Recent reviews by Rettro

This game took 49 hours to complete. After 12 I started running into an issue where the game has about a 50/50 shot of crashing every time it loads a new map zone, which you do more and more as the game goes on. I thought to myself, 'surely the game's almost over, I should just power through this'.

Spoilers ahead, I think?

The main gameplay loop, where you go to a new area, get 3 or 4 of the area's rare drop, and then fight a highly defended area for a shard of the titular 'force of nature', is something I expected to have to do 3 times. Rule of three, ya know? Nope, you need to do it seven time. Each time you basically need to make new armor too, since the levels scale up all the time. After those seven, you get the final task: Go get 25 of each of those 7 rare drops. Have fun with that 50/50 crash chance on using the teleporter! When you're finally finally done, and you craft the 'force of nature'... a pop-up appears that says 'you won, now do it in hard mode'. That's it. The force of nature doesn't even do anything. It's just a blueish triangley thing. In no way does this explain why you woke up on an island you don't know with no memories, or where the quests are coming from, or what the 'force of nature' is.

In the first four or five hours I thought this game had good potential. The tools don't have durability (durability being evil and a curse placed on survival games), and there seems to be a good line of progression for your equipment. That doesn't really matter in the end though, as your stamina is so slow to recover that you'll just die to avoid waiting (which will likely load a new map zone as it takes you to your respawn point, good luck with the 50/50 crash), and each new type of armor is 100% required as they oscilate between cold and hot protection and you just die walking around in the wrong armor.

Very frustrating, far too long, only beat it because of sunk cost fallacy and believing it surely was almost over for the last 37 hours.

This game is incredibly difficult and incredibly forgiving. It's a strange paradox after years of souls-like games intentionally making things more and more difficult. Baratrauma will kill you, destroy everything you own, and call you names... then patiently wait for you to rebuild mid-mission so you don't even have to miss your $4 payday. Then kill you again.

Great way to blow an hour. Makes the developer look good, too.

This Halo "game" is actually every Halo game up to halo 4 - but on PC. The older games have improved graphics that you can switch between live while playing the levels, which is amazing for the sense of nostalgia.

Good game if you're looking for something calm you can play in short sessions.

A fairly well balanced 4v1 game that has a wide catalog of people but doesn't require you to memorize who can counter who how like most hero shooters do, because all perks can be used by anyone with a little xp grinding.

This is a game that provides near zero team communication for the survivors (only in-game 'come here' and 'point' emotes if you can already see each other), but most of the survivors that don't solo queue talk with skype or discord or something. I'm not sure what that actually means for how it works as a game mechanic.

As someone who never plays alone (and thus never on the '1' side of the 4v1) I can say it's a great game when you can talk to your fellow survivors.

ARK is a game about spending a lot of time looking after dinosaurs. I've never reached end game, and I've never tamed a dinosaur without being on a private server. Why? It takes hours. Hours and hours. Of sitting next to an unconcious dinosaur in the middle of it's spawn zone, keeping it alive and well fed. Ignoring that, or spreading it amongst a bunch of people, it's a game about riding dinosaurs. What's not to like.

Somebody spent a hell of a lot of time drawing a billion cartoon style sprites then put it on a predictable story with some of the most bull---- puzzles and fights I've ever seen.

Have you ever seen the Robot Chicken sketch "Hall of Memory"? Well it's that. Short version: Every two steps you take there's something there that WILL one-shot kill you and rarely if ever has any warning that it's coming. Your only choise is to die, go back, try something that doens't work and die again, then try something that DOES work and make it to the next insta-kill step on your journey of bull----... And if you're lucky you'll remember how to do steps one thru 49 as you try to figure out the last thing you need to do before a checkpoint...

Don't believe me? Watch any of the boss fights on youtube. They're all the same:

1. Attack with something you need to do X to avoid
   
2. Attack with something you need to do Y to avoid
   
3. Attack with something you need to do Z to avoid
   
4. Let you get 1 hit in somehow
   
5. Repeat 1-4 three times total, with additional environmental hazards thrown in each time.

2 of my meager 5.6 hours were spent on the final boss. Just rediculous.

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In short:

Incredibly frustrating.

Predictable story. brother vs brother, smart brother gives other brother magic and he turns evil because he can't handle power

Animations are beautiful the first 20 or 30 times you see them but you're gonna keep dying in that same room so the novelty wears off.

It took me roughly 25 minutes to beat this game twice, to see both endings and all the little touches in between. The rest of the time was waiting for card drops. It's a decent enough short story that really didn't translate into game too well. It feels like there were a lot of details in the creator's head that made cameos in the game and never actually got to exist. 'The Beast' at least gets to beat on a door for a second before the game clumsily suggests that you are the most evil thing in the room. Or you're the beast. Not sure, since all it does is make bodies appear when you stand near its cage. Also, the game suffers heavily from the author's non-fluent-English as the entire game is story-driven and all in written text.

The main thing to do, long-term, in this game is to collect. I've played a few games like that before, and they get pretty stale when you near the end of your list of things to collect and the last few just take forever to find... But Stardew has managed to avoid this issue by doing a few things: First, new content is added as time goes on. You'll gain access to new areas and new seeds and animals etc as time goes on - some that you expect and some that you won't. Because of this there's always something new to fiddle with. Along with that, the things that you are collecting / achieving still individually fall into that hole where the last few things hurt to find... But you don't have to dedicate all your time to finishing it because someone else needs something else and you have a brand new challenge to complete - while you're still hammering away at the last one.

I'm about a year and a half through the game, and they're hinting at even bigger things in the future. I don't think it will get stale any time soon.

Beware: Time sink. It's super easy to say 'oh I missed business hours at the blacksmith, I'll just play another day to get this done', but the days are about 15 minutes and the game only saves overnight so 'one more's add up quick.

Update for steam awards:
Currently on year 5 and still looking for a few items to finish one collection... Did I predict that? I think I did. Still like the game.