this shell was made to replace it. I do think it could be fixed, I think it could be much more interesting if they're open to changing certain aspects, but right now I can barely bring myself to play it, it's a combination of boring, flat and frustrating. I really am sad and sorry to see it this way, but I would not recommend this to anyone, regardless of whether you're a fan of strategy, base building, the original game, or even being an evil megalomaniac yourself and living out your fantasies. Just go play the original, you'll enjoy it more, and it's cheaper.

As a fan of both the Yakuza series and RPG games in general, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, is right up my alley, and not only did it not disappoint, it actually rekindled my passion for RPGs more than any other game has in years. It hits every single note fantastically well and I find myself drawn in by the characters and plotlines, and exploring the city for more things to find and bad guys to slap in the face with a stack of cash. Probably my favourite RPG in years, if not ever, outstanding game.

Right now, I cannot recommend this game. There is a lot of work that needs to be done, and it feels more like a demo than a game I've bought, regardless of it being early access. It feels like it's at least a year too early, so I would recommend holding off until it's further along in development.

While most of my recommendation is based on how bare bones it is, there are also things about the mechanics that frustrate me right now, perhaps I'm not the best, but it doesn't feel quite as refined or fleshed out as I was used to in the first, but I hope this improves and is polished with time.

Don’t Starve Together is exactly what it sounds like, the multiplayer version of the indie game Don’t Starve, developed by Klei Entertainment. I initially received this game when it was released in the beta stages, and have played hours here and there over the years since it’s release, and upon returning to it now, I have to admit it’s something of an anomaly to me. I enjoy almost everything about it, the artwork, the exploration, the challenge, the lore, the characters… and yet given how much I like the presentation, why have I not sunk more hours into it? The key component is the third word in the title, Together, because very rarely have I played it with other people, that same challenge I enjoy, the same aesthetic I appreciate very much wards off my friends, and thus I play solo. Alone it’s still a good game, but I have to admit I’m not the greatest at it.
Since my recent return to the game I have explored a bit more, seen all the things added to the game free of charge and appreciate Klei even more than before, two large content expansions coming to the game with new features, characters and mechanics, new cosmetic items that drop at a very good pace, as well as your daily gift, DST often spoils you in comparison to other games with cosmetic drops. There are events every so often which adds additional flavour to the game, such as the Winter’s Feast, Hallowed Nights, Year of the Gobbler, etc… which can be revisited even out of season to enjoy year round. The characters get a lot of attention, with tweaks and reworks to better bring out their unique characteristics and gameplay mechanics, and all are interesting to play, except Wes. Wes, like all mimes, shouldn’t exist.
All in all, I would recommend Don’t Starve Together to others, but advise you to have people backing you up, and expect to learn the hard way, as there is a challenge there, but if that’s your thing, have at it solo even!
I give Don’t Starve Together seven Dragonpies out of a Deerclops, and hope to see you in game one day!

I played the Beta of PUBG, and have played a few rounds each session, maybe 3-4 times a week ever since picking it up shortly after it came out. I am by no means a dedicated player, and nor do I have the intention of being, so this is purely from the experience and viewpoint of a "casual" player, someone who mostly plays for fun with friends, but has at least experienced a decent number of chicken dinners.

I want to be able to give a positive recommendation for the game, I truly do, but as it stands I am worried that some of the design decisions for the game are taking it away from the niche which is what initially brought people in to begin with, and instead making more and more decisions that seem to bring it more in line with a deathmatch FPS. Maybe this is what people want, I don't know, but I got into this game for the Battle Royale experience, the tactical decision making that can bring you either glorious victory or horrible defeat, if I wanted a pure deathmatch, run at the opponents and die over and over, I'd play CoD or Battlefield, or whatever it is the kids play these days, but I don't.

Making smaller maps and trying to focus gameplay into a few minutes of action in "hotspots" just makes the rest of the game become more and more stale, I understand why this is happening, they look to youtube and streamers, who cater to an action needing audience, and this influences the game in the wrong direction. You only have to look at the now-reverted changes they made to quicken the bluezone as an indication that this isn't what the playerbase want. People want to drop in a place, gear up, whether they want to fight for it or not, and then out-think their opponents, out position, out gun, and ultimately out perform them to pick up a win. That is what feels good, and they should take this into consideration rather than trying to force a faster pace of the game.

