Recent reviews by SeriousBug

Immediately repetitive and not fun. Here's how the game works: You can only hold one item at a time. You need to drop the item you're holding onto the ground before you can pick up something else. Nothing in the game has an "interact" button, you instead interact with them by dropping objects on top of them. This is interesting at first, but it gets boring really fast. You can't just refill your bucket from the river. You have to drop your bucket into the river, run after it if it tumbles away from you, and pick it back up. Next you have to pour that water into your pan, but you can't just interact with your pan. You instead have to aim the bucket correctly for the water to pour in. And that wouldn't be such a problem if the bucket got poured where you aim. Instead, it gets poured a feet to the right of where you aim, so you have to aim to the left of the pan. You then have to add dirt to your pan and use a brush on it, but again you can only hold one item at a time. So you have to pick up the shovel, put a shovelful of dirt into the pan, then drop the shovel onto the ground. Pick up the brush, click once, drop it onto the ground again. So you're constantly grabbing and dropping objects, and they do all have physics so if anything rolls away from you, better start chasing!

Okay, you finally have a bunch of ores and gems. Great, right? Well except "you can only hold one item" also applies to these. So you can't just pick all of them up. You either have to keep them all in your pan and carry your pan, or move them to a cart and pull the cart behind you. If you do put them on the cart like I did, woe to you because once you get to where you sell them, you can't just sell everything on your cart. You need to move each ore and gem, one by one, onto the merchant's table (in the game's defense, if you keep everything in your pan then you can put the whole pan down on the table).

Yes, now you have sold the fruits of your labor and you have some cash. Except, again the "1 item only" applies to the money too. You can't just put the money in your pocket. You have to carry it around as a physical object, haul it to the merchant where you buy stuff, and drop it into their payment bucket. It is also funny to note: if you put two piles of money together they merge, but you know how you split a pile? You have to use a saw. Like this is just ridiculous, I can't just right click to split a stack or something. No you have to use a saw. Wow.

And the worst part is you do all of this, and they you have a tiny amount of money. So you're gonna have to keep repeating this a bunch so you can earn enough to buy equipment so you can start crafting things like jewelry to make a bit more money. After about 20 minutes, I've had enough. I don't want to have to spin my camera around chasing a shovel and a bucket so I can make a tiny bit of money, to maybe see what the game has next.

Honestly i don't have much to say, except that I really enjoyed the game. Climbing mechanics are really satisfying, even if it leaves you a bit confused at times as to what the game considers a good spot to grab and what isn't. I didn't love the survival mechanics, but it was okay. Where the game really shines is the scenery, and writing. While you get the story in small bits here and there, it really made me feel things.

The mechanic of dropping items when you fall combined with the relatively strict grab range means you end up with items stuck in places where you can't get them back. Because the game doesn't allow you to save and reload, you can't even go back to a save before you dropped the item. The only way you can get the item back is restart the game from scratch and hope you don't drop it this time.

The game is a lot of fun. It has some base building mechanics, you can build both on land and on your ship. There are several locations that you have to revisit often, which makes it valuable to build them up so you have resources there.
Travelling around on the ship is fun. It bobs and sways with the waves, and it seas really do feel choppy when weather gets rough. The general atmosphere of the game is a lot of fun.

The bad sides are, hopefully, related to it being in early access. Over my playthrough so far I think I had 5 or 6 crashes. And encountered some minor bugs like dialog overlapping, or minor issues like some functionality not being explained clearly. I did hit one crucial issue though where an elevator got stuck, blocking progress. Thankfully on an optional objective, but still. It was enough for me to say that I've had my fill of fun for now, and I'm going to wait for the full release.

I do recommend the game. With it's current condition if nothing was to be improved, I think I would recommend it but not at the current price. Once issues are ironed out and the game has some more content, it would definitely be worth the money though.

