Recent reviews by Tenet

The Standard Settings Dueling mode is a Martial Art with a surprising level of depth. Expand that to a 4v4 Death match, and you have one of the highest skill cap PvP games on Steam.

Download it and challenge me to a duel.

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It's a classic and a genre starter. Just deep enough to keep you interested for a few playthroughs... then a few more. Very unfair, but that is part of the genre.

Small but surprisingly fun game that will test your tactics to the limit!

This is the most fun contemporary Chess/CCG hybrid. The card and currency mechanics are very fair. The amount of Single-Player, Puzzle, and Co-OP content is significant, and there are several PvP modes, from very competitive, to draft-mode fun.

The Chess aspect of the game - moving the units on the board as it is built up by lands, collecting mana from the wells - is very smart and adds a lot of challenge missing traditional CCG's.

The game's economy is very generous:
Special currency is used only for cosmetics. Arena is sustained if you play out your games, even if you mostly lose. Card Chests give you only cards you can use and new cards (duplicates stop showing up). Cosmetic Chests only give you cosmetics you don't have. Each day you can craft a number of cards of your choice and get rewards for logging in. Many free chests of both types and cosmetics are available for completing the puzzles, tutorials, story and co-op games.
The price of the game and expansions seems fair while on Steam Sale.

I don't know whether the Competitive scene is healthy, but this may be a game you just play to relax or have fun with friends. I stopped playing competitive modes and only watch the top games in each tournament. I mostly play Pandora (Arena/Draft) and the only negative is that waiting times go from 1 minute at best to 3-5 minutes at worst on certain days and hours.

Visuals: 10/10 - The game has excellent artists and a distinct style that is consistently executed. I like the Art and style better than Heartstone, Artifact and MTG.

Score:
Casual Players that want to have hundreds of hours of fun at a fair price: 10/10
Arena/Draft focused players that enjoy crazy RNG fun: 8/10
Competitive focused players: 6/10 - Balance and Popularity may be issues

Faeria is a hidden gem, unusually good for a Strategy-CCG hybrid, and should be way more popular!

P.S. I started playing back when the game was F2P and spent about $15 on expansions and cosmetics.

DWARVES WANTED for hazardous operation, small wages, ravenous bugs, underground mazes in complete darkness, constant danger, explosive munitions, toxic fumes, and frequent alcoholic intoxication. Safe return doubtful. Honor and Gold in event of success!
Contact Ernest Shacklebeard at Deep Rock Galactic.

The gunplay mechanics on some of the weapons, and some of the crazy combinations possible, kept the game fresh for both an initial playthrough and a repeat at higher character levels.
The lack of good options at the beginning of playing a character is a bit of a let down, particularly when starting over, but that is a necessary sacrifice to appease people who love 'progression'.

This game often goes on sale with 75%+ discoun on the main title and the DLC's, which actually makes most of those expansions worth the price. It is a great value, and a fun game to play Co-OP with friends.

This is a potentially great game hidden behind a HORRIBLE economy and awful new player experience.

Piranha Overcharge you on Everything with the Cash-Currency, and try to force you into payment by making the alternatives exhorbitantly priced with earned currency.

There is NO WAY to BUY the game at a Reasonable Price. You may choose to pay for the $12 Monthly Subscription that only reduces the grind by 33%.

Your income is pathetic even if you do well in matches. You choose whether to invest it into mech skills - which cost way too many credits, or save up and buy a new mech variant - which means playing mechs you don't like for a month or more. Mechlab tinkering is hidden behind huge cash grinds.

The UI design is atrocious, both outside the match in the Mechlab, and in the way information is presented inside your mech, and there is no way to mod it to be useful.

Average of 135K credits per game before expenses. -40K per match for coolant shots, -40K per artillery strike. "You don't need them to play" but they add another edge to veterans that can afford the expense.

Want to buy a new mech engine? That will be 1.5 million credits, wait a week.
Want to switch from Double Heatsinks to Single, or back? That will be 1+ million credits.
Bought the wrong engine? Sucks for you, no trades.
Want to buy a new mech? Get ready to grind for a month or more for ONE of the variants.
Finally have a few variants, half a year of active play later? Buy Mech-bays with Cash or you can't use them.

