Recent reviews by Ausrick

Plain and Simple. It's a fun game. a lot of thought went into it. There are so many options to complete your missions. However, This game is priced and monetized like Cell Phone Plans: If this is your first time, and you did not buy 1 and 2, then this is a steal for you. You can get all of the content for one bundled price. HOWEVER: if you were like me and played season 1 in 2017 and Season 2... Congrats you are buying the same stuff again to get an updated engine and season 3 like some poor sod who is trying to switch from iOS to Android. My one gripe is the way I was forced to buy everything again. This is why I say your mileage and opinion will vary depending on where you are coming from.

This game is just somehow designed to integrate with and activate a Gamer's neurons. It is a perfect example of something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

An analogy: When I was a small kid I "thought" the greatest movie Hollywood could make would be a movie with both Arnold Schwarzenegger AND Sylvester Stallone. We got "The Last Action Hero" ... kinda. And eventually we got "The Expendables" which kind of scratched that itch but it fell flat. Looking back at what I "REALLY" wanted as a kid, was an Arnold and Stallone movie, where they were Buddy Cops like in Lethal Weapon, but the setting was more like "Big Trouble in Little China" ... Palworld effectively did this for Video Games.

As I've played, I've noticed "Oh, this is just like Ark" or "Oh, that is like Breath of the Wild", or "Obvious Pocket Monster Reference ... Though Lamballs are so cute mounting crew-manned weaponry and assembly lines". I've even noticed some more subtle things, like how one of the teammates on the dev. team must have enjoyed Elden Ring, because the world design and the way distant locations are presented, homages to the ruined churches of Marika, and the Evergaols, and that as soon as you make it out into the start there is a Giant Boss that if you mess with it it will kill you.....

But, you know what I didn't notice? how it somehow got to be 3:00 AM and I work tomorrow! ... Every night for the last few weeks. And when I'm at work, I'm thinking about what I'm going to build or where I'm going to explore next.

As far as Souls games go, this is the most refined one. They combined the lore elements from 1, some flavor from 2, and some lessons on maneuverability from Blood Borne. If you are new to the series and worried that you need to start with 1, that's not necessarily true. It's all like one big puzzle, but you will need to go back to 1 afterward to fill in the missing pieces but then it will make more sense. Is the game hard? That depends. It's all about learning. Death teaches you. In those regards it's like really old games. This one has the most refined mechanics so you won't feel like the Developers and controls are that much against you. My best advice is as a new player, read the item descriptions, be patient, take your time, expect Ambushes! expect gravity to be your worst enemy. The enemies telegraph, and you may be tempted to roll away, but usually rolling into them or around to the right on their shield side is better. and for a first run through, choose Knight, with a starting blessing of fire gem. enchant your starting sword with that, and put all of your points into Vitality, Stamina, and Vigor. 40 is the softcap on stats. This should help a new player. If you want easier mode, get some friends and use summons for bosses. If you want to become top tier, learn how to parry. Make sure that you are never so heavy that you fat roll, ...Do everyone a favor and resist the urge to use the Fallen Knight set, Irithyl strait sword, and grass crest shield as that's the ultimate NewbLord combo. The Ringed City DLC has the best rings in it so make sure not to miss out on any of that. the DLC's are substantially harder than the main game. Do not go into NG+ without having done them. The bosses everyone gets rekt by are Nameless King and Midir so don't let them phase you. use help. There are a ton of players that have gotten good at certain bosses that just love to put their summon sign down to help new players. Take advantage of this and even the most casual of player can still make it through Dark Souls.

It feels like a more fleshed out spiritual successor to Gauntlet. The play is addicting, especially with friends. each NG+ Iteration allows your team of Heroes to become stronger, but each NG+ brings extreme new challenges. Early on each stage feels like such an incremental hurdle to overcome. There is a lot of complexity to how you can play the game and how you choose to play your heroes. A lot of thought and prep can go into a single dungeon run.

It's Blocks (Voxels) like Minecraft but it Isn't Minecraft. It's a Colony Strategy Sim that happens to occur in a 3D First Person world. Most of the game is managing your colonists and what jobs they do to assist and grow your colonies and building and shaping their environment to your desire. You have to balance food production, security (guards), morale (happiness level, good food, luxury items), and raw production of necessary goods (mining, smithing, tailoring, weapons and ammunition for your guards and tools for your workers.)

The bigger your colony grows, the more monsters attack so the more important managing your guards and the entrances to the colony becomes.

The Dev team is very active on updating the game and adding new features. It was originally just one colony, they added more tech trees, gliders for long distance travel, different regions with different resources and inter-colony trade so now you are encouraged to make multiple colonies in different regions and have them support each other.

Coming out soon (as of this writing, tomorrow) is the new update which will let you see the statistics of your production as currently managing over runs or shortages and having some colonists that can't keep up while other ones are idle waiting on the materials they need to do their jobs. At the time of this writing the only way to do that was to visibly watch the stockpile in real time to get a sense if it was dwindling or not realizing that there may be huge lags and surges (wheat harvest and planting cycles vs relatively constant milling time, etc.) and there are a lot of opportunities for production bottlenecks so you had to walk around your colonists and check up on them as they worked to see if any of them needed anything. This made larger colonies much more difficult to manage and the process very reactionary. For instance, at some point in the growth of my colony, My guards were using up their ammunition nightly at a faster rate than my workers could replenish it during the day... Before that, I had built up a huge surplus but I didn't notice that the number was getting smaller each day until one night they ran out and were completely overran by monsters and I lost half of my colonists. I'm looking forward to the insights and quality of life that this next update will enable.

This is an expertly designed an balanced board-game that translates really well to the digital medium. It feels like one part "Game of Thrones" and one part "Settlers of Catan" but with animals in a high fantasy setting which kind of gives off a "Watership Down" or "Wind in the Willows" vibe. If you watch the trailers and get super stoked then this game is for you, Though the trailers or more cinematic they really convey the feel. This game is something beautiful. I wish they would develop a physical board-game of it, and also an Action RPG set in its world because the world is really amazing and well done.

The balance of the characters, the gameplay mechanics, the look and feel of everything, are all top notch. The game is really fun and exciting. You feel like you are really in these camp grounds and being chased through the dark or on the hunt. It brings a feeling that I haven't felt in anything in the assymetrical genre's to date. The devs worked really hard at getting the look and feel and atmosphere and game balance just right and movie authentic.

The only negatives I see are in the rough release. We seem to forget about horrible multiplayer issues of AAA games like GTA V's Multiplayer or Diablo 3 when they came out.... Here you have 12 people managing it all and on a holiday weekend. Most of the complaints are things about getting kicked out of matches. Server Issues, Lag. DLC not showing up, Colision detection glitches. ...These are all things that it is only a question of WHEN will they get fixed, there is no IF.

The Dev's are really up front and communicative. They want to fix issues and make sure you have a good game. Wes Keltner direct messaged me on day one when I had an issue with the Unreal Engine 4 dll's and told me how to fix them. Would you ever get that from an executive at Rockstar? Blizzard?. For the cost of about 2 trips to Applebee's you get to play as/against Jason Voorhees from the movies, played by one of the most iconic actors to ever play him in the movies. It will only get better, Its got so much going for it now and they've got such a great roadmap for it in the future.