Recent reviews by SpacemanSpoof

I bought this game a long time ago, but my first playthrough stalled out when I hit the difficulty spike in Chapter 3. Recently I finally got around to starting over and playing it all the way through.

If you like Spacewar-style combat, you'll love this game, because that's pretty much all there is. Jump to a map, blow up everything with a red icon, repeat over and over and over for hours on end. There are some other missions, and elements of leveling-up your ship and supporting fleet, and a very basic story layered on top, but it's mostly just top-down spaceship dogfights.

The first two chapters go by fairly quickly, but then you get to Chapter 3 and hit a wall. You'll spend what seems like forever grinding for upgrades because those inner systems are tough if you didn't do that grind already. Then you get to Chapter 4 and there's a totally different kind of grind, which I won't talk about for spoilery reasons. (But here's a tip: for the most part, you don't need to worry about the UTA bases in Ch. 4. Once I figured that out, I mostly breezed through to the end.)

Also, if you're playing on a modern Windows, you may need to adjust your compatibility settings for the game to work properly. You can find threads about that on the forum.

All in all, I'm giving it a thumbs-up because I (mostly) enjoyed it. Just be warned that it's very much a niche game, not something that will appeal to everybody.

This is a tough one to recommend, but in the end I had fun with it.

I've played a lot of survival games, and this one falls squarely in the middle of the pack: not amazing, but not terrible. One thing I liked was the variety of environments; each island comes with a different set of challenges. The starter island is large and full of resources so you can get your footing and learn the game. Then you move to an arid island with no rain, which significantly ramps up the difficulty. After that you go to an island with few resources and entirely too much rain, and so on.

The game felt very slow-paced to me. You spend most of your time building up a base on each island and gathering whatever special resources you'll need to continue your journey. Then you build a new boat and sail off to the next one. But there's also a good amount of exploration, finding the story breadcrumbs of both your own ill-fated expedition and of the area's former inhabitants. And speaking of story, I also liked the setting. The conquistador era is an interesting period of history with just the right level of technology for a game like this - not entirely primitive but not futuristic either. And sailing. Lots of sailing.

There were some downsides, though. Fighting is the big one: the combat system is very poorly implemented. Every fight basically boils down to letting an animal bite your arm, then throwing it down behind you and whacking it while it's stunned. Until you get to the final boss, that is: even your superhuman forearms are no match for a guy with a sword and an insanely large hitbox. (The optional snake boss was pretty frustrating as well, but I killed it.)

The other big problem is resource scarcity. Resources do respawn over time, but incredibly slowly. Even building a farm doesn't help all that much, and the late-game metals are in short supply. If you're not judicious with your iron you'll wind up not having enough for the weapons and armor you'll need to survive those boss fights. I wound up sticking with stone and bone tools for most of the game since those tend to be far more plentiful, and saving the copper and iron for when I really needed them. (Protip: don't slack on reading the skill books. They give some useful perks that will help stretch your resources.)

Overall, I give it a weak thumbs-up. Not the best survival game ever, but it's a passable beach vacation for the cold winter months :)

Rain, rain on my face
Hasn't stopped raining for days...

Normally I'm not a fan of roguelikes (or roguelites). Tried a couple but never could get into it. But when I saw a game that billed itself as a "roguelite city-builder" it was just weird enough to catch my eye. Instead of crawling a dungeon, your "runs" are setting up a settlement.

The basic premise is that you're building a village in the rain. Over and over and over again. This is a world where there's not a rainy season, there are just different seasons of rain. But it's magic rain, and later on you can use the different types of rainwater for beneficial purposes. There's also a meta-story about restoring some ancient seals to push back the cataclysm that periodically destroys all your villages, but I haven't got very far along in that yet.

