Recent reviews by Homiccus

TL;DR The title of this game should be changed to "Ultimate Ship Designer: Torpedo Boats".

I have a love-hate relationship with this game. On the one hand it's janky, buggy and lacks basic QoL features, but on the other hand there isn't quite anything like it and I've been waiting for a game like this since SSI released GNB in 1992. Sigh.
Anyway.
I find it hard to recommend this title in the current state - after "The Last One" update. Why?

Because it's broken.

Allow me to explain.
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts is a game where the player gets into the chair of a chief naval architect of one of the chief naval superpowers of the late 19th century. This is accomplished through three main components: ship designer, the battle simulation and the grand campaign/strategic map. You will work out the overarching naval strategy according to the position of your nation and its technological advancements, implement it, design ships around it and then maintain and order the fleet to achieve a goal of... well, whatever it is you want to achieve. In theory.

Now if reading the above brings to your mind Jellicoe and Jutland, Rozhestviensky and Tsushima or Iachino and Cape Matapan, and all those glorious ship-to-ship actions, you will be severely disappointed.
I've done the bulk of my hours around version 1.3, which, even though janky and buggy, reached a certain, enjoyable equilibrium - the AI's designs and tactics were laughably bad, but somewhat balanced out by loose and generous budgets, ultimately leading to nice, big, capital-ship battles. And even then, out of dozens of encounters, perhaps one or two were actually memorable, when coincidence and RNG dictated that the opposing fleet had a reasonable composition (because usually it mixed modern ships with outdated cruisers and a zerg rush of TBs), their designs were reasonably executed (because usually they had heavily armoured BBs with minimal bulkheads and CAs with superimposed B turrets over non-existent A turrets) and the fleet actually formed cohesive battle lines (because they usually kept running around in circles). A couple of 20-minute battles in over 200 hours of gameplay. Right.

But all this is now in the past, because with the ultimate update came the abrupt end of development.
This last update didn't address any of the issues such as:
- nonsensical matchmaking between Task Forces and ships in ports.
- unfriendly, unintuitive method of ship management.
- unfriendly, almost non-existent method of fleet management.
- janky, unresponsive ship builder.
- research system which just exists.
- unbalanced naval invasion system.
- utterly broken minelaying and submarine systems.
- pointless, extremely limited diplomacy options.
- lack of aircraft carriers.

...but instead introduced a couple of game-defenestrating re-balances.
1) Reworked international tension system, which results in even less control over who goes to war with who and makes it almost impossible to provoke your opponents.
2) Reworked GDP and budget calculations for everyone, which means that no one can now afford a decently sized fleet of battleships.

So, it's an Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts game, which doesn't allow the player to have control over their fleets and doesn't give enough money to play around with dreadnoughts.

I was actually waiting for the development cycle to finish, so that my saves and shared designs would stop being constantly wiped. But that last update announcement only adds insult to injury. There is also little hope for the title in the future, because the Devs have actually closed the architecture even a bit more, making modding harder than it needs to be.

So, Caveat Emptor. Watch some YT videos or streams to gauge if this mess is worth your money.

Please consider postponing the purchase until the game is actually finished.
It's not really out of EA as of yet:
- it's not feature complete - editor is missing;
- it sports 4+ hours long single player scenarios with no means of saving your progress;
- there's only a few scenarios available and they're a bit glitchy;
- some features are only available in multiplayer (which too isn't buttery smooth).

This is a really good railway simulator, with great attention to detail and reasonable graphics, with a rarely used Polish setting. It'd be an easy recommendation if there was actually some form of a game in here.

You may get your money's worth if you're willing to try multiplayer servers, but for solo gamers - stay away.

TL;DR: Currently there are two games vying for my allocated gaming time slot: Baldur's Gate 3 and this. Guess which one is winning.

Vampire Survivors has been recommended to me as a "casual time-waster". This is my first foray into "bullet hell" auto-shooters, so I really didn't know what to expect.
Man, what a delight it is!
I'm so far around a 1/4 into the game, but I've seen enough to judge. It's like a younger, more funny and sexy cousin of serious aRPGs (like Diablo or Grim Dawn). Yeah, it's arcade pixel style, but guess what: wanna try a new build to completion?
Sure, go ahead! It'll take you max 30 minutes, and it won't require endless item farming and grind.
The developers are so well adjusted to what the players want, that the answers to any problems I might have come right away. Like - "it's tedious to grab all those far-away items on each map". Wa-bam! Here's a solution. "I've ingested so many eggs I can't move straight". There's a pill for that. Etc. etc.

Just pure fun.
No qualms - recommended with both hands.

