Recent reviews by Ancient Snek

This is amazing, oh my god. I hope and pray that the game does not get taken down for copyright, and that we get to see the full game SOON <3

I stumbled upon this game as a recommendation in a Freelancer video as I was going on my replay-once-in-a-few-years nostalgia trip, and I am very impressed.

Haven't completed the story yet, only 12 hours in, but I feel comfortable laying out my initial impressions. The game has a strong sense of identity, and the demo provides a very good insight into what you can expect.

Pros:
* The game is beautiful and colorful. It's a joy flying through space.
* Decent soundtrack, kind of a synthwave vibe going on.
* The game has a story. While the plot so far isn't anything necessarily outstanding, all of the characters are very well written and voice-acted.
* The game has a sense of humor. Kind of a continuation of the previous point, but if Freelancer was a more serious space mystery/drama, Everspace 2 is more a swashbuckling adventure.
* The combat is fun. A similar feel to the arcadey style of Freelancer, you mostly work with primary and secondary weapons, each with their own pool of energy/ammo, that you can cycle through. Primary weapons will generally be guns and lasers, while secondary weapons will be missiles, both guided and unguided, and mines and so on. To complement this, you also have activated abilities that can be swapped out and are on a cooldown.
* There is decent ship variety. Admittedly, I haven't tried most of them, but ships vary in both size, and the abilities they have - such as having a drone escort, or linking enemies together so everyone takes the damage you dish out.

Cons:
* The flow of the game can be a bit repetitive - fly to area, complete area objective, fly to new area. I'm oversimplifying, and the game does have a variety of tasks you need to do in each area (find a stash, blow up an asteroid, clear a base, complete a combat challenge), but I can see how this might get old to some
* ~1s load screen as you jump between areas. And you'll be jumping A LOT. I've gotten used to this by now, but as travel involves activating jump drive, and then landing on an area, that is two load screens to get to a new place, plus the travel time. I wish this could be smoothed out somehow. Not horrible, but a bit annoying.

Strong recommendation for when you just want to go pew pew in space.

A phenomenal martial arts brawler. As if Sekiro, the Batman Arkham games and Devil May Cry had a baby, with a love for kung fu cinema throughout. Lovely choreography, and a colorful art-style. Nobody uses guns, even chefs know kung-fu, the boss stages do not make logical sense so long as they look cool, AND I LOVE IT.

Yes, speedrunners can complete the story (a standard kung-fu revenge plot consisting of 5 levels) in ~2h, but there is a ton of replayability. If you are into mastering combat mechanics and enjoy repeating levels to improve your score and performance, there will be plenty to keep you busy, for example:

* Trying to reach each level at a younger age (you get "older" as you die, with final death at age 70), as you can repeat any level at the youngest age you reached it at.
* Testing yourself in (currently) 45 challanges. These almost work as separate levels, as you encounter arenas you never saw in the story mode - rooftops, restaurants, warehouses, etc. Hopefully there are more to come.
* Adding modifiers to your playthrough - from making enemies tougher, to removing your ability to resurrect, to replacing your moves with ones used by certain enemies.
* Kicking the difficulty up a notch. I've been playing mostly on Disciple (recommended/default) difficulty, but the jump to Master difficulty is quite noticable. So just when you think you've mastered the game, it can put up more of a fight.

I understand the 40 EUR price tag can seem a bit much, but I think the game is well worth it at any sale. I got it for 30 EUR and think the value for money is top notch.

Finally, an honorable mention to the training mode, where you can pick any foe you've encountered (including bosses!) to practice the parry/dodge timing of their moveset. This is not an easy game, but the difficulty feels very fair, and it is very satisfying to see your skills improve.

9 or 10 out of 10.

I love this game.

While it wears the Factorio inspiration on its sleeve - conveyor belts, inserters, assemblies and smelters, colored science inputs - Dyson Sphere Program also has more than enough of its own identity, and a lovely design, along with a pure focus on building. No biters here. Heck, I can even ram into a black hole and my mech is fine.

Starting from manually collecting resources by hand, you will go from a humble planetary industrial hub, to building your own megastructures and having a proper multi-system empire. And what is very impressive to me - spreading to other planets is not a gimmick, but a necessity. The game has its hooks in me and will not let go. After finishing Factorio for the first time, I at least had a moment of "okay, time for a break", but I keep getting more ideas in DSP.

