Recent reviews by Max Noskill

This time I will do the review differently. I'll review the story first by telling it again. However, there is also much to be said about the gameplay and game itself.

Game was bought years ago in 2014. Five episodes were promised. I purchased new Xenonauts 1 in the same Steam purchase as The Long Dark. Today (3rd of April, 2026) is dawn of the Xenonauts 2 release. TLD reaches it's ultimate final only now after long years of waiting when others have already climbed on top of their next milestone.

As I hit the character limit of 8000 chars, I instead posted the Ep5 story as a guide so you can print it and use it as toilet paper.

Review "guide" right here:
https://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3698865804

Game episode 5 played through on Hardened Survivor.



As I get back to the game after 4? ... 5? years, I was again hit with the fact:


We have 2016's game in 2026 with UI from 2006.

Game is littered with insane design decisions which should have been ironed out during development time of 10 years. If developers would just listen to actual players instead of flatterers and sycophants on their own forum...

- Any kind of ease to use functionality, shortcuts and just plain multitasking usability is totally absent. For this kind of survival game some sort of task management for nearby on-going multiple actions is a must.
- You ever skinned your moose with such a zen-focus that meanwhile your cooked food got charred and your coffee boiled out times ago and then you just freeze to death as you are blissfully unaware of surroundings? Multitasking? Please?
- Game is literally full of snow and your crosshair is white. There are all kinds of useless accessibility options like sound filter for eating but no accessibility option "invert crosshair colors opposite to the color under it". I'd take even Fallout Pip-Boy Green instead of white.
- You have cooked hot cup of tea but all of your 10 tea cups look like similar?
- You have lit torch/flare on your hand but of course matches are better default option for fire-starting so you have to search for the torch from the menu.
- You have 0.04L of fuel on another canister and 0.23L on another canister. Let's carry both and that (unscrappable vanishing) jerry canister with 0.17L too.
- Would you like to get the same item that you just Put Away by pressing the same key? Why you would like to do that?
- Your journal is always unorganized mess like Cutscene-Will's life.
- Have you ever though of just boiling 0.33L of water? Grab your half-boiled water early and then put it back. Why anyone would measure anything.
- Certain interactions aren't even hinted on journal manual/instructions like torch extinguishing and re-lighting.

There are more oversights which are obvious when you encounter them. Problem is that long time players are accustomed to deficiencies and they cannot see them anymore and call them features instead.


Then there are actual gameplay disasters:
- Player cannot hold flare/torch on another hand and use items like stim on another. However, player is master climber even with lit torches which stay aflame.
- A.I. pathing and reacting to items is totally ridiculous. Added to lack of (melee) weapons this means just potential random damage and constantly resetting A.I. behaviour due bad A.I. pathing. Try rapidily moving on and off the rock where A.I. wolf cannot path for giggles.
- Character cannot climb at all even 10cm high vertical obstacles but can just scale down insane slopes if you just can find the right angle. In fact 3cm high snow chunks could just stop your movement even at the middle of the road. Snow in this game is solid and sturdy as rock.
- Interactable items are glued on to the world. Campfire comes to the item, item does not come to campfire.
- Places are littered with usable items but as a survivalist you have the fixation to get only certain things with specific shapes. Metal scrap? Better to find those frying pans and toasters!
- Story mode episodes usually narrow down to tightly timed running for... reasons? Ep5 is about the worst of the bunch.


I really cannot recommend this episodic torture to anyone who does not already own the game. Please avoid.

5/10, kind-a meh, too mixed bag to work brilliantly, not thumbs up or down

##############################
# AFTER ACTION REPORT FOLLOWS:
##############################
Phone rang and it was Jessie. She assaulted me with verbal diarrhea about climate something and kept on rambling. Well, at first I was thinking to ask her to find & insert extra disk which is labeled "NINTENDO-HARD PUZZLES" but it was apparent that she was too deeply in climate psychosis. Probably forgot to take her meds. So, for rest of the game I was avoiding deliberately to answer any virtual phones in case she actually gets violent as I am enclosed in VR world dome near her and quite vulnerable for stabbing.
##############################

I think some reviewers just muted her for that reason. Joking aside, I wonder why there was any use to add Jessie when your A.I. CAT would have been perfect narrator and helper. Actually whole part outside VR was really unnecessary so those should have left to cutting room floor with Jessie. Now also game was mindlessly pushed to try convey sad and depressed feel towards end where-as having cat as happy and inquisitive instructor for puzzles would have felt much better (compare how narrator works to first Talos Principle (before it went to utter crap in second version)). Now cat murmurs just few lines like "well done" but that was it.


