Recent reviews by -Z-

Same great single player game, new graphics. Super annoying that it defaults to Online every single time. I never want to play Online, yet I have to click past two online options to launch single player every time.

Is a graphical upgrade worth that? Not so sure.

The story shows Rockstar is maturing. A little bit, anyway. Hard not to fall for the flawed main character. Single Player is where this shines. But I'll just roam single player forever, and that suits me just fine. The only downside is the attention they give to Online, ignoring adding content to the main game. With no way to play privately, Online is a no-go.

A nearly perfect recreation of a modern table top RPG. The world arises and responds based on your character traits. Wide and varied choices extend from that. And no special combat system rules, in fact combat barely plays a part. "Boss fights" are most often personal and social struggles.

CW: explores trauma, addiction, and a wide variety of "isms" (which you are free to fight or defend) and pervasive existential dread.

It's an excellent adaptation of D&D, and a master class of what you get when even a big AAA game gets developed in Early Access and is committed to player feedback. The studio may have started with their own IP, but they are clearly fans of the BG series and D&D.

It's got strong narrative and compelling, branching choices, it's intelligent, it's mature, it's queer, it's colorful, it's clever, it's forward thinking. If Disco Elysium hadn't already done so much more with story, this would be a game changer. Still, it's a revolution in quality all around for D&D games and other combat focused RPGs.

Tons of QoL polish and a lot of replay value. Not just options and decisions you get from making your own character, but 6 characters with their own stories that you can explore as a friend/ally/rival or playing them as your own character. Plus another character only available as a protagonist option that make for a very different experience than all the rest.

Now, it's still D&D. It still uses the boring success/fail paradigm. Combat dominates character features. That combat can be slow and methodical, especially on higher difficulties. Though with careful choices, some of it can be avoided. And unlike sitting at a table where you have to wait your turn for 20 minutes, you get to play all the characters. Playing co-op with friends is pretty smooth and fast, too. But trad RPGs often work great as video games because all the slow, heavy mechanics get sped up, and this is a pitch perfect adaptation.

It took me about 12 hours to realized this game isn't about every thing, it's about Everything. It's also how long it took me to finish the tutorial (give or take 4 years). This game is massive and small, silly and serious, playful and painful, all at the same time.

It's not about every thing in specific. Elephants (my starting point) and Giraffes play basically the same, as do Skyscrapers and Slice(s) of Bacon. You will not learn much about bacteria or a galaxy, except their relative size and shape (and you can play as both). It's about Everything in total.

This is a philosophical game, about existence, size, comparison, difference, similarity, being human, thinking, meditation, science and existentialism, mental health, meaning and meaninglessness, the human experiment, centered distinctly around ideas and talks from Alan Watts (whose recordings provide the only spoken dialogue). If you want to zone out, or you feel stuck, despairing, too small, the world too big and chaotic, lost; if you want your ego challenged (or are already trying to dismantle it), or play while your'e high on life or something else, this game will throw ideas at you and shake you out of your comfort zone with a gentle hand and a big heart.

Everyone needs to play Everything for at least 13 hours. The world would instantly become a better place.

TL;DR my autistic brain loves it, my ADHD brain hates it. The first *several* hours can feel like lots of busy work with no hint of any Dyson Sphere. But it's an amazing, huge game that's shocking it's still Early Access. I first wrote a thumbs down review after 6 hours. Over a hundred, it's a thumbs up with qualifications.

First the great: this game is beautiful. It probably doesn't need to be, and as you hyperfocus laying down belts or reorganizing a bad factory layout, you won't notice. But then zooming around the planet, the sun will blaze over the horizon and be awe inspiring. Or the beauty of a new planet with frozen lakes or alien vegetation.

After 6 hours, I wrote: "I'm pretty angry and frustrated. And yet, it's interesting enough to pursue. I'm partially writing this up, because I expect by 50 hours, my perspective will have changed."

It's amazing how right I was. Around hour 50-60 I could finally see the path to building the Dyson Sphere. I was familiar with enough of the base resources that every new unlock wasn't an exercise in despair. Since then, the cycle is: sublime satisfaction everything is working, plan next expansion to increase output, discover something broken or out of resources and get distracted fixing it for hours, finally get to build the expansion, feel sublime again, repeat.

I highly recommend playing with infinite resources the first time. The tutorial tells you nothing about optimization. It would be great if they gave you a starter blueprint or three, showing how you can layout belts (even better would be getting rid of belts and just have drones from the start). You will do this poorly, guaranteed. Even Factorio and other automation veterans over build with belts and have trouble once other options become available.

