Recent reviews by LagMasterSam

I'm giving this a negative review because they say, "Early Access will last at least a few months" but it will be at least a few years before the game is actually good. There's no way this will be a complete, polished product in even under 2 years based on how long it's taken them just to get to this rudimentary point.

It looks worse than TL1 yet somehow it often takes more than 45 seconds to load between zones on an SSD. That by itself makes it unplayable for me. If it were a truly amazing experience maybe I could deal with the load times but it's not. The poor graphics/style just make it worse because my first thought after it loads is, "I waited all that time for this?"

Everything looks indistinct and smudgy while also cartoonishly blocky. It's like they tried to split the difference between cartoonish and realistic but the result is gross. If you're going to use cartoonish meshes, you've got to apply more style, clarity, and contrast than that. It looks horrible as it is, and it's not something that can be fixed with just "a few months" of work.

The UI is not properly designed for a mouse and monitor. There are an excessive number of UI tabs for the amount of functionality each one provides. It was either intentionally designed for mobile use or they were just blindly following modern "best practices".

The UI for the world map is another example of this. It's so in-your-face with its iconography and contrast that's it's difficult to read on a monitor.

People are saying not to give a bad review because it's early access. I would agree except that I very seriously doubt this game will ever be good. If they said "a few years" instead of "a few months" I wouldn't have left a negative review. They are either misleading people about how long it will be in early access or they are going to release a bad game.

You'll need every Minesweeper tactic and trick known to man to stand a chance at even getting past the second quest in this game. This is a good thing.

It's amazing how well rogue like elements work in this game. I would never have expected things like item synergies and NPCs to be worked so smoothly into a Minesweeper game, but this game does it.

After personally witnessing a mysterious and devastating attack against a civilian population center, active president goes on a secret nation building mission to help establish a world-wide monarchy.

Woke/10

The first few hours of play are good, but it then it gets tedious, very tedious. There are large stretches of time where the optimal move is to queue production, wait for minerals to generate, queue more production when you have enough minerals, and then repeat over and over and over.

One problem is that it doesn't take long to completely optimize the planets you can directly control. Once you get past the early game optimizations, the midgame upgrades are obvious, and then there is almost never anything to decide or change after that. Occasionally you get a new tech that allows for a new building or upgrade, but it's not enough to keep planet management interesting.

Even if you try to keep things exciting by fighting all the time, the battles are pretty bland. The most exciting thing to do in battles is fight losing battles while retreating to slow someone down while waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Other than that it's basically massive death clouds fighting each other on their own.

There is the ship builder, but it's really not as exciting as it sounds. It's not difficult at all to figure out the right build for the right situation. It never feels like you're having to make a difficult choice in terms of how to build ships. And even if you aren't sure, you can always just build multiple designs simultaneously for more versatility. It really doesn't matter as long as your death cloud is greater than your opponent's death cloud.

I'm tempted to say this is one of the most underrated games out there, except that it's definitely not the kind of game for everyone. It's almost entirely a trickjumping/speedrunning/platforming game in terms of gameplay. There is some shooting to get rid of obstacles, turrets, and occasional robotic enemies, but the shooting is definitely secondary to the movement mechanics. In most cases it's possible, and even optimal, to ignore things that can be shot. However, you can only do that if you know what you're doing and you can execute your movements correctly and quickly. In general, the game is very good about providing multiple movement and shooting options with tradeoffs between safety and speed.

This game truly excels at providing a sense of speed. Even the basic movement feels overwhelmingly fast when you first start playing. Using the advanced movement feels almost unmanageable at first, and you quickly realize that trying to maintain high speed efficiently is going to require serious mastery of both the movement mechanics and individual map knowledge. However, this ends up being a positive rather than a negative because of how cleanly the controls for this game handle. The game feels simultaneously responsive and fluid without being jerky or floaty. I'm not sure I've ever played a game that makes me feel so in control of so much speed/power while also feeling like there's so much room for my personal improvement.