The roguelite elements are handled well, I think. There are many different kinds of randomness that make each village somewhat unique. You start off in the middle of a forest (don't ask how you got there without cutting a path ;) ), and you expand by chopping down trees and cutting into "glades" which contain various resources and events. The building blueprints you start with are randomized, so you have to work with what you've got; you can't just follow the same pattern on every settlement. You get a new random blueprint every now and then, to expand your capabilities over time. On top of that, you get random orders from the Queen, which contribute to the victory conditions, and you get random "cornerstones" which give various buffs (and sometimes debuffs). But almost everything is presented as a choice: you have to choose one out of several things, so there's a persistent theme of tradeoffs and balancing what you need now vs what you might need later.

All of the settlements are timed; on one hand you have the Queen's "impatience" which steadily ticks upwards, on the other you have "reputation" which is gained through various means. To win the map, you have to max out your reputation before the impatience fills up. I don't love timed missions in games, but I guess it's necessary here to have some kind of pressure and win/loss condition. And like any roguelite, after the run you get some resources to buy upgrades in the home city to make future runs ever-so-slightly easier.

Overall, it's not the kind of game that one would sit and play for weeks on end; it's better handled in bite-sized chunks to avoid becoming monotonous. I'll usually pull it out every now and then when I have an afternoon to kill and want a diversion from other stuff I'm doing. But in that respect it excels. If you're a fan of weird and experimental games like I am, this one is worth checking out.

Cultists and xenos and daemons, oh my!

My thoughts on this one are mixed. It feels very much like Kingmaker dressed up with the over-the-top ridiculousness of 40k. It's the same basic plot: you abruptly become the lord of an unruly region, you fart around for a while trying to resolve the numerous issues going on across your domain, help out your companions with their personal agendas, deal with a few traitors and rival lords, explore some side areas that have little to do with anything, and then there's a short endgame segment that sort of duct-tapes it all together. The ending cards painted a pretty bleak picture, too, but of course the grimdark future is hardly a place for happy endings.

So the main story is weak, but I thought the companions were generally pretty interesting. They had a nice variety of backstories and abilities, and I wound up with a party that synergized pretty well. Play your cards right and you can even get a Space Marine on your team, and with the right build he can utterly wreck any fight (I had him up to about 6 attacks per turn, with crazy mobility to boot), especially with your Officer giving him extra turns.

Speaking of fights, they abandoned the real time with pause style and went full-on turn based tactics. Honestly it felt like the combat system was cribbed straight from XCOM. (Well, it has an initiative queue so really more like Chimera Squad.) Most fights followed the same formula: stick your ranged units in cover where they pick off the enemies while your close-combat units charge in and keep them busy and your support units toss out buffs and debuffs. You also get a spaceship battle every now and then.

The weakest part of the game I thought was the leveling system. They advertise 130 hours of content for this game, and I think about 30 of that is spent on the level-up screen. Unlike the Pathfinder games, your level in this game maxes out around 50, so it feels like you're leveling up all the time. And there's no auto-level, so you have to go through every one of your companions and pick their new stats and abilities from a rather long list over and over and over again. I eventually just stopped leveling anyone who wasn't in the active party.

The colony-management part felt like it was of little consequence also. You could get a few decent bonuses or equipment from building various projects, and some of your choices affect the ending narration, but in general it was kinda hard to care about. I didn't even bother finishing up all the projects before heading off to the end.

Overall, not the best entry in Owlcat's catalog, but if you like Owlcat RPGs and WH40k it's enjoyable enough.

I know I'm in the minority, and I'll probably get roasted for it, but I really did not enjoy this. The protagonist is an annoying loser; it's one thing to have a few character flaws, but he goes way beyond that. I wanted to smack him every time he did that stupid voice and laugh (which is about every other sentence). His pack of weirdo friends isn't much better, just a collection of shallow archetypes. The story itself is quite boring, I actually fell asleep a few times while reading it. And right when it finally looked like it was going somewhere interesting, it swerved hard into super-depressing and then simply ended - no resolution to any of the major threads, just "maybe things will work out." Suzuha's ending, btw

On the plus side, I did like the "Tips" thing (which would be better labeled a glossary), especially all the various bits of Japanese culture. And it was kinda fun listening for the handful of Japanese words I learned in karate class as they're used in normal conversation.

