Recent reviews by Refurbished Hamster

Just to be clear to the future, this is an Early Access review.

Space Trash Scavenger has quickly become one of my favorite games and I have a feeling it's far from done. What is currently available is really good and points to a really good future.

Phobia Check - None, really. The monsters in this game are all clearly mechanical variants on bright light faces that barf energy at you but in a bad way, but there is a long monster with no legs that if you squint and turn your head, you might see as a snake. There is also a spider (or at least a monster with 8 legs) in the trailer, though I haven't seen it in game (unless it's the big multilegged butthole that I only see from below or in space). Monsters do not move in a natural or triggering way. There are no fangs or lunges or anything like that.

Think I should be checking for phobias other than spiders or snakes? Let me know in the comments!

At first, the game reminded me a good bit of No Man's Sky. Shoot resources, put them in machines, get stuff, make other stuff, sell at market, automate things. However, there is one thing this game does that I've never seen before and I absolutely love.

The way the game handles crafting is, as far as I can tell, completely innovative.

First, it''s important to understand that no machines need more than two things to craft, usually another crafted item plus some raw resources. The crafting machines fling forward anything they make or can't use. Read that last sentence again because nothing further will make sense until you start from there. It's hard to explain just how cool this works out in game. When I make my group of crafting machines, it doesn't matter if I have access to any one specific machine. I can send it through 50 machines that don't need it, and it would still land where it needs to be, so long as the machines are pointing the right way. I forgot to include plastic in one set last night, and just stuck it on the very end of the line. It was flung forward four machines to where it needed to be simply because the machines in between were all linked together and going the same direction.

It makes manufacturing in the game something that is not daunting, no matter how many machines you have to string together. Conveyor belts are also in the game but I haven't had any need for them. The thoughtfulness of the crafting process almost entirely removes the need for such a thing. I just have a 3x4 area of machines that I rearrange when I want to make something specific. It's both as complicated as it needs to be and innovatively simple.

By the way, if you're aware of any other survival games that do crafting this way, please let me know in the comments!

Anyway, I wanted to get that out first before doing the rest of the review.

If I had to mention something specific that the game does wrongly or poorly it would be loot. Loot is shaped like things and even called different things but it's just for throwing in the atomizer. The differences in the salvage items vanishes once it's in the atomizer and just turned into resources as you will do everything else you pick up.

The audio is audio. It's neither impressive nor bad.

Music is BYO IMO. What's in the game is a few short loops of decent sounding music that wear thin within an hour or so. Hey, it's early access, and part of the fun for me is whooshing between the asteroids while listening to trance. I really am starting to feel like music should be optional for developers nowadays. They could share a Spotify playlist instead. This isn't a critique of this game specifically and people would probably ding them for not having music in-game, so I can definitely understand the reasons one wouldn't take this path.

Graphics are decent. The art style is a timeless cartoon look.

Stability is 100% as far as I could tell. I have seen zero crashes of any kind in the entire 90+ hours I have played. There are some FPS drops in a few places but nothing that wasn't still completely playable. I think the lowest FPS I saw, with everything turned up, was around 20 FPS as its absolute worse, though I probably couldn't duplicate it if I tried. I average 63 FPS on a Ryzen 5600X with a Radeon 6800XT. In my opinion, polish and stability are better than a lot of released games. It's not Early Access stable - it's release stable, just lacking content right now. Monthly updates seem to be the norm. My space-thing-person will probably just keep making money until then.

At $20, I'm not sure it has enough content. However, it will be getting more content so, in the end $20 might be a huge bargain. For me, it was a birthday gift.

Replay value is both nonexistent and infinite. By this I mean that going through the motions of a new game would be a pain but if you're just bored you can always hop into the game and do something that might help later. You can fill up on resources, make stuff for money, or maybe do like I plan to do and crash the entire market on everything.

The main question - to whom would I recommend this game? I would recommended to just about any gamer but only if they're not prone to motion sickness. The gravity is fun and kind of realistic but if my wife tried to play this, she'd probably get turned upside-down once, barf on the keyboard and refuse to play anything that isn't WoW ever again. I really don't think it's fixable, though. I think it's just an outcome of Choose Your Own Gravity which, if you can handle it, is quite fun!

Overall, the game is pretty great. Excellent pick from my step-daughter.

Excellent game.

I wish there was more of it but hopefully that's coming in the near future. It would also be nice to open it up to modding so we can add stories of our own, or download them from other people.

I'm not going to write a full review because so many have already done so. Suffice to say, it's just as good as everyone says it is.

Not bad for $1 USD. It's extremely simple and will get monotonous after a while but it's fun to play around with, at least at first.