Burn the heretic.
No aiming down the sights.
Purge the unclean.
No complicated loadouts.
Kill the mutant.
No extended tactical objectives.
Only in death does the duty end.
No huge skilltrees.
Damnation is Eternal
Just you, your boltgun, smörgåsbord of weapons, chaos hordes, blood, gore and death.

Emperor protects.

This is so typical for Bethesda... at peak popularity release an update which fixes very little, adds some minor content and breaks the game for a lot of people. I can't continue my 50+ hours vanilla playthrough because it CTDs after a couple of minutes. Every. Single. Time.

Thanks Todd. I was enjoying this until now.

I usually write elaborate reviews to detail what I think of various components of the game, but in this case I don't want to spend more time writing than playing the game.
WRC is about three steps back from previous titles in terms of visuals, performance and even basic features of a Rally game.
Deep discount 4 months after release from a triple-A studio shows that they too lack confidence in the product.
Avoid.

TL;DR - Pointless, soulless corporate cash grab. Major step down from Snowrunner. Avoid.

Do you remember the Trials from Snowrunner? The "outside the game" challenges which served as a distraction, so thoroughly despised that only a handful completeniks ever bothered to finish them all?
That's exactly what Expeditions is - trials cranked up to eleven and with a new coat of paint.
So without further ado.

Good stuff:
- It's an offroading game where maps have no roads. That's really good.
- New mechanics and gimmicks such as drones, binoculars and anchors.
- Tire pressure adjustment is very neat.
- We finally have some more say over what we load onto the racks, whether it be more fuel or spares. That's good.
- Yhhh, that's it.

Bad stuff:
- Despite protestations to the contrary, it's just Snowrunner with a facelift. Same design philosophy. Same coding. Same engine. Even loading screen tips are the same.
- The game structure is a bit pointless. Instead of a continuous string of objectives to complete, we have separate, loosely connected, heavily scripted missions ("expeditions") accessible from main menu. This on its own wouldn't be so bad but the list of objectives is just that - a bucket list with extreme hand-holding. Mudrunner and Spintires had a similar single map approach, but at least there was a meaningful progress attained in a single, continuous streak with a choice of approach left to the player to figure out. Snowrunner had free exploration, map switching and progressive objectives which enacted meaningful, themed map changes. M:E has nothing of the sort. Go here. Use binoculars. Go there following pre-generated checkpoints. Use drone. Go thither. Collect some item. Go back. Mission accomplished. Wow.
- Asset flip. 80% of machine park is imported from Snowrunner, sounds, textures, warts and all. Remind me what did I pay 35 quid for?
- Speaking of money - it's a cash grab, pure and simple. The game has just barely released and already there's a day one PtW vehicle pack, expensive season pass and additional DLCs which are not included in the season pass.
- There's a weird disconnect and lack of immersion. I mean, imagine a 2024 scientific expedition to Colorado, which uses 1960s Eastern Bloc trucks and cars, painted in wacky colours and outfitted with space-age technology, including sleek carbon-fibre flatbeds and SimonFlash-esque contraptions (with a really long and annoying animation). If this sounds odd, imagine what it actually looks like.
- Speaking of looks. The graphics actually looks worse than Snowrunner. Everything is blurry and has a phoney finish.
- Also, the cargoes are strangely absent from the game. They are not represented by a physical object, only marked by a square loading zone. When loaded (no crane lifting tho) they're a generic blob covered by a tarp. This completes the immersion-breaking experience.
- Even though there are new mechanics, they feel half baked. Drone and binoculars are really one and the same (and just about as exciting as riding a balloon in Mad Max - with worse execution) and drone in addition feels unrealistic. Most (ie. bridges) are scripted and scenario dependent. Jacks don't work half of the time because bad physics. And did we really need to wait 10 years for a winch with more than two functions and still get one with less usefulness than the one in Spintires?
- After so many years perfecting the driving physics, you'd think they'd finally crack it. But no. It feels slightly better than Snowrunner, the vehicles feel heavier, but the atrocious mud mechanics and overall bounciness of the vehicles downgrade the experience to rock bottom. Sigh, I really wish they'd go back to Spintires with that...
- There is a pervasive feeling of low effort running throughout the game. I'm not speaking about bugs and glitches (of which there are plenty) but of the overall "doer-upper" approach. This game is sold as a standalone title but it feels like an expansion pack to Snowrunner, with a literal fresh coat of paint and minimal work done to justify the price tag. But of course then you'd already have the trucks and cars from the game and wouldn't need to fork out money to buy more. This shows the Devs don't really care anymore about us the players, just our wallets.