Game uses lots of mechanics but those are usually used for 2-3 maps and then forgotten. There is never much of mix & match of tactics and most puzzles are very straight-forward with one solution instead of aiming for several options. Watermelon was one of more innovative puzzles but so much was wasted to teach player new varied mechanics and then just throw that out of window. For example world type change and color filters were totally under-used. Only few times camera angle and photo rotation really made a difference.

Gameplay part falls really short and this is VERY short game. Before final map I was "ok, tutorial is now done, now for real puzzles" and then I am slapped in face. With timed puzzle-run on puzzle game which you repeat if you fail.
" :D "


World hubs do not have meaningful exploration opportunities, there are just teleporter pads to next levels and camera filter change option. As you cannot use items or take photos, you also cannot explore around. So, from 7 something gameplay hours about hour was spend on hubs, one at game config&pause and one just fooling around before realizing that there aren't much to do than just puzzle. So that makes about 4 hour game which includes cat petting.

Also just force pushing mushy story does not help a bit to carry the game, vice versa, the story acts just as a distraction. For example in Talos 1 which is better of the Taloses story was integrated in the world and in the puzzles. Here it is just... afterthought and filler.

I really don't know. Game feels really mixed bag without any good sides or totally disasterous letdowns (except Jessie). First parts of game felt fun and engine is quite robust to allow recursive photoshoots and rewinding to mistakes. Then again puzzle part elements were under-used and there weren't much "ah-ha" moments. To add to tedium, character movement feels sort of slow especially outside of the puzzles: if you have to quit, on next game session you drag yourself slowly back to same teleporter. And as an insult, developers decided to slap the speedrun on the top to get really their puzzle game puzzled up.

I would recommend this for maybe younger audience who might struggle a bit with puzzles but for me this game really aren't scratching any puzzling itches. Game engine felt robust but puzzles were lacking. As there are no neutral or "MEH" option on Steam, maybe thumbs down as developers wasted a good opportunity to make a totally great game.

5/10
* big minus for potential key detection problems in gameplay loop
* UI disaster
* looks blurry and low-res textures

---

Difficulty-wise this is just weird. On normal diff you can default attack anything and tank the hits but you also have possibility to sometimes succeed to dodge or block. On harder level you actually start taking meaningful damage but either block window is so insanely small that dodge/block feels just luck or game actually haves some problems to detect the exact time when key is pressed as speedrunner forums complained. I changed dodge/block key positions to mouse or other keys but eventually I felt there is no improvement.

I played Elden Ring through and I had NO problems getting block timing down. Also for usability stand point game offers automatic win for attack QTE (Quick Time Event) but only thing which ever matters is to win defence QTE.

As this is JRPG you have all the time in the world to select action from too convoluted menus to remove health bar but your actual core gameplay is winning QTE for either dodge or parry.

So: your core gameplay loop is just QTE without prompt. Either you dodge or parry. Nothing else. Even row positioning does not matter in this game so it is extremely simple "remove numbers by selecting options from list". This is mobile game level gameplay. Weak point aiming just rises more questions of why, is it afterthought?

Also this game weirdly wins awards but does cardinal sin with slow animated menu opening animation. This is BIG NO in web design but hey, this is game and we can waste people's time by giving them useless menus to wade through, right?

You just can't bind additional hotkeys for quick actions as... game controller does not have enough keys and this is excuse to just to dump fèces on KB&M players. It would just be too comfy to quickly select action on enemy from larger 1-menu or press the hotkey.

You just cannot access inventory for some reason while resting. You have to exit the rest to access your inventory.

When you finally access your inventory, it is just one big mess as always with JRPG without any usability concerns. Want to access character stats? Click through weapons tab, champ.

Could we get just one good inventory screen for all of these menus? Ah, no. This is JRPG for xbox-controllers so it is allowed to be total mess.

Well, how about that art design? Art is hidden in GFX technicals: game looks extremely yester-year. Dated, BLURRY and low resolution textures. Only good looking shots are close-ups from persons and those definitely suffer from low resolution textures. On Elden Ring you just could download 2K or 4K textures mod and game would be peachy but here we have actual award-winner which looks like turd out of box. And don't get me started with 30 FPS cut-scenes, like wtf, just animate them with game engine as everyone else does.