I do intend to give it another go eventually, and I'll update this review if I can find a better route. But after one pass I can't recommend it. Go read Fate/Stay Night instead.

Review part 2:

So here's my update after playing the other endings. That first non-ending is roughly the midpoint of the story. Still bugs me that it's the worst ending and also the default - in other games the default ending is generally ok, and it takes some work to get a really bad one. Anyway, I made it to four of the endings on my own; it's pretty obvious how to do that once you see the pattern. But to get the True Ending (and one other that's closely related) you'll most likely need a walkthrough, since you have to make very specific choices in a dozen or so places going back all the way to chapter 4.

Regarding the other endings, it kinda reminds me of high school English class - every one of them, except the True Ending, is somewhere between bittersweet and downright tragic. At least they're handled better than the first one and have some sort of conclusion, even if it's not a happy one.

The story itself gets better in the second half, but it's still kinda meh. As far as time-travel stories go, I've seen better. The protagonist mostly drops the annoying mad scientist bit after a while, but he's still an idiot. There's so much foreshadowing that's about as subtle as an anvil on the head like the CRT, or Suzuha's nature, or the time machine on the Beta worldline but no one in the story seems to pick up on what should be obvious. It's like, even though they've accidentally invented an actual time machine, they're completely ignorant of the most basic time-travel concepts. It's irritating enough to break suspension of disbelief. There are a few genuinely surprising twists, though. (And certain people might appreciate that Beta comes before Alpha... ;) )

In the end, I'll swap my grade to a reluctant thumbs-up. I won't give it gushing praise, but it's decent enough if you like sad stories about clueless teenagers or don't mind using a guide to see the one good ending.

I generally have a rule against buying Early Access games, but this one looked interesting enough that I picked it up anyway. Made it about to the aluminum stage before I fizzled out.

When I saw it was released I gave it another shot, and actually finished this time. It's much more chill than other automation games I've tried - the critters stay away from your machines so there's no tower-defense minigame to deal with, and the resource nodes never run dry so you can focus on efficiency and optimization rather than resource management. (The only non-renewable resource is the plants you use for burner power early on, but once you get to coal power that becomes irrelevant.) This means that even if your factory is an inefficient mess of spaghetti, you can still get to the end with enough patience.

There's also a huge world to explore, with lots of collectibles and hidden caves scattered around... and more dangerous wildlife as you venture further from the starting zone. So, even though you can be waiting hours to finish up the production for the next Project Assembly phase, between exploring the world, tweaking your factory, and progressing the research tree you'll never get bored. I very frequently found myself with "one more turn" syndrome, where I was just gonna take care of this little one thing before bedtime and finally quit 2 hours later.

The first-person perspective is both good and bad. It's great for exploring the beautifully weird world, but it's awkward for factory building. Fortunately you get the ability to fly and hover later on, which greatly helps with managing complex layouts.

So, if you're new to factory-automation games, or just want to tackle one from a different perspective, definitely give this one a try.

So, the only thing I actually learned from this game is that it's perfectly ok to join a startup, slap together some shoddy unscaleable code in an afternoon, let it run until it becomes unmanageable, then cash in your stock options and leave the mess for someone else to fix. In other words, most realistic software development simulator ever!

Seriously though, if your idea of a fun evening is using decision trees to sort simple geometric shapes into increasingly complex bins, then this game will be right up your alley, because that's all it is. Almost every puzzle is an input box of shapes on the left and an output box of shapes on the right, and you have to connect them with a various conditional branches. That's about the extent of the "programming" here. Sure, you can reuse earlier puzzle solutions as function calls, but the only one I ever found useful was the RGB sorter. And you can write "DLLs" as additional pre-packaged functions, but those really only matter for the startups, to save some space on the board when you try to add some parallelism. All the nodes in your DLL still count against the overall node limit though, so you can't add very many parallel calls.

