Recent reviews by AnDanDan

While fun, the gameplay is incredibly repetitive, and not that engaging for the effort you put in. Despite advancing and getting new ingredients to use, they dont add a significant change up to the main gameplay.

If this game is on sale, go ahead and grab it. Full price, not quite worth it

The ship breaking is fun, though the only main means of challenge they add is more subsystems (only like 2-3), and bigger hulls. Nothing else crazy. Your repertoire of tools doesnt really expand either. You get the detonation charges later in, but thats it. Its good for a bit of just relaxing, listening to something and cutting up a ship, but not much beyond that.

This game's story mode is the only thing keeping me going but the ONLY reason its doing that is because then I have a definitive end to this game and having it 100%'d. It's not a very good story. Typical 'corporations bad' done very on the nose. You cannot skip dialogue and Lou really, really likes to talk about just how evil corporations are and how good unions are. Like Im with you but please shut the ♥♥♥♥ up. You can repair your own little ship but outside of that you have literally no agency in the story whatsoever. You are forced to listen to a radio play at the start of the day, start of missions, and end of missions occasionally.

The pacing is just.. off. Like many I will be making comparisons to subnautica. First off is your source(s) of oxygen. To start, you only have the one point, your starting ship. It makes it tedious that you have to be returning to this one spot a LOT to progress. I get it, it's space, but cmon. This is compounded by your first speed upgrading be a sprint. As opposed to Subnautica where the flippers make you go faster all the time, here you have a limited sprint bar. Which would be okay, if this game didnt take place in somewhere with enough of an atmosphere to slow you down if you arent constantly accelerating. Has Outer Wilds spoiled me? Perhaps.

If low speed and one source of oxygen doesnt get you rared up to play, how about your first upgrade doubling your oxygen and still barely being enough. You better like crafting consumable oxygen candles to up your supply, or begin to haul a ♥♥♥♥ load of oxygen generators with a limited number of oxygen each out to create waypoints. It was at that point the tedium got to me.

How and where to get resources could be better explained (had to google how to get aluminium, an early resource), the voice speed needs to be slowed way down, and this ones subjective but the humour just isnt for me. For instance, crafting a joke item thats a waste of resources that you cant recycle as one of the earliest tasks in the game. Thanks Devs for that stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I bought this game, seeing it on Steam after having played the FREE VERSION on the phone made me think it had gotten some major upgrades.

It hadn't.,

The game is pretty bare bones. You plop creatures down and they form villages, then kingdoms, and wage their little wars. They slowly develop tech over time. And you can drop monsters, and bombs, and all manner of adversary against them but thats it. Thats the game. There is little depth in your interactions in this sandbox, which was extremely disappointing. Like I know its a mobile port, but I had assumed in the transition it would be something better. If you are fine with mostly just watching hordes of AI people duke it out with little direction at all from you, or against some enemies you drop in, this is fine.

One thing, gameplay aside, is the UI is... not good. I found it obtrusive, with no way to hide it. And for a game that relies on time as a main development mechanic for towns for their size, populations, and tech, why are the only major hotkeys for UI beside navigation and pausing time to be hotkeys for the tabs? 1,2,3,4,5 should correspond to their time. So in order to change the time, you need to click on the UI. But the clicks seem non responsive. Many times I'd want to place a little something down to only find out, OOPS, you didnt actually click sheep yet you still had nuke selected so you just nuked there!

Was this game entertaining? Yes
Would I recommend it? No

The game's premise is interesting, you need to figure out how to use this machine you're in to escape from some oppressive space: both in a societal sense and in the fact you're literally under 20,000 atmosphere's of pressure.

Figuring out the ship for the first time was fun. But after that actually playing the game was very repetitive. Exploring a random maze with little challenge once you understand the base mechanics.

I didn't play this for terribly long, and I don't feel any desire to go further. That level of repetition without much else going on didn't make me want to continue. There wasn't much intrigue, and no real story hooks either. You're given a machine, and told to escape. The few journals you can find and the associated number of achievements tied to them pointed at a pretty shallow narrative experience. So it all came down to the machine.

Move. Encounter turret. Drop power and flow, up cloak. Move. Vent heat. Move. Apply spare battery. Move. Out of range of turret, drop cloak, up flow and power, move. Repeat.

