Recent reviews by Scratch2k

It's a skinner box wrapped up in a hamster wheel which you can never get off, great community though.

Your move, creep.

I bought this in the winter sale so I'm not sure what it was like in the before times but there are several things I love about Nightingale.
-The crafting system is excellent and well balanced. There is very little need for farming resources, you just get them as part of normal play (as long as you do some light work to gather stuff during the quests). You rarely have to wait for crafted items to be made, a few seconds at most. The progressing is smooth and logical.
-You don't have to carry around all your crafting materials with you, as long as they are stored within a certain distance of the crafting stations you have access to them, this is a QOL feature I really love.
-Voice acting is top notch
-The story and lore is deep and interesting
-The combat is pure chaos
-You can set the difficulty to anything you want, from content tourist (Explorer) to super hard core streamer mode.
-I saw the comparison to Satisfactory and it's not immediately apparent why, but the followers system and the many difference realms and stations you can build to farm resources make it possible to almost automate some things. Final product crafting is still manual though.

The bad points
-It kinda runs like crap unless you play with the settings, I have a 3060Ti running at 1440p and it at any level of detail it runs pretty bad, it runs much better at 1080p and still looks great.
-Combat is pure chaos (I know this was also a plus).

After only 127 hours I feel like I've finally nailed copper ingots.

Super chill city builder, some nice features such as unlimited resources (as in, once you set up extracting them they never run out), no combat/adversaries and minimal random natural disasters. You can't, however, just set and forget, your little village still needs quite a bit of maintenance to keep it happy and healthy, micro manage those little people into their graves!

Love it, full of Australiana and hilarious as ever.

Highly addictive, although once you nail the formula for "winning" it seems like it's just maintance and making your town as efficient as possible, not that there's anything wrong with that, it's brilliant. No military conflicts, no external threats (except starving to death, or freezing), just surviving and building and watching your little guys run around happily doing their jobs. I wish the concept was expanded upon a bit, so you could advance through technology, or that there were more building types but this is a great starting point.

I've put nearly 10 hours in and managed to build a well balanced city with plenty of food, booze and a population nearing 200. Then I walked away and left it, thinking I had the balance just right, had disasters turned off, I figured it would just tick over and I'd come back to either a similar or better population. How wrong I was, I returned to a ghost town...nearest I could tell, one of my wood choppers died of the pox, then the other got attacked by a wolf...so my town wasn't producing any chopped firewood..because the filthy blacksmith was using up all the coal to make steel tools the people of my town went cold for many seasons, I guess from there their productivity took a dive (despute being highly educated) and everyone just gave up and died in their homes, The Stand style...I'll try harder next time.

Damage physics still need a bit of work but it's really shaping up to be a great racer/smasher.