Done on Unreal Engine, it is also hungry for resources to waste, so updating the GPU would make FPS go up but graphics stay the same so what's the point to see more blur with $1700. Developers even try to hide blur issues with ah so popular motion blur, chromatic aberration (read: abdomination) and adding more film grain to avoid seeing anything. So, nice art direction. Just add more grainy pixels which didn't happen 10 years ago and win the award. Perfect.

Granted, GFX technicals aren't art direction but have you thought that your art would be better presented with something which looks like 2025 and you absolutely had a say during development process how the end product would look like? Great direction. Let's clap.

And hey, camera FOV? Please? Ah, I have to edit it to game config and then make sure it is not overwritten. While I'm at it, I guess I can manage to type in few other config rows to fix a bit your train wreck. Of course, those fixes would be disaster for console peasants as their boxes are what they are.

Sorry, I forgot to check my calendar before buying. This is era of peasant game consoles and PC gaming just gets left-overs. Only solution is not to buy.

Final verdict: over-hyped peasant game console port with QTE as main gameplay loop. We live in 2025's. Enjoy your time as PC gamer. Do not believe anything what game journos say.

Game purchased from Steam as Deluxe edition. Actually I am facing hard choices if I want to finish this or not as there are so many other games and LLMs waiting for GPU time. Maybe I dump this to laptop as it really won't matter on what potato I run this on and click it casually through.

edit: avoided hearts by changing wording to JRPG, explained QTE acronym

7/10, kind of good entertainment.

Game received for $1 from Humble Bundle choice.

Russian power trip fantasy simulator where your glove is smarter than you and does everything better than you (well, do they do that left handed in russia)?

About story:
As this is Russia, research facility robots go haywire and kill people. Player to rescue as he is supa-dupa military guy. Though he gets bonked and starts only with axe and ultra-high tech glove. Player protagonist talks to his hand mostly and his glove trash-talks back. Some reviewers said conversations are infantile but actually most of them are quite good. Though protagonist goes to rage rants for no reason a bit too often but he's mass ax murderer which slops heads off from corpses as he sees fit. This could also be "lost in translation"-type of problem though english in the game is... fairly good. I need to shoot better, okay?

Environment is kind of believable as the world characters live in. Though peasants continue to be peasants and russian (research) villages look totally backwards russian villages even robotic labor is widely available. Game plays around with cold war-era propaganda stories as Dollar-NATO is always making war and always threating hard-working peasant serf. You could only wonder what kind war machines has to be on that side as russians have superb Polymer which is goo-ish solution to everything and Soviet Union is still sort of contained in global scale.

Game also features Mary Sue-style granny right at the start and certain other magical plot devices are just slapped on to get story to go forward. Character actions aren't the most believable but this is FPS game after all. At least player character does not let anyone to push him verbally around but hoo boy he is dumb as sack of bricks without his glove which in turn pushes him then around.

Interestingly, most of actual gameplay, boss events and combat situations are designed in a way that you can expect and prepare for them. So you usually have opportunity to at least save and probably gear-up for the encounter. Save points are mostly abundant which is a good thing as you cannot save everywhere. Backtracking to save points aren't usually blocked.

Playthrough on hardest, after few early enemies which you have to ax with default level ax which is tiresome to Max, game then goes to be super easy. Loot is abundant and as your character "develops" (read: you click on skill tab), game starts to be more and more MOUSE1-fest.

Difficulty spikes on bosses which have funky Elden Ring-style mechanics meaning random spam attacks and large AoE splash areas. Well, probably they cannot damage player otherwise but spamming large AoE is really tiresome. Other enemies have irritating spawn mechanics which could be countered by killing them under some kind of roof. Default mobs aren't much of hazard later on and you'll manage to deal with most of them with your Palpatine lightning and pew-pew electro pistol.

In addition of few normal weapons game has several melee's to offer but actually in addition of Steam achievement, you really do not want to use than just one melee and few select guns. Also player has two magic glove skills to boost player even further which on max level gives you enough edge to deal with anything as MOUSE1 fodder.

There are some real janky moments which are probably just russian design or plainly by-passing game testing but nothing really serious. Testing ground 11 frozen boiler is broken as it probably relies on janky Unreal Engine behaviour on peasant game consoles but you can actually use second boiler twice. I actually have maxxed settings on NV2080 and over 60FPS natively on 2560x1440 (motion blur, DLSS etc. off), so at least this game is min-maxed on polygon level to give decent performance for target audience on serf consoles.

