Recent reviews by Salami

Great little game. Striking artstyle. Decent soundtrack.

Easy to enter a zen state and chill out mining, or challenge yourself with a complex achievement hunt. There's enough to keep you entertained for ~30 hours (at least, that's my playtime at time of writing).

There's a pretty bad performance bug in this version (as of Sep 2024). Framerate slowly degrades over an hour or so, requiring regular relaunches of the game.

Technical issues aside, time has not been kind to this game. The character movement and animations are clunky, the gunplay is meh, the AI is dumb as hell, and every enemy is a giant bullet sponge (unless you do the requisite grinding for XP).

If you have two options:
1) Pay $80 for Starfield with high expectations.
2) Pay $20 for Elex with low expectations.

Don't even think twice, buy Elex. It's janky and barely works, but it's pretty fun.

The good:
The world-building is interesting and you won't walk too far without spotting something worth investigating. Going along with that the quest design is generally interesting and varied. Nothing groundbreaking but honestly better than anything Bethesda has pumped out in the last decade.

The bad:
The dialogue is sometimes good but often suffers from its poor translation. The late game is thin on content and can be a bit of a grind.

For those having difficulty with combat, my recommendation is to cheese the game to within an inch of its life (anything with knockback like grenades or the Cleric's black hole tech is all you need to finish the game). Nothing is balanced, but it's fun to abuse.

A fairly casual and well presented take on the base builder/automation genre.

Note: At time of writing I only played with the "Green Mars" DLC, but no others.

This isn't a 1000 hour forever game - and it doesn't pretend to be - so comparisons to Factorio et al aren't really appropriate. I finished the main campaign in about 20 hours, mostly while eating/listening to a podcast in the background/etc. Most of the time I had a singular short/medium-term goal to shoot for, most of which you could achieve in an afternoon's play. I'd recommend this to people who like the genre but don't have the time requirements they normally require.

It isn't terribly cerebral, but it's pretty satisfying seeing your actions affect the planet. There's a delicate interplay between the temperature, water/humidity content, atmospheric composition/density, etc, that's all modelled and reactive in real time. There are a half dozen or so map filters to track the progress of these stats, which each have a strong visual style. Pretty cool overall. From a gameplay perspective this is fairly basic: make the numbers go up to win. However, I suspect the developers opted to simplify the simulation in order to keep the game less of a datacrunch simulator. Interested to see what innovations/complexities the developer will throw in if a sequel/successor game is made; the bones of the sim are pretty neat.

The game seemed to grind to a halt as my base grew too big. I think the temptation in playing the game is to build a singular sprawling megabase across the entire surface of the planet, but I don't know if the AI is up to task. Often they travel on less-optimal roads, carting unimportant goods, ignoring prioritised tasks, and so on. It's a shame there aren't more tools to poke them in the right direction; this likely would've taken the game from a "pretty good" to a "must play" for me. On the other hand, refer to my earlier remark about the "1000 hour forever game" - by the time I encountered this kind of issue I was basically at the endgame anyway.

The worst thing here is the Elon Musk fart-sniffing. Not only is it extremely soy, it has aged terribly! Just replace the word 'hyperloop' with 'train' and you'll be fine.

At the time of writing the game is about $40, which works out to $2/hour for me. IMO, a pretty good deal. Even if I never boot it up again I think I'll have the soundtrack stuck in my head for a while...

Having trouble putting this game down. Very compelling mix of roguelite, deck builder and colony sim. For an early access game it's rock solid; no crashes or technical glitches as well as plenty of content. Highly recommend.

Hard to say anything other reviews haven't already mentioned yet. Just buy it.

This is the most compelling argument I've ever seen to own a VR headset.

Pretty much the newest iteration of DDR/Guitar Hero games. Completely different experience being in VR though.