Recent reviews by astarr

A+ game

WOW! Look at all these wonderful properties that WB executives interfered with or cancelled!

It's Amazon.

What an incredible story wrapped up in a great RPG.

Edit: This is good! The December 15th patch added great modes and some great quality of life options.

It's similar to Family Feud, or Jackbox's Guesspionage. The different game modes are a good way to use the ranked surveys, but bounce - while creative - doesn't really feel good to play.

Edit 2: It's been another two months, and I get excited every time there's an update. There's so much great content coming out regularly for this early access game, and it's already been a joy to play for the past 6 months.

Edit: It's been two months and there's been so much content and quality of life updates. This is turning out to be an incredible early access game.

Original: It's like Farm Together 1 - a very good game - with improvements.

Read my full review[backloggd.com].

This is what you all wanted, right?

After numerous times seeing Steam discussion topics like "I'm not buying a new JBPP until there's a universal launcher!" It's here and it does what it's supposed to.

It can be better; users are making their lists of wants to the developers and its being updated. So far the biggest challenges are launching in windowed mode, lack of customisation and accessibility options, and no controller input.

I put 55 hours into Star Conflict, a similar PVE/PVP F2P game from Gaijin. I only put 3 hours into this before seeing the same structure, which is unbearable PVE in early levels, and then impossible PVP when other players are paying for vehicles and parts.

Except in this case, Crossout is pretty boring. You can drive around a desert with uninteresting landmarks, brown colour schemes and nothing but enemies or mission markers around. Even with the vehicle-building aspect, there's no hook or anything to pull the player in, except a sunk-cost fallacy if you ended up purchasing something for this game. Even if you paid to win, I don't see how showing up to the same arena to dunk on bots and noobs would be exciting.

I'd recommend something like Mechwarrior Online instead. Even though you can't build a vehicle from the frame upwards, there is interesting customization attached to lore, strategy, tactics, great gunplay, and actually populated servers for matches.

war is a ♥♥♥♥.

Jackbox Party Pack 10 is a real test with these party packs. It's a test of what new experiences will work with your friend group, what will work with your phone and what works generally as a gaming concept.

I was able to play the >3 player games a couple of times each, before a significant update on November 15, 2023. Rating each of these packs requires a breakdown of each game, so here's what we thought of the 10th one in the series.

Fixy Text was loved by everyone, but me. I believe this is where the device bugs hit the hardest. It's an interesting design that is kind of like Job Job and Quiplash from other packs. The fun lies in how interesting, creative and funny your friend group is, with some minimal support from the game. The game provides some prompting, but doesn't rely upon it, so role-playing elements depend on the group you're with, unlike Roomerang or Hypnotorious from this pack. I experienced a lot of bugs while playing, including my cursor and typed letters being randomly applied in the text message, making me a chaotic disaster to play with. Everyone else really loved freestyling text messages with minimal prompts and having their wit acknowledged by others gifting them points.

Tee K.O. 2 was a hit among my friend group, and this has definite quality of life improvements over the first. My problems with the first one are mostly resolved in this one, you can re-use text and pictures that weren't used in previous rounds. However, I really didn't like the last round re-using the shirts we've already made and won with - our group really enjoys the surprise and hilarity from introducing new shirts, but this is a new favourite of ours despite this issue.

Dodo Re Mi is a highlight. It's Guitar Hero for your phone, which I'm very surprised hasn't been done yet. It can be played solo or with one other person, and has been incredible fun just for my partner and I to play through. It's what we've spent the most time with and had the most connection to from both myself who has mastered most Guitar Hero games and someone who has never played a rhythm game before. This could have been an entirely standalone game with the amount of work going into it. However, my Samsung A13 really struggled, often skipping, lagging and freezing during the game, or having inputs not recognized or seen, but that's probably all on my phone model.

Time Jinx is a decent trivia game that is something closer to Guesspionage than a You Don't Know Jack or Trivia Murder Party. It makes good use to contemporary popular cultural historical events for trivia questions. It also has decent for rubberbanding for players who either struggled to remember timelines or guessed poorly. It's fun and interesting, albeit not as much as their other trivia games.

Hypnotorious could potentially be the weakest one of the pack. It relies heavily on the group's roleplaying ability, which mine isn't good at, but also has a somewhat confusing premise and prompting. Our group will have to revisit it, but some of them did enjoy it.

The November 25th update seems to resolve some issues and improve games somewhat, but I have yet to try. This isn't the weakest of the Jackbox Party Packs, but it's far from the strongest.