UI at least acknowledges the mouse and I can rebind keys to mouse too but I guess that might be just UE default behaviour. Switching weapon slot places is one of the most confusing but working UI design pieces ever.

Game has Quick Time Events but I CAN DISABLE AND WIN THEM AUTOMATICALLY FROM MENU. Which is total win as I just hate QTE crap though this game seems to have at least same button every time. You absolutely want to turn QTE off as it is insta-death in boss battles.

Map design is a notch of more interesting than your run-of-the-mill console MOUSE1-fest featuring 60's futu-fantasy setting. Game is "open-map" but not open world style. Map (singular) is somewhat spacious but totally free roaming is not possible.

Soundtrack includes both new and oldies goldies style music including Alla Pugacheva whose songs has also spin-offs in finnish. Game though does not have portable radio so you have to use your Ladas with mono radios to create surround sound system. Song list is a bit too small but maybe that's why player cannot listen them except near radios.

Also game features probably real cartoons with wolf and bunny. Usually that is interesting distraction as player just keeps staring inside the game something which is not a game where wolf chases a game (glove makes a joke about that at some point). Also game mimicks or just tries to spin humour from Fallout by having young party-obedient pioneer scout adventuring (similar to Vault Boy) and his nemesis Evil Capitalist Pig. Game does not actually use that design enough so it is more likely nod to Fallout and therefore kind of falls flat.

Warning: game includes Denuvo. You cannot even remove intro videos.

Well, time for conclusion. As game was $1 I could recommend this but definitely would not pay full price.

Final verdict: Would buy Tereshkova seks bot model as soon as they become available in 3-orifice configuration. I am such a filthy Capitalist Pig. Nora was right about everything after all.

7/10, interestingly different game but has it's flaws.

Finally, a new game idea instead of usual texture asset swap. Though I got this from Humble Bundle monthly choice (about $1 per game) so it's most likely this hasn't sold very well. Game had a major patch when I had only few last kilometers left so I cannot comment much about new changes.

Gameplay consist of mostly driving around in maps and collecting and managing resources so for looter-hoarder it scratches lots of itches. This is not open-world game, maps are pre-build and anomalies are randomized on certain spawn spots.

Driving part is sort of game-y, maybe on purpose so this isn't your Forza Horizon. When driving you can mouse around to see what's around you and use kb to drive which works quite well and I have absolutely no complaints about driving controls which is rare. Well, except car uses american automatic shifter with only two positions. Manual shifting gearbox is for clutch winners.

This is not a horror game which is relief. It totally omits typical sci-fi horror jump scares and enemies which will munch you in the dark. Anomalies are mechanic or (super)natural types and only sort of horror element is exploding crash test dummy which moves only behind you but even those regularly gift you items. So it's quite chill game to play and enjoyable change from common sci-fi horror.

Soundtrack (radio station) is quite mellow but you are left to aching more of included songs. Last patch added few more songs but they were even more of mediocre pop than previous.

Game picks up pace quite fast in the Mid-Zone though I have a habit of master looter-hoarder pirate which might have sped things up. Eventually as you reach Mid-Zone and farm resources from few maps you are mostly done with tech tree (and game).

Gameplay loop keeps fresh and fun when there are upgrade possibilities in early and mid-game. Eventually gameplay gets a bit dull: quest or gather rez in new area, open portal and go home. You never cannot drive back to your garage. Exploring a new map ends always your route so this artificially lengthens the game. When you get to Olympic-material parts, you are collecting them from the very same place you intend to use those parts. So, fairly quickly you realize it's pointless effort especially one pillar drops only meager amount of Olympic material.

Upgrades come in typical game console format: there is The Item and then there is Item Upgrade Tier 1 and Tier 2 and maybe Tier 3 if you are lucky to have such a plentiful choices. Only reasonable gameplay choice comes from electric engine, others are just "replace old one, put new in".

Game has quality of life improvements. When you craft, you use resources automatically from your containers. Inventory space for player is limited but at least there is enough unless you go totally arrrr!!! loot all mates! These very basic things eludes lots of game developers and we live in year 2025. Everyone hates Inventory Tetris.

