Recent reviews by Bioautomaton

TLDR; It's a lot like playing a good book you can't put down.

If you don't like to read you're really not going to like this game, but if you do like dark low/medium fantasy fiction and if you've ever enjoyed a text-based adventure, this is an easy recommendation.

The time limit can be a little stressful, but I walked away with an ending I was pretty happy with (but only JUST made it). I would have liked to have explored a few other threads and tied a bow on things, but that also adds a replayable angle to the story, giving you an opportunity to explore other paths or optimize how you approach things on another run.

Great story, awesome horde mechanics, strong environmental design, pretty much the peak of the open world zombie genre.

It's not perfect, but it's absolutely worth your time.

Shadow of the Erdtree did not disappoint. The amount of content in this DLC is nearly enough for a sequel, and the design and visuals are every bit as good as the original. There's a wealth of new armor, weapons, ashes of war, and spells to play with. Memorable zones and encounters were added that stand out from the original and the new progression system (despite being a bit controversial) means that you won't just streamroll everything with your existing character when you return to the DLC from the base game. It's more of what you loved from the base game, assuming you loved Elden Ring.

It's not perfect, though. The Furnace Golems feel like a poor design choice, even after learning that you can fight on horseback or throw pots on the top they feel are a slog of a fight or navigation challenge that feels like an unnecessary timesink. Some of the bosses also feel like they have spectacle over substance (the end boss being the most obvious one) and often elicit the feeling of "When is it my turn?" when dealing with long flashy combo strings with heavy tracking or huge AoE. A few additions to PvP are of somewhat questionable balance right now, but if we're being honest Elden Ring's never had the best PvP balance when compared to its Dark Souls predecessors. The balance of rewards from exploration can also feel a little weird, with some hard to get to spots awarding basic upgrade materials or worse.

In short, it's not flawless in every way, but if you're up for a challenge you're going to have a good time exploring more of FromSoft's beautiful alien fantasy. This is an easy recommendation for anyone who loved the base game and the value per dollar feels excellent.

Interesting for a few hours, but the shine wears off once you dig in and realize there's not much beneath the surface. Artificial difficulty mechanics and outdated design views from the developers suggest this is unlikely to evolve in a direction that will make for long-term enjoyment. No real plot or direction, just a hostile sandbox. Frustration is a feature.

Flying through space without hitting rocks isn't easy. The control scheme is unique and while it can be a little fiddly, provides a unique way to provide vector control. I think it's a good approach and those that complain about the autopilot mechanics as a whole haven't spent the time to learn to use it, but the game doesn't really do a great job of teaching you to use it so it's a justified concern. Certain autopilots do not work well with some thruster types, though.

The core concept is kind of neat, but doesn't seem to naturally get expanded on. There's no real motivation to go deeper in the rings that I could find, and it takes a very long time to travel deep. The best way to progress deeper seems to be random events that pop up from crew or hailing other ships. I never made it to the second gap, personally. The distance is a lot longer to travel than it looks, and going at high speed is dangerous, even with good parts. Once you go deeper, there are... more rocks. No new minerals, though the odds of good concentrations of the expensive ones seem higher. Maybe if you go really deep there's something hidden out there, but it would take hours of navigation and/or some lucky event spawns to find out.

Frustration as a feature seems to be the core of the game. Parts will fall out of the front of your hold because that's gameplay, I guess. Manipulator arms are going to do derpy things because you don't have any real control over on or off. If you launch a mining companion accidentally and hail something else before getting back to it, it's just going to do what it wants. If you want to do more than one thing at a port, you have to go to another docking claw or you're SOL. So many weird, limiting gameplay choices here that lessen the ability to explore and do more. It feels like things are deliberately limited to prevent the player from realizing how little actual substance there is.

There's no plot, no real story. There's some underlying lore and world-building if you dig a bit. and and some faction alliance stuff you can do, but there's no story and the game doesn't strongly nudge you into pursuing any sort of directed path. This is just a space rock sandbox.

Real mixed bag here. Parts are designed to fail or perform badly, and when asked why this artificial difficulty was introduced the developer stated that "it introduces natural difficulty, not artificial one." That's a direct quote from Koder. The intention seems to be for there not to be an obvious meta, or for things to be clearly better than other items, but that results in bizarre design choices and parts that just straight-up don't work well. Cargo holds that clog, baffles that aren't independent of the hold layout, manipulators without grip strength calibration, and autopilots that just do not work well are all features resulting from this design philosophy. Maybe that would be interesting at the low end of the tech, but it persists through the entirety of the tech available to the player at this time.

