Recent reviews by Thykka

An exceptionally fun co-op extraction shooter, probably GOTY 2024.

But there's a catch. Two actually:

- Servers are absolutely swamped right now. It might take well over 30 minutes to be able to log in. Seems to have been mostly fixed.

- The game's 3rd party anticheat (nProtect GameGuard), is causing lots of false positives and various kinds of game-breaking problems for many players.

2026 Update: CTDs every 3-30 minutes, even with no mods installed, fresh graphics drivers & settings. Unplayable right now.

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This is a difficult one to review, largely *because* it's a Bethesda game, and there are a some really good Bethesda games to compare it to.

If you're the type of player who expects the game to guide the player through, you'll be disappointed. The scripted storylines are quite short and somewhat uninspired. Dialogue options are weird, there's very little nuance and some conversation choices are written for a total doofus character. I wouldn't know who'd want to choose those, except when the only alternatives are playing a naive Good Guy™️ or a total psychopath. All in all, there's not much moral gray area available, which makes RP a bit boring.

I liked the Ruyjin industries storyline, with the corporate espionage stealth stuff. The main quest has a pretty neat idea, that ties the game mechanics together with what is happening within the game. It's nothing groundbreaking or new, but I liked it nevertheless. It gives a strong incentive for beelining NG+, but more on that later.

Talking to random people, doing side quests and exploring aimlessly is kinda fun. It's not as good as with Skyrim, but it's decent. Bethesda didn't solve the problem of procedural generation though; eventually you'll start seeing stuff you've seen before. And when you do come across something you've seen before, it really is identical to what you saw earlier, down to the exact locations of loot and the loot itself. It seems like a no-brainer to at least randomize the loot for different instances. That said, it took many hours of gameplay before such deja-vus started appearing.

Unlike with FO4, base building has an actual purpose; production lines. I was stoked to learn about this mechanic, but the execution isn't as fun as the idea. It takes a long time to set up even a simple production line. Planning production lines is awful due to the star map UI (no search feature, star system names aren't visible, planets can only be seen by zooming into a star system, etc.) and finding decent planets with a few the resources you need just isn't fun. There are lots of limitations regarding base building, which doesn't encourage building outposts either. I wanted to like this, but the execution falls short in too many ways.

The skill system seems annoying in the beginning. You're locked out of key skills, and picking the wrong ones can hinder progress quite a lot. RP-wise this isn't great either, because the initial skills don't match well with character backgrounds. The system starts making more sense with New Game+, which brings it's own problem: The plot and the skill system pushes towards NG+, but the tediousness of outpost building makes NG+ very costly. Apparently, you're supposed to NG+ around six times to *really* finish the game. I avoided spending any time on building or ships on my first playthrough because of this, and now I don't want to NG+ again because I'd lose my outposts. Would be cool if I could at least recover them somehow.

Ship building sounds cool on paper, but it's a bit lackluster. Again there are severe limitations that force you to build single purpose ships. In effect, it feels more like tuning pre-made ships, rather than building something with personality from scratch. Also, NG+ gives you a very good ship which can't be customized the way other ships can.

The economy is really weird. You can consistently make big money just by selling the weapons of your fallen enemies, yet capturing and selling ships gives you a lousy fraction of the cash you make from selling guns. The in-game explanation is "registration fees", which is a whopping 85% of a ship's value, making piracy a waste of time.

Combat in low gravity has it's moments, but the enemy AI constantly reminds the player of how bad it is. Enemies don't really work together, they freeze up in weird situations and have very large health pools, which often makes guns feel like pea shooters. There are mods that help with these aspects though.

Space combat can be really difficult at times. So much so, that it's usually best to avoid random encounters, unless you're actively looking for a fight. Enemy ships always seem to have better maneuverability than the player.

Exploration is one of the stronger suites of this game. To survey a planet, you're supposed to find and scan all minerals, plants and animals, as well as the special features of the planet. This is similar to exploration in No Man's Sky, but there are less unique plants and animals, and so you have to find multiples of each to complete the survey. Once you do, you get a survey data item which can be sold for cash. It doesn't sound super interesting, but I think I've willingly spent around 50% of my entire play time on this alone.