Extremely confusing. I selected a salvage mission. I tried to target the destination I need to go to. Did I target it correctly? I have no idea. I think I somehow deselected my target? I managed to finally make my way over there, and grabbed the salvage. Hurray. But then suddenly a ship lands near me, 6 NPCs pop out, and shoot me dead on the spot. I die and respawn. Do I need to go back down to grab the stuff again? No the game said I didn't lose anyting, and the mission now seems to be telling me to go back to the station I got the mission at. I do so, but when I go to turn in the mission on a terminal... nothing happens. Did I complete the mission? No idea. Am I missing the stuff I need to complete the mission? Haven't got a clue.

It seems like in the pursuit of immersion, they made the game unapproachable to all but the most dedicated players. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some spring chicken. I have played World of Warcraft on and off for the last 15 years, I played Eve Online. But this game just offers no explanation for anything, and very little feedback what you're doing right or wrong.

Haul things around so you can build bridges and roads, so you can haul more things around so you can rebuild more things... It's a surprisingly enjoyable gameplay loop. The graphical fidelity of the game is pretty amazing, and it does very well at giving you the feeling of playing with heavy vehicles.

It's nothing incredible story-wise, but it is satisfying to see things get completed as you repair facilities, reconnect power lines, and bring life back to an area. I will say it does sometimes feel like it drags on, primarily because the current maps available at launch are repetitive as they are all basically either an "African Desert" or "Eastern-European Forest." But I suspect there will be many other kinds of maps as DLC comes out.

If you're coming from SnowRunner, do mind that this is a completely different game. Almost all your vehicles are essentially capable of traversing any terrain, as opposed to SnowRunner where you'd have to choose what vehicle you're taking where very carefully. Your focus then is more around restoring enough of the infrastructure that you can get through completely impassable areas like deep rivers. I do wish this game was a bit more of "SnowRunner, but you can fix the roads" but that's not what it is.

The game could also use more vehicle customization, like picking different attachments. But right now any customization comes from buying variants of vehicles, like the same base vehicle with a truck bed or a crane attached. So I don't think customization is likely to be coming.

I think this game is actually more of a factory builder than a city builder. While you build housing and build stuff to feed and entertain your badgers, the badgers are not too fussy and won't just start getting mad at you like citizens in city builders often do.

Instead, once you secure basic necessities the game becomes a problem of optimization and building up. Place resources, storage, and housing strategically to optimize how quickly your beavers can work. Or even if you don't like optimizing, just keep building more and more because you can.

Within a couple hours after completing the tutorial, I immediately found myself trying to build grand projects like building dams and rerouting rivers. You can get really ambitious, and you can build some crazy cities as you get more advanced. I especially love how easy it is to build up vertically, it really creates these amazing looking cities.

Totally worth the price, event with just the content available right now during the early access.

It feels like I'm the only person in the world to dislike this game looking at other reviews on Steam. But I didn't really like Doom Eternal. What irked me the most are:

- Too much exposition. This is one of the greatest aspects of the previous game, with the somewhat-famous scene of the Doom guy pushing away the screen with the exposition dumping character. This game? You have the "Jarvis" narrator constantly talking in your head, and explaining that you need to go here and kill the hell priest and that something happened... just tons of exposition that was not necessary. Doom shined by telling its story through the environment, Eternal loses me with the story.
- Constant tutorials. Did you know this big shiny part of the demon sticking out that glows when you hit it is the weak spot? Did you know hitting them in the weak spot is good? Did you know you can stagger demons? Did you know you can punch them when they are staggered? The game starts out with a constant barrage of tutorials that just never end. Every new enemy you encounter, the game stops the world and shows you a tutorial of how you can defeat that enemy. It won't give you the joy to discover that yourself. Thankfully this can be disabled in the settings, but what you can't disable are the short cutscenes that constantly point you towards where you need to go. You do something to unlock a door? The game takes control away from you to show you that door, even if it's in an obvious spot where you can clearly see it. The early levels I played through were pretty linear and had obvious paths running through them, there was no need for this kind of distruption of the game.
- Doom guy, as a protagonist, had been almost a non-entity. He's just the avatar of the player, and this works well. it feels ilke Eternal places too much emphasis on the Doom guy though. We now get third person cutscenes of the Doom guy putting on his helmet, or walking around, or doing stuff. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen his face in fact! This is minor, but it feels antithetical to who Doom guy has been in the previous game. He's not Master Chief or Blazkowicz, he's more of a force of nature. He's so much of a non-entity that he doesn't even have a name!
- The combat has become puzzle-like. You get very limited ammo, and enemies take lots of hits to kill. You have to constantly use your chainsaw to regain some bullets, and you have to utilize the "right" way to kill every enemy. You can empty your every bullet into the Cacodemon and barely kill it... or you can throw an explosive into its mouth like the tutorial showed you to kill it in one shot. This takes the fun out of this being an FPS! I want to shoot things, not run around executing a predetermined set of actions.

