Recent reviews by Allen

I loved the early access version, but the 1.0 release (and updates after it) have not fixed performance whatsoever, in fact I think it might have actually made it worse.

It's not stressing the CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 9900x) or the GPU (RX 9070 XT OC) (except when you turn v-sync on in the menu, where it then tries to generate more frames than the refresh rate is configured for, even with the limiter on), so I genuinely suspect that the game isn't programmed in a way to take advantage of more powerful hardware that gets thrown at it.

When your specs are higher than the recommended, (and keep in mind I also had tested this previously on a Ryzen 7 5800x and a 3070ti and got the same results) and yet the performance is still stuttery and bad, then that tells me that the game isn't ready to be out of "early access" or have a "1.0 release".

From the other reviews, it seems like the developers just sorta gave up (or were forced to) and published an unfinished product as an initial "1.0" release, and are missing the original vision that they had for the game, likely it was pressure from the publisher (as a software dev, I know that feeling all too well) and it's a damn shame because it seemed like when it was in early access a lot of effort was going into it, and there was more frequent updates than there are now. (Which could be a good or bad sign depending on how you look at it, if they're taking more time between updates, perhaps they're polishing the updates more, or maybe there's less people working on updates?)

While the developers' claim they have plans for it in 2025, and that some of the ideas they wanted in 2024 but ran out of time, they don't seem to mention fixing the performance, which (in my opinion) is one of the critical issues holding the game back, adding new content is fine and appreciated, but new content isn't enjoyable if the performance is bad.

So, while I enjoyed the early access version, I just cannot recommend it in its current state, if the developers actually end up fixing the performance and bringing the original vision to life (hell even if they just fix the performance), then I'll re-examine my review at that point and maybe it'll switch to me recommending it.

I genuinely do hope that they're able to pull it off, because like I said, the idea is excellent and early access was really fun (even with the limited content at the time), but every time I try to go boot the game up and start playing, the stutters and lag just completely take me out of the game.

In short (TL;DR), with poor performance, lack of content, and a poor first release, I cannot recommend this game at the time, but will re-evaluate in the future if improvements are made.

While the game is addicting and fun to play, it is disappointing there's only 3 stages, I hope in the future more are added, or perhaps an endless mode. Regardless for the price it's not bad, but it does need more content, if you're on the fence about whether to get it, I'd say wait for a sale.

Good game

As of right now, I cannot recommend the game due to a security risk.

The developers recently added "featured mods" which downloads a ZIP file from their server, which contains XML and image files.

This would be fine, if the developers were using HTTPS for communication, but at this point they are refusing to do that, due to it being "too complicated and requiring too many libraries".

This is 2022, it is unacceptable to use HTTP for a public facing service that downloads content to a user's machine. It leaves the door open for man in the middle attacks (MITM)

They proposed doing zip signing instead, but that will not do any good should a MITM attack occur resulting in a malicious file being downloaded (recall that there were exploits in the past that only required you to download a file, not interact with it, but simply download it, and the exploit relied on a vulnerability in the way Windows Explorer handled icons.) Even if signing was used, all it takes is a vulnerability to occur in the signing verification or even the extraction of the ZIP file (or perhaps one in the XML/image rendering library the game uses) to pwn your machine.

Should all this change and they actually switch to using HTTPS, then I will remove this review, but in the meantime, if you do want to play the game, do so at your own risk, you'll likely be fine, but the risk is always there.

Edit 2022-12-16:
The domain they use for promos still doesn't support HTTPS.

Edit 2023-11-10:
So I wanna address a few things because some of the folks commenting here seem to be misunderstanding.

Loading the game up, without ANY user interaction AT ALL, before the user even gets to the main menu, a call to the following URL is made

hxxp : // promo.teardowngame . com/promo . php?version=<version number here> (commented out the replaced "tt" with "xx" so that no one accidentally clicks it)

What gets returned is a link to a ZIP file in plain text that the game then automatically downloads and extracts.

In this case it was hxxp : // promo.teardowngame . com/2023-11-01 . zip (again replaced "tt" with "xx" so no one clicks it)

Without ANY interaction at all, without even downloading a mod, simply just launching the game, it makes an unencrypted (thus interceptable on unsecured networks, such as public WiFi networks, and let's not forget that because of things like laptops, and steam decks and whatnot, that the possibility of this is greater than 0%, because it's not unlikely that someone might decide to go to a coffee shop or something with their gaming device and play a bit of gaming while they wait for their order or whatnot) request through HTTP (and I have confirmed this with Wireshark).