Meh stuff:
- The UI is a mixed bag. Control scheme has been altered so much, that your Snowrunner knee-jerk reactions won't help you much. But it's actually a better layout than before, where most of the stuff you'd normally do during driving is operated seamlessly through RB combo. The "at a glance" HUD is also nicely laid out and functional. But the lack of the accessible and clean menu to activate addons and attachments is a major step back. It's replaced by at least three different menus operated by different combinations of buttons and it's utterly confusing.


Before I bought it, I secretly hoped the Devs harkened back to the sense of wonder and exploration, like it was back in the day of Spintires and Mudrunner, you know, when unknown waited for you around every corner. You know - "Expedition Into Unknown". But instead of that we got a funky offroading mobile game with almost no challenge and no real sense of achievement.
I'm not going to reward that kind of behaviour with my hard earned money. Pavel has sold his soul to the corporate, and here's the effect, so Bye Bye Saber. After hundreds and hundreds of hours spent traversing the un-traverse-able, Spintires franchise is officially dead for me.

TL;DR This is a game which you didn't even know you needed or wanted. But you do. Badly.

So my first thought when I looked at the screenshots was: cool, a train simulator. I mean, it's gonna be ETS2 but on rails, right?
Well, yes and no.
It's a railroad simulator, which at first introduces itself as a train engineer kind of thing. Then it tells you that, ackchyually, it's more about logistics than merely pulling brake levers. Now, my experience with steam trains is limited to robbing one a couple of times in RDR2, so when a torrent of anglecocks, waybills, interchanges and gladhands arrived on screen I thought that it's only going to be for the proper railfans, but then I've discovered AI engineer orders and fuseés.
And everything finally clicked into place.
Railroader is just a giant sandbox model railway, where you choose your own fun and pace. In meta-speak, there's a system of 'missions' to be fulfilled, map unlocks, gear upgrades and reputation system to maintain. Logistical puzzles to be solved. Route planning to do. Finances to take care of. But most of all there's a marvelous sight of meticulously modelled thousand tons of steel on wheels chugging past you at 35mph, which makes you stop and forget what you were doing for a few minutes.

Thanks Devs.
I needed that

TL;DR: There is only one word to describe this game's deficiencies: performance. Performance and optimization. That's two words. Performance, optimization and Traffic AI. Four. Four words. Although technically these are three words and an acronym. D'oh!

UPDATE #2 (07/01/24): So, after several months I've been enticed by one of the Devs to come back and try the new and enhanced Alaskan Road Truckers. I duly did. What changed? Well, firstly I've updated my graphics card to RTX4070 and added a second SSD to my rig. With that I could crank graphical settings to max and marvel at ART in its intended full glory.
Except... except that my main gripe persists. The performance is adequate at first but the longer I played, the worse it became. Sudden FPS drops, stuttering, assets "popping in", abysmal AI cars - it's all still there.
Admittedly, the Devs have made a lot of improvements in several areas of the game, and made some additions available for free and again it would have been very welcome, alas! I've given up after maybe half an hour, when stuttering became so bad, I've lost control of the truck several times, ultimately ending in a crash.
Sigh. I guess I'll just sit and wait. The game remains a very good idea mechanically, but it's not enticing enough to save, quit, restart, reload every 30 minutes to keep it playable.
Sorry.

UPDATE #1 (24/10/23): Five (?) patches on, and there's little improvement. The performance improved from constant slideshow to occasional one. Zone loading issues persist. Textures still constantly lose coherence. AI traffic had somehow gotten worse - turned it off completely.
I've since encountered many other bugs: pertaining to controls (steering wheel turns off as soon as you touch the keyboard), invisible chainsaws, invisible speed bumps and the game completely flipping out in the truck dealer section of the HQ office computer, forcing me to do a hard close.
Still a hard no. Small dev team or large dev team - how can you start selling a game which is held together with toothpicks and PVA glue? After years of Early Access?
I'm now past refund time, but if I could, I would.
I'll actually try.

OP (21/10/2023): With a bleeding heart I'm giving Alaskan Road Truckers a negative review. Which is a stinking shame, because this game has so much potential to shine. First the positives: sound design is glorious, the meaty engine, the cabin sounds, the tires on the surface. It makes the experience. Content-wise there is enough to keep going and pushing on, unlocks, trucks, some new parts, different cargoes. The map is decent, a tad monotonous but not boring. I'm obviously not expecting ATS level of road span and network, and this is fine. Good scope. The driving is decent enough and the graphics are simple-ish but functional and not at all tacky. Survival elements are light but constantly tick in the background, which adds a nice layer of realism. Couple this with all the interactions you have to have with your truck and the surroundings and it all gives off the vibe of a MySummerCar-lite. And that's a high compliment.

