Recent reviews by ManlyMeatMan

Blacksmith has an interesting idea that ultimately falls apart due to its execution. The UI leaves a lot to be desired, while the gameplay overall is fairly slow paced and repetitive. A few design choices feel more concerned with realism instead of enjoyment or gameplay. An example is that you cannot invite people to your shop unless it is still morning. While sure, the idea that the people of this town would be too busy working in the middle of the day makes sense, for gameplay purposes it just adds an extra step in which you have to leave your shop and walk to their shop/home. This does nothing but add an extremely minor layer of immersion, and waste some time. Similarly, you can't invite people unless you are good friends with them. The idea is that these people wouldn't just show up to a stranger's shop simply because he asked them to, but for gameplay it just forces you to walk to their shop again. For the UI, it feels very clunky and unrefined. A number of menus feel poorly sized, while the drop down menus are unwieldy, due to the large amount of options and the very small drop down size. Overall, I find it tough to recommend at this price given all the issues this game has.

DLC Quest is good for a short amount of time, but quickly becomes tired and boring. It has a speed run mechanic intended to add some replayability as you learn the best path, but for a casual player, it doesn't hold up very well. It's a fun, interesting concept, but isn't executed in a very unique way. I'd recommend it on sale if you are interested in what you see from the trailer, but overall, the game doesn't really encourage revisiting it.

Enter the Gungeon is a rogue-lite dungeon crawler mixed with some bullet hell elements. It features a fantastic progression system, as well as satisfying shooting and dodging mechanics. Every unlock makes the game easier, yet also gives the ability to make the game harder. This keeps the game at a relatively consistent difficulty, but with enough leeway for both hardcore and casual gamers to get what they want from it.

9/10

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Baba Is You is a 2D puzzle game focusing around word/phrase puzzles specifically. There are sometimes other elements to each puzzle, but the core of the game is about combining words into phrases in order to change the “rules” of that puzzle. For example, you might have the words “Baba”, “Flag”, “Win”, “Is”, “Wall”, “Stop”, and “You”. Usually, “Flag is Win” starts out as a default rule that can’t be changed, but sometimes it isn’t. You could solve the puzzle by saying “Wall is Win”, then bumping into the wall to complete the level. You could also remove the word “Stop” from “Wall is Stop”, which would allow you to walk through the wall and touch the flag to win. There is a huge amount of possibilities thanks to this open-ended system, which does wonders to keep the game interesting and varied.

The game starts off slow, but quickly ramps up the difficulty and complexity. Some puzzles have challenge versions, in which the obvious solution is no longer possible and you need to think of a new strategy. This is done by making slight changes to an existing puzzle that seem relatively minor, but wind up forcing you to think outside the box. It shows off how talented the developers are, to be able to create the same puzzle twice but with wildly different solutions.

Aside from puzzles, there really isn’t anything else in this game. There isn’t a narrative like Portal, instead the game focuses all of its energy on puzzle design. For some people, this can make the game a little one-dimensional, but for “hardcore” puzzle fans, it gives you a huge challenge and doesn’t hold your hand as you play.

Baba Is You is one of the most well crafted puzzle games of all time, easily earning its stellar review score and all the praise it has received.

10/10

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This game wasn't bad for what it was trying to do. Its a simple puzzle game with maybe an hour or so of content, depending on your skill. You try to color every vertex without having any vertices connecting to the same color. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you know what you are getting into and it interests you, it's well executed.

Cool game, the Chinese reviewers are all mad because the devs joked about winnie the pooh.

For anyone curious, the score before the review bomb was 94% positive.

Factorio is a base building game, with a strong focus on automation. In simple terms, the gameplay loop is just gathering resources, then using them to expand your factory. In practice, it becomes a complex game where you must strike a balance between expanding your factory and defending it from the native wildlife.

Your factory starts as just you, mining ore and stone in order to manually build things. By the end of the game, your goal is to launch a rocket into space. The journey to that goal is challenging, but satisfying. You go through many different advancements, unlocking more complex elements to add onto your factory. It is fantastically paced, preventing the gameplay from becoming stale. This level of depth can be overwhelming for a new player, but there are extensive customization options available, allowing the player to make their game easier, if need be.

Factorio is extremely polished, with a strong focus on performance. It is easily one of the most well optimized games I’ve ever played, something that is often an afterthought in modern game development. Gigantic factories, with thousands of moving parts run unbelievably smoothly, especially for a game that is partly an RTS, a genre often plagued by poor performance when there are too many entities.

When it comes to presentation, Factorio does a great job. The visuals are detailed enough to look good, but not too detailed that it impacts performance or gameplay. There is a consistent art style that allows factories to stand out from the natural environment, while still meshing together. It makes your factory look unnatural, which works well with the pollution mechanics in the game, as well as the overall goal. You spend all your time harvesting natural resources without worrying about the environment, and the game let’s you know. Factorio never gets into any moral discussions about climate change or pollution in general, but the visuals let you know that you are actually the villain of this world, rather than the hero.

The sound design is another of Factorio’s strong points. The ambiant sounds, both from your machines and from nature, really sell the environment and atmosphere. When your factory is small and just getting started, the soundscape is quieter and more peaceful. This quickly changes as you expand, to the point of drowning out all other sounds in the game. It can be overbearing at times, but it fits the world of the game. The soundtrack wasn’t my favorite, and tended to feel more like background music. It was far from bad, but to me, it didn’t have much weight.

Factorio also features a talented modding community, with numerous overhaul mods that can make the already challenging base game even more complex. They range from more tame mods that simply try to expand on the default version of Factorio, to absurdly complex mods that require hundreds of hours just to create a large factory. There is something available for every taste, giving you the freedom to customize the game to be exactly how you like.

Factorio is a game made possible thanks to its dedicated development team. The defining feature of Factorio is how polished it is. This alone is enough to make it stand out. Factorio is truly a great game that fully deserves all of the praise it gets.

10/10

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Starbound is difficult to review due to its huge overhaul mod Frackin' Universe. It is one of the most popular mods on the Steam Workshop and features thousands of changes. Without this mod, Starbound is a pretty mediocre game. The story progression is tedious and repetitive. The item progression was simple and boring. The only thing Starbound does well is variety, but even that runs out. For the first few playthroughs, you'll encounter new planets you've never seen before, but the game quickly runs out. With the Frackin' Universe mod, Starbound becomes a fantastic game. Boring story progression is hardcoded into the game and can't be modded out, but the mod manages to add its own quest system to go alongside the normal progression. The way you progress in gear is changed, requiring you to explore new planets in order to get the next tier of gear. The planet variety is huge, and you rarely have similar playthroughs because of it. Tons of new content that really transforms the game completely.

9/10 (with Frackin' Universe)

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Civilization IV is, for me, the peak of the Civilization franchise. It's much more accessible and user friendly than the first 3 games, but isn't overly streamlined like the most recent games. It can be played casually and you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of it, but you can go deep into the micromanagement of it and make the game a lot more complicated, if that's how you prefer to play your strategy games. This flexibility is another of its strongest aspects, which is heightened due to the extensive modding community. It is the largest and most active modding community across the entire franchise (in my experience). There are some truly amazing mods that can completely change how the game is played and what it's about. My personal favorite would be Caveman 2 Cosmos. It has 5 times the technologies of the base game, which expands each era into its own small game of Civ. It is extremely long and adds dozens of new mechanics, so it might be too much of an overhaul for some people, although I still recommend giving it a shot.

10/10 (with Caveman 2 Cosmos mod)

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