Bought the wrong Mech that you don't like, or that became obsolete due to balance patches? Sucks for you, selling means abandoning half of your investment.

Want to try and be smart and plan your rise within the game? Most of the serious tier lists and resources are outdated or abandoned. Welcome to viewing unreliable forum posts and 'scrub build of the day' youtube channels.

Spent a Year getting good and unlocking some of the Mechs you correctly guessed would be "in-meta" by the time you are ready to join an organized team? Congradulations - There is no way for you to show your worth or find out who is good.
The leaderboards are nearly useless. There is no way to quickly show to another person how well you performed in the last 30 days. Good luck finding a matching skill level group.

There is no way for you to find out people's ratings inside the matches - so you don't get to complain about bad Matchmaking and explain the frequent stomps (0:12 matches where you do highest damage on your team by hitting with each of your weapons 3 times).

Piranha learned all the bad tricks from Wargaming (World of Tanks), but didn't pick up any of the redeeming qualities or gameplay depth.

I really wanted to like this game and satisfy my craving for Mech Battles and tinkering in the MechLab but I cannot even start talking about the Positive qualities because the game prevents me from reaching them in a reasonable time.

Update: The first DLC was alright, slightly disappointing relative to time after release. New maps can be accessed for free, which is great. I hope the next DLC from Fatshark is significantly better.

Cooperative First Person Dungeon Clearing with well crafted maps.

1. Atmosphere and Immersion: 9/10

Do you want an adrenaline rush? Do you want some moments of visceral terror? Do you like an occasional dark humor joke? Did you have a bad day and just want to crush through a horde of monsters, tearing at their limbs while feeling like the ultimate badass? This game is for you.

All the elements I will describe in detail below contain some flaws - but when combined they work and balance into a great experience.

2. Graphics: 7/10 to 9/10

If you judge strictly on the complexity and fidelity of the graphics, the game will appear outdated and not a match to boundary pushing titles. If you freeze frame and look at details, you will find flaws.
However, if you look at the game as a moving image, when absorbed in the action, as clearly intended, it deserves a higher score. This game does not suffer from oversaturation of effects, or from a harsh contrast between quality levels. The individual flaws of a texture or model disappear when all the elements work together on the screen and in motion.

Game performance is acceptable, for the size of the studio and budget involved they have done a good job of allowing people with a variety of hardware to play the game with decent graphics. On high end machines you can easily play with maxed settings, and midrange PC's will not require a significant sacrifice in visuals.

3. Sound Design: 9/10

Those horde drums are still a terror, even after you hear them hundreds of times.

The various souns of the monsters, specials and hordes are well produced and sufficiently distinctive. The horde and boss themes can be particularly terrifying. Some of the callouts from the monsters can be highly amusing, and scary in their own way. For example, the little rat slaves yelling "stay together" in their thin voices sound as a mockery of your team's similar attempts to organize over voice chat.

The melee sounds can be quite disturbing, matching the gruesome visuals.

4. Gameplay: 8/10

At the highest difficulty level the variety shrinks down to a few classes and styles, when a team is trying hard to maintain a high clear rate. This, however, does not extend to the lower difficulty levels where the majority of the people play. The balance for beginners through veterans is just right - challenging at all times but never impossible. It is very easy to figure out what you did wrong, and improve.

The developers are very active at smoothing out the difficulty spikes that existed on release day, while not sacrificing the randomness and presence of intense moments.

The Melee and Range combat systems are sufficiently deep for the genre - there's a variety of swings and timings availiable, and aiming for headshots can be important (but not mandatory for some styles).

The AI Director, a concept taken from Left4Dead, is crucial, and it largely works. It is a system that adjusts the spawns and challenges in the middle of missions to create a new experience each time.

This is how PvE should be done in MMORPG dungeon instances and other cooperative games. There is no more excuse for having a "GRIND", for forcing people to "aggro and clear" the same groups of mobs over and over. With an AI Director involved, PvE can be quite a bit more cerebral, and actually promote fluid teamwork and cooperation between players.

The crafting in this game is a bit tedious - requiring a high number of attempts, each followed by a short animation, of achieveing a desired stat re-roll. It would be perfect if there was an option to leave a weapon/item with an NPC, set desired goals, set a maximum allowance of resources, and come back after a mission to claim the results.
This is a minor issue - since some of the items are shared between all characters, and some are shared within the same class, so you do not have to craft very often once you finish progression and get items approaching "best in slot".

