Recent reviews by Zedrin

good and chill

Final Fantasy 9? More like Final Fantasy 10/10

I never played the original, but as far as I can tell this is a solid port. The story itself is great with some entertaining and likable characters. The remaster features a quick save option to help mitigate the cheap or unfair moments, as well as a variety of speed controls (including the ability to just disable encounters).

For the most part, there's not a lot of moment-to-moment strategy in a fight: the ATB system means you have to act quickly to decide what action you want a character to take, as while it's still turn-based combat, the turns come up in real time. This sometimes leads to annoying situations where you queue up a move only for the enemy to immediately use an action that invalidates it, or you'll get interrupted with a CC ability in the middle of selecting an action. Some fights are also more meant to be solved via equipment selection rather than in-game actions, which is frustrating if you're going in blind and is more a product of a different era of gaming.

Despite those gripes, the game isn't pointlessly hard, and while I had been hoping for more tactics involving abilities combo-ing off of one another, the strategies around what equipment to give characters and how to assemble a party for coverage were still very satisfying and scratched the turn-based itch I had.

Fantastic on all fronts.
The tactical, puzzle-like gameplay is very well understood by the developer, and the levels and objectives can get to be very challenging while still having a multitude of paths to success.

The writing is also amazing; it has the perfect balance of wit and humor with some very serious and fascinating worldbuilding and plot threads.

One of the best values for me this past year.

this game f***ing rules

The game desperately needs a test branch.

Somehow follows everything that made the first Hades good while also deviating from the original formula just enough to feel distinct from it.

Supergiant Games don't miss

I finally sprung for this while it was on sale and holy cow I've been having so much fun.

Within a sci fi sandbox game, I love the prospect of exploring and then getting rewards for it, and that's a huge part of this game. For the most part it's mainly just cataloging the type of life something is or what its material composition is, which is a bit simple, but it works.

The core progression path for basically everything is based on modules. This means gradually outfitting your ship, multitool, exosuit, and later your exocraft and freighter with new equipment or boosts to existing pieces as you explore the universe and gather materials or make connections and learn how to communicate with other alien races.

Beyond exploring, scanning and shooting, there's a ton of subsystems in the game, and you can choose which ones you engage with. You're not forced to use a system you don't like. Some include settlement management, outpost construction, fishing, and fleet/frigate management and expeditions.

The weirdness you can discover is also fantastic. I've found planets where some animals look like tumbleweeds made of bone or are literal floating balls of energy, the entire environment appears in black and white, where giant worms plow through the ground, etc.

I almost wish I had picked this game up sooner; I haven't even gotten to the new corvette customization system yet and I've been having a blast.

I'm kinda finishing this game out of sunk cost fallacy atm. it's not a terrible game, but it's also a bit hard to recommend. I could see it being better as a low-stress co-op game, but it plays more like an idle game than a survival game.

The unique aspect of this game is the concept of terraforming: introducing life to a planet that was previously a barren wasteland. It's kinda cool to see rain fall, ice melt, and eventually plants and animals emerge.

The problems are more just a host of small inconveniences:
Most of the core gameplay is continually replacing older machines with newer ones that massively dwarf the previous ones' efficiency. These are all to raise certain statistics, like heat, biomass, pressure, oxygen, etc., all which raises your terraforming index and unlocks more machines and research. Ultimately, this plays out more like an idle game than a survival game.

The survival aspects are managed purely through meters: oxygen, water, and food. There's never any genuine threats, and the most dangerous encounter you'll have is you getting lost in the wreckage of a ship with a full inventory while running low on water or oxygen. It's not exactly the most creative way to handle things, and they're more token survival elements that more serve to nag and annoy you rather than provide a level of depth.

The game's physics are all over the place: your rover will slide around and flip over at the slightest bump.

End game expects you to raid a lot of wrecks that are procedurally generated via a portal generator. Doing so will really make you feel the worst pains in the game: inventory management. Even with a fully upgraded backpack, it won't feel like enough space, as wrecks are large and have a LOT of chests in them full of both good items and useless scrap. What's also odd is dropped items can obstruct your movement--so that 56th piece of iron you're trying to get rid of is now an obstacle.

The stronger gameplay aspects involve actually collecting a variety of animal species via both discovery and genetic manipulation (the categories being butterflies, frogs, fish, and mammals). That last one is somewhat more interesting as you get to select multiple aspects of a genome to build custom creatures.

You don't get to interact with them much, and if you take their DNA tube out of their shelter they'll reset to infancy, but seeing what you get visually is kinda neat. All of these options generate biomass over time of their corresponding category, but unfortunately it's mainly just another idle meter that you're progressing.

There was also an attempt at a story, told entirely through logs. Its progression is a bit weird; I've been sitting with all the objective components acquired for the past 10 hours in game, but I can't do anything with these components until the game says I'm ready to beat it.

Tl;dr, this is less a survivalcraft game and more an idle game, which isn't automatically a bad thing, but it's not the most active experience.

Expedition 33 is a tragic story with some fantastic writing and character moments. Characters are witty, passionate, and human. The visuals and UI are also absolutely stunning, with some amazing, painterly art direction, that admittedly can be a bit intense on your system at times, but it's still better optimized than many visually similar competitors (which unfortunately isn't a high bar, but credit where it's due). Gameplay wise, the parry and dodge system is satisfying, and ties into the AP system with how you use abilities, creating a nice mix and flow of strategy vs skill.

The only major issues I had came at end game, where the equipment and skill system (pictos and lumina) starts to get cumbersome--moving gear around to optimize your lumina points is a very tedious hassle when you have a high number of points. Definable sets would've been appreciated to rapidly equip batches of lumina all at once.

Additionally, leveling is a bit obfuscated, as no fights have indicators of their level, so you have no idea if something will be tough, feasible, impossible, or a cakewalk; you have to try and retry on fights til you find a place you can level. (As a recommendation, do the final boss at around level 60-70. You can do the additional content after that point, though if you want to experience other endings, be sure to reload your old save first. One-shotting the final boss skips some of the dialog and reduces its overall impact.)

When I played there was also an issue with dropped dodge/parry inputs on Mouse and Keyboard, so a controller was necessary for me. Recent patches may have addressed this, but be prepared to go at it with a controller.

All said: it's really damn good. If you wishlisted this, it is worth it even at full price, and is absolutely worth it if there's even the slightest sale.