Aesthetically, there isn't really much to change beyond your parts. Obviously not a priority, but it would have been nice to at least slap a coat of paint on the ship, change some lights, I don't know. The major place you can customize your experience on a graphical level is the HUD. Being able to swap out your entire HUD is cool, but I would argue that only a couple of them are really very functional. There's a lot of form over function in the HUD designs, and some are straight-up missing information components. The core KNTRL HUD is honestly probably the best of the lot. Weirdly, though, the ship icon that displays things like fuel level and thruster activity doesn't actually update to match if you put it in another ship.

Finally, you can't seem to name your ship. Weird choice. Sure, it's kind of interesting checking the dealer for a ship with a "cool name" as a thing to do when you have all the ships you need, but why can't I just give my ship a cool name by paying a registration fee or something?

What you see in the screenshots is what you get. Everything is from an effectively 2D overhead perspective, and the cinematic is the only real 3D you're going to get. This doesn't bother me, just set your expectations accordingly. This is a sidescrolling asteroids game with mining and occasional combat.

The HUD by default is tiny on all ships. I recommend scaling it up in the menus. I've got good eyes, but it's just straight-up hard to read a lot of this text. Another place where the game seems to be fighting the player, here, because information is not reliably relayed or easy to decipher in many of the layouts.

Sound design by and large is pretty good. Thrusters sound the way you would expect, the game indicates when you're putting stress on the ship by turning rapidly, weapons sound decent, and there are other things built into the sound language of the game but.. there's nothing to explain what those things mean so it can be hard to form a mental map. A lot of the ship feedback is mysterious and not linked well to what it's warning of.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that there's too much beeping. Something will beep at you all of the time. LIDAR pings (you can turn this off in tuning), RADAR pings, proximity alerts, stress warnings, your space microwave, god knows what else. The game is constantly beeping at you. There are so many warning sounds it's hard to know when something important is actually happening. Eventually you'll just learn to tune them out.

The music's pretty generic. It's just a tool to act as combat or activity warning, as far as I can tell. You can turn it off and use visual indicators around the edge of the screen instead, which is a nice accessibility inclusion.

I wouldn't recommend Delta V, even for $10. Maybe if you pick it up for less than half of that, but the gameplay you get at the surface is the gameplay you get in the end and it doesn't really reward time put in or investment in its mechanics. It's a sandbox that feels unfinished with an adversarial relationship with the player rather than one that fosters exploration of what's on offer. Maybe I'll check back in a couple of years and see if my opinion changes, but I can't recommend it in the current state.

I don't know who any of these VTubers are and I don't care, this is unironically an excellent survivor game with a huge amount of character variety. How is this free?

I've got 500 hours in this game, according to play time. I played it when I caught COVID, and left it open a lot, so let's cut that down to a generous reduced total of 300 hours. I think I've done pretty much everything to do in this game, and I mean literally almost everything, except for some alternate universe shenanigans.

So given how much time I spent in Starfield, do I recommend the game? Honestly... no, not really. It's a pretty middling experience for a product of this era. It was a good way to distract myself while sick that didn't require too much of my brain. Starfield is just Skyrim in Space, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Every area where Bethesda had the opportunity to improve on their formula and learn from past mistakes they steadfastly refused to evolve. The UI is clunky and dated, lacking even basic RPG inventory functionality and exhibiting a bewildering lack of detail or sorting logic. They know the kind of things people want (and have modded in already) because this has come up with every inventory system they've released in the past decade and players have installed the same sort of UI mods in droves. Conversations are still largely on rails, giving the illusion of player agency without the reality of it. The map system is godawful and everything hinges around fast travel. NPCs, especially generic ones, suffer from the usual weird Bethesda-face problem, resulting in a hilarious amount of improbably ugly people. Melee combat is barely supported and feels wooden, arguably it's worse than previous titles. You'd think Bethesda would know how to handle a character with a sword or knife by now, given their past releases.

On the space feature side of things, the ship builder is kind of cool, but clunky and oddly restrictive. The space combat is.. uh.. lacking. Basic features of spaceships are locked behind character progression for some reason - why do you have to invest points in a skill tree to make a ship drift or strafe in space? The combat itself isn't challenging, and there's a clear meta for both ship design and weapon usage. Instead of calculating center of mass or targeting the bridge, enemies target the calculated center point of your ship, so if you just build around the center they shoot through you. Bizarre, fixable, obvious problem.

Finally planet exploration is pretty dull after your first one or two. There's no real reason to make an outpost, and the outpost builder is somehow worse to control than the Fallout base builder they already built years ago. You'll see the same flora and fauna with different names very quickly because there seems to be a pretty small pool of models and archetypes to pull from. Despite being barren rocks in space, you'll trip across evidence of other humans on planets every few hundred meters anywhere you set down on a moon or planet. I never really felt like I was exploring. Somebody else beat me to the spot. I quickly knew the layout of every base. I guess everything is just a prefab, and events are doomed to repeat when you build a building the same way? Then the temples with the exact same enter the door, fly through the sparkles, fly through the rings gameplay... ugh. Y'all run out of time, or what? That gets old real fast.

