Recent reviews by Xander

As of writing this review, I have played approximately 1600 hours of Destiny 2 over on Battle.net, where the game was previously hosted before moving to Steam.

Destiny 2 is an interesting game, an instanced MMOFPS which certainly isn't a common sight. Just some quick history first, I picked up Destiny 2 upon release back in September 2017. I had not played Destiny 1 over on consoles so this was my first contact with a Bungie game since Halo: Reach. Both Destiny and Destiny 2 had issues in development apparently and Destiny 2 released in a subpar state, at least according to Destiny 2 veterans. Personally, I thought it was fantastic at the time and enjoyed Destiny 2's first year despite the extremely negative reception. Since then, there have been three major DLCs, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken, and the year two annual pass containing three minor DLCs, Black Armoury, Joker's Wild and Penumbra. As Destiny 2 enters its third year, the game is transitioning to a free to play model alongside its fourth major DLC, Shadowkeep.

So right off the bat, I want to praise Bungie in their slick gameplay. Halo was renowned for its great gunplay and despite the Halo series being over for a while (games after Reach don't count), Bungie clearly have shown they still have it through Destiny. Destiny's core gameplay of shooting dudes feels fantastic in pretty much every way, from the way the guns handle to the way the enemies move and react. All the guns feel and sound very satisfying, and enemies over the four enemy species are varied enough to change things up pretty frequently. This makes the in the moment gameplay just feel far better than most games I play.

Speaking of sound, Destiny really excels at sound design. The music of Destiny is amazing and really shines in things like the story, dungeons and raids. Notable tracks like Journey or The Hunted just really set the mood perfectly and show that although Bungie no longer has Marty, they can still creat exceptional soundtracks. Sound effects are in the same boat, the musical cue of the Leviathan's castellum doors opening, the telltale "ting" of Calus's chalice being shot or the boom of his thunderous claps, the crunch of the killing blow on a cursed thrall, the crack of a golden gun activation, I could go on and on. There's so many sound effects in this game that just feel right and it makes the game so much better.

Onto art direction and graphics, Destiny just looks beautiful honestly. The graphical fidelity might not be quite as high resolution as 2019 titles, but you don't notice it even staring at rocks up close. The direction is incredibly varied, from the forested ruins of the EDZ to the geometrical, artificial terrain of Nessus to the fantastical cliffs of the Dreaming City. Each location has a clear direction and pursues it to the fullest, all the way down to the organic hive infested tunnels on Mars or the dark, eerie depths of the Ascendant Plane. Even the skyboxes are great to look at, and I frequently find myself just watching the clouds roll over the lakes of the EDZ or the spaceship traffic in the tower in the Last City. In short, the art direction is stunning and Bungie does not shy away from ambitious vistas in this game.

Destiny 2's looting looting and gear aspects are pretty simple. There are five tiers of weapons; common (white), uncommon (green), rare (blue), legendary (purple) and exotic (yellow). In contrast to most games, these classications aren't indicative of rarity, instead at low light levels (weighted average of equipped gear levels) commons and uncommons drop, but at high levels commons and uncommons become impossible to drop and most of drops are rare, with the rest being legendary and sometimes exotics. Only legendary and exotic gear is really viable in any way, all other tiers are just for levelling or infusing (levelling up) the legendaries and exotics you like. Speaking of exotics, you can only equip one exotic weapon and one exotic armour piece at once, but they generally change your playstyle with completely new gamechanging perks. Levelling generally consists of doing any activity, raising you light level with random drops until you hit the soft cap, then doing specific activities that reward powerful gear until you hit the hard cap. This is then exceeded to an extent by using the artifact. Both the soft and hard caps increase with each season, as does the level requirement of new activities. Most activities are locked behind light level requirements, but since new players start at 750 now, this is irrelevant. There's a huge amount of activities in the game at this point so it can cater to anyone. Year one story campaigns (Red War, Curse of Osiris and Warmind) are somewhat lower quality compared to newer content but are a good start. There's a good amount of PvP variety if you're into that and a very large endgame with plenty of room for gear improvement.

In terms of the endgame, Destiny 2 has quite a lot. Most prominently is the raids, of which there are seven at time of writing. The three year one Leviathan raids are available to everyone, the others need the relevant DLC. The raids are long, six man activities that are heavy on interesting mechanics and both individual and team skill expression. They're all an absolute blast to play through; if you're feeling up for it, doing them completely blind and figuring everything out on your own is much more fun than looking up mechanics and encounters. Performance in Destiny is heavily based on gear, so playing through specific activities to get good perks on your armour and weapons can take some time but gives you a huge edge or can be an endgame itself if you're so inclined. There are also dungeons like the Shattered Throne, which are shorter three man raids, which can be fun to explore and challenging to play. Or maybe you want to climb in competitive PvP or PvPvE. There's even a speedrunning community if that's your style. Grabbing a bunch of friends to play through the endgame stuff is recommended, or you could find a clan that suits you or just LFG for raid groups but experiences may vary wildly.