Every now and then they try to throw in some actual machine learning concepts like using genetic algorithms to build a self-driving car, but really it's more confusing than educational.

Overall, a decent puzzle game with a few challenges if you try to go for gold on every puzzle. Just save yourself some headaches and don't bother with the startups, because the mechanics are poorly explained and the limitations are incredibly frustrating.

In my experience, LOTR games tend to be hit-or-miss. This one was a solid miss.

I have a general policy of finishing a game before writing a review so that I'm covering the game as a whole and not just the initial shininess, and this one really put that policy to the test. I found it incredibly difficult to get through, not because of gameplay challenges, but because it's just so dull. Felt kinda like running a marathon on a treadmill - you cover a lot of distance but the scenery never changes. But for your sake, dear reader, I endured through to the end to bring a full and honest review.

This game has three major flaws (and a whole pile of minor ones):

First and foremost, it's misnamed. Return to Moria conjures up images, at least to me, of leading the dwarven diaspora back to their ancestral homeland, restoring and repopulating the great halls of old. That's not this game. It would be better called Escape from Moria, because you wind up "returning"to Moria mostly by accident, and spend the rest of the game trying to get back out.

Second, it's not just the name that's awkward; the whole game design is in conflict with itself. The narrative is constantly pushing you forward to the next goal, but to reach that goal you have to build new tools and weapons, which means building up a base in each new area, which means back-tracking to the old areas to get the resources that you need to build the same basic furniture over and over again, and then trying to remember which chest in which base has those rare resources you picked up days ago and finally have a use for. So there's this continuous tug-of-war between the narrative driving forward and the gameplay pulling backwards that gets really annoying after a while.

And third, it's just so incredibly repetitive. You move to a new area, but your weapons are too weak to fight and your tools are too weak to progress. So you build up a base, explore around for new resources, build your new equipment, and move on to the next area. In this new area, your weapons are too weak to fight and your tools are too weak to progress. So you build up a base, explore around for new resources, build your new equipment, and move on to the next area. In this new area, your weapons are too weak to fight and your tools are too weak to progress... I know that's the core loop of any crafting-based game, but they simply failed to do anything interesting with it here. Plus, aside from the big set-pieces, it feels like there are about 5 templates for rooms & corridors, so you see the same patterns over and over and over again, maybe with slightly different contents here and there. Same for the enemies: each area has its share of goblins/orcs, wolves/wargs, and spiders, and that's pretty much it. As you progress through the areas, you mostly just encounter stronger, texture-swapped versions of these same three types (along with the occasional giant moth, or bat, or underground mountain goat).

I don't want to be completely negative, though, so I will say I appreciated the music. Song and poetry is a major part of Tolkien's work, and it really bugs me when adaptations leave it out (*cough cough* Mr. Jackson). But your dwarf in this game knows many songs, for mining, drinking, and Durin-worship. Some are familiar from the books, and some are new, but listening to them offers a pleasant break from the drudgery of the game. Some are even pretty funny if you pay attention to the lyrics. I guess a dwarf's gotta sing to keep from going crazy after spending the better part of a year underground and all alone.

I could go on, but I'll just wrap it with a comment from my daughter. As I was getting ready to fight the final boss, she was all excited and wanted to watch. When it was over, all she could say was a disappointed "That was it?" That's pretty much a perfect summary of this entire experience.

If you've played the original Psychonauts, this one is more of the same. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's tough to make a sequel to a 20-year-old game and maintain the magic that made the original so amazing, but they've done it. You've got the same fun psychic powers that Raz learned at camp, plus several more that you pick up in this one. There's a whole new set of grotesquely goofy characters alongside a few familiar faces. The levels are even more trippy and mind-bending than before. And of course there's a whole slew of hidden and not-so-hidden collectibles that will have you scratching your head trying to collect them all.

