Recent reviews by iyuha

If you enjoy games like Dwarf Fortress, Project Zomboid, and Rimworld then you'll probably enjoy this game quite a lot. Like all of those games you'll probably have to watch a little bit of a playthrough or a tutorial to really get a grasp of even the basic game mechanics. HOWEVER, once you put in the work this is easily one of the most rewarding games to play.

The basic gameplay loop is as follows. You start off with a small dinky ship which (usually) immediately puts you around $500,000 to $800,000 in debt. Then you purchase a salvaging license (or don't), get in your ship, fly out to derelict ships, uninstall and repair the most expensive parts, fly back to base, sell everything, pay your bills, and repeat. But you don't have to sell the parts, instead, you can choose to install them and slowly improve your ship. This is the part I find to be the most rewarding. The ship I currently fly doesn't even remotely resemble what I started the game with even though it's technically the same ship.

But if the game was as simple as that I wouldn't have the prerequisite of liking those other games. All of these systems are (usually) incredibly complex, or have surrounding systems that are complex. Just flying the ship requires you at least read the very short cheat sheet. But other things such knowing how to properly pressurize your ship and setting up a reactor have entire in-game fantasy manuals that read just like real ones. But it also knows exactly when to scale complexity back. Like installing additions to your ship is mainly a challenge of just having the correct parts and some time. It's the perfect thing to do while listening to music or a podcast or watching Youtube.

There's so much I can't possibly mention all of it. You can take gigs, solve murders, flip ships, become a pirate, fight pirates, go to other planets, and I'm sure much much more that I haven't even discovered yet.

But unfortunately as much as I would like for this review to be entirely positive there are a lot of issues and some seemingly unfinished or odd design decisions that I have to address. For instance, you can talk to and have relationships with other people you meet, with the ability to hire them as a crew. But the dialogue choices are really just a choice of whatever stat you want to raise or lower, and as a result a lot of conversations are entirely nonsensical. A back and forth might go like this (P = Player)

• P: How are you doing
  
• NPC: Lightly Touch
  
• P: Nod
  
• NPC: Savage Insult
  
• P: Yay!
  
• NPC: Shoot The Breeze
  
• P: Shoot The Breeze
  
• NPC: Shoot The Breeze
  
• P: Lightly Touch
  
• NPC: Savage Insult"

And if you keep that up you can make anyone your best friend. It seems oddly non-complex or unfinished for a game like this, And it isn't the only issue the dialogue has. Everyone including your character can only do one action at a time, and since talking counts as an action that means you can't speak to anyone while you or they are doing anything. You also have to be directly next to somebody to speak to them which means if an NPC is walking around you have to kind of awkwardly follow them until they stop walking, or intercept their path just to talk to them. An option to "call somebody over" like in The Sims would alleviate a lot of frustration there. My black market NPC has a set path back and forth between a cart and doing anything with them is a chore and a half just because they're constantly interacting with things (doors and the cart) and on the move.

There's also one truly baffling UI decision which makes this game needlessly frustrating, the items in the context menu constantly change positions. Instead of having a hotkey to cancel an action you cancel it from the context menu, but it wants cancelling your task to be the first option (because you can't do anything else while doing something anyway). So it inserts "cancel action" at the top of the list, pushing all the other items and hotkeys down. This cancel action button shows up doing anything other than walking. Sometimes you'll set a path for your character to walk, then while they're walking try to tell them to do something, but because they had to open a door you accidentally told them to bash the object instead of something else.

This isn't even only a problem with cancel action because there are other instances where new items get added to the context list such as the "jettison" action. and I just don't understand why. There are 4 hotkeys for the first 4 actions, they should simply just be static. Every time you right click an object and press 3 it should repair it, I shouldn't have to EVER worry about that changing. Cancel action should just have a unique hotkey. I'm not saying it can't be in the context menu, but it has to be inserted BELOW all hotkeyed actions. This is easily one of my major frustrations with this game.

And don't get it twisted, these aren't even close to the only frustrating issues. NPC crew mates are only "half-NPC" meaning they do things on their own, but you can also "fully control" them (you have to constantly fight their automatic actions to control them). However, they're incapable of actually taking care of themselves in any capacity. I have seen my NPC crew mate use a hygiene pack ONE TIME in a week, every other time I had to switch control to the NPC, feed them, make them drink, make them ♥♥♥♥, bathe them, swap the batteries in their equipment, Without my control they were essentially useless, stuck on an endless loop of working out for multiple hours straight, then sleeping (on the floor for some reason) until I wake them up to manually take care of their needs, only to repair ship at 1x speed because they're exhausted and sad from not taking care of themselves and endlessly working out, then after shift immediately go back to working out for hours until completely exhausted and sleeping again.

Then you dock at the port and even though they're on-shift they don't help you repair your haul they leave the ship and wander around watching TV's, talking to everyone, writing letters home, and quietly sobbing to themselves, even on auto task. Maybe I have to manually use the PDA to tell them to repair the loose items, but honestly I shouldn't have to, Eventually I had to uninstall all workout equipment but my crew mate still had the "at physical limits" moodlet for 2 entire days before I decided to just fire them because doing everything on my own was simply easier. I should not have to micromanage a crew mate this much, Taking care of your primary character is hard enough.

I also just have to quickly mention the games performance is really bad. I have an AMD 5700, Intel i7 10700k 3.8GHz, and 32GB RAM and the game suffers from lag, stutters, freezing, and memory leaks. It's still entirely playable especially when compared to something like a heavily modded Zomboid, but I can imagine this game being a nightmare on a low-end PC.

