Recent reviews by The_EC

It's not every day I end up buying a game as cute, simple, cozy or even something that is inspired by the likes of Animal Crossing. But this one stole my heart quite quickly after having witnessed that you can play as a little dinosaur character yourself helping out other dinosaur characters.

And the rest of the game? Equally heartfelt and adorable all around. All the characters you meet up and their unique character quirks, the wonderful soundtrack for each time of day, the art direction itself from characters themselves to the Amber Isle itself... this game is definitely a labor of love.

The game revolves around you helping to refurbish Amber Isle back to it's habitable state and upkeeping the only shop in Amber Isle. Many of the items you can craft with resources you can find by exploring around the island and it's biomes and then sell them in your store. You get to choose when you want to open the store, so you could take a day off to do some proper exploring for resources and talking with other residents, but to get the main story going, you need to accumulate Amber, the currency used in this game, to pay off the shop repairs and it's mortgage, as well as fixing broken down spots in the island to make them more accessible.

You get to talk with the paleofolk on the island, invite them to live on the island, get to learn them and even do quests for them as you go, even get to hang around with them: everyone has at least something to say once (per time of day) and their own quests you can perform are also adorable in their own way - including the main story itself as you try to help the locales to make Amber Isle the lovely island it once used to be.

However, there is but only one thing I wish more than anything from it: more of it.

As it is right now, the gameplay loop pretty much boils down to the following approach: Find resources > Craft items to be sold > Place them into the shop/storage > Open up shop > Sell items, haggle occasionally, clean the shop > Make money > Go to sleep > Repeat.

The quests you get to do with other residents are also one-time. Most have three quests in total, most which become accessible either by having increased friendship with them or by completing other quests, while others only have two - some only have one. So the amount of unique dialogue they have when you wish to talk to them is very limited and becomes rather repetitive, especially as everyone has one thing to be said at one time only.

You get to hang around with other paleofolk, which is a lovely idea - but as it is right now, all they do is merely follow you around and cheer you up when you remove debris and gather resources. They don't even take a seat next to you on a bench you've placed on an island, making "hanging out" feel more like a glorified level-up grinding system.

And I think this monotony hurts the replay value of the game. And I say this as someone who's already finished the main story and am on path to complete all the quests the habitants have.

If you are reading this, developers at Ambertail, then allow me to propose few ideas I have in mind as to how to make the interactions with other paleofolk more enjoyable and break the monotony of the gameplay:

+ Add more dialogue options with the citizens. Perhaps there could be things everyone enjoys talking about or things they dislike; perhaps we could ask them of the stories of how they came to find their profession or where they are now; maybe we could try and tell a joke to see if they like it or not. Or just pick a topic that we could discuss with them.

+ Make hanging out more than just "follow the leader doing their chores": perhaps you could set up tiny little events like playing a sport, reading books together, hanging around at a place and discussing the events of the day, maybe even have a race from point A to point B. Make it so that we can interact with the lovely people. If possible, make it even so that you could engage with the activity the individual paleofolk is known for.

+ Since almost every paleofolk on the island has an occupation of some kind, why not make minigames where we can help them for a change? Someone's a chef at a restaurant, you could be their waiter; someone needs to do deliveries, you could arrange the packages in the order they need to be in; the local doctor is busy with patients, you could be there to help give them the correct medicine or tools of recovering to them, and so on. The potential for you to be able to help them and have a varied gameplay loop (even if it were to boil down to "fetch something for someone on time" -style) would be an additional way to increase friendship with them and break the monotony a bit.


I genuinely love this game for what it is and I wish to enjoy more of it. I understand if implementing such features like what I wish for and stated above are difficult (if not downright impossible), but the impact this game has had on me at the start of the year has been a big one. A dash of positivity that I definitely needed in my life.

The game is perhaps the most wonderful (and occasionally infuriating) experience I've had in for the longest while and the experiences I've had with friends are downright unforgettable. Which makes my negative review hurt my heartstrings even more and feel equally saddened for Arrowhead Studios, the developers, who have made such a wonderful game for us all to play.

But I'm doing it because of 2 fundamental principles that Sony, the publisher, had doubled down on while ignoring the issues they've created as a result:

1) By requiring players to have their accounts be linked to PlayStation Network (PSN) address/ID, they've made it so access to the game is now impossible as those services do not exist in more than 100 countries on this planet, barring players from those countries and regions unable to play the game whatsoever. From mere business practice perspective this is a bad move, since people from these regions are now incapable of playing a product made by a developer team full of passionate people and are now resorted to refund the game or keep it as a mere digital paperweight.

2) Sony's data security has been breached multiple times in last couple of years, making a clear case that it's not a trustworthy platform for those who wants their data be kept in secure hands. By doubling down on their decision and insistence that players must use PSN ID to continue to play not only bars players from properly playing the game, they also offer a poor quality of security management that a fair amount of players wish to not conduct with.


