Recent reviews by Cassol

Like other Paradox grand strategy games before it, this is an absolute time sink. Paradox did away with the pointless complexity that plagued its direct predecessor, CK2, and made it a micromanagement hell; the result is a far more enjoyable experience without all the pointless stuff, focusing on the actual core gameplay. It has its annoying bits, and it is better with mods that make it more like what you want, but it's an excellent experience out of the box, and regardless of DLCs, which are not necessary to make the game feel complete.

Lumino City is an oddly cute puzzle point-and-click adventure game that follows a girl called Lumi in search of her grandfather, who... largely seems to be abducted first thing in the game, sort of. It turns out her grandfather is known locally as the Handyman, but, unlike regular handymen, he's a bit of a mad superintelligent engineer who can design stuff like houses that rotate upside down... yeah. Anyway, Lumi has to traverse a place called Lumino City in search of her grandpa, but to do that, she winds up having to solve a bunch of different problems, with only the help of the Handy Manual, a tricks book the Handyman wrote... and, of course, of the player. Those problems are the puzzles that are central to gameplay, and it turns out that Lumi has her grandfather's brains (or perhaps the player does), because she fixes half the city's general brokenness (or perhaps the entire city's general brokenness) in the process. Hints to the solutions, or even the solutions themselves, are provided in that book, provided you can solve simple math problems for their location (or, alternatively, comb through almost 1000 pages manually, though I wouldn't really recommend that approach).

The puzzles vary quite wildly in difficulty; they range from braindead easy all the way to utterly incomprehensible to the point of forcing you to rely on the Handy Manual to even tell which is up, let alone solve them. The point-and-click adventure part can feel a little puzzle-y sometimes, and it is there, in my opinion, that the game shines, not so much through the adventure itself, but through the overall atmosphere. The game has this calm, relaxing, feel-good look-and-feel that makes it more of a trip to niceland than a game in the proper sense, though of course it's still a game with proper mechanics. It's a great game to play in bits and pieces after a hard day's work, if your brain is still functional; if it's not, then maybe during your days off. The puzzles can feel even secondary to the atmosphere (in fact, in my opinion, they are), but the puzzles still need your brain to be functional enough to solve them, so finding the perfect moment to play it is something of a balancing act.

You can't save manually; instead, it seamlessly autosaves at specific points, which is actually quite good, because it crashed on me some two or three times, possibly because I played it on Linux. I personally found the purely mouse-based controls a little annoying, but I guess it's really the only way a game like this can be played, so I decided to deal with it. A particularly annoying aspect is that the conversations go slower than my reading speed and absolutely cannot be sped up in any way, which made me waste a lot of time waiting for people to talk. They really could have taken a leaf from other games and let you speed through the talks when you have already finished reading would just like to move on, as contradicting with the relaxing atmosphere as that can be, or maybe that's just my irritation with slow text speaking. Even so, it's a reasonably short game, taking me about 5.5h from start to finish, though I did admittedly give up and look up some of the more opaque moments online after repeatedly failing to figure out what I was doing wrong. If you already know how everything works and have the puzzle solutions available, you can probably rush through in I guess 3 hours or thereabouts; I doubt it would reach 4. Of course, there's hardly a real upper boundary to how much time it can take to play a puzzle game of all things, but unless you get actually stuck I can't envision a duration of over 8 hours. There aren't different levels of completion, either, only pointless extra dialogues that get tiring extremely quickly due to the general slowness of the conversations and which you end up trying very hard to avoid.

Overall, I found this a very enjoyable game that I could see myself playing again maybe in ten years. The replay value is low, as is the nature of such games, and its full price is expensive for how short and unreplayable it is, but I'd definitely recommend picking it up in a bundle or with a sufficiently good discount if you're into puzzle games, point-and-click adventure games, or relaxing stuff in general. My final grade for it is 8/10, very good.

Repetitive, grindy, boring, goalless, eventually almost entirely luck-based. It took me over 700 hours of play to 100% the game. The last 1% took at least 90% of those hours and was all about luck not going my way.

Ultimately, though, none of that really matters, because you can let it play itself while you're doing something that isn't playing a game. Of my 700+ hours, very few (2? 10? I don't remember) involved any actual human interaction. A game that plays itself isn't even a game.

It might be a cheap game, but it isn't worth playing even for free. It's just a chore, if one that mostly does itself. And to top it all off, it's been abandoned in Early Access. It will be in Early Access forever and will stay trash forever. Hard skip.

I gave this game two hours of my life, and I spent those two hours trying very hard to not hate it. And I failed really badly at that. I don't remember when I had last actually hated a game, but it had been a while. This thing deserves the hate I'm giving it, though.

The interface is clunky and horrible to operate, the gameplay is boring and without any depth (hold the mouse button down for as long as the fight lasts, and each fight lasts a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ eternity), the story is stupid, etc, etc, etc. I could go on, but why even bother. I don't intend to ever give it any more of my time or patience.

It is a tedious piece of junk. I can scarcely believe this thing was once in my wishlist. If you want a game that seems like this one but is good, I suggest you play Torchlight instead; it does everything this calamity of a "game" does and a lot more, except it does it right.

It's not like I don't like driving in real life (which I very much do), but I never thought I'd be in a situation where I'd like driving a truck. And still think I probably wouldn't like to drive one in real life, but damn is doing it in ETS2 a whole lot of fun. The gameplay itself is very solid and a highly polished experience and showering it with praise isn't enough to do it justice. I'm not too hot on the whole business simulation part of the game, so I can't talk much about it; I'm in it for the driving, and the driving is just great.

The bad part is how it really should be "a Small Subset of Europe Truck Simulator" instead, with all the rest of Europe being slowly added via a bunch of DLCs, some of which somehow actually cost more than the game itself. Not providing a way to grab these DLCs in a bundle with a sizable discount is a major minus on my book, and the emphasis on monetizing the game via an endless stream of useless DLCs (paint jobs and the whatnot), again without providing any form of discounted bundling, seems more than a little dodgy.

Overall, the base game is greatly recommended, but the DLCs can be a little up to debate.

The whole game is excruciatingly slow to the point of being unplayable. Another reviewer stated that it plays at 4 fps; it may well be so. This is unforgivable for a game that could well run on a toaster. Controls are unresponsive and dynamic is broken. It is really a pity because this would otherwise be a pretty nice game. I'm fairly sure I could recommend it as a good match-3 game if this was fixed, especially because older games in the series are good. The way this game is now, however, it only triggers frustration.

The game refuses to start. Multiple people report this issue, the GOG version reportedly works, and the Steam version is never fixed. I really want to play this game, like it, and then be able to recommend it, but I can't, because the thing doesn't frigging work. It is a waste of money.

Thanks, Stardock.

This game is addictive. Very addictive. There was this time, during vacations, when I played it for something like 50 hours in 3 days.

Don't buy it. Don't play it. Stay the hell away from it. You still have a life, and a chance to keep it as it is. :P