So, play infinite resources. There are enough hurdles and things to figure out that you don't need to chase running out of resources. After 50 - 100 hours, you'll understand so much more about how to lay things out. You can then either start a "real" game if you need more challenge, or rework your early stuff without the additional problem of having burned through half your starting planet's resources.

The game is still much too massive and complex. They have a "blueprint" system, so you can save and share layouts. This is a band-aid.

The biggest problem is you spend the first hours (a few for a veteran, dozens and dozens for first timers) building conveyor belts and smelting ores like it's the 19th century. You also need to build factories for every step. Need processors? That's easily 8 factories, plus mining and smelting some raw materials, plus a chemical plant for specialized materials. Excuse me, I'm a late Class I civilization quickly heading into late Class II if not Class III and I'm working at a level that Queen Victoria would have found old and boring (hint: modern tech isn't even close to Class I and will take millennia to get there)!

Contrasted with this: your robot avatar can make processors and nearly everything else straight from raw materials, with a few exceptions. Why can't I build a factory as good as my robot's internal replicator? The factories are at least 4x the size, and they don't have to walk or fly or do anything else. It's insane how limited technology is in a game explicitly about the magic of future technology. They need to break away from the outdated Factorio model and embrace the far future game concept. New unlocks too often just add more complexity that can take hours to wrangle, instead of feeling closer to "magic" that sufficiently advanced technology should. I often hold off on research, not for lack of resources, just lack of mental stamina.

Another problem: half-assed keybinds. They "allow" keybinds, but for some reason E is restricted from being re-bound (it is hard coded at Inventory?! and closing all menus?!) almost forcing WASD, the lazy-man's controls, and preventing ESDF, the pinnacle of control schemes. The only positive spin is using the KB for movement is easy to ignore. But hitting E instead of I to open my inventory still trips me up (yes, after 100+ hours). I understand they didn't have any keybinding at first, but added it in the first year or two of EA. It's a very bizarre and nonsensical design choice, hopefully they'll fix this before the official release.

There's other smaller issues, like tutorial instructions focusing on "what" to do rather than "why" or "how" you want to do these things. The writing is pretty awful, but it seems like a non-native issue, and in most cases so far, it's clear what they're trying to say. It surely feeds the poor tutorial guidance. The robot that is your avatar can fly over water, walk through most trees and minerals, but can't path find at all and it can't walk through your constructions -- so you can't just click as far as possible. If the robot walks through your built up areas (which is most of the time eventually), it will push against buildings, slowing way down, possibly stopping entirely if the angle is just wrong. When on new planets, there can be massive rock fields, practically invisible at night, and you'll constantly be getting stuck when you're not accidentally digging up rocks you don't want. You have to micromanage the movement around buildings and terrain often (fortunately it can walk through conveyor belts).

The concept is fascinating enough to put up with these issues. With experience,

My original review ended: "Ideally, at 100 hours I'm embarrassed by this review and want to flip the thumb."

At least I was half right. It's definitely taken my interest. It's also made me want to play with infinite resources, or even cheat (but I'm far enough in that the achievement hunting is paying off), or even mod the game so factories actually feel like something from the future. But I wasn't embarrassed by my original review. It's actually a little sad how much of the original frustration of the complexity stays with the game. The specifics ebb and flow, and many early complexity woes give way to greater mid to late game complexity woes.

But in the end it's beautiful. It's impressive to see my skeletal Dyson sphere grow, exciting to maybe -- hopefully if I can solve enough of the cascading problems that pop up and wrangling the scale with my human brain -- build other Dyson spheres in other systems. But it needs a lot of polish, and re-working/re-imagining of systems that I doubt will ever happen, to live up to the far future, post-singularity premise.

They're also going to add combat. I shudder to think about playing this game with all of the complex, annoying problems that distract me from my main goals already, with bad guys I have to fight as well. For that, they really do need to turn down the factory automation and turn up the future tech magic.

Love the art style. I could clear the map fog on planets made of hexagons all day. Gameplay is fairly simple, but has puzzle components that ups the challenge to do the best with expanding and resources. Not your typical real time building game for that reason. The main downside so far is after playing a lot initially, returning to the game a few weeks later, I had forgotten what I was supposed to do and how to do things, and it wasn't easy getting back up to speed.