The good part of the crafting system is that items have a variety of effects that offer some Horizontal progression, where you gain increased options with neither being strictly superior.

5. Replayability: 7/10 on release, 8/10 as of the most recent patch.

There is the initial advancement of 5 different characters through their levels, with unlocking of perks and gear synergy. Then there is the quest to obtain the 'Red' items, that guarantee perfect stat rolls and have unique impressive skins. The last patch added Daily Quests, Event Quests, Achievements rewards, and a chance of Cosmetic in the loot boxes.

Loot boxes can be improved in quality through in-mission decisions (through certain pick ups which raise the difficulty), and there is some RNG involved to get the best rating.

You can also find "Deeds" scrolls that change aspects of the gamplay and can be cleared once for an extra loot box reward. There is no limit on the attempts until success.

There are 13 maps that can be played in sequence as a story, or by picking one in particular, or via random queue. Some of the maps are relatively shorter runs, while others are long and multi level, some are open, others more closely resemble dungeons. There is a good variety of themes.

The maps all feature some kind of an end-map task or even, or a boss. Some have fixed mini-bosses, or random appearance of bosses in certain sections. There is also the occasional chance of "Patrols" of difficult enemies that can be potentially avoided, adding an element of stealth. The variety of the maps combined with the AI Director create a very high depth of potential experiences.

6. Community: 8/10

The game has a functional Voice Chat that is quite necessary for efficient cooperation with random pick up groups.
Playing Quick Play I encountered very few trolls despite Friendly Fire being on at higher difficulty levels.

For the best experience, I recommend joining one of the advertised Discord channels: Blood Moon Inn, Squirrel Squad or Loot Runners. They are decently moderated and you will be able to find groups to your skill level, with a generally friendly and knowledgeable community. This community has some great memes, including poking fun at developers and game issues in a non-toxic manner.

The best part is that if you do encounter a toxic person - you can leave the group (get replaced by a bot) and find another group quite quickly, or even start a game with bots (which are not entirely useless relative to other games).

Like most cooperative games, it is best to gather a group of friend, and build connections with the people you had good experiences with previously. I ended up creating several Steam Friend lists, sorted by tags - with dozens of new people added. Integration with Steam-Overlay is not as smooth as it could be

7. Value: 8/10 on release, 10/10 right now.

For $20 to $25, you ge 100-200 of hours of highly concentrated interesting and stimulating experiences with minimal down time.

8. Bugs and Support: 6/10 at launch, 8/10 current

The most disrturbing bugs that the game at launch were addressed, and developers work relatively fast to respond to patch bugs with hotfixes. It feels like AAA treatment from a much smaller studio. The current main releases are as stable as you can expect with a PC game and hardware/software differences. Stability issues seem to be resolved during Beta testing of upcoming patches.

Conclusion / TLDR:

9/10 Great Cooperative First Person Melee/Shoter game. Buy it with friends for a good challenging experience and many opportunities for laughs!

Fatshark impressed me with this title. I am still wary of their ability to balance, but they have proven to be able to create fun cooperative experiences! Keep up the good work with the DLCs!

The ship building is very fun and has a surprising level of depth, The community of the game is currently quite small but contains several great modders that work to improve the UI and remove some of the roughness. The developers are still adding features. The game is well worth the current price.

Good:
- Ship Building
- Exploration
- Mining Fleet Creation
- Upgrading and Loot

Average:
- Combat (there is potential for depth and shooting some weapons is fun, but current state is very simple)
- Procedural Generation (the game needs more developers to add some more spice and mystery)
- Storyline / Main Quest - it's just barely enough with a few fun puzzles but not yet fleshed out and requires looking at Wiki or lots of guesswork.

Poor:
- AI is Basic
- Simulation of economy and factions is very basic
- Filler Quests are very basic, no surprises, fetch and kill quests
- Performance drops rapidly when large numbers of ships appear in the same area, or large numbers of parts are used
- It's Early Access, there are some bugs and private servers disable unstable features (currently Fighters)

Overall the Good aspects, particularly the ship building, far outweight all the negatives.
Check out the Workshop to see the incredible creations by the community.