I could go on but I have to wrap this up. I think even in it's current state it's still worth recommending to a specific type of gamer. The game is currently in Early Access and receiving regular updates to fix bugs, tweak the UI, and more. I can live with certain oddities like the dialogue system, but some of these other issues have to be addressed. Still, I'm not disappointed in my purchase at all, Steam says I have 40 hours but I played about another 60 hours offline and I still want to play more. If this games modding scene grows the replayablility seems like it would be essentially infinite.

As somebody who's played Tekken since 2 I'd love to recommend this game, but I can't.

On release you might've called it the best Tekken of all time. Full story mode with animated cutscenes, decent roster, no battlepass or shop, easily moddable thanks to UE.

It was unbalanced sure, but it was the release of the game, there hasn't been enough of a sample size to see which characters are broken so that's forgivable.

But then the balance patches came and didn't address tons of issues, Azucena WR, homing grabs, non-reactable grabs, heat smash too OP for how little effort it takes. And you would think with Heat they might remove Rage Arts since they kind of achieve similar things. But no those are still in the game. If a player saves their heat and rage they can blow up most of your health bar with very little effort if you make one mistake. It's not like a long combo you have to practice and have the potential to mess up, you can just press your rage art button and heat button and as long as they didn't block or grab it'll do everything for you. And honestly even if they do block it, it'll still chip away tons of health.

And I can't make this review without mentioning just weeks after launch they decide to add a store to the game which they only told people about AFTER the refund window has closed for early buyers. And then to make it even WORSE they added a Battlepass shortly after the store. Both of these things were not in the game on release, and honestly shouldn't be in this game at all. I generally have no issue with stores or battle passes in free or even cheap games, but not only did I spend SEVENTY DOLLARS on this game, but they added it AFTER THE REFUND WINDOW CLOSED FOR EARLY BUYERS.

In addition to sneakily adding these F2P game elements in their $70 AAA game, they also decided to come after the modders! It's not like we're talking about cheats, we're talking about CLIENT SIDE SKINS. Things other players can't even see. The most dedicated of the fans are being shafted over and over again and the game hasn't even been out four months.

It's almost like they intentionally want their most dedicated fans to hate them. Whoever is making these decisions (or non-decisions in terms of balancing) needs to be fired. Just like Cities Skylines 2 made me swear off Paradox games, this has made me swear off Bandai Namco games, I will never purchase one again and neither should you.

best driving game

tl;dr: Session is unfinished, regardless of early access status, and may never be finished.

Session is the most realistic skating simulator that may ever exist, but a simulator is all it really is. And even that part is extremely unfinished and buggy. There is a very light story mode, and challenges you can complete for money. But neither of these strip the focus from just free form skating. And when it works the skating is legitimately the best in the business, the controls feel like crack for your fingers. But when it doesn't work, which is often, you'll often become frustrated, and not in a "I can't hit this line" sort of way, but in a "why do I keep bailing for no reason" kind of way.

The reason I am even writing this review is the news that they're looking to hire developers for a NEW game, when they haven't even finished Session. There is absolutely no excuse for the game being as buggy as it is, since the developers would like you to believe the game is "finished." IT IS NOT FINISHED! The story mode and challenges are barebones, often with directions so confusing you'll have to look up the solution, only to find out you're literally supposed to just ollie while holding a trigger down. Sometimes these challenges simply don't register the correct trick, and you'll have to do the same exact input tens of times only for the game to finally register the move you've been doing for the past 5 minutes. All animations for goofy style are stiff and bugged, and you will OFTEN bail for no reason while goofy. You LITERALLY cannot ride in a straight line on goofy style in many places around the maps without bailing. The game has tons of other weird bugs too and I'll list a few here.

* Spawning with your back foot wedged under the board and not being able to push until you respawn again
* Anything that touches your character model while riding above 1mph will cause your character to instantly bail
* Sometimes pressing the push input followed by holding your stick to crouch causes you to bail
* Sometimes your characters legs might just glitch and snap in half for no reason

And the list could go on but I think I've made my point. And instead of fixing these very basic issues with the game they release DLC and updates that add board breaking and cosmetic items. Board breaking is cool, but they should be fixing the basics of the game before adding more half finished features to the game. Cosmetics should be put on hold indefinitely until they have a character creator, yes they don't have a character creator. You can select one of a few races with either a male or female body type, and then you can change your clothes, that's it. The board customization is actually really nice, even though the parts often time don't affect gameplay significantly.

The recording and playback feature is the best of basically any videogame out there, it's trivial to look up a guide real quick and then have all the knowledge and tools you need to create really sick looking videos with cool effects. But as with everything in Session, of course there's a catch. The animations look okay with physics enabled (experimental setting), while riding normal stance. But even with the experimental animation features, the animations are still stiff even by Playstation 2 standards. It often times looking like your character just snaps between animations rather than fluid motion. Your characters ankles look like they break when they do flip tricks, and it's obvious when the board snaps back to the players feet. So you can't just pick the coolest angle, or the slowmo at the perfect time because you might show the extreme animation flaws this game has. So you have to compromise when recording to make it look as good as possible with the animations we currently have. And some really good and realistic looking stuff can come out of this game, but that's through trial and error.

If this was finished it would easily be the most realistic, and in my opinion, the best skateboarding game to ever exist. But with the prospect of them shifting focus to a new game I suspect Session will be relegated to a small development group that will drip-feed small content updates with little in the way of patches or improvements, while they work on their new game, whatever that is. Don't listen to the canned copy/paste response Crea-ture might put on this post, they need to stop surfing steam reviews and get to fixing their product. If there are any improvements in the future I will GLADLY eat my words and update my review, but actions speak louder than copy paste responses.

I'm never not horny ever since I got Wallpaper Engine

like skyrim with guns

it's ok