While we're at it, let's discuss the maps. Initially, the original map was my favourite... when Miramar came out, I disliked it, I thought, it's too easy to spot people, the guns are worse, etc etc, but as time went on, my viewpoint did a 180, and Miramar became by far my favourite, the hills never fail to allow for decent positioning if you care to go for those spots, and there are always a smattering of buildings available regardless of where you land, whereas it feels like in Erangel... there are huge stretches of open field which are basically like a no-mans land, run across them at your peril. I would love to see Erangel revamped with their newer map design in mind, but we'll see. We still have a ways to go before that's considered, I'm betting. I won't even bother with Sanhok, because as stated... I just don't like the idea of the smaller map. A personal preference probably.

So yeah, while I would like to give a positive recommendation, I can't. I am genuinely concerned with the state of the game, and while I do still play it, I'm not entirely sure I could in good conscience advise people to buy it when the future of the game is uncertain to me. There are other battle royale games coming into their own now, and I fear that rather than focus on bringing PUBG into a better place, Bluehole are just gonna keep pushing the game into the wrong direction.

Oh, and if you do buy the game. Never, and I do mean NEVER, get into a trike unless you are prepared for the game to flip you in every direction it can before instant killing you. I don't know what the hell they did to the physics engine to cause these things to happen, but the bike with the sidecar is a deathtrap that has ended many a run.

From what I have experienced of Vagante thus far, I can say that for the majority, I have had a lot of fun. It's a good non-traditional roguelike, being a 2D platformer, but it interprets the style well, taking some inspiration in level design from Spelunky from what I can tell.

The coop aspect of this is what caught me, offering online coop for a rogue style game was something I had long desired, and this delivers what it promises. The fact you can play with up to 3 friends is great, it becomes a little hectic and it seems at least one of you falls pray to the dreaded spikes, or a boulder trap they spring without looking.... even when it's only two of you this seems to be the case.

There are a few minor gripes I have with the game, but they can usually be overlooked, unless they get in the way of a run with potential to be a good one. These gripes are the worm boss, which has a slight chance to bug out completely and either not drop the key, or just decide he's had enough and disappear entirely, second is the Mushroom Golem, which in my opinion has a lot of HP and Defence to deal with in comparison to the other bosses, making him extremely tough to deal with, especially for certain builds... which can be frustrating, and finally, some of the controls can interfere with each other, for an example, jumping down from a ladder as the Wildling class, spikes below me, without me pressing down to activate the second animal skill, it shot me downwards once off the ladder anyway, and just instantly murdered me, which can be a little frustrating.

There are a handful of minor bugs and gripes, but in general the game is very fun... provided you are something of a masochist, because this game is not forgiving.

I am what you would call a beginner when it comes to pixel art, I have played around with it before in various programs but never really felt comfortable with the end result or the user interface, feel is a pretty important thing to me. I recently tried out the aseprite trial, just to see how it felt after receiving recommendations from the googlywebs, and I bought the full version the very next day. I may not be the very best pixel artist, but I feel like aseprite absolutely gives me the tools to take one step towards that end, I find myself making a few sprites a day to practice, and I do not plan on stopping any time soon.

Could not be happier with my purchase, unless somehow it also manages to increase my skill at battle royale games too... maybe?

I can't begin to tell you how many hours I've sunk into this game over it's various incarnations and on different platforms, but it always keeps me coming back. There is a kind of magic in between the frustration that comes with the random aspect of the game, that makes the high points transcendant and the low points soul crushing, and those high points become a drug that keeps you coming back and selling your possessions for another hit. The storyline is not thrown at you, or given easily, you have to earn it, and the darker aspects of the narrative are masked by cutesy art styles and childishly gross imagery, but it's compelling nonetheless, and even when you find out the truth behind your quest, you can't stop, you have to keep going.

So yeah, it's alright.