I wish they'd implement a few quality of life updates, for example some overview of a planets logistic stations, so I wouldn't have to manually check which ones supply and demand specific materials, but the game is worth the full price right now.

If you get it, my recommendation is to not look up any strategies and go in blind. It's so satisfying to figure stuff out by yourself, and improve upon your designs.

Performance could do a bit of work though. Framerate can start to get a bit taxed with dense designs. Maybe another reason to spread production around.

This is such an amazing game.

While some might compare it to Minecraft, in my opinion, this game isn't about the creative building - though you can still make beautiful structures.

No, what I really love about Terraria is the exploration, the way you improve your gear over time, to overcome the bosses and monsters the game throws at you. And the game is really smart about it, too - there are ways for you to manually summon the bosses, but events will happen automatically over time to nudge you in that direction.

Great, whimsical soundtrack. Tons, and I mean TONS of content and references. Well worth full-price. Go from a doofus to wielding the powers of a demigod.

As someone who has gotten every achievement for Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3, as well as Sekiro - this game is fine. Not fantastic, but my impression is more positive than negative, I guess. Lots of copy-pasting, and I don't think a single boss-fight blew me away. No Midirs or Gaels, or Isshins.

Graphically it's... not a tremendous upgrade over DS3. If someone told me this game was released 4-5 years ago, I'd believe them.

In fact, it was while slogging through the final three bosses - sorry, the penultimate Hulk Hogan fight, as well as the two bosses stiched together for 0 reason - that I realized how mediocre this game is.

It's not horrible, but it's not great either. Some cool environments. I doubt I'll remember most of the boss fights. Worth it on sale, I suppose.

Something like a 7 out of 10.

It's alright.

Short P.S.: Got every achievement here, too. Raising to... 7.5 or 8/10. It baffles me how wide the experience can be. Malenia, possibly the hardest boss in the game, felt like a nightmare. Then I tried Rivers of Blood with a Mimic Tear, and teared through her in a minute.

The "no difficulty settings, only harder and easier strats" thing held true in previous games too, but... not to this degree.

Excellently paced horror experience.

Yes, you'll finish it under an hour, but it's just 5 eur (or whatever currency) - well worth it. It is also for this reason that you should avoid any info on the story beats.

Get it, turn off all the lights, put your headphones on, and dive in the blood moon. The water's great!

A convenient way to replay the trilogy again, with ME1 seeing the better improvement graphically.

Playing through it again, I saw more cracks starting to form in the story - lazy ways to raise the stakes, or the team just evidently writing themselves in a corner, leading to some rather unsatisfying explanations that make me think it would've been better to say nothing at all.

Also, in a bout of frustration over the story, I stumbled upon a post on a forum documented the features that were promised for Legendary Edition, or bugs that remain from the originals - I suspect if I was paying attention to those, my opinion might be more negative. But I went in just knowing that ME1 was more polished.

Finally, I'd like to formally apologize to ME1 for preferring ME2's combat. After playing everything back to back, I'd rank the combat, in terms of fun, ME3 > ME1 > ME2.

Still, I think it's definitely worth getting on sale, because the games do still have many high points, with threads running through all three games that you get to tie together in a really satisfying way if you took your time with each entry. You just might need to take a moment and make a headcanon that adjusts the issues of the plot.

Absolutely nothing to do with the 2006 shooter (I mean... both have aliens, so I guess there's that?), but the game has a fair amount of replayability - 100% worth grabbing on sale at the price it's going for.

At one point, I tried going for all achievements, but only stopped because I wasn't really taken in by the Mooncrash DLC, which has achievements of it's own.

The main thing I loved about this game is that there are many solutions and paths to an objective. If memory serves, the sequence of the rooms might be semi-linear, but within the rooms there is so much room for creativity.

Without spoiling much, the game has two sets of powers - human and alien (roughly speaking). For example, the human side of powers has access to stuff like hacking, but even without hacking it is possible to figure out a way to get in a room... saaay by turning yourself into a teacup and rolling through a narrow slit.

Good times.

The game comes with everything that you'd need in a game - shuffling decks, rolling dice, drawing cards, flipping tables.

Don't be confused by the DLC if you don't see the games you'd like to play - you can find a ton of games emulated in the workshop, which you can get FOR FREE.

It won't be able to fully replace meeting your friends in real life and playing a physical copy of the game, but getting TTS means you don't need to buy dozens of board games, and it can be easier to find a few hours at your computer, rather than an evening to travel and meet.