The graphics are not horrendous, given the game still runs on Bethesda's ancient Creation Engine. Okay, they claim it's actually CE2, but I'm pretty sure they just copied over large portions of CE1's codebase, due to the many familiar oddities and quirks. Like, why do merchants need an invisible chest to be able to sell stuff? Still, the engine allows filling a room with fully simulated potatos, which is important for me.

Historically, Bethesda's games were always saved by the modding scene. I really hope the same will happen with Starfield once Bethesda releases the content creation kit. Right now there are too few interesting mods available. That said, I strongly recommend StarUI and the various 60fps UI mods, because 30fps in 2023 is unacceptable, and because the default inventory UI is a giant chore to deal with.

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It's hard to decide whether I'd recommend this game or not. On one hand I know it won't appeal to everyone, and that there are serious shortcomings I'm not expecting Bethesda to ever fix. On the other hand the game has it's moments and I've managed to spend 140 hours on it - on par with BG3, NMS and DX:HR. So for now my recommendation is to wait for creation kit and the mods that will follow. Also, if you're going to buy the game, waiting for a sale would probably be the smart thing to do. At the time of writing, the game has been on -30% sale twice.

It's a bit like RimWorld, but you become a martial artist on a post-apocalyptic moon. In RimWorld, thriving is easy. In Kenshi, you're barely surviving. Every encounter might be the death of you, until you get beat up enough to withstand the raiders and the slavers and the bigots of the desert. Honest work doesn't pay, so it's very realistic.

The graphics look a bit dated. Despite this, the game has it's moments. The desert feels vast and unwelcoming.

Despite the simplicity of the controls, the game seems to have a lot of depth, and makes for good stories. Like this one time I tried to carry a known felon into jail, but ended up accidentally attacking some allies who beat me up, and as I was laying there unconscious, a few slavemongers walked by, decided to cuff me and carry me to the other side of the map. Luckily, the slavers were attacked by hungry bandits, and I managed to escape while they were distracted. Made my way to the nearest town, and laid low until my hair grew back (don't want to look like a slave). Then I found a guy selling bonedog puppies. Bought one. Immediately got attacked by a pack of wild bonedogs, who mutilated my puppy. Did my best to carry the pup into a town so I could heal it, but 50m from the gates another bandit group attacked me and killed the puppy. I was devastated.

10/10 will play again.

Game was great before Epic, and now it's full of bugs to the point of unplayability. Kinda bummed I paid for this game.

This one looked promising in 2014, and it has become one of my top 5 favorite games since. Recently passed the 1000 hour line, so I figured it is time to review it.

You might like SE if you like:

- Building vehicles, bases, robots, logistics systems and stuff
- Learning through exploration and mistakes
- Trying to escape gravity wells
- Mining asteroids
- Being a space pirate
- Subscribing to 600 mods, then wondering why it loads so slow
- Any of the above with friends

It's a very cool conveyor belt puzzle game!

Somewhat like Factorio, but easier to learn, I'd believe. There are no enemies and resources are endless, so the player can progress at their own pace. If you're into puzzle/sandbox games, I'd very much recommend it. Under 5€ seems less than it's worth right now.

I originally bought this on itch, after trying out the browser demo version. My save has 14 hours of playtime in addition to what Steam shows.

Wow.

6/5 everything!

Much recommend

This game is worth it just for the awesome ASCII graphics, but the game itself doesn't disappoint either.

It works well with macOS, as long as you install it via PlayOnMac. (If you're wondering about my low play time, I'm not running steam in PlayOnMac, so hours haven't gotten clocked..)

EDIT: I've heard there have been issues getting this to run on macOS Catalina, not sure if there's a workaround yet. Still works fine on Mojave!

I have no idea how to build this car, but I've been totally content just drinking Koskenkorva vodka and shouting profanities in finnish while trying to warm up the sauna. The atmosphere in this game is spot-on.

New features are nice, but ever tried quality control?

Frequent desync issues in multiplayer
Corvette building utterly broken in multiplayer sessions
Clipping into terrain/structures occurs frequently
Items get erased by various inventory related bugs
Invisible mystery collision boxes prevent movement and/or building
List goes on.

And even if the bugs didn't kill enjoyment, the gameplay remains lackluster. The systems don't play together, and there's no real goal or purpose to anything.