It's pretty bare bones and I have the feeling there was supposed to be a lot more to it. For instance, attacking a country that is currently owned by someone else doesn't have any backlash whatsoever. Neither does nuking whomever you feel like nuking. No one will retaliate.

You simply need a bigger navy, army, and air force, and you'll win every time. That's the game.

I'm not going to recommend a game when I stayed away for over a year and the game still struggles with the most basic of things. I still lost an entire fleet, in my first game, because I told two fleets to attack a system and they took two different ways to get there and one was slower. The flight path had them going in the same direction and next I look, one of them diverted up to an unexplored area on the other side of their destination before coming back around. No explanation. No warning. Just stupid.

Fleets and ships still happily go further than they have fuel even though it's within the first circle which (I guess?) is the halfway mark. Somehow they always seem to find some way to be completely ridiculous no matter how sure you are of where you told them to go.

My home starbase never has fuel because all the ships were coming out of there and the private market isn't stepping up supply regardless of having five other places I'm getting the fuel. I'm watching the other places. They have fuel. They don't have a bunch of private freighters lined up to ship the fuel to where it needs to go. There's not a big back up of private ships to be built. I don't care how complicated you make the game, this is not how a private economy works, and the private economy is basically the only redeeming factor of the entire game when compared to its contemporaries.

I played DW:U (the first one), and it never struck me as broken as this. I tried for many hours right when this game released but it doesn't look like it's been meaningfully changed at all. Most of the problems I found still exist and the developers still say they're "rare" even though everyone is experiencing them.

But there's DLC!

I think it's time to admit that the UI/UX was never going to be able to handle what the developers wanted this time around and either work on streamlining it or simplifying it. Thing is, they clearly don't want to do that to the point I wonder if they are even able to see what the rest of us are seeing!

It's not a game that just has a few bugs. It's a game in which you will never be able to tell if it's a bug, a feature, or you're just doing it wrong, or some setting randomly reverted. Most of the discussions you'll find while searching are back from 2022 when the game was even more broken. Even then, the developers waffled on everything and mostly told us we were just doing it wrong.

You can, and will, put a Herculean amount of effort into this game to try to get it to a state where you can just play, or even just get a basic understanding of its systems. Not to mention you will find things constantly throughout playing which aren't doing what you thought, or what was logical. It's irritating and tiresome and should not take that much energy to enjoy a game in a genre in which I am extremely familiar.

They need to put this game in front of your average 13 year old (or adult) and see how long it takes them to actually have fun. It won't be quick.

Maybe I'll revisit this later and give the game a chance to change my mind.

Summary: The game is great fun until you get to the part where you have to program computers with no guidance whatsoever. People who already know assembly might be fine but I do not, and it was a really weird and out-of-the-blue requirement about halfway through the game. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend something that is advertised and starts as an assembly line game that suddenly needs the player to know how to do programming.

What is it? An assembly line simulation about making food in a small restaurant.

What I like about it: I enjoy assembly line games quite a bit, and I was having a lot of fun with it right up until...

What I don’t like about it: ...you have to learn at least the basics of assembly programming language to continue. Also, the food items are a bit limited. It never really gets "interesting." You make a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers and fries. Some fancier foods would be welcomed, as well as more machines that did more things. For instance, none of the foods actually require seasoning or sauces or anything like that. Just mostly junk food in slight different ways. (Hot dog, cheese dog, chili dog, burger, double burger, double burger with cheese, etc).

Is the price fair? At $14.99 USD, I'd say it's worth it, except for the aforementioned ugly progress halt.

How does it stand out? It's an unusual combination of food, assembly line, and programming.

Graphics: Graphics are good. The game uses a sharp-but-clean graphics style.

Music: The music is okay but it's a pretty short loop with limited tracks. It's all jazz, which gets grating pretty early on.

Sound Effects: Good. Every little machine that you expect to make a noise makes the exact noise you're expecting.

Stability, Polish, and Performance: Very stable (zero crashes my entire playtime) and is clearly very polished. Handles alt-tab fine. I had no issues running it perfectly with my machine (AMD Ryzen 2600, Radeon 5700XT)

Age and Future of the Game: At the time of this writing, the game is 3 years old and there has never been an update or mention of a sequel.

Replayability: There is some. You're encouraged to back and improve efficiency but I'm not sure of the point of that.

This really could've been a spectacular game, but the limited amount of food items cuts it a bit short, especially if you can't (or don't want to) code assembly. That said, if there were ever a sequel that added actual chef things instead of all junk/fast food, and the stupid programming check was removed, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Caveats:
I played only in single player.