It's like Solitaire Carcassone. It hardly feels like early access, because the game play is very solid. It's the best kind of early access where there plan from here is mostly quality, stability, content, and optional features. They tackled the important stuff early.

Played on a free weekend, and meh. Maybe if it was under $20. But normally, skip it.

The great: Kamala's character design and acting, top notch. The initial story and using the tutorial to try most of the main Avengers was great. World building in a dark Marvel setting, lots of fun and potential. Only played in a free weekend, so only got 15% progress in the first story after 3-4 hours.

The bad: The style is a boring realistic one, and except for Kamala, every human character is somewhere in the uncanny valley, with Thor being particularly bad. Beards in general looked like gross cotton candy, but for some reason they featured early and often.

The combat is messy and unclear. This is doesn't come close to Marvel Heroes or even Marvel LEGO gameplay. The 3rd person camera is too close to the action, so what's going on can be easily lost as fights get more intense. Basically button mashing with an overwhelming number of combos, positioning, and options that's dramatically different for every single character. A super hero roster of this scale needs to keep the commands simpler and customizable, because there's already a lot to learn with each character you play. Plus it shifts between cinematic quick time events and normal game control without warning, and they don't use the same controls. Makes QTEs more confusing and frustrating than normal, although there was plenty of reaction time usually, so it's not disasterous. But these only happen early on and don't seem to be a major part of extended gameplay. Kind of worse that they front loaded it.

Lots of premium currency, although most of it is cosmetic, there's plenty of boosts and RNG boxes that exploit addictions. It's baffling for what seems to be largely a single-player/co-op game, with arena based multiplayer. If this were an MMO with a persistent setting (and better gameplay) the costumes might be compelling, but RNG/VIP cards are just toxic in any game.

Minor but annoying: the photographer mode ignores keybinds and does not have any way to change it.

The good and ok: The graphics are impressive, despite uncanny models. Cool effects with powers. Engaging story with additional single player campaigns that are mostly free. A pretty good job of feeling heroic. The first two chapers of the first story are very well done, and mostly avoid by focusing on one character and slowly introducing combat (a lot of the early game player is walking sim and stealth platformer exclusively).

It's not for everyone, certainly. If the idea of a space flight sim in a 1:1 recreation of the galaxy sounds cool, read on.

Note: Why the bad reviews? A terrible DLC launch pissed off a lot of people, justifiably. The main game is solid. The last year or so, the dev team seems scattered and pulled back a lot of support and focus. But this game never needed a content treadmill (though it would benefit from more focus and dev work to improve and expand what's there).

I first wrote this with only 40 hours played, so... you could say I've enjoy it.

I heard about the 1:1 scale galaxy and was nearly sold. Except the title, especially "Dangerous" kept me away for years. I heard the horror stories of EVE, ganking and abuse that were par for the course unless you were a member of a gang (sorry, corporation). That's possible here, but only in certain, high traffic areas, even then, it's not like the Barrens in WoW on a PvP server.

First up, you can pop between Open (everyone), Private, and Solo instances any time you want. Need to visit a popular hub with a rep for ganking? Log out and go solo or private. For example, I heard gankers commonly hunt systems outside the safe newbie zone, so I went solo when I left, other than that, I've been in Open. Even in the densely populated "bubble" I rarely see other players, and none who have been hostile.

The game aims for realism, so there's a big learning curve and a lot of deep systems. But it was worse at launch. Now there are some in game training "levels" (they load separately from the main game) to let you practice flying, combat, landing, and other risky endeavors. There's also a lot of guides to answer the more difficult "what to do" questions, although in game missions are good to point in those directions. My main piece of advice is to stick to the newbie systems and experiment with different styles before considering leaving. As you get an idea of what you're drawn to, you can find resources or ask questions in the generally very friendly and helpful community.

A big draw for me is Exploration, and wow does this game deliver. The only thing you can't learn well in the newbie area is deep space exploration. But with over 99% of the galaxy unexplored (99.5% by 2021), you can find systems unseen by any other player, even the developers, once you're ready to leave the dense bubble were the majority of game activity (trade, combat, in game events) takes place. Even within the bubble, I've still found a few planets unmapped by anyone else.

If you love the idea of space travel, don't mind the realistic emptiness and quiet in between the moments of activity (many space truckers and explorers listen to podcasts), and enjoy flight sim gameplay and ready to learn dozens of key commands (or controller commands), you absolutely need to give this a try.