Destiny 2 is great in its current state, the best its been in fact, but I do have some complaints, albeit somewhat minor. Transparency is one thing, with the game insisting on using vague terminology when it comes to stats, leaving the community to have to extensively test what the descriptions actually mean. It would be great if the game used numbers more to help players into deciding what gear and mods to use. Some gear farming oriented activities like the Menagerie are somewhat stingy in the amount of loot dropped for the time investment. It would be nice to have more control over activities you play, for example there is no way to launch a specific private strike, and story mission replays are on a daily rotation. Some exotics are underwhelming and not worth the slot in any way (such as Oathkeepers) and some legendaries perform better than many exotics (like the Recluse). Crucible balance is quite poor too, with Bungie reacting extremely slowly to balance it when something becomes overpowered unexpectedly. Subclass diversity is also somewhat lacking compared to D1, it would be nice to get proper skill choices and trees.

The new player experience has changed significantly with the F2P transition, with D1's intro mission being remade and added to contextualise things. New players also start at 750 light level which is good if you want to jump into endgame stuff, but kinda sucks for a sense of progression and challenge in my opinion. Year one raids are trivial at 750 light for example and the red war campaign would be a pushover. Regardless, new players have access to more than ever so I would highly recommend getting a few friends together and trying out the game. If you do, don't be afraid to ask things in local chat if you're lost or confused.

If Steam allowed for a neutral recommendation, this game would get it, for now this review is a tentative recommendation.

First, some context. Announced far too early following the original announcement of the end of Terraria's development cycle (which was then reconsidered), Starbound was advertised as similar to Terraria, but in space. As an avid lover of Terraria, I backed it very early on. The game ran in to some troubled development but was eventually released in beta form, though late by several years. With even more rebuilding of the game systems, it slowly crawled towards full release, though in a rather different form than originally planned.

Starbound is, at a glance, similar to Terraria. The core gameplay loop involves mining for resources, building new equipment, exploring, and finding sweet loot. In contrast to Terraria's single world containing fixed mobs, Starbound boasts procedurally (and randomly) generated planets and star systems across the universe, each with their own procedurally generated passive and aggressive mobs. To travel, you use your spaceship that can be slowly upgraded and expanded through various means. Tier progression in Starbound has undergone several major revisions, currently higher tier ores and materials are gated behind environmental hazards such as searing heat, radioactive solar flares or simply stronger monsters. To combat this, you'll need to build and equip EPPs to cater towards whatever threats you'll face and craft and find better weapons and armour. Along the way, you'll run into plenty of combat, of which the game handles decently. There is ok diversity in weapons you can get and reasonable abilities you can unlock but they aren't too exciting.

A large part of the game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on exploration. With travel to different star systems available very early, you zap around the universe frequently in search of loot and gear upgrades. You'll always want to spend time on the hardest planets you can currently weather, as they provide the new tiers of ores and loot. This makes the exploration fleeting and the planets you find feel disposable. There's barely any reason to stay on a planet you like for long as you'll soon get access to better tiers and zoom off for a new world. This in turn makes base building feel meaningless. In Terraria, you need to build a town to get access to NPCs, store your stuff and use crafting stations. In Starbound, you have access to a mobile ship that acts as a portable base that heavily restricts your building. It’s enough to have contain your storage and crafting stations but doesn't really ever feel like a home. In spite of all the cool planets you'll come across, there's never a sense of permanency as building a base anywhere will just slow you down. There's no point to infrastructure like mineshafts as ores on a planet are only useful for a short amount of time before you need to find another planet to mine on and actually getting back to a planetary base requires either flying there in your ship, using lots of fuel, or setting up a teleporter, an expensive option you don't have access to for a while. The game clearly puts a lot of effort into allowing players to build fantastic structures, there's a ton of depth when it comes to building, yet there's no gameplay reason to. The dissonance between the actual core gameplay loop and the effort put into building systems strikes me as very poorly thought out. Inventory management is also quite bad, each differently coloured dirt or rock forms a different stack and along your journey you will inevitably pick up countless bits and pieces of structures and furniture. The storage options are poor, with the basic storage option, the chest, having just 16 slots. In comparison, the player has 1000. The best storage solution in the game for some reason is only available on the ship at 64 slots, adding to the feeling that the game doesn't even want you to build on planets.