The early levels are not too difficult to complete by taking all the easy paths and muddling through. However, the most difficult levels sometimes leave you feeling like a miracle is going to be required to complete them. But, because of the excellent controls, reproducing those miracles becomes increasingly easy as you practice. Essentially, the skill cap for this game is enormous, but the progress toward that cap feels remarkably consistent.

The movement mechanics are obviously the most important part of this game, but the graphics and narrative are also excellent. All of these aspects (movement mechanics, aesthetics, and story) are tied together very well to make a unified theme. In other words, no aspect of the game feels gimmicky because of how it all ties together. And, of course, the game also has leaderboards with alternate options such as infinite energy, least energy used, one hit kills you, etc.

I strongly recommend this game if you like very high-speed, very challenging 3D platforming.

This game had an enormous amount of potential. The basic grappling and movement mechanics are amazing, but the game feels severely rushed and cut short. The early stages have excellent pacing and aesthetics with clever variations on using the grappling and movement mechanics. There is even a fun "boss fight" near the beginning that requires timing your movement so you aren't seen by the boss. But inexplicably (other than the game being rushed), there are no other boss fights in the game. There is a fun endlessly-falling-platforms section, but I don't consider that a "boss fight" since there really should have been other sections like it with some variation.

The rushing becomes increasingly apparent as the game wears on because you mostly end up either repeating more of the same tricks or doing the same thing but with more difficulty. Requiring the same tricks with increasing difficulty is not necessarily bad but it should be interspersed with new ideas and other content. The end game just becomes a grind of doing tricks without much exploration beyond finding the necessary surfaces.

The end game also suffers from what appears to be a lack of design and testing. Sometimes you can easily and obviously skip things that would otherwise be difficult. Yet other times you have to go through a rapid and convoluted series of precise actions to just barely reach the target.

The game is also very short. I wasn't in a particular hurry, yet I beat the game in 2.7 hours. If the game were longer, and the quality from the early game carried over to the end game, I would recommend the game. However, I can't recommend the game as it is.

This game is extremely good as a puzzle game. It might be the best puzzle game I've played. I enjoyed playing games like Portal I, Portal II, and Quantum Conundrum, but the Talos Principle is even better in terms of puzzle design. It also mixes in some philosophy surrounding the situation you find yourself in, but that's not the reason to play this game.

The puzzle designs in this game are so expertly done because, despite the large number of puzzles, there are almost no puzzles that are difficult due to shear complexity or obscurity. Despite this fact, the puzzles actually do increase in difficulty to the point of being seriously challenging. It would be trivial to make puzzles increasingly difficult by just making the puzzles more complex or requiring more obscure actions. Instead, The Talos Principle manages to increase in difficulty by constantly requiring the player to think of using previous tools in a new manner.

The most difficult puzzles are far more difficult than what can be found in the other games I mentioned. I was never truly baffled or boggled by any puzzle in Portal I, Portal II, or Quantum Conundrum, but some of the puzzles in The Talos Principle really left me at loss for what to even think about. But the brilliance of the puzzle designs really showed when, once I did figure out the solution, I was never mad. I didn't feel cheated by the solution being something ridiculous, obscure, or overly complex. Instead, it was like witnessing a simple magic trick, wondering how in the world the trick was done, and then having the cleverness of it revealed. If you've ever experienced that, it's not something you get mad at, but something you want to congratulate someone on for being so clever.

The puzzle designs alone make the game worth buying, but some people might also like the philosophical nature of this game. It's pretty clear from the start of the game that you're an AI running inside a computer program along with an AI god figure. A little bit later you can run into an AI serpent figure that tries to make you go against and doubt the AI god. The exact nature of this whole situation is slowly revealed throughout the game, but saying more might spoil that. However, the main reason for all the philosophy is to make you think about what it means to be human and how much the AI character you're playing would think of itself as human. It's not particularly in-depth, and the AI serpent who's driving this philosophical exploration gets annoying very quickly. For nearly every dialogue option you choose in response to the AI serpent, it just resorts to straw man and ad hominem fallacies to argue against what you say. This aspect of the game could have been done much better.

Overall, though, the game is amazing as a puzzle game and I strongly recommend it for that reason alone.