Recent reviews by WillzZz

This game is goated. Super fun, relaxing, scratches the ARPG screen blasting itch surprisingly well. Great for a quick Dopamine chase. Great pacing for the first hour or two, drags on a bit after that. Glad it's not grindy for no reason and can be completed.

I've updated this review after playing it a few years later. The performance has improved dramatically, and it's plenty of fun for a weekend of blasting. Solid VS-like

Probably my favorite game of all-time, with thousands upon thousands of hours so far. So happy for them, this is such a triumph.

Great game! Scratches the "single player eve" itch without being overly monotonous like some other space sims. The action combat is fluid and feels great. Different ships are a lot of fun to try out, and fleet combat is really interesting. The massive faction battles are my favorite part of the game. Lots of small QoL improvements, AI improvements, polish and balance changes would get this a 10/10, but it's a solid 8/10 right now. The (solo??) developer is hyper active, so it's only getting better over time. Well worth the purchase.

This game gets worse with every single patch. The devs are not testing anything, and it's ruining the game. Sure there are balance changes, those are all going in the right direction. But with the constant dupe bugs, shutting down of the economy, arbitrarily slowing progress by significant amounts, and completely unplayable lag / rubber banding, and add to that the plethora of UI bugs, it's quickly turned from one of my favorite new surprises to a complete disaster. Maybe this will be a FF14 with a realm reborn start over, but it's feeling more and more like a very short lived, less fun, buggier Shadowbane.

Rewriting my old review for 1.0.

Satisfactory is amazing.

It's everything you might want in a factory sim game. There is enough customization now for everyone to enjoy the game the way they want. They're constantly improving every single aspect of the game.

It still has a couple of rough edges. multiplayer and/or dedicated servers have some rubberbanding and weird states that typically require a restart of the server or client. Double inputs from jetpack and jumping are common with latency. But the game itself is incredible. It has improved dramatically in each and every update, and 1.0 is the biggest update of them all.

My only real complaint is that I'm sure updates will slow now as the team takes some well deserved rest time. I look forward to their next game, and hope we have more updates for satisfactory coming in the future.

One of my favorite games of all time.

Not recommended. Which pains me deeply. I worked next door to Flagship for a time, and met the original torchlight team and went to lunch with them, etc. I genuinely loved the first game, as well as the second. I have about 200 hours in the two of them. But this is... not Torchlight.

Online only is insanity. Perhaps that will change, perhaps it won't. But porting a server-side gameplay system to client-side only is either a small problem or a serious undertaking, and there's not much room in between. I understand this started as an MMO, but it just feels rushed. Someone, somewhere, is forcing this game to be launched before it is ready.

I think the aesthetic is wonderful. But this is what happens when you focus tons on iterating the art and not on iterating the core gameplay loop. Compared to almost every single ARPG out there, this game is lacking in every way. I'm still going to continue playing, because I love the franchise and want it to get better. I'll see where it's at around 10, 20, and 30 hours, if I get that far. And I'll re-review if I change my mind.

But this is an unmitigated disaster. Completely unplayable without perfect conditions, the rubber banding suggests a very simplistic, low tick rate netcode. For such a simple game, with so few entities on screen, it's downright unacceptable for this level of performance. And I bring all of this up because UE4 built-in netcode is actually pretty decent. So why is it this so bad?

Level design is vanilla. Skill design is vanilla, with very little depth so far. Ridiculous difficulty feels AWFUL as if no one has ever played the first hour of their game. Hitting monsters for 1 damage over and over isn't fun gameplay, it's punishment. Yes, we understand how difficulty works, we don't need the game to be a slog to get to the enjoyable part.

The core game experience is actually pretty great. Having a pet is still awesome, and the ability to get pet abilities is fun. The characters are interesting and different, and the world is beautiful. Combat animations feel pretty good, although I'm no expert on ARPG anims. Spells look great, the animations, silhouettes, and palettes all feel great so far. The art team should be very proud.

But it's objectively a bad game so far. "It's early access" will be the cry, but we've all been through this countless times. We'll see if that holds true, or not. Until them I'm staying optimistic. Good luck!

Roguelike deckbuilder with a wonderful dev team who is constantly releasing new content and fixes. I can't recommend this enough. Huge replay value, and the new characters bring me back every time.

*Rewritten after game completion* OFFLINE play only

The game itself is fun. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and continue to enjoy it. My recommendation is literal. I do not recommend this to friends, yet.

Story progression has numerous bugs. I had to replay areas at least a dozen times. Once I got stuck in a loop of replaying an area I had already completed, which would no longer let me pass through a door. I restarted twice and it worked the third time. The game crashes upon exit each time, sometimes not saving your progress. Letting your PC sleep after idle time will crash the game every time. Alt+Tab in full screen crashes the game. My PC is roughly the best you can purchase at this time, and dipped below 60fps at times on 4k/High settings. That seems acceptable, but I hope there's room for improvement.

Game balance is awkward, at best. The second and third acts are not balanced much, if at all. Act 3 especially feels rushed, and I found myself running straight through entire zones to be done with the tedium. Lots of passive abilities do not work, In normal gameplay, mobs and bosses are mowed down quite easily, with barely a thought. The act bosses, however, are crushingly high damage. Often it's a matter of patience, as many mobs fill your area in an attempt to block you in to a oneshot AOE. Tanky builds are SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER. After struggling mightily with a ranged build vs the Act 1 and Act 2 bosses (10+ deaths apiece, thanks to one shot difficult to dodge abilities), the Act 3 boss bugged and stood still, letting me kill it at a distance. I think its AI bugged out after Broken state. It wasn't very rewarding, to say the least.

You could tell they tried to make the bosses meaningful, and they nearly succeeded. Maybe with some feedback and tuning they will be fun. I'd love to try them again with my endgame character. Maybe they wanted it to feel like dark souls, but I didn't find any of the fights "fair", as I do in dark souls games.

All of this having been said, it's VERY FUN. If you aren't feigning for a new ARPG, and can stand to wait a few months for bugs to be fixed, try it then. Maybe it will have a summer sale, try it then. It's a really fun game, but they have so many bugs to fix. And that's not even considering their servers didn't work at launch for online play.

I put this game off for far too long. It was recommended repeatedly and they're all right. Definitely give it a shot!