Recent reviews by Big Zei

Millennials ruin everything.

(TLDR at the bottom)

For a supposedly feature-complete game, I ran into so many small nuisances within the four hours I had playing for the first time that I simply cannot offer a recommendation. It's a huge shame because underneath it all is a really good game that desperately needs a round of player feedback to reach full potential. To Pixelia isn't across the finish line yet and people should know what they're getting into.

Overall, and from what I can tell, the game has some serious longevity if you don't mind grinding some slightly tedious gameplay loops to make progress. The game is clearly designed around slowly improving your skills and climbing your way to either fame or fortune (or both depending on your career), building friendships, relationships, family, and even rivalries along the way. I don't mind the grind personally as it adds a sense of reality to a genre that's otherwise saturated with idealised visions of the world. In To Pixelia you will be paying income tax, making rent every week, taking on debt, considering what services you do and do not need to meet your basic human needs, and generally be clutching your in-game wallet tighter than a first-year college student. It's great.

However, and as I said earlier, your overall experience can easily be ruined by any culmination of the minor oversights and bugs that could easily be ironed out if this was given even a small 1-year window of early access development. Aside from the very minor yet frequent grammatical issues, the most egregious of headaches is the painfully slow dialogue system that makes avoiding NPC interaction more preferable. For what it serves, this UI should be snappy and responsive, deliver quick, flavourful animations that add a sense of development with the character. The UI animation of the text tree unfolding is painfully slow and will not register the conversation as 'complete' until it's finished so you can click the next option for the chance of a measly +1–3 relationship points. It takes way too much time to do this a total of 8 or 9 times per person, and since the game clock is paused during this time, you're really only wasting the players' time.

This issue with UI persists in places like the casino where you have to re-enter your bet between every round and UI elements have to complete their slow fade-in animation before they can be interacted with. Overall it just needlessly slows the entire experience down and was my largest source of frustration. As a quick aside, the entire menu UI is a bit cluttered in places and makes use of very light pastel colors that can make distinguishing menus from sub-menus challenging at times and will certainly flashbang you if you're playing in a dark room and unprepared for it like I was. I also have no idea what that investment screen at the bank is attempting to convey, but it fails — What's wrong with a graph? All. Small. Oversights.

I haven't had much time to explore the career paths but two issue I noticed with the starting job as a waiter is that you don't have to take their orders or even show up on time at all. You can simply stand at the chef UI and wait for the order to be delivered to you telepathically and click on whatever dish gets a (1) underneath it. Really trivialised the whole thing, and I suspect similar logic gaps like this will appear in the other plentiful careers. Furthermore, jobs as a whole seem to be instanced minigames that offer no incentive to arriving on time. You get the same payout no matter when in your allotted time window you arrive, so you can literally arrive in the last 10 minutes of a shift and get a full day's pay depending on your performance in the minigame. How very EU-friendly of them.

There's nothing bad about a game releasing in early access when it's developed by a small or solo development team, and for what To Pixelia offers I would say has it more than 90% of other Early Access releases. I love playing and supporting small indie games like this and I will continue to play and probably flesh out this review more in time. To Pixelia offers a fun, casual and addictive experience that I really, really want to enjoy but actually playing it makes me more sour than it should for a genre of game that's meant to be intuitive and enjoyed casually.


- Gameplay loop is solid and enjoyable, if slightly repetitive.
- Plenty of gripes with UI and game logic that can make the experience sometimes more frustrating or disrupt immersion.
- Needs a few more months of development to iron out the minor issues I encountered.
- If you don't mind that or just really want a good life-sim game to sink 100+ hours into, I say go for it. Otherwise wait a few months or probably until the end of the year to get a seamless experience.

About as reliable as the Mcflurry machine

But seriously, about time I updated this review fairly:

PAYDAY 3 would never have lived up to the hype and player expectation weighed on its shoulders by 10 years of development of the previous game. As a result, I cannot review this in a non-biased manner without saying "Just go play PAYDAY 2 instead." Made only crappier by its shift to an online-only model, Payday 3's launch was destined to be a colossal let down by all manners except the enrichment they sprinkled in on the combat mechanics and gunplay. If you want to play Payday just buy Payday 2 and a handful of DLC that will keep you entertained for the years it would take Payday 3 to reach that level — maybe even surpass it.

-[Review pending update as of patch 1.1 which addressed the primary concern of my negative review]-

Words can't put in to measure how disappointed I was to go through the final stretch of exorbitant shopping lists this game threw at me as its final quarter, "beat" the boss; and find out there's literally no ending to the story. The story just falls off, unfinished.

Much with a few tidbits observable on the journey, namely items and mechanics that have no use or aren't explained, I got the impression this was a "rough around the edges" project. Likewise, you can tell where each update was introduced because of the juxtaposing breakages in what was a smoothly flowing story throughout the first half of game time. But what we have here is a 1.0 release of the game that is just flat-out incomplete. What a disappointment.

It's 2021. Any negative stigma attached to this game and Hello Games should long be departed after the 5 years of unbridled love and attention that Hello Games have loaded into every. single. update.

This dedication hasn't gone unnoticed. No Man's Sky has earned a plethora of awards on Steam and across multiple legitimate ceremonies for the commitment to making this game what it is today. I, like many others, felt betrayed for the first year after its release, but little did I know the incredible journey it would take me on, both in its world and the physical. What's here now is a stand-out piece of arcadey-space goodness with tonnes to do and a helpful, friendly and welcoming community on its doorstep; brought about by Hellos Games' nurturing and strive for excellence.

With a friend, or even venturing alone, I recommend you all strap in to your starship and explore what's out in the stars waiting for you; for the experience alone... I cannot recommend it enough.

Make a new one that can perform well on modern systems, remove the insane level of grind for equipment upgrades and charge ~$50 for it. I would love to get back into this but I've missed out on so many updates and the immense level of grinding for fundamental equipment and superior weaponry puts me off within a day of returning to it.