Recent reviews by Cat®

I like sound, I buy sound.

I like sound, I buy sound.

Most of what's in this expansion pack is pretty good. One of my issues with the original game is that there's never a snork that comes and kicks your ass. This time a snork does show, and he does kick your ass. But make no mistake, this is "another Pacific Drive" not "more Pacific Drive". The new content is entirely gated off from the old, there's a parallel tech tree, parallel resources, etc and that is a massive weakness.

The new content is also about picking up items that induce quirks, and using them to get resources, but in turn the hostility of the zone goes up faster. Which means Ironwood correctly identified that players love quirks, because quirks are a cool mechanic. But also that they haven't realised that players want more quirks, not less.

Really mixed bag for me. It is more of what I wanted the game to be like originally, but also it doesn't feel as polished as the original game. It has all the same strengths and weaknesses, but more severely. For the price it's worth it, and to me it's more the proof that they are willing to work with more dynamic threats, and maybe that is indicative of future PD content, or a new game. A weak recommendation. Soundtrack rocks though.

Having played SR1 I was excited for the sequel, but I am left disappointed.
- There are new slimes, but at the cost of several old slimes being absent.
- Rare resources aren't as rare, but you need way more of them
- You still have an incredibly limited inventory, and expanding it is even more expensive than before
- The first few areas are really well-designed and fun to explore, but since they all have the same resources it's not that fun to explore.
- The resources requirements to craft gear are obscene, they drop in quantities of avg2.5 and you easily need 15 for a single piece of gear.
- There's no new gimmicks to slimes that make ranching them more engaging, corral, garden, and you're done.
- There's no daily missions to do, which makes farming a variety of resources less attractive.
- NPCs ring you up constantly to bother you with their blogs, I was never a fan of them but this certainly didn't encourage me to change my attitude.
- There's no really any big secrets to find around the map that give you a sizeable resource boost, so exploring becomes a rote grind pretty fast.

This game really suffers from the first half feeling really polished and the rest of the game feeling incredibly lacklustre, but opening up an ancient portal to a mystical land should not reward me with the same 3 slimes that are available right outside the base. It might be technologically superior, but it's not a better game than the first. Everything just feels like such an immense chore and the game never really lets up to let you have fun.

I suspect the full release will, like Battle Brothers, become one of my favourite games of all time. This is good stuff.

Gravity Lagoon has something special

Delightful

A paralel game that has no synergy with the pre-existing content. You need progress to do AoD, by the time you have this progress AoD content is no longer valuable to you. It takes a long time, and the good rewards are only at the far end of the game where they don't matter.
Cool idea, but it clearly wasnt thought through.

Hurts to play

The things that make this game would take multiple pages to elaborate on, long story short it is a 4x game that takes inspiration from the greats and removes as many pain points as possible. The AI is a bit weak, but other than that its greatest weakness is that there's not more of it. Absolutely wonderful game.