Recent reviews by hypesystem

it gud

Dead Island: Epidemic is a promising game with a fun gameplay. It is easily accessible and feels and handles well. Wait times for cooperative play are decent in popular hours.

The game has ingame purchases, but definitely does not feel like a pay-to-win game. Everything is unlockable (at the moment quite easily, but that might be a result of the early access) through normal play. And in any case the game, so far, has only co-op (not versus) modes, which means that paid users really have no advantages over non-paying users, other than being able to help them more.

It has been hinted, however, that they might add versus modes later, at which point it would be prudent to reevaluate whether the game is pay-to-win or not.

Binary Domain wants you to talk to your computer. That's a great idea. Except it doesn't work if you have any accent other than very plain American. It wants you to yell out commands to your team, which is a really cool idea, but which doesn't really work.

I only played the game very briefly but was quickly stuck because my voice commands were not recognized. In addition some things were a bit wonky: shooting a team mate reduces their level of trust in you, but your team mate will continuously run in front of where you are shooting; shooting droids in the head supposedly turn them into "mindless bots" who don't know their friends from enemies---but in reality it just makes them join your team until they are killed (easy to abuse, not nearly as chaotic as implied).

Other than that, the game is just plain generic. There might be more stuff later on, but I never made it that far: it's a pretty boring shooter with mediocre mechanics that tries something new (and unfortunately fails).

I was faced with this game, The Settlers Online, when I was popping by Steam to pass some time. I thought, hey, I liked the Settlers back in the day, why not give this a try. Sure, it's an "online" game, and might be simple for the times, but I liked the old-school Settlers 2, so this can't be too bad... can it?

The game starts out with a simple tutorial, getting you through the basics. Or so it seems. I still haven't made it out of this tutorial after playing for an hour, and it is basically dictating my every move. Not much for open-world civilization-building. The tutorial basically holds your hand for the entire time, and actually punishes you for thinking individually. I started building more buildings than it required, and suddenly couldn't complete the next steps of the tutorial. The tutorial steps are required for advancing levels, and levels are required for building more buildings. I was stuck. This reminds me of public school teachings, which are often more focussed on regurgitating facts than actual exploration, learning, and fun.

In addition to being an inherently fun-spoiling "read-and-repeat" experience the game is generally lacking in quality. Settlers 2 had a more convincing atmosphere, even now, 19 years after its creation. This game looks and feels like a very bad browser game with unconvincing animation; roads that "do not improve" (their wording, leaving out the subject of the sentence); mediocre graphics; unconvincing copy; etc.

One example of unconvincing copy is this: a quest describes "Bandit camps" as such:

Originally posted by Schmettlers Online:

These are divided into two different types:
1. Leader camp [...]
2. Regular enemy camp.
3. Contrary to leader camps [...]
4. [... you get the gist]

In addition, the quests regularly fail to notice that prerequisites have been fulfilled. For example, I had to restart the game to unlock the quests for level 4 (because it hadn't noticed that I had reached said level), and upon reaching level 7 was completely stuck. Restarts didn't help it unlock the next quests, for which I had already fulfilled the prerequisites. With no way of advancing, I was, again, stuck. This time for good.

I spent around an hour playing this game, thinking, "maybe soon it will let me out of the tutorial, and, you know, actually play." It didn't. Don't play this game. It is a waste of time. It is hardly a game.

At least the "quit" button has an instant effect.