The one thing that's significantly different is the storyline: the first one was just plain silly, what with the evil wannabe dentist making kids sneeze out their brains for the evil camp coach to implant in battle tanks to take over the world. This one takes a much darker and more mature turn, examining some serious topics like how a decent person can become a monster, along with issues like loneliness, depression, survivors' guilt, and alcoholism. The last few levels, for all their humor, can get quite grim.

Speaking of collectibles, this game is a bit easier than its predecessor in that regard. A few of them are tough to find, but there aren't any levels here that are really frustrating to get 100% (I'm looking at you, Milla). I managed to do it without any guides, and only just barely using the post-game tool that you get to help find them. And, as usual, I'll point out that this is a game in which you can reasonably get 100% achievements in one play-through. (There is one missable achievement I think, but it's hard to miss if you're doing sufficient exploring in the hub)

TLDR: A bizarre, somewhat challenging, puzzle-platformer that will repeatedly have you laughing at its goofiness right before smacking you with a gut-punch.

I have a hard time recommending this one - at two different points I was ready to hang it up and give it a thumbs-down, but fortunately there's the handy Community Editor that can help fix the worst of the problems.

Like a lot of other sandbox games, there's no real story to speak of. You have an overarching goal of clearing all the Plague Hearts, and then you get a short Leader-specific line of missions once that's done, but otherwise the story is whatever you make it, driven by your own choices and the steady stream of missions and random events that happen. And of course the town is full of other survivors who all need your help in some way, like asking you to drive all the way across town to deliver a bag of food because they can't be bothered to hit the mini-mart across the street. And if you don't do everything they ask, they'll either leave town or turn hostile. But scratch their backs enough, and they'll become allies and offer some nice bonuses, so it's worth it.

I did think it was interesting how you handle the survivors. You don't have a single player character, per se, instead you take control of one of your survivors, and you can take along a second one as a follower. But after a while your character will get injured, or infected, or just tired, so you have to leave that one to recover back at base and swap out to a different one. So you're steadily switching between your survivors, improving their skills and community standing as they go out on expeditions.

The biggest problem with this one is balance. Things will be going along just fine, and then some crazy random thing will happen out of nowhere that gets your survivors killed. In my first playthrough, I hadn't really figured out the game yet and was still working on a fledgling community. Got a mission to help someone recover some meds from raiders, went to chat with the raiders and they gave the meds back. But when I picked up the bag, they suddenly attacked and I was stuck in a firefight that wound up getting the quest-giver killed. Oh, and did I mention that the game loves spawning these quests in plague territory? So I'm having a shootout with these guys while at the same time being swarmed by plague zombies, and then the game decides to throw the super-strong juggernaut Curveball, and wouldn't you know it, there's a jugg right down the road that's eager to charge into the fight. Well, so much for that community.

Ok, lessons learned. I start over and get to doing pretty OK with my second community. While I'm still building out that one, the game decides it's a great time for a Black Heart. I ignore it for a while because I'm not ready to deal with it yet, and then the Out for Blood Curveball spawns right next to it. So now we've got an overlapping area of extremely tough, crazy aggressive zombies with super senses, plus an aura that drinks up fuel like an alcoholic at an open bar, and they're constantly sending out Infestations that I have to deal with. I can't drive to the hearts, I can't sneak to them, I can't fight to them - it's basically game over again. That's when I found the Community Editor. A little experimenting with that, and the Black Heart is erased from existence, allowing me to get on with the game.

There are also some game-breaking bugs: So I finish that map and move on to the next one, figure I'll try going for the Builder legacy. I've gotten pretty good at clearing the hearts by now, so I systematically wipe them out and get ready for the endgame. And then... no endgame. Must have played for a couple of hours waiting for the final quest line to show up. Community Editor to the rescue again! I demote my leader, use the CE to bump her back to Hero status so I can re-promote her, and even move to a new base to clear out all the old construction. Finally the quest spawns and I'm able to wrap up the rest pretty quickly.

In the end, I think it's a pretty enjoyable game if you can overlook or work around the problems. But if you're going to play this, definitely get the Community Editor. It'll save you a lot of frustration.