Recent reviews by SpacedMonkey

Subnautica is an atmospheric survival crafting game with an interesting premise. The game starts with you in an escape pod as it is ejected from a space ship and hurtles towards an alien water world. With help from an advanced tablet PDA, you must gather the resources to survive this unearthly environment until you can find a way to escape.

You are encouraged to explore, not just with interesting and varied biomes which feel, for the most part, like real environments full of alien flora and fauna, but with occasional radio messages from other survivors, and the main game mechanic of gathering resources to make devices and vehicles which make exploration easier, which reveals more resources, and so on. It helps that dying, which you will do, is only a minor setback, taking some resources from your inventory and putting you back to a safe habitat.

Gradually, via text and audio notes left behind, you uncover story elements that reveal the lives and fates of previous inhabitants, ultimately leading to your way off the planet. Although the early game leads you to some of these, they are mostly discovered out of order, so you have the fun of discovering and piecing the stories together yourself.

I love this game. You get a real feeling of exploring an alien world and revealing its intriguing history. It strikes a good balance between leading you through the mechanics to the story and letting you unearth the clues to work out what to do next. That said, I wish it had been a little clearer that you need to go deeper, literally, to progress. It might be because I didn't realise this, and spent too long in the middle portion of the game, that left the ending feeling a little rushed.

This game really shines in VR, where you get an incredible sense of scale and the idea of wearing scuba gear fits really well with wearing the headset. It's a shame it uses a normal controller rather than the VR ones.

At its core, This War of Mine, is a 2D side-on crafting-survival game. The bleak setting is a civil war in a fictional eastern european country, where you must survive as a small group of civilans (two to four) living in a bombed out house.

Gameplay has 2 phases; each day you build up your home, crafting tools and equipment, and deal with occassional vistors wanting help or offering trade. At night you scavenge for resources in various war-torn locations, where you can encounter various people, mostly harmless nobodies, some traders, and some hostile.

It's at night when most of the action happens, you could be shot at by unseen snipers, get into a fight with soldiers or thugs, or steal from other survivors if you get desperate enough. As usual, combat can lead to injuries that need treating. Not so usual is the depression that can occur if you steal from innocent survivors, that will also need treating. At the end of each night you return to find discover whether your friends were injured during a robbery or slept peacefully.

The atmosphere is already depressing and gets even worse when things start going wrong. Your people can starve, die from sickness or injury, commit suicide, or run off in the middle of the night.

If you let it, this game can really draw you into the story unfolding for your survivors, feeling all the ups and downs they go through. The recent story additions play on this, giving you more narrative beats and difficult decisions, in what feels like a more tailored experience. I found The Last Broadcast story particularly moving and look forward to playing it again.

This felt a bit expensive for DLC but I am glad I spent the money. It adds more narrative elements, more gameplay elements, more 'vanity' elements (I'm spending far too long on Mission Photos), a wider variety of missions, and the performance has been improved!

There are some bugs, I managed to get into a state in the tutorial where I couldn't move and therefore had to restart the game.

If you like the new XCOMs in any way then this is a must buy.

Firaxis: To win my undying love please make a Stargate SG-1 game like this.

A damn fine game

This game is awesome. It's like Turrican and R-Type had a pixel baby!

Have you ever run up behind 3 uruk, slit the throat of the first, taken the second down with an arrow to the head, then drained the third all before they had time to react? I just did and it was every bit as satisfying as it sounds.

quite simply, fun

The wildlife in this game is a nice touch. I particularly like the frogs :)