Recent reviews by BinarySplit

Starbound has always tried to balance procedurally-made content with hand-made content, and while they've done great work, it just still doesn't come together well. The problem is that the procedurally-made content quickly becomes tedious and repetitive. The hand-made story line gives you a greater sense of purpose, but it seems like they went to every effort to do anything to avoid making a storyline themselves. The result is a bunch of scenarios that end with either nothing except a bit of worthless loot, or a new quest marker to start it over again in a slightly different place.

If you still want to play Starbound, just know that you won't get a satisfying ending - you'll just stop playing when the endless stream of randomly generated game stops being fun. Otherwise I'd recommend Terraria instead - it's the same gameplay style but most of the content is hand-made and actually gives you a sense of purpose.

Unplayable. At first the game just doesn't start. After 20 minutes of installing and configuring Locale Emulator so that the game thinks it's running on Chinese Windows, it starts, but the game has no text. Dialog boxes are just completely empty.

I'm not the first to have these problems. As I write this this there are 5 discussions in Steam - 4 are people complaining the game won't start, 2 are even in Chinese, so it's probably not just an OS language issue.

Mixed review.

On the positive side, Do Not Feed the Monkeys is a collection of short detective scenarios that are really well done and very engaging. I rarely finish games, let alone replay them, but I'm currently working through a second playthrough of DNFtM.

On the negative side, you have to deal with a mix of gameplay mechanics that will leave you with an adrenaline hangover. You have to constantly be on edge looking for yellow-highlighted clues to click, as they only appear for about a second and often won't reappear for ~10 minutes if you miss them. All the while you have to manage your hunger/sleep/money meters, and try to combine clues to get more clues when you have some downtime. Basically you'll spend the whole game on high alert, trying to make every second count and in a state of hypervigilence trying to make sure you catch the clues in time. Fun, but it quickly takes its toll on your brain and becomes quite unpleasant.

The gameplay seemed really interesting... but it crashes too often to actually enjoy it.

I had 10 enjoyable hours exploring the beautiful world of Tokyo 42 and completing a variety of stealth-focused missions. And then they started to wrap up the story by throwing several increasingly difficult combat missions at you. At the best of times aiming guns is awkward and the camera is mildly annoying, but once you've got the pressure of a firefight, having your gun suddenly start shooting at the sky because a hovercar flew in front of the camera is infuriating. You will die many times because of the terrible camera and terrible aiming.

The first 90% of the game is pretty good, but I'm not willing to waste hours and hours repeating the joyless last few fights until I manage to finish them without taking a hit. It ruins the experience to be denied the ending of the game due to unnecessarily awful controls.

I didn't play this - I watched Wretch Plays' Let's Play and it was so good I felt compelled to buy this game just to leave a good review.

Supposedly Wonderful Future's gameplay is almost entirely expressed as a visual novel. There's a lot of reading, a few hard choices, and a lot of thinking in deeply unusual ways about the ethical and philosophical problems it throws at you. The writing is fantastic, and it's novel and creative in ways that you hardly ever see in modern media. I thought I was relatively experienced in sci-fi storylines, but I've never seen anything like some of the situations you play through in this game.

Overall, I highly recommend Supposedly Wonderful Future. It will expand your mind.

This is a mixed recommendation - I chose thumbs up purely because The Hex is appropriately priced at launch, which is unfortunately rare these days.

The premise is interesting - 6 characters, 6 genres of gameplay (+ 3 more genres across minigames & the hub world). The problem is that you have to put in a lot of effort to get through the game, but for too little reward. Gameplay is continually interrupted by cutscenes. It makes you wonder why they put effort into actually implementing gameplay, because you never get more than 30s without a cutscene showing up and ripping you away from the action.

Throughout the ending I had this constant sense of dread that I was missing the true ending because of how many loose threads hadn't been tied up. In a completely linear 6 hour game that has very little action, the prospect of having to replay it from the beginning is horrifying. No idea what I'm missing. I don't want to sit through all those cutscenes again to find out. Some quality-of-life improvements (e.g. cutscene skipping, and free roaming after the end of the game, so that I can tie up loose ends without having to play the full game from the start) would make the game so much better.

Ultimately, The Hex is a unique experience with good ideas and mediocre execution. I don't regret buying it, but I feel it's not living up to its potential.

I disregarded the other reviews, thinking that they just must not be getting how immersive sims are supposed to work, thinking that it must have some redeeming factors underneath the bugs, thinking that such esteemed developers couldn't have released something as bad as people were saying. I was wrong.

Underworld Ascendant's problems are in the fundamental areas of its design. While it's fun for a few hours experimenting with fire, physics, magic, etc., the overarching objective of the game completely saps you of motivation: You play missions (always either a fetch quest or an assassination) in a small set of levels, while each mission increases one of several numbers that brings you closer to some sort of ending. I don't know what that ending is. I played about 15 missions and wasn't even half-way toward the ending, and there were no indicators of progress other than these numbers increasing. As far as I can see the plot doesn't change, the world doesn't get permanently affected by your actions, anything you do that isn't directly related to completing missions to increase those numbers is pointless.

A good adventure game with a very Blade Runner-esque storyline.

The puzzles were just about the right level of difficulty. I had to use a walkthrough once, but otherwise most things made sense.

While it is a good game and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of adventure games, I'd recommend the Blackwell series and Kathy Rain over Gemini Rue, as they have better character development, and consequently their stories are more interesting.

Wait for a sale. It's one of those games that is unique, highly polished and actually really fun, but it's too short for the price and doesn't seem to have any replayability beyond achievement hunting.