Recent reviews by LFP Gaming

Cons: #1. No difficulty info. You aren't told ANYTHING regarding what the difference is between easy,normal,hard,etc.
#2. No info on the classes. They don't tell you that only the ranger can use crossbows or that he has 50% more hp than the Diviner, or that only the Diviner is capable of using staves, and you're not given ANY info on the different skills that are exclusive to each class. You literally have to create a new character with each class and go through the intro and then open the skill tree to see what the differences are.
#3. The game often uses the "lock you into an arena and spawn a bunch of monsters ontop of you" trick, which is really cheap and doesn't benefit either the Ranger or the Diviner in playstyles.
#4. The gear in the game has durability, and no way to turn it off.
#5. The mercernary that you can hire blocks you in doorways, which is hella irritating.
#6. Spell casting is rather clunky
#7. No tooltip information on the range of different guns, or different spells. Also no information on the magazine sizes of different guns.
#8. The inventory is tiny
#9. The stash has an issue where you can fill it up to 40+ items but then if you add more items, you can't even scroll down to see the items that are below the UI so you can't remove those items as a result before removing the items above it.
#10. Merchants have a tiny amount of gold before they can't buy any more of your items
#11. Music is incredibly forgettable
#12. No 'confine mouse cursor to active window' toggle
#13. The dungeon generation leaves a lot to be desired
#14. You can't heal your mercernary
#15. You can't give your mercernary any items or gear
#16. The tutorial is very lacking in info
#17. The game is for sale in countries that commit crimes against humanity, like Izrael and Ruzzia.

There's better boomer shooters out there for $20. This game isn't terrible, but it's not good either. The devs could vastly improve the game by increasing the skill tree by at least 300% and getting rid of the terrible skills/passives, and increasing the inventory by at least 300% and making durability optional and allowing you to heal your mercernary. If you are looking the best 'boomer shooter' ever made, then look no further than ShadowWarrior2 for $30... Second Sun needs to be improved a fair bit before I can even recommend it for $20.

my first impressions review: https://youtu.be/pjOrxXJgWmc

The devs claim that the game has "VERY light p2w" but that's just not true. If you spend just like $10 on the game at the start, you'll be easily 300% more powerful than a non-p2w character... that's not exactly 'light'.

The devs also implemented a bunch of predatory FOMO tactics, such as timers on discounts and a despicable mechanic where a lootbox will drop from random enemies once in a while, and then you only have 2 options: "Pay between $1-$10 to open the lootbox" or "Destroy the lootbox". This is highly predatory and the fact that some lootboxes cost $10 to open, is insane... once again, the devs' "VERY light p2w" lie is laughable.

You also have to pay for storage. You get 4slots when you pay $1, then 4more after you pay $10, and then 4more slots after you pay $30. So it costs $41 to get just 12 storage slots, which is absolutely bonkers.

You also can't open the Map anytime you want. I've pressed 'M' many times, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

I've spent literally tens-of-thousands of dollars on f2p games that deserve it over the years, but this game won't be seeing a single red cent from me, on principal alone.

Here's a 21minute video where I go into the P2W mechanics of the game: https://youtu.be/BhZElo7N4Bs

-Food & plants spoil and there's nothing you can do about it. No building stops spoilage, and there's no setting to turn it off.
-Immigration and birthing are both very very slow. After 12hours of gameplay at mostly 3x speed, I only have 170population, so that's barely 15population per hour of gameplay at 3x speed. It makes the game feel incredibly slow and boring.
-Crops/farms/fields are constantly needing to be micro-managed and are constantly plagued and pillaged by animals too. It's a huge pain that you can't just build a farm and forget about it like you can do is 99% of other city-builders.
-The working area size of forager camps is way way too small. I find myself having to constantly reposition the work area on all my forager camps individually each season, just to grab everything in the surrounding area. Once again, you can't just build it and forget about it like you can in other city-builders.
-Military units cost FAR too much upkeep.
-You can't garrison your military units into any garrisonable building... it has to be their specifically assigned one, else you can't garrison.
-A large building like a barracks doesn't have an upkeep cost, but a wooden watchtower does. How does that make sense?

Honestly I wanted to like the game, but I just can't enjoy a game like this if I'm constantly having to battle against foodloss, which is a gigantic shackle around your leg in the game. If that one single mechanic was able to be turned off, then I may have been able to give this game a tentative recommendation, but without it, I simply can't. The 'city builder' genre is simply too stacked with fantastic games to waste any more time on this game.

Pros: #1. I honestly can't think of anything... I guess the intro cinematic is cool?