This game is very frustrating. While it has great gunplay, the game loves to wrestle the control away from you at every opportunity. There are constantly long cutscenes that interrupt your gameplay. Every time something cool is about to happen, the game takes control away from you and shows what happens in a cutscene instead. Max is about to jump from a railing, kick in a window and shoot the bad guy? Of course that happens in a cutscene, couldn't possibly let the player do that. You just get to slowly walk to the ceiling. Then after you are in, the game hands you back the control with the gun already pointed at the bad guy so all you have to do is click. The game treats you like a child, showing you a bunch of cool stuff and then giving you the controller at the end so you can press the last button and feel like you did something. It's absolutely not satisfying in any way. It almost feels like they wanted to make a movie, and were forced to sprinkle in these sections were you get to run around and shoot a few people so it could be considered a game.

Throughout the game Max also just never stops talking. Constantly narrating and making jokes. This is almost really funny, but the game takes itself way too seriously for it to be. Max is just constantly pissed about everything, and complains about people and the city and music and just how much of a sorry drunkard he is. None of it comes of as comedic to me because it's a serious topic of someone losing their family and self-medicating with painkillers and alcohol. It's a sad story, but the game is neither willing to accept that it is a sad story about a sad person, or to not take itself so seriously and let thing just be funny. The game is doing this mix of film noire and action movies, but instead of adapting it to a more modern day it copies it almost verbatim and acts like it's giving you the most important lesson of your life.

Dusk is a really fun retro style FPS. Some of the highlights include a large variety of guns, varied and unique level designs that keep things fresh, and new enemies the game introduces at the perfect pace as you get used to the existing enemy types. The level design is really the most interesting part of this game for me, there is tons of environmental storytelling just through the levels. And I don't mean "pick up and read notes scattered through the levels", but just what these places are. You go through a farm, then make your way down to a city, and through some mines, to a military facility, to research labs... The game tells the story of a deep demonic conspiracy by just taking you through these levels. The game even sprinkles in some horror-esque sections, and it is amazing that they are able to impart that feeling despite you mowing down tons of enemies just minutes ago.

A few things do let down the game a bit. One of these is the sheer darkness of some levels. While certainly thematic, the flashlight you are given lights very little, leaving you to play the game while feeling like you are looking through a pinhole. The game and its design really shines in outdoor levels where you can actually see things, and I kept wishing the indoor sections would end or at least lighten up so I could see what I was looking at.

The gunplay in the game is a bit boring. The enemy AI is not great, mostly just walking towards you while shooting. They don't take cover, avoid you, regroup, try to flank you etc., just walk towards you and shoot. This has the effect of making the game very easy, apart from areas where there are tons of enemies or boss fights where bosses will shoot lots of projectiles, requiring you to move quickly to dodge them. Otherwise the combat is not that interesting, just aim and shoot at enemies that slowly walk towards you. Even enemy bullets move slowly, allowing you to easily dodge out of their way.

Some levels leave you with little direction. Should you miss a key to grab or button to press, some of the larger or more labyrinthine levels end up requiring you to walk in circles over and over again in search of one key or one button you missed somewhere.