Gameplay-wise it might make a sense but running car engine does not recharge car battery any way. Also car mechanic system is really barebones and easy. You can just rip tires, motor or side panels out in seconds and slap another in it's place. It's sort of easy to play and very shallow at the same time. I'm not sure if more in-depth mechanism would add more to gameplay as you tend to fix car a lot on the road. Magic repair jelly is maybe too overpowered. At least window protections etc. are completely missing from parts list which could be next logical choice if you intend to drive around in irradiated wasteland. For player damage, come Chernobyl or nuclear war, there is nothing so bad that good old medkit cannot fix.

Also there are sort of mini-games. Your car develops weird behaviour (quirks) on it's own like horn honking when you close trunk door. It's up to you to figure out the culprit. This was sort of fun to figure out unless your car develops totally irritating tendencies which you cannot guess immedialitely. Turning driving wheel and having radio going on/off constantly may just require turning your amplifier or headphones off too.

Difficulty is very forgiving on default setting. There are customization options for difficulty so any player interested to keep on playing will be happy. Current gameplay loop offers a bit of replayability with harder settings but lack of depth is jarring.

Onwards with the main quest and there comes first part of big negatives... main quest is actually a big MEH at the end. Psycho-corridor where you hold W to go forward while voice-overs blather endlessly has done to death by so many games. You were promised The Exit from the Zone. Well, Abby takes one immedialitely but player is left wondering what happened to promised escape from Thunderdome. Well, you have option to play endless mode but gameplay is not that enticing after you finish the game.

There is one weird plot hole in car survival game: you can magically drive map transitions (3/6/9 hours) without using any gas. Driving time between map transitions only serves a purpose of changing day/night cycle. Even on certain main quest missions there are fixed clock so time does not move at all to get rid of random arrival times. It also totally eludes me why player does not have sofa or such to rest or just sleep inside your car at garage so there is more control over day/night cycle.

Also while you plan the route, you can never drive backwards to outer ring, it is always towards zone center.

Minor bugs, mostly with UI. The worst one was where I had to use cursor keys to move car panel item inside repair station to furthest slot. Latest patch seemed to fix it but now parts hang in weird spot related to mouse cursor. Other found bugs are janky logbook notes and UI cannot decide font size.

All NPC "interactions" are very limited or more specifically non-existant, i.e. hearing voice lines which consist of endless drivel between bossy lady Oppy and two dumb wacky nutcases who apparently have gone fully fruity in some secluded underground bunker. This gets rather tiring after a while and there is a reason why there are chat channels for private chatter as no one cares to listen that feud on public radio waves for long. So, what about other people in the Zone as you definitely want a break from hearing that endless yapping?

Game hints many, many, many times that there are other survivors out there. Zone is populated at least about hundred or more people. You NEVER encounter any of those people. There is merchant wagon added by latest patch but it is only static auto-vending machine. You never get to another place to repair your car and rest. As you explore the place entirely, you SHOULD meet other NPCs and settlements but no, you NEVER meet anyone. All you hear are random radio broadcasts. Even Oppy clearly hints that she resides 10 miles to the west of your garage but you never meet her there. This is totally major plot hole and also big gameplay opportunity absolutely missed. I just cannot imagine why this was not followed through. Maybe for keeping the gameplay loop (teleporting to start) or low developer resources. Anyways, sad times.

Game is also victim of contemporary fad trends. It looks like game happens around 1998 but developers slap you with pro-current-thing stickers at the start of the game and you get usual assortment of Brokeback Mountain items and NPC character relations. It feels totally ODD and so out of time. Back in 1998 about no one cared about things like this and even games were... games, not any political manifestos. As time goes on, this kind of stuff attached in game does not age very well. Then again, I got this game for $1 from HB Choice bin, so...

Conclusions:
Game is different enough to recommend it. Gameplay is chill and easy to enjoy even if you do not like car games. The gameplay loop gets stale towards the end, but game ends soon enough to make you play through it with semi-interested passion.

5/10, mediocre direct game console port.
First of all, this runs really slow on NV2080@2160x1440 unless you use FSR upscaler which reaches half-playable frame rates. Visible ghosting effects, especially on Pip-Boy text.

This is total walking simulator without any branching paths. In fact that you can actually move around may soft-lock you on autosaves. Call it game console curse on PCs or whatever you like but that's the fact.

Game was received from HB monthly bundle so I'd say maybe $1 is fitting price for this.