I have a high tolerance for grindy games. I've spent a long time on some of the most tedious grinds in WoW, I 100%'d Adventure Capitalist and Cookie Clicker. This game is one I can't stand.

I didn't know this at first but Lazy Bear made another game I put down for ♥♥♥♥♥♥ grind: Punch Club. It makes sense now.

The grind in this game is inflated for a few reasons. First off, the actual combat. Walk to the next thing, then do a short animation to pull out weapons or the right tool. Do the thing, then repeat the animations before you begin walking. It eats up your time like crazy. You dont get a ton of resources each run, and it takes a good deal to make anything. Alright, sure, thats fine. Whats not is the second point: gold is hard to come by and the inflation is nuts. So how do you make more gold easy? Sell off the meager resources you need for said gold.

This loop would be ok if there was ANY OTHER GAMEPLAY OF WORTH. In WoW I can put it off because the combat is fun. In AdCap and Cookie Clicker it was ok because those were literal idle games. Here, there's so little actual gameplay its not worth it.

I'm extremely dissapointed I decided to stick out it after the 2h refund period to see if it got better. It doesn't. Stay away from this game.

EDIT: To add insult to injury, not an hour after I wrote this review I got a 10% off coupon for it.

I purchased this day 1 to support Unknown Worlds. I have complete faith in them to deliver a good product in the end.

And they called their penguin analogues Pengwengs. That alone is worth the money.,

While a good concept in reality, and not awfully executed, I find this game has two pretty blatant flaws. The narrative - at least the little of what I experienced - seems very on the nose. As in, there is no subtly to the story they are trying to tell. Secondly, there is a fatal flaw in the game mechanic.

The main mechanic is dragging information into a profile of someone to build up a profile of them. Fine and all, but there's two parts to the fatal flaw. Number one: You can't undo dragging in info. New info can overwrite previous info, but you cannot erase something. Secondly, context is not taken into account. During one portion I dragged in a comment from what was effectively facebook which contained a very obvious hyperbolic joke, and the profiler took it as literal and your helper agent freaked out at what the info was. This little thing absolutely killed the game for me. Without context, a way to edit it, or erase this clearly false information, the game is actively working against you when you try to profile people. The obvious counter point is 'Well the game gave you tips not to just drag in information willy nilly', but the fact it BLATANTLY ignores any context that the player sees is ridiculous.

This isn't a bad game, but between a very shallow seeming plot that basically could just be called 'The CIA watches UC Berkeley commits a Riot' and a picky core - no, let me rephrase that - ONLY mechanic, this isn't an experience I wanted to continue playing.

I wish I could give a midling review.

This game is a competent puzzler, even if I found 95% of it very easy (Talos Principle trained me well), but for those not used to puzzle games it might be some good fun. The initial theming was nice, but quickly the narrative worn on me. It was the same as so many other stories I've seen, with the only interesting bit being the ending in some specific ways. But other than that, The Turing Test did nothing for me story wise.

So, the gameplay is middling, and I found the story to be very passe, what is there to recommend? As I said, the puzzle elements are comptent and to provide some entertainment. The visuals are well done, and I had no technical issues. The real, true negative here is the price. This is NOT worth $20. I would say this is worth $10 maybe. Only buy this on sale, as for the content you recieve, especially given the time taken to complete it, is just okay to pretty good at best.,

I remember learning about STRAFE due to it's approach to marketing, since it played itself like a hardcore shooter literally from the 90s. I didn't think much of it, it looked neat, but I didnt buy it. I ended up getting it in a Humble Monthly bundle, and boy am I happy I did.

It's not the best game in the world, but I like it a lot. I know a lot of people have issues with the game, but I enjoy it for what it is. It's styled as a fast paced FPS, in the vein of Quake or Doom.It's a Rogue Like, each time you start a run generating a random set of rooms for that level and providing random enemies and upgrades. Each level has it's own themeing, with there being 4 zones, 3 levels per zone, and a final boss.

I fire it up now and then, just to have some simple shooting fun. Im sure I could practice and get better at the games core mechanics and attempt full par clears, but thats not for me. I just like playing a straight forward shooting game, with little getting in the way of me and action.