Recent reviews by vel

even more confusing and alienating than its predecessor. i will update my review as soon as the game starts making some more sense.

haven't had any performance issues but i have a nice pc so maybe it can tank whatever's going on. as for the dlc itself it's basically like the devs released a third half of the base game. the final boss is a little overtuned but otherwise the dlc's difficulty is on par with the final few areas in the base game. shouldn't surprise anyone who's beaten the game. over all i was a little underwhelmed by the dlc but im not sure fromsoft couldve released something that would've met them to begin with.

ffxiv raiding as a 2d sidescroller a la bullet hell games very cool

the woke mob is trying to cancel me for saying this is a better and more enjoyable soulslike than Dark Souls 3 but nothing they can do to me will make it any less true

As it is right now (in Early Access) there are minimal differences from Slime Rancher 1 other than some different slimes Quantum, Saber, Dervish, Tangle, Rad, and Mosaic Slimes are gone and are replaced by Cotton, Batty, Flutter, Ringtail Slimes as well as more to come with continued development and a new map that, in my opinion, is much more confusing to navigate.

If you're just looking to play more Slime Rancher, feel free to get this game. If you're like me, however, and hoped for sweeping changes/upgrades to core gameplay mechanics from the first game, I'd recommend waiting for the full release

it's just another edition of More Borderlands but this is the first time ive regretted checking out what's new. class skill building is dumbed down to one page of skills per class with a choice between two active abilities each. the game is narrated by tiny tina which, in case you were wondering, DOES make it that much more painful to play. the characters are all a lot less endearing when you have no attachment to them whatsoever which is already on top of them being written for Borderlands to begin with.

if you loved all the other borderlands games, you might like this one. if you thought the other borderlands games had some gems buried deep in the mud like I do, don't bother.

its alright, short even for the price and not very memorable but for $2 you'd have to mess up pretty bad to be a waste of money

promising movement shooter, relatively open-ended map design left me unsure where to go for decent stretches of time and i think the game could do more to make the weapons feel stronger (VFX-wise, at least) but its a lot of fun still.

edit for episode 2: grappling hook :)

TL;DR: the game is playable and there's some enjoyment to be had in watching things go brrr but you'd be better off spending your time on probably any other idle game. the basic mechanics are very poorly thought out, active gameplay doesn't feel particularly rewarding but idle gameplay's contribution to progression is marginal. i dont normally write steam reviews (let alone these long ones) but I was so intensely disappointed by this game that i felt like i had to say something. sorry for the lack of formatting, except i'm not actually sorry because it'd be a pain to do retroactively.

the game is technically functional but as an idle incremental game it's pretty shallow and uninspired. the last "new feature" (item effect/upgrade that doesnt just increase a basic stat) you get is from the second megaboss and all it is is "super crit," exactly what it sounds like. to max out all the boss items (inventory mechanics of NGU Idle sans boosts) without savescumming you need to play for at least about a year and there's no autokill mechanic for them like titans in NGU (but they DO have staggered respawn timers) so have fun keeping those timers rolling.

the AFK mode does literally nothing except display a lil bedroom with a TV on it where the game is playing, doesn't reduce computer resource use or anything like that. you can only buy upgrades while between rounds while the game is paused which, while i will admit a more attentive player than me might not experience this problem, results in touching down in the game to buy upgrades, setting it to play again and going to bed or whatever, then coming back to the game and realizing you forgot to turn farm mode/autoplay back on and it's been sitting doing LITERALLY nothing for 8 hours. there are certain enemies with specific effects (namely healers that heal other enemies) and, while its nice that there's a feature to prioritize certain enemies over others, but the menu to select what enemies to prioritize is static and only lets you pick enemies in the first area regardless of what zone you're in. in case you're wondering, no, the healers dont appear in the first area.

there are ~5-7 weapons depending on how you classify them: the obligatory damage on CLICK, single-target ARCHERS that can supercrit (with how fast/how many arrows you're shooting all it is is a slight average dps boost), LASERS that bounce between enemies and are much better for multiple targets and i think they increase in damage the longer they're on the same target but that really only has a visible effect on bosses and megabosses, single target big damage MISSILES that come out relatively infrequently, ROCKETS whose only upgrades are the number you fire at a time (max 9) and a homing upgrade that they are literally useless without, a CANNON that does periodic damage to the middle of the map meaning it only does anything while enemies are approaching the castle, and a BOMB thing that causes the cannonballs to explode after a short delay and suffers from the same issue as cannonballs.

of these weapons, only clicks, archers, and lasers have items that augment them and talents that reward you for investing in them. as is par for the course for systems like this, you are not rewarded for diversifying your spending and you're just going to end up funneling all your gold into archers or lasers, choosing one over the other depending on how far into the game you've progressed. in the time i played, i didn't reach the point in the game where lasers' waveclear outweighed arrows' supercrits/armor pierce and, as much as i wanted to watch the incoming enemies melt against my lasers, the point in the game where you can see that is too far in to justify the grind.

the prestige/soft reset mechanic gives you coins for every unique round you clear and every time you kill a megaboss that you can cash in on reset, meaning that leaving the game on for an extended period of time farming a single round doesn't directly assist meta progression, just gives you gold that lets you push a few more rounds before you're stuck again. you can spend them on 5% increases to damage, gold, or experience points that, as far as i can tell, stack additively, as well as increases to coins earned per zone/megaboss kill and decreased enemies per wave but, since they decrease enemies by 1 per tier with an exponentially increasing cost, I'm pretty sure its just a trap to make you waste coins since you start seeing several hundred enemies per wave pretty early on anyway. bosses appearing every 5 waves that far outscale the regular enemies means you can pretty much softlock yourself if you let the game autoplay for long enough, all but forcing a soft reset.

if you want an idle tower defense game, play The Perfect Tower (1 or 2). If you want a decade-long number go up simulator with a thousand mechanics to manage to balance out the lack of reward for active gameplay, play NGU Idle. if you want to play a tower defense game with a variety of viable strategies, play Bloons TD 6. if you want to play a good game, play ULTRAKILL.

it's a very good game. it has some issues (absurd difficulty spike in the latter half of the game, a lot of uninteresting copy/pasted filler content and bosses, some very frustrating UI quirks, classic FromSoft camera issues massively exacerbated by everything being massive, etc) but as always with fromsoft it's a fantastic world and a hell of a lot of fun to explore. have mostly wrung it dry aside from PvP (no incentive really) but i can confidently say this is the most a AAA release has met its hype at least since Sekiro dropped, probably longer.