Recent reviews by fiendish_thingie

I can't believe I've only played for 28 hours so far, I feel like I've been completely consumed for a week! This is such an amazing survival sandbox game. I've only played in Open World on co-op mode so far, so that's all I can speak to. So far I've unlocked a fairly small portion of the map, tamed a zillion horses (lost 4 RIP), and died to so so many bears and wolves. Progression feels really nice and paced out! I like how even thought some things are in the tier one scale, you can only unlock them at a certain level. The incentives for each player to unlock different parts of the tree, at least at first, is something I feel most co-op games lack.

My biggest *actual* complaint is that the tamed animals have horrible AI. My horse and wolf get stuck in between trees, rocks, and berry bushes all the time. Even when it looks like there should be room for them to move through, I've had to go back and figure out what angle *I* can move so that my animal can free itself from its bush prison.

Performance-wise it's ok. My PC can handle much more detailed games on the highest settings with no issue, but struggles to load even fairly barren areas here on a mix of low and medium settings. However, as much as I love the beautiful setting, even on medium/low it's still very nice to look at!!

I do have one question for devs though.... Have they ever seen a horse move? This is absolutely a nitpick and I mostly mean it as a laugh, but I feel like we all got horse movement down quite a long time ago. Sometimes I'd rather just walk because seeing the Terranus or bison move becomes irritating. Moas are less irritating because look at 'em. That thing doesn't know anything.

The mount movement actually reminds me of how mounts in Dragon Age: Inquisition moved, and the first thing I noticed when starting the game is that the player animations also look very Inquisitor-esque. (This is just a funny comparison - I know they don't even use the same engine)

This game is cute af, and despite a few hitches, it's really fun!! Bugs that get reported are taken care of at lightning speed because the dev is an amazing human being!! I'm usually so scared to give criticism because I hate being mean, but Luamar understood what I meant immediately and was so friendly!

The art style is amazing, the sound effects are satisfying, and there are dinosaurs!!

Aesthetic: 11/10
Mechanics: 9/10
Audio/Sound: 10/10
Story: ?/10 (I haven't made it super far but I am enjoying the beginning!)
Overall VERY fun game with a responsive dev who clearly loves their project. I hope more people give it a second shot as bugs get fixed. Just remember to keep in mind that this isn't from a large studio with tons of resources!

And if you're nervous that you might not like it, it's better to wait to buy it than to buy and refund. The existing reviews can give you a good idea of whether you like it so you don't have to take a chance. Or, wait for it to go on sale! If you have issues, check the discussions or the updates to see if it's on the fix-it list before leaving a rude rant!

*extremely* fun!!! If you're unsure, wait for a sale or something. Or, see if a friend has it who can let you try it. Combat reminds me of Amalur and older MMOs, story so far has Dragon Age/Final Fantasy vibes (maybe just because those are the two things I've played recently...but still!) Customization is phenomenal. There are lots of outfits and dyes. You can even dye your weapon!! Oh I forgot - housing decorations!? In a game that already had a ton going for it!? Pets that you put *in* your house???? Pets that you put *in* your house that *stab* you when you pet them???!!?!

This game has SO much stuff!! You mat think at first that the armor system looks boring. Ohoho, I promise you, it is very very detailed. Lots of ways you can build you character, and lots of choices to make! The moment you think you've seen the entire UI, you unlock something else to make spreadsheets for.

As for visuals, it hits the perfect mark between Amalur and early WoW for me! Lots of colors, but not so many small details that everything turns into a blur. To be honest, I put the game on the lowest graphical settings for fun. Only makes sense since it was originally meant to be an old school MMO!

All that said, it does crash pretty frequently during multiplayer for me. I can see how that would put people off; it's certainly annoying to be in a rift and have to start over. However! Fixes have been pretty fast so far! You gotta remember that this is a relatively small team for something this big. And $25 full price is an absolute steal for what you get. Some of the naysayers probably defend big studios when their $80 release is unplayable, yet pick on littler studios like this when everything isn't perfect. Perspective is important, folks!