The theme to the game seems to be "It's good enough as a framework, modders will fix it later." Except.. it released months ahead of any modding tools, meaning Bethesda kneecapped the potential for ongoing momentum right out of the gate.

There are some good stories here, and compelling quests. The side quests in most cases outshine the main story in terms of writing. I'm not saying you won't enjoy the narrative at all, but you're going to be fighting through a lot of mediocrity to get that enjoyment.

What we're left with is just.. a bunch of weird decisions here and a lot of uninspired compromises. A lack of improvement over time. A clear reliance on third parties to provide the game that people will want to play on top of this framework. It'll fill your time, but once the shiny new paint starts to flake off and you see behind the facade, you might wonder why you bothered to invest time in it.

One of the easiest recommendations I could possibly make if you like fast-paced mecha games and enjoy a challenge.

I've done the full NG/NG+/NG++ playthrough. Every achievement except S-ranking everything (maybe some day I'll go back for that). I've spent hours in the insanely good decal editor and more hours making fancy ACs to show off while playing online. I've customized, painted, fought with, and re-customized so many mechs. Built lookalikes and original concepts. Slung missiles, shouldered artillery, shot guns and shotguns, ran rifles, pew pew'd with lasers, gone sword and board, and run everything in between. There's a lot of meat on these bones, and it's good meat.

Some granularity was traded for accessibility. If you're a fan of the older offerings this may rub you the wrong way. For me, though, this hits a real sweet spot. It's faster, more aggressive, more streamlined. There are a few builds I could say you can run as general purpose for most things, but you will likely find you need to (or want to) shake things up from time to time depending on the mission, and that's a good thing.

It's a really good game, but it is not kind, and it does not pull its punches. There is no difficulty setting, either. You will learn, or you will be filtered. That said, there have been balancing passes that have made things easier. Newer players will never know the nightmare of the original Balteus, for example... but maybe that's a good thing.

The multiplayer works, but it is a little janky. It blatantly shows its console origins and the lobby system feels dated. I wish we could talk and compliment each other's builds, or communicate over voice in team matches. Sure, it means we never run into toxicity, but it also means we don't get the sense of community that we could. I wish there was a faster way to queue for 1v1 matches, like a global quickmatch with MMR or something. It would be really nice if there was a "random" map setting. There's polish here that is missing, making the multiplayer feel like an afterthought.

Still, Armored Core 6 is a great game. I was very happy with what I got, I will be buying any future DLC that releases, and I really felt like I got my money's worth. I wish we had more games made with the loving care and consideration that we see here from FromSoftware. This feels like a game from a bygone era when the developers cared more about producing games as experiences rather than as maximum-profit products.

The game's got some decent ideas, and the core progression and gameplay ideas are fun, but the game just isn't solid on a technical level. It's built from big dreams on a rotten foundation.

The performance is very poor, and god help you if you add ground effects into the mix (I don't recommend a ballistic missile boat build, for instance). The game badly needs more optimization.

The sound design is painfully, ear-gratingly bad. Like, 30 Atari consoles in the same room blaring distorted sound effects at you at the same time with no sound layer management bad. It seems like the game is going for retro without the aesthetic or simplicity to make it work. It becomes a soup of static and distorted effects very quickly, and some layers seem to loop even when paused. I kept turning down the audio and then eventually just muted the game.

Visuals are a mixed bag. The ship designs are kind of neat, but they lack visual separation due to them all using the same color scheme. Enemies are very same-y. Clear Zerg inspiration from Starcraft, to the point where the Hatcheries look exactly like.. well.. you guessed it. Some effects are hard to read and there can be visual clutter, but most of the weapon effects do actually look decent.

Tooltips are all over the place. I felt like I needed more information on things (Overcharge, for example) in a lot of cases. Ships don't tell you what they are when unlocking them, and I couldn't even see what the cost was. It's not free, it seems to cost some kind of credit? I don't know where the credits came from? I have no idea how the meta progression works. The decks aren't really well-explained, either. They're not really handled like decks for gameplay, just in how the upgrades are doled out. At least when it comes to what is affected by what, and the effects of damage, RoF, etc. the effects were generally well-communicated.

I want to like this game, but I don't think the creator is going to be able to salvage it based on their recent posts. I hope I'm wrong, though, and I'll keep an eye on updates.

Honestly, it feels as dated as it is, even with a new coat of paint.

Fewer bugs and better endgame than Diablo IV.