Character control is very janky as it tries to emulate inertia but fails. Other games do it so much fluidly. Internet discussions point out that it's fairly bad idea to rebind keys so I managed whatever was available.

Game has Quick-Time Events as only form of "gameplay" other than walking and examining items. I think I managed to win only one timed QT-event and apparently it does not matter if you win or not except at the end. Events are way too fast and come out of nowhere.

Story has some real blunders and they increase towards the end. You never cease to wonder why protagonist does not finish off baddie, dump the girl in the safe place or at least throw out second helmet out of airlock.

After failing the walking event (which leads to secondary ending) at the end I watched youtube video and decided rest of the QTE hell is not worth of my time. Also there is no way you can get some of the missing collectables without replaying.

I'd call it half-decent but if you expect anything where your actions matter, look elsewhere. I guess bit of spit, polish and optimization on this and doing it on Prey/System Shock way with meaningful exploration & actions would make this worthwhile game. And NO QTE, thanks. There aren't anything really memorable on this game so... maybe thumbs down this time.

Maybe 5/10, prime example of overmilked game and overextending it's stay because of lack of competition.

First of all, do not buy this game for basic vanilla gameplay. This review is mostly for saying what has gone to hell in handbasket in last 10 years. After tedious screen staring I have come to realize that best parts of this game is pausing so you can leave it running and another is moddability so anyone can do a game modification. There is absolutely no point to play this without modifications. With decent modifications game is golden but really suffers from engine limitations.

But the default game, yeah...

Base vanilla game is completely designed for redditor-level crowd who just wants to quickly play with A.I. assists and wants to experience Civilization-tier core rot. On vanilla you can conquer Russia or USA in three months tops with proper army. Disregard any logistical issues, wargaming is so dead with this game.

It does not even matter what country you are playing as everything is 1:1 including all weapon designs. Actually gameplay (and DLCs) mostly caters for people who play tiniest pimple on the map and will conquer the world by game design. That is what developers intended and they use this as DLC selling point. Smells like neo-Civilization? Yes. Is this World War 2 game? No.

Game was released in 2016 so it has at least 10 year old game engine with all the bugs. We have seen at least 3 major naval combat redesigns and naval warfare still has same charm as eating dog turds. We have teleporting fleets projecting magic naval supremacy and good luck to modders getting any sensible parameters to fix that mess which is naval combat. We have extremely weak A.I. which haves no concept of defence in depth lines and shuffles it's front line troops (leaving holes in the front) from thousands miles away because infantry is better than infantry. And let's not talk about the supply system. Or how about insane technical decisions where units actually process supply ticks per hour but you can still be freeloader oil trader during day and trainer/builder at midnight.

A.I. assisting aids for player are next to useless or even negatively affects the game play. Who thought extending front lines AND then force moving player units would be good idea? And let's not talk about airplane re-work which added new useless interface and forced airfleet sizes to 100 so you have to micromanage that trash with airwing specialization. So much of original good clean UI design with principle "everything has tooltip" was totally destroyed as every DLC adds it's own different menu. You cannot even see the country's cabinet ministers anymore as that information is now hidden as top secret.

Vanilla game is totally worthless without mods. HOI4 may still have a successful future as a modification platform. If there would be only basic game, I would have ditched this dumpster fire times ago. Big thank you to World Ablaze, Fallout, Rings etc. Steam workshop is crammed with modification projects.

Best Hearts Of Iron ever was also a modification before it was made to official game, HOI2: Arsenal of Democracy. Change my mind.

So, why to even add review? HOI fills a niche which nowadays are generally avoided by game companies. Back in the retro times strategy game genre was quite popular but now it looks like strategy game genre for PC is mostly dead. Game console trash like Civilizations does not interested me even the slightest and 99% of new released games are either "strategy" (RTS click-fest) or some oversimplified hex-grid game or god-forbid board game conversions. Paradox does not even think about going for HOI5 as long milked money is flowing in from DLCs.

Is there any hope left for wargaming and PC market? I look at you Matrix Games and Slitherine but maybe I'm just staring at the void.

Comments are left open so all redditors can come here and whiteknight for Paradox. Unfortunately Steam does not reward you with social score points but you can jizz each others off while trashing my review.

6/10, above average due interesting setting. Console game ported to PC without polish. No thumbing up or down, but Steam forces me to do it.