Now all this is completely ruined by absolutely atrocious optimisation and performance issues. Despite simplified graphics and effects, despite tweaking any and all the settings, I can't run this game over 35-50 FPS. Now my PC isn't brand new, but it's not a potato either, it happily runs Cyberpunk2077 and the like in high to ultra settings. Alaskan just says no. Running a hardware monitor reveals that GPU core load is almost always at 100% (Snowrunner on my PC clocks at around 50-60%) even when you alt-tab out of the game. Furthermore it turns out that ATS-Win64-Shipping.exe is quietly using the Internet to send some data, even though it never asked my consent to share anything. What are you doing, Green Man Gaming? Are you quietly mining crypto behind my back?
Anyway, back to other gremlins. There's visible stutter in places (I'm assuming loading new zones), everything reloads from time to time (which includes textured inside the cabin and elements of the HUD), the elements of the surroundings spawn in at a short distance for a while. And it just doesn't work.And don't even get me started on wing mirrors.

Final nail in the coffin is what everyone else also says: traffic AI. Asthmatic acceleration, brake checking, running well below speed limit, sometimes driving obliviously on the roadside as if it was asphalt. It only seems to be reacting to the player, I already saw several pickups flipped over, which the AI just plowed in, following the predetermined route. The immersion is coming apart at the seams.

The devs have already pushed a patch through, which somewhat improved things, but the performance is still lacklustre and keeps dropping badly the longer you play the game.
I'd say buy this only if you're an ETS/ATS fan or MySummerCar-like fan and wish to support the further development. This game is a diamond in the rough, but until performance issues dramatically improve and ART doesn't try to burn out my GPU, I will stay away.
Man alive, I'll gladly change this to thumbs up when it happens.

Thanks for reading.

Dwarf Fortress isn't just a game. It's a story generator. And repository of memories.
Apart from the ubiquitous gore, vomit, killer carp and demon infestations of course.

I've spent countless hours playing DF, since around v0.23, and created many weird and wonderful forts. Some succumbed quickly, some lasted for years and were abandoned out of boredom. Some played as scenarios to rebuild a fallen civilisation, others were started only to build a megaproject. Whatever the cause, there's always something to remember these creations by, and it usually boils down to a few notable denizens.

One was a dwarven Queen, quite elderly, childless for whatever reason. This fort happened to have an unusually high percentage of migrant children, who, as dwarven kids are wont to do, made an absolute royal mess of everything. The toys were everywhere, in the forges, in the farms, down the mineshafts... and then I've noticed that the queen, whom I've relieved of most duties, was on a sort-of self-imposed cleanup duty. All she did, month by month, was to walk around the fortress, picking up toys and putting them back into storage.
To this day I can imagine her, humming to herself whilst she tidies up the mess, made by her adopted children.

Another one I still pity till today was Udib the Carpenter. I've decided to build this fort on the surface, in a savage biome. And this one, over time, suffered from dozens of raids by Giant Rhesus Macaques, who, in essence, kept stealing everything which wasn't nailed down and beat up anyone trying to get in their way. Poor Udib got caught twice in their path, resulting in the carpenter having both of his arms broken and with severed nerve connections. To the end of his days he was cursed with wandering around, lugging two useless, limp meat stumps for arms. All was well until he tried to drink. First he went to the storage, to pick up a mug... with his teeth. But then... the poor sod just couldn't figure out how to use it to drink from the barrel. If I spotted this on time, I'd forbid the mug he was carrying, and Udib would happily go and dunk his head straight in the booze barrel. But then I forgot.
He died of dehydration, three urists from the plentiful booze stockpile, still clutching an emerald mug in his teeth.

And then there was the reclaim... I've embarked to reclaim an almost fallen civilisation, at the point of collapse. After checking the legends, I've chosen the oldest site to reclaim. The files stated that it had a few visitors but no original dwarven population. Expecting a fight with a Forgotten Beast, I've embarked with seven axedwarves and mostly military equipment. The site turned out to be... infested. By elven and human "visitors", who squatted in the fort ever since the original inhabitants were killed off. And they were hostile.
Almost nine hundred "visitors" killed, and eight or nine months, later, only four of the original seven were still alive, and congregated in a newly designated meeting hall, among leftover trash and rotting body parts. They were all traumatised beyon reason and didn't really care for anything in the world anymore. With a sprinkling of imagination, one could almost see their thousand-yard-stares, dented armour and axes chipped on elven necks.
I've never continued this fort afterwards, letting these heroes' fates be unsung.

...and this is why I'd recommend this game. 223%. To anyone who has an inkling of imagination and enough dedication to pass the learning curve.

Thanks for reading.