Maybe I'll give it another shot some day but what I played was mostly just annoying. Everything is very jerky and feels delayed due to the quasi-turn-based-combat system. Maybe this was great back when it was new but in 2022 it just feels bad and isn't nearly funny enough to justify itself on that alone.

Eh. This is the entire game:

Select row/column that seems to have the most stuff you can use.
Calculate points.
Points are progress towards achievements.

That's it. The game has no intrinsic goals, just mostly collection stuff for achievements. You don't keep a deck. You don't get enhancements on anything.

If that sounds good to you, have at it, but if you want to play something that doesn't feel pointless at every click, look elsewhere.

Nice little game. Doesn't take too much concentration but the game play loop leaves you satisfied. Definitely on the cutesy side.

I have no idea how this game has so many positive reviews.

Positives:
- Story may have promise

Negatives:
- Controls are bad. You will literally die from the bad controls.
- The library boss is incredibly irritating. Be prepared to run in circles (literally) and die far faster than it takes to get back to where you will probably just die again. And again. This is where I stopped.
- Developer(s) couldn't decide if they were making a mediocre point and click game or a truly awful action game.

Dead Age bills itself as a survival RPG, but it is very light on both survival and RPG. It's more of a choose-your-own-adventure with basic fights and gearing. The strongest elements of the game are really in the strategy.

TL;DR at the bottom.

Phobia/Trigger Check

No snakes, spiders, jumpscares, sexual violence, or copious blood.
There are needles in the game but they are only mentioned as an item. They have no dedicated animation nor are they highly visible. (Want other phobia or trigger checks in my future reviews? Leave a comment!)

Who needs this?

Recommended for: Fans of turn-based RPG combat that aren't expecting a big, evolved game, or much of a story

Not recommended for: Anyone who hates mobile-looking games, doesn't like grinding, wants a good story, or migraine sufferers.

The Yarn
The story is super simple and could be distilled down to about a paragraph with a sentence or so for each character. There's not much here but fighting. Yes, there are "multiple endings" and various characters with their own stories, but the stories are thin and the multiple endings boil down to "did this or didn't do this one thing."

The Sights

When you first load the game, the graphics look great! However, as you play, it becomes immediately obvious that the graphics are...weird. They're both blurry and shiny. My wife tried to get me to stop playing it because just looking at the screen almost triggered a migraine. I didn't have a problem, though. Still, nothing about this game is worth possibly triggering a migraine.

The GUI is obviously set up mostly for phones. There aren't even numbered keyboard shortcuts to the basic abilities - you have to mouse it.

The Sounds

The background music sounds like it would be cool if it weren't so compressed. It sounds pretty terrible.
The sound effects are very good, though the stereo channels aren't set up correctly. Gunshots from your team, who is always on the left, come from the right ear. Oofs and ughs from the enemies, who are always on the right, come through the left ear. With both ears on, it wasn't so obvious so YMMV.

Loop de Loop

The gameplay loop is definitely Dead Age's strength. To some, I'm sure it's boring and monotonous, but some of us are okay with doing the same thing over and over again with slightly different gear, abilities, or stats. The whole gameplay loop can easily be described as very repetitive.

The Struggles

Dead Age isn't very difficult once you get over the hump of learning where and where not to specialize your characters. I'm not sure why so many reviewers are whining about RNG. Once you have decent gear, RNG still factors, but not generally life or death unless you are really, really bad about not using heals.

The Bugs (or lack of)

The game did not crash through my multiple playthroughs. I didn't see anything that I'd really call a bug, except maybe that an astounding number of NPC enemies end up with another turn due to having 1-3 HP after your attacks. It's way too common to be random.

The Eff-pee-esses

(My system: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, AMD RX 5700XT (2560x1440), 32 GB DDR4, Samsung 960 Evo SSD)

Looks locked or maxed at 90 FPS. You probably wouldn't notice much difference at 30 FPS with this game. It's just not that animation-heavy.

The Cost

This is definitely not a $15 game, and that's the main reason for my non-recommend. However, as of today, Dead Age has been in 23 bundles and has been on sale numerous times for less than a dollar. It's a decent game for that amount, but anyone paying $15 is going to feel completely ripped off.

The Verdict

- Blurry and shiny graphics. Looks bad.
- Background music sounds awful as if it's very highly compressed
+ Sound effects sound good
+ Turn-based, old-school RPG style combat...
- ...which is way too simplified.
+/- The game is basically nothing but a grind
- Story is too basic to be engaging
- Price is WAY too high for this game - make sure to get it on sale or in a bundle