Positives:
+ voice actors are ok.
+ sphere controls are completely ok (played Descent 3D a lot). Lot of players complain about this but just fine-tuning sensitivity fixes any issues.
+ space ship interior and exterior is exciting to explore (first time, until you have to backtrack)
+ graphics are sort of ok on Ultra High but I would like one notch more for gfx settings as we can't make sense from printed labels etc. which are around the ship. Turned horrible Motion Blur and Film Grain off. I don't know why every developer pushes that blur and grain crap as 99% of players turn them off anyways.


Meh:
= story is full of itself. Keep it simple and it works better. In 80-90's movies hero grabbed shotgun, said catchy one-liner, blasted the aliens, got the girl and I'm 100% fine with that kind of simple story. You really aren't new Kubrick so just do not try too much.
= expected to be HAL-9000 with potentially nefarious motivations but story is in rails and choices do not matter. Wasted potential right there.


Negatives:
- mouse is laggy and sluggish at UI menus, developer cope-explained in discussions that "conveys space-y movement during gameplay". Well, IMPLEMENT CONTROLS WHERE IT IS USED, not at UI menus!
- cameras do not use mouse for movement, instead you push slowly them around with WASD because game consoles use controller.
- options to select things and puzzle responses are limited to four. Why four? Because game is completely made for D-pad brains. We have Fallout4-syndrome here again.
- damned autosaves do not save even when the game shows saving symbol. Also there is NO saving at quit. Played from beginning and upon reaching UN I was hunting document for an hour and then wanted a break. Ta-daa, game starts from start of the UN-module without documents... Looking at game discussions/comments gameplay is on rails anyways so finding documents do not matter. This kind of issue is game-breaking problem.
- animation freezes a lot so Emma looks like robot. I'd assume she would slap the sphere bumping on her face but no, frozen expression is all I get.
- on comments some players complained about resolution setting resetting and keybindings do not work for puzzles. Therefore I didn't bother to rebind most keys to mouse where I usually set them.


Game window-shopped & purchased from HumbleBundle store with several others, pricing was under 8€ which is in the ball-park if game would have more polish. It's somewhat telling I made the purchase two years back and didn't try the game until now.

9/10, recommended.

I have always had sort of aversion against pixel games as they underline the retro but not the gameplay, but I was totally wrong with this one. Heretic Fork stands apart from other pixel mush by being as innovative and fun to play game like the games were back in actual retro pixel times.

Being hell rift tower defence manager you just mostly have to buy cards, play them out and then lay back as during gameplay all systems are automated which is definitely welcome IQ 200 move. There is no frantic clicking on screen. You just lay back and watch and listen soundtracks which consist of dark synthwave from artists like Occams Laser and Nightcrawler.

Aside mostly obvious card mechanics with draw&discard deck and hand cards there is also permanent discard/upgrade system with card saving slot which is quite brilliant in it's simplicity.

Gameplay flow is pleasant and I think game works so well as it does not try too hard to overcomplicate anything (well, except PONG.exe). It's just automated tower defence card game with hellish story. A lot of the charm comes from soundtrack which plays a big part, good games need also good soundtracks.

One major drawback is that only useful game speed is fast forwarded one, unless you want to play active skills by yourself for some weird reason. Speeding up even more would free up your time if your computer is up to the task. Granted, rounds are short but full playthrough takes easily half an hour... and it's likely you play more than one playthrough.

Another minor gripe is lack of totally accurate mechanics described on cards as with few of them you just have to guess but here I am just nitpicking.

I'd recommend this one.

7/10, good game but needs modifications to be truly great.

Other reviews probably have reviewed this to the Deeproot Depths so I just go through some basics for co-operative play.

Here we have "action-fighting" PC game which loses to kids' Hogwarts Legacy what comes to control customization. Nuff' said.

Here we have PC game which competes with Skyrim which one has more arrow blocking meshes.

Here we have PC game from 2022 which looks like something which crawled out of PlayStation 4.

Here we have game which forces you to play PvP with hikikomori wiki-crafters if you want to play only co-operative mode unless you install modifications.

So, to for all new players I'd recommend before you even start playing:
Install Elden Ring Mod Loader.
Install Seamless Coop.
Install 2K or 4K textures.
Lock PvP hikikomori nerds to colosseum, throw away the key and get VERY LARGE cup to collect all salty hikky-tears. xD
Invite your newbie friends.
Start your playthrough.

9/10 modded.