Poor private data security + making the game inaccessible because of region-locking = unhappy customers, which therefor equals poor business practices.

Reduce your cocaine snorting parties and fix your ♥♥♥♥, Sony.

A jovial arcade game with a fine art style reminiscent of stylized comics with a solid gameplay loop. Can't get enough of the personality each of the kobolds you get to play as has, let alone the enemy gnolls you face off in increasing numbers and difficulties in this seemingly endless castle-defending indie game.

Highly recommended for those who seek a small but fun retro-inspired games for short quick bursts.

A surprisingly solid game with a simple premise: land your dome of a station on the surface of a hostile planet, go digging for resources underground underneath the dome, come back to the dome on the surface to fight off against shadowy alien monsters trying to destroy your dome. It's simple and to the point, but it does it so well.

Additional bonus points to the fine art style as well as the atmosphere the music creates. The fact that I've sunken in 28 hours into the game in short time span is a good sign of a gameplay so strong that I can happily recommend it to anyone into pixel-styled resource-gathering and base defense games.

At time I'm writing this, I've only played and finished the main campaign. [Review updated on November 21st 2022, check below to see more.]

The base idea and concept of the game is something up my alley: you spawn in a fictional Swedish region of Östertörn in 1989 that's been overtaken by hostile robots. You (and your friends if you've got three others to play with) have to now figure out what exactly had happened where this robotic invasion started.

For the game's pros, the landscape is a beautiful mixture of forests, farmland fields, archipelago coasts and little towns with intense fighting against the many robotic enemies and their variants where you have to use culling tactics to take all the enemies down. Each enemy also possesses many weakpoints that has to be shot to shut them down for good. Sometimes you have to just distract your opponents and choose your battles carefully, as you may not have enough ammo and resources to take on all of them - upon detection, they are relentless in chasing you, so any and all tactics are clear to keep them off from you. If anything, the game can be suspensful at times.

But alas, that's where the pros end.

If I had to describe the game's cons in two words, they'd be "tedious" and "inconvenient".

Since you're trying to figure out what caused the robot invasion to occur, you will never find any other NPCs around, only notes, last recordings or radio transmissions of the moments when the catastrophe happened or aftermaths of it. You'll find yourself often in a situation where a main mission or side mission ends in the typical "you're too late, player: they're already dead all along" -scenario where you pick up what's left of the person, group or stash left behind. Supposedly one of the DLC expansions to the game adds some life to it with introduction of NPCs...

Beyond just suffering from emptiness of no living, talking, breathing NPCs like the very launch of Fallout 76, your only methods of traveling are by foot or by bicycle. And if you're a hoarder in open survival-games like I am, I've got bad news to you: you'll soon find yourself overencumbered to sprint, which is necessary for fight-or-flight situations and off-road terrain (as well as fast traveling) and the bicycle is only meant for going through roads - something where you often end up facing against enemies anyway, making it a risky to use if you simply want to go from point A to point B.

Leveling up your skills and abilities is on par with most other survival games like these: level up, get skill point and spend it on one of the things to improve that particular aspect of your skill. However, you can only have a total of 30 skill points in the entire game (you start as level 1 and end at level 31), meaning you have to decide CAREFULLY which skills are important to your playstyle - which is a crapshoot if you select one that doesn't suit you or doesn't work much at all. And all of the choices you do are set in stone: there's no respec capabilities in the game. And the way you unlock skills forces you to pick up some of the unnecessary skills anyway, so all you can do is to not level those specific skills up again unless you feel they serve you well.

What the game tries to go for in terms of realism, it only makes things inconvenient in gameplay feel: both your storage box and recycle station, where you can drop your items and crafting resources to, have weight limit to them. Item hoarders and "be prepare for anything" -players (aka: you carry multiple weapons and healthpacks with you for any situation ever) will find this to be a difficult thing to manage, as the game incentives you to spend a lot during a battle and craft more later down the line. While the capacity can be increased, it can become tedious if you can't find certain resources required (pro tip: to reach max level on both stations, you need Tungsten - those can only be found sometimes on Apocalypse variants of enemies, so get ready for a tough battle).

Ultimately, Generation Zero suffers from tedious repetition: after having reach another region, it repeats the cycle of "roam around, get into fight, fight back or run away, repeat", with missions themselves boiling down to "find the mission start at Point A, go to Point B to finish mission". The games core-design doesn't make it any better for solo players either, unfortunately: you're MEANT to play with other friends so that you can distract, flank and set up attacks and traps to the best of your abilities, with everyone having SET ROLE that you're not supposed to deviate from by either painstakingly maximizing all of the skill trees or even becoming a Jack-of-all-trades. I'd argue myself that having an increased level cap to 41 would make things bit more lenient or having at least the ability to respec your skills and appoint them properly for players benefit would take some of the tedium off, but that's only one aspect of the many others. Even another vehicle, an off-road BMX bicycle, or a moped, would make traversing and escaping more possible.