Cons: #1. No 'zoom-in killcam' like you get in many other TRPGs
#2. The art in the game, including the weapons, heroes, items, etc. all look like they were generated by GI. I'm not saying that they were, but just that it looks like that same low-quality and generic style of 'art'.
#3. You can't create a custom hero at all. You are forced to select from pre-created heroes
#4. You can't see your own inventory or your own items.
#5. The tutorial is terribad, and it needs to be in-game instead of a stand-alone thing
#6. There's MANY missing tooltips throughout the game, such as zero information regarding the differences between easy/normal/hard, and they don't even show you the damage/range/etc. on some of the guns.
#7. Many of the missions/briefings don't have voice acting
#8. The game is for sale in countries that commit crimes against humanity, like Izrael and Ruzzia.

Summary: My opinions on the game, is based on the media-preview that I played a few days ago. The game could/will certainly be improved in the future, but I always base my reviews and opinion on what the game currently is, and not on what it could be in the future. I would seriously rather get XCOM, Wasteland3, Midnight Suns, etc. on a slight discount or you could honestly even think about something like Baldur's Gate3 or Divinity Original Sin2 for around $40 on a discount, which would be far, far better than MENACE right now. I will check out MENACE at some point in the future and then update my review accordingly as I always do with EA games, but honestly this is a rough EA game right now which doesn't offer any of the features and quality and content that the other games above do, and it's charging $20 too much right now.

Here's about 5hrs of gameplay that I streamed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h0AOxWId0M

legit one of the worst games i've played in recent memory. no tooltips anywhere. no tutorial. ship controls are terribru. it takes over 2minutes just to jump to a new sector and you often have to jump 10+ times to get to a quest location, so that's 20minutes of your life gone, just from loading. game starts up at 4k rez with uncapped framerate, which immediately maxes your PC out in the main menu (New World says hello).

Without spoiling anything, I'll just say it's a fine short-story game (finished in 45mins).

There are games you could get for $5 that give you hundreds of hours of playtime, like Brotato, Binding of Isaac, Vampire Survivors, etc. but this game can give you something that those games can't.

I won't say that it can give you a 'life lesson' or anything meaningful like that, because it didn't do anything like that for me, but what it did do, is illicit a bit of emotion, and offer a moment of self reflection.

I played through the entire game, and summarize my opinion at 1:25:16 without spoilers (obviously the parts/gameplay before that timestamp does contain spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOuakSeayyY

Pros: #1. The game runs very well and it looks very pretty. The graphics and the performance of the game is the most impressive thing about the game (most Unreal5 games run like dogwater, but not this one).
#2. The world is very big and it's truly open-world after you complete the tutorial. I'd have to explore more of the world to say for certain, but this world could be as big as Satisfactory's.
#3. There's enough content in the game right now to keep you going for 40hours+ which for $20 already is good (that's IF you can make peace with the 19 issues I highlight below)