All it takes is someone intercepting that request and sending a spoofed response with a different URL, or hell even running a rogue network that points the promo domain to a different server to send back a malicious zip file (and this is possible because with http the client doesn't need to validate the server that is responding because it's unencrypted).

Once again, YOU LITERALLY DO NOT EVEN HAVE TO INTERACT WITH MODS/THE FEATURED MODS BUTTON ON THE MENU OR DO ANYTHING AT ALL BESIDES LAUNCH THE GAME.

If you don't believe me, open up windows explorer, navigate to "%localappdata%\Teardown", look for "promo.txt" and a folder called "promo", delete both of them, and then launch the game but don't do anything, and then look at the folder again. You'll see that it will have recreated the folder and file you just deleted, without you ever doing anything to prompt it to redownload other than just launching the game.

Hell if you open up promo.txt you'll see the URL, and you'll see it is still using HTTP.

I can understand how some people might think it's not a big deal, but when a game gives you no control over disabling it from phoning home (because that's what it is doing, it's connecting to a server that is controlled by the developers to get information about featured mods) and it's not even doing that over an encrypted connection, it's a ticking time bomb just waiting for someone to get hacked.

It doesn't matter if the developers hand pick the mods themselves they feature, that it isn't the problem, the problem is the request is not secure and you'll never truly know if the response you got back, was truly from the server owned by the developers, or a malicious third party who did a MITM (Man-In-The-Middle) attack on your connection.

And yes, they still aren't using HTTPS

Edit 2023-11-19:

Checked the latest version, and to the surprise of no one, they still aren't using HTTPS. You'd think with all the extra money they're charging, maybe they could afford to spend some time to actually implement secure communication in something that is automatic and can't be disabled by the end user.

Raft is an... interesting game to say the least, it does something interesting that a lot of these other open world survival crafting games really don't do, and that is, having a constant moving base. A concept that seems interesting and enjoyable at first, until you start to notice the cracks in the execution that spread to other parts of the game, but first let's discuss the raft issue.

You start with a small raft, a base if you will, and if you lose sight of it, you pretty much are screwed and have to start the game over. You can't build a new "raft" even if you have all the parts you would theoretically need. You can expand your raft, but need to be a build new one? Nope that's not possible.

That's the first issue I have with this game, if your raft gets lost or destroyed, that's it, game over.

So play carefully, you don't just randomly abandon your raft and you make sure to keep sight of it and also either fight the shark(s) off from destroying it and make repairs as they are needed.

Not so bad right? Well, take a look bottom left corner of your screen, hold on a minute you're starving and thirsty, but you just started the game, what's going on?! This is the second (and arguably the biggest issue) of the game, your character seems to have one of the fastest metabolisms in the world it seems as if you aren't constantly stuffing your face with both food and water, you'll start to feel the effect (and if you let it go down far enough, you'll start to lose health and then eventually "pass out").

Now, I can understand the thirst part, you're on the open ocean, and the sun is beating down on your head, and with no shelter really to start off with, it makes sense that you could become dehydrated pretty quickly. (Of course I would assume at night the temperature cooling down would slow your thirst, but it doesn't) But the hunger? It just feels off.

Now according to the Wiki, all modes have a base hunger loss rate of 0.09 seconds, which is then multiplied by a certain amount depending on the difficulty setting. The following list shows the time it takes for a full hunger bar to reach empty based on each difficulty:
- Peaceful/Easy: 30 minutes, 52 seconds
- Normal: 18 minutes, 31 seconds
- Hard 14 minutes, 15 seconds.

This would be fine, if it didn't feel like a grind, because let's face it, you gotta keep acquiring food, whilst also boiling salt water, fighting off sharks from your raft, exploring the water around islands to find materials to build things to research to be able to make progress.

New players, are going to have a hell of a bad time on normal difficulty, hell even easy is difficult because of this. Oh and don't forget to boil the water before drinking, because if you don't (let's say you misclick because it happens) your thirst is emptied out almost immediately.

Oh and exploration in the water? Yeah good luck doing that outside of peaceful mode, your ass is gonna keep getting eaten by sharks.

But let's say you're an expert, you enjoy the grind, you manage to build a damn good raft, and you make progress in the story. Well good luck with the platforming nonsense they've added to it as well. Platforming with jank-ass physics and controls, I'm sure that'll go well for you.