Very cool concept, very pretty, but constantly freezes every 15 seconds of movement when it has to load so much stuff in. My PC can run FF14 and No Man's Sky on the highest settings, but this is unplayable even on the lowest.

Will give it a go every few updates or so. It's just really, really frustrating at the moment.

Less important notes:
Turn radius on characters is also irritating, and the run animation has you running with your torso at 90 degrees. Bugs are inconsistently balanced. I understand a ladybug having more "armor" than an ant, but it shouldn't be so much harder to kill a level 1 ladybug vs a level 10 ant.
This game has one of my least favorite things as well - no one knows that there are more than a couple shapes/patterns of butterfly. Glad it's more than "we took a monarch and paintbucket filled in different colors," but with the effort the other creatures have in them it'd be neat to see more variety.

Very very charming little diorama-builder, and at the exact perfect pricepoint! To be honest, this isn't the kind of game I thought I'd enjoy, but I bought it because I'd been waiting to play it since it was announced. It just looked too cute, even though I didn't get what it was exactly. Then when it released at just five bucks, I took the chance!

This developer put so much work into these little guys, I just love them. They have a very Pikmin feel with their little flower heads. There are no real "goals" in this game, since it's essentially a sandbox. You do collect happiness points from your little dudes to unlock a few furniture items, but there aren't very many and they can easily be collected in a couple hours. I find this to be a pro and a con at the same time. The pro: very low-stress, low barrier to full creativity mode. The con is purely personal taste; I like unlockables a lot as a reason to keep playing a game, and I didn't really care about any of them. All the items I liked were available from the get-go. However, like I said, it's objectively *good* because the point of these games is relaxation, not chasing quests and new content.

I have a few criticisms, but I'd say it's 99.9% perfect.

- The houses only change the roof color, but the rest of the house is just white. Plus, it sucks to not be able to change it after you've placed it - aside from deleting it. I made the mistake of not paying attention to the color options until I had spent an hour and a half setting up the inside of a library.
- The building styles are almost exclusively "house." There is a tent, a barn, and a couple city municipal-looking ones, but I want to make a town with stores and such. None of them really scream "grocery store" to me. They're mainly brick houses with chimneys.
- Most of the floor patterns are huge eye strainers.
- Not being able to move tables with stuff on them is a pain, because selecting the thing *on top* is a pain. The cursor seems confused about what object you're trying to select.
- I'd love if the rugs were single tile and snapped together, so that I could center stuff on them.
- I don't know if the Creatures do anything...they are very cute, though, so not really a criticism as much as a confusion. I don't think I've seen my Gourds interact with one. :o IMO they should just be called "birds" or "pixies" or something, since they are just different coloration. Not really category-worth; I'd put them with miscellaneous personally.
- The categories seem kind of weird sometimes. There are things in Misc that I'd definitely put in the more specific areas. For example. a record player is in "miscellaneous," but it is an electronic item, so I don't know why it isn't there.


Couple of bugs as well:
- when my gourds were sitting on a chair interacting with a computer (on the crate-type table) from a specific angle, the computer disappears and the gourd&chair turn into a light green grass block. This happened no matter which building I placed them in, or what spot in the building.
- the "camera" object and the "toilet paper basket" don't rotate.

Amaszing

In it's current state, I don't think I'd strongly recommend it.

Pros: it's very pretty.

Cons:
*Not much flying for a game about flying.

*Constant cutscenes that take way too long to show you not just a peak, but literally every step you need to take. It kills the joy of searching on your own. Some of them are to show off scenery, which is beautiful, but I don't need to be shown the scenery that I'm about to be in. I also don't need a long pause on the map unlock. It slows down the game and takes away from wanting to play much at a time.
*The multi-player aspect is a neat idea, but it's really weirdly implemented. You can play with others or yourself, but there's no option to only be able to see friends. It's also unclear whether or not your friends are online because clicking on the friends menu does not show you a list of friends.
**There are cosmetic transactions that are far from "micro", as well as the ability to just buy the currency that normally takes quite a while to accumulate. Would really rather just buy a complete game (including paying for early access) than have any micro-transactions. Even cosmetic mt's are just irritating. I don't like anything, not even Cinnamaroll, enough to pay over $30 to have a slightly different cape and haircut. Some other reviewers seem to have issue with complaints over this. But there *are* also non-cosmetic transactions - you can literally just buy the candles so that you don't have to spend time walking around finding them all.