Cons: #1. Zero game customization options. Unlike in other games like Enshrouded, Grounded, etc. where you can change your world's settings, in this game you can't change anything. So you can't change/remove hunger, loot drop on death, stamina drain, day/night cycle times, etc. and you also can't customize the rate at which you gain experience/resources/credits/etc. and you can't change the difficulty of the bugs/combat either. I would honestly like to increase the amount of bugs on the planet, but you can't even do that.
#2. The building mechanic is somewhat broken right now. There's several bugs which simply deletes your rails when you connect two buildings and you often times can't place two buildings next to each other because you get a 'building collision' error, yet the buildings clearly aren't colliding. These bugs makes building (which is a huge part of the game) a chore instead of a joy like it is in better games like Satisfactory or Techtonica.
#3. The game doesn't have crafting-from-storage. All of these types of games, like Planet Crafter, Enshrouded, Grounded, Satisfactory, etc. have crafting-from-storage because without it, you are going to waste literally hours of your life just searching through your storage boxes to find that one specific thing you're looking for, and then crafting the item, and then putting the item back. It's frankly shocking that this game doesn't have crafting-from-storage.
#4. Resources are not actually stored or held on your conveyor belts, so unlike in Satisfactory or any of the other games that I've ever played that use conveyor belts, in this game if you have a looooong conveyor belt which is 3minutes of rail-time away from your base, and you have it connected to a factory... when the factory needs more resources, it then requests some more from the origin, but it takes 3minutes to travel from the ore-miner building, so your factory won't start producing any items for 3mintes... and this cycle will repeat ad-nausium and continue to waste efficiency, 3minutes at a time. This is giga-inefficient and wouldn't be a problem if the conveyor belts were populated with resources like in any other conveyor-belt game.
#5. The game has no 'store similar' or 'transfer only resources' buttons
#6. You can't 'ctrl-click' or 'shift-click' an item to transfer it between your inventory & the storage. EDIT: The devs informed me that you actually have to 'ctrl-double-click' to transfer stacks, which is weird, but OK. No way for the player to figure that out on their own, but atleast it can be done.
#7. The inventory storage mechanic is really bad, because you can fill up your entire inventory, by just carrying 24 single items. Instead of using a far superior inventory system that is 'weight-based' or 'quantity-based', this game uses the terrible system where you can fill your carrying capacity to 100% by simply carrying 24 different single items, so 1leaf,1ore,1bottle,1bullet,1medkit,1seed,etc. will fill up your entire inventory and force you to go back to your base to store the items. This is a terrible inventory mechanic.
#8. It's pretty easy to get stuck in the environment when trying to climb over rocks or even climbing over your own buildings, which means you have to kill yourself to get unstuck which means your inventory gets dropped on the ground. I've gotten stuck several times in my livestreams when just climbing over/through my buildings in my base.
#9. The tutorial is rather bad, in that it misses several very important things that the player should know about, like the fact that you have to research new schematics before you can craft them in your factories, and the tutorial doesn't even tell you anything about the planet's (very important) day-night cycle and doesn't even tell you some very basic things like the fact that you can double-jump, ground-slide, rename boxes or that you can reload your harvester to vent the heat from it.
#10. You can't press & hold the interaction button, to repeatedly loot stuff like you can in other games like Satisfactory for instance. This means you'll be pressing E several thousand times during your gameplay.
#11. There's only 4 guns (pistol, shotgun, AR & LMG). I'd like to see a rocket launcher, sniper and at least one lazer-type weapon added. The game also doesn't have melee attacking at all, so you can't even punch the bugs with your fist, so a bladed weapon of some kind would be great (maybe even a hammer if you wanna get juicy?).
#12. No screen resolution options, unless you play on exclusive-fullscreen (like who even plays on that?!)
#13. You can't set the time increment at which auto-saves occur. It is 15mins by default and you can't change it.
#14. The game only has just 3 auto-save slots, which isn't nearly enough
#15. The game uses terms like "class" or "profession" or "specialization" when selecting your character at the start of the game, but it's all smoke-and-mirrors... the game has no classes and every character is exactly the same, just with a different voice. Maybe it's just the RPG player in me, but when I see these words, then I expect them to mean something and not just be fluff.
#16. No dual-keybindings
#17. You have to right-click then select "use" to use item, you can't just double-click to use it.
#18. Enemies get stuck in terrain pretty often and the ranged poison spitters will continue to spit poison at you even when they are inside a wall, which results in them being able to attack you, but you can't attack back.
#19. You can't stack resources in a storage container, you have to take the resource stack out, then stack it, then place it back into the container. It's absolute insanity.

Summary: I'm 19hrs into the game and still working through it, but right now I can say the game is not enjoyable. There are too many issues and too few QoL features to make your gameplay less painful. The amount of time you waste on inventory management due to the missing QoL features is crazy. I just want to play the game and explore the world; I don't want to stare at an inventory screen whilst moving stacks of resources one-by-one into my 15 different storage containers. Perhaps after a few months more of development time, the devs will have added a few of the most crucial QoL features I've mentioned above, but right now, I would much rather play some of the better games in this genre out there instead, like Techtonica, Planet Crafter, Astroneer or modded Satisfactory, whilst the devs put this bun back into the oven. I'll check the game out again in a few months.

Here's some gameplay where I'm about 8hrs into the game: https://www.youtube.com/video/TMnL0-UKpTE
I do indie game reviews on YT and Steam. You can support me if you want to see more in-depth reviews like this, my links are on YT.

The game used to cost $40, but now it uses a P2W model. Absolute scum move.

I did a video review of the game back when it cost $40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pm6XI5SC8c

Spoiler: It wasn't a good game back when you could outright buy it for $40, and now that it is stuffed with P2W trash, it is even worse. Avoid this developer.

Good game so far. It is very much like Len's Island, which is a fantastic game, but this game doesn't have a good skill system or character progression like Len's Island has. There's also a few bugs in the game right now like the fact that floors aren't hidden or fade away when you are under them, which means you can't build multi-story buildings at all, and the game also has missing QoL features like disabling the exp loss on death, and a 'stash similar' button like Grounded has for all chests would be great too. It's also really illogical that you can't use a Workbench when it's raining, and when your character is wet then they have reduced armor(?). The 'tutorial' (if you can even call it that) of the game also is massively lacking. But overall it's a game that I can recommend right now for $20 and I look forward to what this developer can deliver in the future, but until this game gets more polish and content and an actual RPG character progression system, I'm afraid that Len's Island is just far superior for just $5 more.

My first impressions review: https://youtu.be/3EG9ecUUask

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