Recent reviews by Greyed

I went into this know a little from Mighty Jingles' short play of the Demo. I figured I'd have a fun little 2-3 hours and then move on.

Yet here I am, pushing through 6 hours with ideas of what is happening in the unfolding story, a few serious "holy CRAP!" revelations coupled with understanding that the information was staring me in the face the whole time. All of that is leading me to keep playing long after I thought I was done.

Is this a diamond in the rough? Well, if it is, it is an uncut diamond. I think progression is a bit to fast or feast. Finding new equipment is most often greeted with the miner declaring he has better. Also, the chests are largely useless. One expect them to share inventory, which they don't. And they are only in a few starting locations then largely abandoned. But those are minor nits in an otherwise fun little indie game well worth its price. Also, for some reason my Steam Achievements are not working.

Tip to anyone playing after reading this. The credits are not the end.

Wonderful take on the survival genre. In its current state it is worth a few dozen hours of play, at a minimum. It is not a hard core survival/crafting/base building game. The main game loop is more rolling up to a PoI, clearing it out, fixing it up, making it fit to return to if needed, loading up the ship with the spoils of exploration, and doing it again. You won't be building your own bases, more patching up what exists.

Be warned, it is EA. There are going to be bugs and not just the hostile snerglie variety. The physics in the game mostly behave themselves but sometimes they don't. And when they don't, hope you have a recent save. Save often!When you get to a new location, save on the boat. As you're clearing a location out and you find a save node, save! If you have build a long cabling run, or placed/repaired a slew of machines, for the love of dog, SAVE!

Finally, yeah, this game is terribly optimized at the moment. Scour the forums for any current tips to get the game to run smoothly. They really need to cut back on the fidelity because right now most people are going to see a muddy mess. Even so, the game looks good and is quite immersive.

ARC Raiders is a perfect example of a recent genre in gaming. GvPvE. Griefer vs Player vs Environment.

A typical encounter in ARC Raiders, and other games in the GvPvE genre is like this. Wait until the target is distracted, kill them. A classic example of this was an encounter I had 3 nights ago.

I was looting a container when a griefer came around a corner and was able to down me before I could get out of the container interface. As they were walking up and winding into the KO animation, another person (friendly as they we had exchanged words previously) rounded the same corner, and nuked them down before they could finish they KO animation. Before I downed they told me they didn't have a defib. I thanked them for the revenge and surrendered so they could loot us both.

There is very little in between. Either you are ganked, or you meet friendly people. As time goes on, more of the friendly people leave because that interaction happens rarer and rarer. So ultimately, it is just a game infested with griefers preying on the few decent people trying the game out before their frustration gets too high.

Ultimately, the problem is these griefers will shout at anyone who would dare call them out for what they are doing. They will claim "It's just PvP" and "learn situational awareness" as their standard battlecry to defend the actions they take, and that Embark has enabled. The problem is, people who play PvP games, and not GvPvE games, know the difference between PvP, and griefing. And they, too, avoid these games like the plague because they aren't griefers. Just as the griefers of this genre avoid traditional PvP game where things like taking on a target which is aware and not distracted with looting, fighting ARCs, avoiding heavier ARCs, trying to complete missions, and so on. Their weakness is any fight from their target at all.

This is why MMOs have split PvP and PvE servers with the latter vastly outperforming the former. Because of the power imbalance and the notion that any fight in return from the opponent is to be avoided at all costs is the essence of toxicity which only a very small, very vocal, and very obtuse "fan" wants to touch.

Embark has created a game that enables that toxicity. So much so that customers who identified as mostly PvE players in a recent survey had their survey shut down with the lame excuse of "too many responses."

Unless and until Embark tackles this very real problem not only in their own game, but in the genre itself, one other genres have had to tackle, avoid this game. Unless you're a griefer. In which case, this is the game for you!

(And cue the "git gud", "its pvp", "learn how to listen" comments along with the joker badges in 3...2...1...)

Aw, look, still cheaters even after Linux customers were shafted.

A decent base of a game, but really needs a bit more polish. Can't really focus on a build so you're left to the whims of the RNGods. Additionally the items that are present are mostly small incremental changes. Nothing major, nor build defining. It apes what others in the survivors genre do, without understanding what makes them so popular.

This is the spiritual successor to the OG Gauntlet arcade game, smashed together with roguelite meta-progression we didn't realize we needed. It is oh so satisfying to crank out a run until you eat one to many bad-guy blasts, return to the town, and see what new goodies you are able to unlock. Only to flip to another character, buff it up, and do it all over again.

Inside Dune: Awakening are two games. One game is excellent, a stand out in the genre. The other is a bolted on mess which ruins the entire experience.

The world, the survival mechanics, the base build, the moment-to-moment PvE experience is one of the better survival games out there. It really shines both for solo and co-op survival play. Arrakis really does feel like it is trying to kill you. The regular sand storms, the worms that roam the open sands, the sun itself are all dangers the player has to learn and mitigate.

A little work could be done on the NPCs and POIs that fill the world, but they are truly a minor nit-pick for a game that is solid as this. That with a few QoL issues are all that I can say are negatives.

Except...

Funcom made the classic MMO blunder. Making 95% of the game PvE and then thinking that making the final 5% PvP is good. PvE and PvP should not mix in an MMO (or most other games for that matter). If you're going to be a PvP game, own it and be PvP from the start. But when you craft such an excellent PvE experience as the bulk of Dune: Awakening is the shift to PvP at the end is jarring, off-putting and ultimately, a let down.

