Recent reviews by Brother Eye

A lot of ups and downs in this game's continued live-service development that are reflected by the Steam reviews having gone from Overwhelmingly Positive to Mixed to Very Positive to Mixed to Mostly Positive over the span of a few months, but post-September 17th patch a lot of the major mistakes gameplay-wise (most significantly, many weapons being nerfed into not feeling good to use and flame damage mechanics being heavily nerfed) have been largely corrected so that basically every weapon in the game now feels like it has a viable use and you're not being pigeonholed into using a specific set of weapons all the time.

Very fun game, even moreso if you can get some friends along.

At least a few people in the reviews are suggesting that the recent (2024) Machine Age DLC completely makes this one redundant (as Machine Age allows you to play machine empires which you needed Synthetic Dawn for before), however there's a few things exclusive to Synthetic Dawn that make it still worth getting, but maybe at discount rather than the full price:

-Determined Exterminators civic, where you play as a machine empire devoted to killing all biological life
-Driven Assimilator civic, where you play a machine hive mind that turns all biological life it conquers into hive-minded cyborgs
-Rogue Servitor civic, where you play a machine empire that values biological life as something to be pampered and cared for
-the machine uprising situation
-Resource Consolidation origin
-Machine Worlds ascension perk
-Grid Amalgamation species right
-Chemical Processing exetermination type
-Ancient Caretakers Fallen Empire

Along with some music and portraits

Top-tier cyberpunk point and click story

This game is currently up there with Suzerain for my favourite narrative functions in a videogame.

It's got the open-endedness of procedural story generation that comes with something like, say, Rimworld, but makes it much less abstract. With Rimworld, you're always having to fill in the blanks- there's no actual dialogue, just vague ways of interacting. None of this is to knock Rimworld, because it's great, but there's something very satisfying and different about Wildermyth's system of having comics with dialogue generated by character personality and relationships.

On top of the wonderful fantasy story experience, the tactical combat is also surprisingly deep for how simple it is. It's not on the scale of something like XCOM, but there's a wide variety of different enemy types and a decent number of ways to build your heroes differently. Probably the single coolest element of the tactical layer that doesn't exist anywhere else (so far as I know) is the mage's "interspersion" mechanic. This is the mage's main thing, and it lets them manipulate environmental objects to different effects, such as exploding a tree trunk to shred enemy armor with wood shrapnel, or animating a stack of fabric to wrap around and hold an enemy in place. It's a very cool mechanic that makes you think tactically about environmental object positioning.

The legacy hero system is also very good. You can carry over characters from runs to other runs and if you promote them at the end of a run they retain changes made in that run and come back with more starting levels next time. It's a great system for getting to see new versions of your heroes come back time and time again.

So yeah it's an easy 9/10 at minimum for me

What if Phillip K ♥♥♥♥ wrote a Papers Please-style game about doing extremely enhanced mechanical therapy on people where leaving them with a functional personality afterwards is optional rather than a job requirement?

You get Mind Scanners, and it is great

To be blunt, most of the negative reviews on here simply seemed to have no idea what kind of game they were signing up for. This IS a challenging game, you WILL die a lot, and if games that don't have a real progression system aren't your thing, it's definitely not something you're going to enjoy. That said, if you are up for a challenge, the boss fights are smartly designed: simple, but very tricky to beat. This is a game entirely about lining up your shots with precision timing, and while mechanically it's VERY bare bones (you can dodge, you can shoot, you can recall your arrow, you can move, and that's it), each boss makes good use of the limited mechanics to be a unique fight.

Outside of the mechanical aspects, this game is GORGEOUS. The environments are lovely, the boss designs are superb, it's very pleasant to look at and the soundtrack is pretty good.

The only major criticism I agree with across the board is it gets kind of tedious having to walk back from the save point to the boss area everytime you die since it can take a good 15-20 seconds which isn't a lot but when you die 30 times to the same dude sometimes within a minute it's a little annoying. Besides that though it's pretty great.

Family murder simulator 1066
Finally figured out how to actually play it
10/10

>implying I wouldn't recommend this game
>implying there's anyone who shouldn't play it
>friendly reminder that if you don't play this you will be marked down as heretic scum
>yfw you will have the wrath of the immortal God Emperor rain down on you
Get this or get rekt.