Don't get me wrong, after adding mods to it, to slow down hunger and thirst, and playing on peaceful mode, I actually enjoyed the game. The problem is, I shouldn't have had to do that, I should've been able to play the game without worrying every 10 seconds whether I was going to die from hunger or thirst.

On paper, the idea for this game is perfect, it's like Subnautica, but on Earth with a raft instead of underwater bases and whatnot, but the execution misses the mark in several places and bring it down to a level of frustration that I simply cannot recommend on it's own.

If you're willing to mod the game, just be warned that the mod loader does some memory hooking/injection that your antivirus might flag as suspicious (I've heard BitDefender broke the ability for Raft to even launch as a result of the mod loader), it doesn't harm your system from what I can tell, but it does use methods that malware has been known to use.

But yeah, to wrap this all up, I cannot recommend this game if you're simply planning on playing it vanilla, now if you play with your friends or with mods, it's a different story (still has issues but not as bad) but by yourself without mods, it's just not fun.

Honestly the first thing I gotta say is, thank you for including FLACs, my ears thank you for that.

So let's talk about the music.

It ranges from okay to good. A few of the songs I gotta say are absolute bangers, such as track A10 (although the percussion could be dialed back a bit though)

Honestly compared to the base game right now, I say it's worth dropping a dollar just to pick this up.

So they've patched a lot of the bugs which was making playing the game annoying, but one of the main issues still stands, the game after the first initial play-throughs is boring. Not to mention there aren't a lot of people playing it at the time of this re-review.

I'm going to swap this from a not recommended to a recommended, but that's only because steam doesn't have a neutral rating.

Honestly the game is going to need more mini-games and more variety otherwise it's just going to go the way of other steamer games, basically once the hype dies down, people likely won't play it anymore.



The game is currently too buggy to play, controls randomly stop working, the pause menu is non-existent and picking items up is unstable.

Edit: I've found spinning up your own games is a bit more stable. So I was able to try all of the games. Let me talk about them

Shapes

Honestly I'm not sure if this one is even part of the scoring as if you skip the introduction it doesn't make you go through it. (May require another player) but this one is (at-least in it's current state) near impossible to do, as if you're the contestant then you can't even fit the small blocks in due to an invisible wall or poor collision and if you're the audience then the bigger blocks are unstable when picking them up. I've been told that this isn't part of the actual game and is a gag, so that explains it :P

This one this fairly straight forward and is fine, but gets boring when you've played it multiple times in a row.

This one is also straight forward and gets more difficult as it goes on, I'm not sure if the patterns change each time or if you could just simply take photos and just breeze through it each round after round.

Some of the patterns are straight forward and others are not, I blame this probably on me having brain damage or something.

Right now in it's state, it's 50/50 on whether or not you'll successfully play a round and not get frozen controls, but even after that, the game will get repetitive quickly so unless they're planning adding on more content to it in the future, I don't think bug fixes will be enough to save this game's future.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the effort put in and speaking as a software engineer myself, this is the kinda thing that just ruins your day when you put hard work and effort into something and then it goes live in production and just breaks. It's not a good feeling and I truly feel bad for the developers, hell it also highlights that sometimes QA isn't 100% perfect, people make mistakes and miss things.

Once they fix the bugs then the game will be worth a try, but as I said it's going to need more content to help keep it afloat and fresh.

Can't recommend it until a vsync option is added (one that doesn't require cranking the settings all the way to high)

Mini Motorways, a game brought to you by the same developers as Mini Metro.

It is a "peaceful" and "relaxing" game, which starts out easy, but becomes more complex as time passes, to the point where you can no longer sit back and relax, your mind has to be engaged to avoid bottlenecking the transit system.

Much mini metro, you're on a timed system, which begins to count down if the drivers aren't able to constantly reach their destination in a timely fashion.

If you enjoy organising and designing efficient set-ups, then this game you will enjoy. If not, well then you may still enjoy it for a good way to kill some time.

It's a lightweight game that'll run on any computer running windows 7 and above, and will likely run flawlessly on the Steam Deck if and when you get your hands on it.

So, if you enjoyed Mini Metro, you'll enjoy this game and I cannot recommend it enough.

It's a great game and I've enjoyed playing it so far.

If you're attempting to run it on Linux and it isn't working for you, please note that there is a work-around you need to do to get it running.

The work-around can be found here: https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/app/238460/discussions/1/451848855012217196/?ctp=3#c133256240730773507