What's more, the PvP in this game is just broken on several levels.

1. The Landsraad system is obtuse and hard to follow. The introduction to it in game is non-existent, the Wiki does not help, and most information on it outside the game is contradictory and misleading.
2. EU servers reset before the NA servers. NA guilds have figured this out and are able to see what the Landsraad requirements are before they are unlocked and are able to prepare their turnins to the point of being able to insta-capture goals as soon as they open up on NA. Funcom can prevent this by having EU and NA not share the same unlocks, but they don't.
3. The major house that wins gets a week long buff. Couple this with the above, and you get a huge snow-ball effect that will discourage the losing side from continuing to play. In fact, with the betrayal mechanic it encourages guilds to swap to the winning side since there is no concession to the losing faction. This is unbalanced and off-putting to all but the most annoying of the "Git gud, hur, hur" crowd.
4. The above could almost be forgivable, and fixable, if not for the fact that the moment-to-moment PvP combat is nothing more than a hot-mess with immersion breaking tactics. Desync issues in ground combat, exceptionally low view distance for aerial combat, despawning vehicles onto your belt to save them from destruction. All of that, with the broken meta-systems above, makes PvP itself annoying and pointless to engage in. The best tactic is to just run as the Deep Desert is so vast, and the render distance so terrible, that one can easily disengage and just go do something else.

Funcom should have looked at the designer that suggestion "end game" be PvP and told them, firmly, "No."

Wish I could recommend Dune: Awakening based solely on the merits of its PvE/Survival core. But the bolted on, forced, broken and unbalanced PvP is a weight that just drags down the first 95% of the game.

Does this train sim have real locations? Well, no.

Does it have real world engines? Also, no.

But it is better for it. By not being trying to go 100% faithful route Derail Valley achieves something that that 100% replication sims fail to achieve. That honest to god "just one more run" feeling.

The trains are realistic enough as they are inspired by, but not 1:1 direct copies of real world engines. Each is has a niche to fill in the game for either an in-game reason or for just coolness factor. Each of the stations has a purpose, generating jobs based on the products that location creates or consumes. The end result is a great sandbox where the player decides what trains to build, what runs to make, what engines to use.

Do you want to be the shunting master in the harbor, unloading and loading trains? You can!

Do you want to slap together a super long train with drops in 3 other stations and delver them all in one run? You can!

Do you want to load a train from one station, take it to another, unload it, then take the empties back to the original station? You can!

This random, sand box nature of the game is what makes it far more compelling that the true-to-life sims that came before it. All packaged with a very satisfying tactile interface that has just the right mix having to interact with things in game vs. having real-world bindings for certain interactions.

How compelling did I find it? I've clocked ~40 hours in 6 days since I purchased it. There are many, many games in my library that don't get 40 hours at all, let alone in less than a week.

If you love train sims, or hauling sims in general, give this one a chance!

Update: Even after "performance updates" performance is just getting worse, can no longer defend their terrible attitude towards PC customers.

Monster Hunter Wilds takes the formula of World, gives it a large helping of QoL polish, and delivers excellent moment to moment action.

Unlike previous entries into the franchise Wilds does not pull heavily from the prior games in terms of monsters to hunt. While some fan favorites are present, near 3/4ths of all the monsters in Wilds are introduced in Wilds.

The same goes for all the systems we've come to know and love, er, be frustrated by. However, almost every system in Wilds has had some improvements added to them to make them less frustrating than in the past. For example, Wishlisting now allows you to forge/upgrade straight from the wishlist! On top of that any quest or investigation which contains an item needed for your wishlist, a pin is shown on the quest's icon. This even extends to your inventory. Items in your inventory needed for your wishlist get the pin. This is great when selling to the vendor as you can tell at a glance if you need that item!

I'm sure die hard pathfinder players who are well versed in the game will find it quite enjoyable. And the systems in and of themselves are great. The overworld map and traversal is great. The moment to moment encounter movement and combat is great (though it could stand for an undue for silly misclicks). But the encounter balancing is entirely out of whack.

I've just been following the early missions given by the base NPCs at the trading post. So far I've had to reload because:

* An encounter with a Manticore in the wild
* Going to retrieve some items in a spider nest where the giant spiders were push-overs while the small spiders were end-runners as they were immune to weapons and the items given to use on them only do 1/3rd health. They give you 6, and there's more than 2 small group of spiders.
* While chasing my rival, failing a check I didn't think was going to even be a check, falling 2 levels in a dungeon, then running into 8 skeletons 2 levels above my group of 4 adventurers.
* Following the main questline running into a mob 2+ levels over my group which could literally one shot any of them in a single round.

All of that in <8 hours on normal and barely out of the tutorial area. All with very little introduction to the underlying system or really any way to inspect ahead of time how things might go. I thought maybe it was just me, but checking online for the encounters I had returned pages upon pages of people hitting the same brick wall with the only real consolation being Pathfinder TTRPG vets saying that the encounters are doable if you have read and understand the TTRPG ruleset.

It seems like the devs forgot that, as a CRPG, this might have a broader appeal than just fans of the TTRPG and would be an entry point to the system - with the requisite need to provide a little more guidance and inspection of the underlying systems.

I know there is far more game here than just the small party. I would have loved to gotten to the kingdom management aspect of the game. But having a reload every ~hour because of terrible balancing and pacing means I simply have to put this game down as I have far too many other games vying for my attention. Games with far fewer frustrations.