Despite this, everything I just laid out might not necessarily be reason to avoid this game. After playing it for a long time, I get the feeling the game really doesn't want to be about building and settling down. Much in the core loop incentivises exploring, always moving onward and always cresting the next hill. Planets can be strikingly diverse at times and the sheer amount of random stuff you can come across in the universe is surprising. You might come across prisons in a state of rebellion, totalitarian ape towns, peaceful rustic bird villages, giant docked airships filled with pirates, pyramid dungeons, underwater cyberpunk cities, the list goes on. Even underground, you often run into old ruins or small bunkers scattered throughout the universe that give great variety. All of this though sometimes feels shallow though, with many locations being boiled down to either "shoot the people here" or "trade and do quests here", often not obvious which one at first glance. It feels like Starbound often doesn't care for the denizens of its world and keeps urging the player to keep searching for something else. Luckily, you'll find yourself doing this a lot.

Contrary to Terraria, Starbound has a story. You'll start in an intro quest that will contextualise the universe you're in, give you an overarching goal to achieve and of course a short tutorial to introduce you to the game. After that, you'll be free to continue with it, seek out side stories or just ignore it entirely. The main story isn't that interesting in my opinion. The writing is mediocre and it follows a very strict pattern of "find a town inhabited by a certain species", then "get through this handcrafted dungeon where you can't break anything and kill the boss at the end", then repeat these steps like six times. The dungeons are a nice break from the general game and a usually quite fun but the forced exploration is not. While finding towns in your aimless exploration is always a pleasant surprise, once you have the goal to find one from the story it becomes a bit more tedious. There are side stories, quests and quest chains that are usually quite good but there aren't too many of them. There are also randomly generated sidequests you get from NPCs in towns and the like. These are trash really, just boring fetch, escort and crafting quests that rarely give any good loot anyway. Bosses you face are passable I suppose but somehow fall short of the bosses you would see in Terraria and rarely feel inspired.

All this can be good or bad depending on what you want from the game. If you want a nomadic game where you can never really belong or settle down and need to keep moving onward and exploring, you might really enjoy this sort of thing. It’s almost like No Man's Sky in a way. Both games boast procedurally generated planets and enemies. Both games have ruins or strange structures scattered around the universe to investigate. Both have base building, but neither seem to want the player to ever settle down, instead they constantly want to player to press onwards and have a nomadic lifestyle. Both games have NPCs around but have very limited interactions with the player and ultimately feel apathetic or dismissive to them. And both games technically have an end goal but one that is largely ignored for the most part. If that's your thing, then go right ahead and get the game. It’s hard to meet the feeling of Starbound when you bunker down in a cave for the night on a hostile world with a blizzard howling outside, and you just light a campfire, play some tunes on your guitar and wait the night away. It's incredibly comfy. The soundtrack really adds to this feeling too, it’s very relaxing and really adds to the feeling of exploration or desolation depending on where you are. But if you're looking for Terraria in space, this is probably not the game for you.

I, for one, bought it for Terraria in space but stayed for the strange nomadic game it is and have thoroughly enjoyed my time in it.

Fantastic program, would absolutely recommend as long as you know what you're getting into.
I've been following the development of Space Engine for quite a few years and was very happy to see it come to Steam. The developer puts a lot of work into Space Engine and it really shows, though of course quality takes time. As for the program itself, do note that it is by no means a game. There are no core loops or objectives in the main mode, the planetarium. There is the option to fly pre-existing ships around with full orbital mechanics simulated, but there is really no gameplay so I would not recommend Space Engine if you are looking to fly spaceships. Regardless, if you are looking for a universe simulator, this is by far the best out there. There is an astounding amount of real systems, planets, galaxies and objects modelled in this application in an impressive way. Where data and observations are lacking, Space Engine begins to seamlessly procedurally generate new objects for you to explore. The result is a fantastically immersive universe from zooming between galaxies to exploring mountian ranges on planets or cliffs on asteroids. All along the way, everything is stunning visually, and highly customiseable if you want to tweak the camera settings. All around a great purchase.

So I never was really interested in many collectathon games in the past but this one had a certain charm to it that I couldn't really resist. Something about the trailers gave me a good dose of nostalgia, with a fantastic soundtrack to boot. A Hat in Time delivers on all fronts, it's pretty much exactly as advertised, a sort of homage to old Nintendo 64 games with with modern controls and graphics. The movement is fluid, exploration is enjoyable, characters and writing the right sort of quirky, the bosses interesting and just challenging enough, everything feels good to play. In some respects it feels almost closer to games such as Conker's Bad Fur Day than Super Mario Sunshine that it was inspired by, with fairly frequent genre and mechanics shifts to mix things up a little. Only a few minor complaints; notably controller camera control was sometimes annoyingly restrictive in vertical view, sometimes the forced camera perspective shifts were inconsistent and jarring, and the lack of connection between the chapters felt odd but these issues barely affected my enjoyment.
Would absolutely recommend.