EXTREMELY fun and cute game! Please keep in mind - this game is still in early access. If you're not sure what that means, please inform yourself before purchasing. It's fine to not want to play an early access game, but if your review says that it's "unfinished," then that's not a review, that's being captain obvious. The dev is super open about progress, which is a huge plus! They just released some notes earlier this month (Feb 2023) so I'm not sure why some people are griping about no updates. There were a few months of a break, but that is to be expected during the Winter with so many holidays going on! The dev has always been active on social media even before EA release and continues to be.

The text is a little clunky, but it's easy to understand and tbh I couldn't do any better writing a game in several languages at a time. It's not inhibiting to gameplay at all.
I feel like all of the puzzles/potions/ingredients are straightforward and intuitive. This game should be pretty easy even for someone without history playing similar video games.
The music is so cute, and the sound fx from interacting with things are top tier!
I honestly have nothing negative to add, which in a way is unhelpful, I know. But I just wanted to add my vote to the "please buy this!" pool. :) Whether it's now during EA/Open Beta or later when the game is fully finished, this game is excellent and made by a wonderful developer!

We've been playing with three, which does increase the difficulty as it gives the bugs a few more health bars but ONLY if the other player/s are within fighting distance of the bug. If you're killing one alone, it'll have the regular single-player amount of health. It only scales when more people are near.
Something else that scales is that of course you need to kill more bugs/collect more stuff to equip everyone with, but by no means are you limited to equipping everyone with the same gear. There are a lot of specializations that each team member can go into. You can go into underwater gear, speed, DPS, max armor, etc. So you don't need to kill 30+ wolf spiders to gear everyone as one reviewer complained. You still should since they provide valuable resources, but you can get perfectly good armor by fighting anything else. The game is only as difficult as you make it, really.Another cool thing is that you literally *can* make it less difficult with the in-game settings. You aren't just limited to easy-medium-hard, you can fine tune the things you do or don't want to deal with.
On a typical day, one of us gets super into a certain story path, one gets into gathering food, and one figures out how we could make our base even stupider. We've spent the majority of our 30-odd hours so far f***ing around with building. I finally understand why The Kids like Minecraft so much.

It's VERY fun, but extremely buggy. Recommend buying it on sale - this is not a fully finished game. Clearly was rushed out before they could fix it properly. Always have backup saves somewhere - it's been known to corrupt files dozens of hours in.
That said, the bugginess almost adds to the enjoyment in a nostalgic way. It's reminicent of the old Spiderman and Hulk games. Sure, you can play the story as intended...but you can also jump around the city via a grappling hook. The batcycle is garbage. It goes so slow for what you'd expect a vehicle to go, so grappling is really the fastest way to get around. Even the quick travel points are hardly a time saver since they have an unskippable cutscene every time you use it. You may as well move from point to point fighting crimes on the way.
The graphics are cool - it avoids too much uncanny valley that plagues other games that go for this kind of detail. The mouth syncing to voices is impressively accurate, and the amount of detail in facial expressions is spot on. I'm really impressed with the small details Gotham Knights has to offer. Each of the four characters deals with the story beats in their own way that feels true to themselves.
It's also amusing that they insist your enemies are "unconscious" when you dole out curb stomps, bombs, and bullets. In a setting with magic, made-up tech, and resurrection, you'd think we could accept that death is how this world deals with whatever they perceive as a crime regardless of real-life morals. But I digress. Absurdity is definitely part of what makes the story and the gameplay work for me.
Edit: Barbara not walking like a catwalk model also sells it for me. Jason and ♥♥♥♥ have the most ridiculous walk cycles and movements. It's refreshing and even more appropriate for the characters!