In short: Despite the beautiful locations and the interesting idea of how fights are more involved beyond just "point at enemy and shoot until it's dead", the amount of repetition the game has and how tedious it is with some of the design choices devs have made makes the game difficult for me to recommend, even if you did have friends to soften the impact of the cons. If I do get some of the DLC expansions later on (FNIX Uprise and Alpine Unrest), I'll update my review.

UPDATE [November 21st of 2022]:

Returned after introduction of motorbikes. Tried even Alpine Unrest DLC.

Both of the DLCs shows that adding something that was severely missing from before makes a great difference: for the Alpine Unrest, adding people that can talk with you and provide feedback adds a little bit more life to situations and even some driving motivation, even if it isn't exactly Oscar-worthy; motorbikes makes traversing around places much easier and makes escaping during more dire situations a viable option rather than being stuck in a situation, yet they're not overpowered: you won't be making mountain climbs up steep hills and coming down is always a risky maneuver, but possible if you know the terrain. These DLCs show that we're going to the right direction and I'm hoping that more content and longevity, including with control points as well as the new enemy machines introduced, will be added.

Other things added in includes the ability to respec your current skills and redo them again, something I originally said was an issue with a game with only 30 skill points available. Now you're able to redo your builds according to your play style; also included is the ability to start a new game+ with an existing character or make a new character for the existing world - four character and four worlds, making experimenting more lenient.

However, there's still few issues existing that needs to be ironed out, such as when your character falls down from heavy attacks and can't get back up as it's still ragdolling, the immense difficulty when playing solo versus when playing with friends, occasionally getting stuck in corners or objects when trying to crouch, as well as the strange case how certain locations are named completely differently.

These issues aside, the game is slowly starting to show some promise. I still feel hesitant to give proper thumbs up for recommendation, but with what's been introduced now, I'm keeping to my word and do recommend the game - though with heavy asterisk of preparing yourself for hard session unless you're playing with friends.

A surprisingly solid hack n' slash adventure game with nice focus on the roguelike/roguelite playstyle. The visual design of using the sort of 16-bit/32-bit coloring with simple 3D models gives it a look that nicely stands out on it's own, but the way how you can create each of your attacks with the given strikes for different weapons is the true seller here: from making weapons strike more often to guard-breaking to even increasing their size with each strike and applying elements make them all feel unique. Multiple enemies on the field grants that lovely "wreck 'em" feel that a certain carnage-seeking need in me yearns, though on the occasion there's couple of puzzle-like elements that one can do to break the monotony of the battles.

However, there's few criticisms that have to be mentioned here: 1) While the graphical design is nifty, it can create he issue of cluttering up the the screen when combined with the other particle effects that take place in, blocking the view of enemies and surroundings quite easily. 2) With the angle of the camera, it's difficult to see further in the distance as it's rather zoomed in close on the character. If the players could zoom out just a tad, they could keep an eye around the surroundings just a bit more. 3) While the game can be played on a keyboard, it's clearly designed with controller in mind: if you're like me and use a nordic keyboard layout, you have to remap couple of the keys so you can even perform two of the Heavy Attack prompts - otherwise you won't leave past by the tutorial screen.

These are just minor gripes, but I still have had loads of fun with this game. A solid game with a solid customization is something that can be difficult to do, but always welcome addition in any game.

It's free. And I'd still would want to pay for this game.

The amount of content it has may be minimal, but for a single-person project, it has already most necessary base functions going that a lot of the big-name developers and publishers don't have these days in their endless pursue of money.

And this game was born out as a response to a YouTube comment daring him to make a multiplayer survival game, which is an outstandingly ballsy move.

Of all the games I've played, I would have to say that this is by far an audiovisual trip of the grandest kind. And it's all about fitting them Tetris blocks into right place, while going on a trip through and beyond humanity (I think).

Words can't describe how enjoyable the experience was.

Just within four hours of gameplay, it's already noticeable that there's a major improvement in the gameplay: enemies are more ferocious, but so is Doomguy. The quality of the gameplay shines all over the place and it's all crowned by the magnificence of Mick Gordon's musical score. An absolute must get for anyone into anything DOOM related.

Mine minerals, shoot at alien bugs, keep the team alive, get an occasional promotion, spend credits and minerals on weapon overclocks, costumes and beards (don't forget the beards!) and spend more credits and resources on drinking beer (do NOT forget the beer!!) - all this while you're behaving like a badass space dwarf.


TEN-OUTTA-TEN would Rock and Stone to the bone again.


Update: There's even more beer and more beards now. Even more weapons and missions. Heck, they even got the concept of "free season pass" right in my mind. There's more things to kill while mining.

The management should be pleased.