Recent reviews by ollj

pre-load the city-tour and introduce others to VR by making them them sit on the floor and letting them crawl on the floor, while they can safely play toddler-godzilla without any need for holding any (vr) controller and with minimal risk of getting dizzy.

This game is a guilty pleasure, The NPCs just love to piss in the drinking well and pool, while stqanding next to a perfectly usable toilet and being able to reach any of the 2x as many toilets as NPCs for half a day, they just love to piss themselves instead, like a pro-gamer.

I prefer games that dare to do physics besides solid-kinematics, and that get gameplay out of fluid dynamics or even termodynamics or simulating (even basic) occlusion of light for solar power generation.
I really like the thermodynamics of this game.
I hate the thermodynamics of this game (needs easier difficulty option for newbies)
I really like punishing games, that are NOT pretentious-punishing-rougelikes or souls-like, that lie about being difficult, while clearly giving you countless obvious difficulty options and assist-modes (ranged skills are always easy modes, all darkspuls-likes are pretentius, and all rougelikes are just imballanced "gambling" in terms of having absolutely no difficulty curve that is non-random)

The pipes/cents/tubes are VERY dumb, they do not simulate pressure, and instead can only be one-directional, which forces you to build 2,5 x as many pipes+vents as you would need to if pressure would be realistic in pipes/vents. I understand, this increases perfoirmance, but it should just be a "dumb compatibility mode" that i would not have to patch out with mods.

It could use easier difficulty settings for learning the UNPREDICTABLE tech tree progression requirements, and for acessibility in general.
This game has THE biggest tech-tree-flaw: You can skip ALL branches, that are or-ESSENTIAL to manufacture product, that product (here it is refined metals) is essential for another tech-tree-branch, that you can research first, but ALL its buildings need refined-metals that you can only get from other tech-tree-branch-products that you simply UST research first, and it just will NOT tell you, and this makes it important to keep looking up the ingame library/indes. i dont mind researching somethign to skip over it, but this game just keeps raiging false hopes continuously.

The ingame library/index is pretty good, unlike the mouseover tool tips, that could ust display "need A (from air or ground or vent or pipe) , produces A (out of pipe or air), but we can not have nice simple UI cant we?, instead you hide and obfuscate essential information unnecessarily almost constantly

THE build ui also needs a text field search, this is a HUGE issue with ALL Klei-games, the ui is unnecessarily dumb, almost as pathethic as the skyrim-ui and any ui, not-made-for-mouse-ui, like , it often booils down to "this ui looks like its straight from the 70s, even DOS was better than this" (refusing to use 2 dimensional lists and insisting on much loser scroll tabs, and on NOT showing a lot of information, just because you lacvk the resoirces.) and being just bad in visuals/icons.

for no good reason, you can NOT PLAN the production of anything (needs planning-overlay of rimworld), instead, you can not even place any researched buildings, because you lack "refined metal".
this could be done easily by "a priority of 0"

lets see if any modifications fix all the issues of this game.

This works VERY well as a basic free interactive tech demo.
You can tweak the Raytracing and dlss quality a lot and quickly see the difference and yo can change the light sources more easily than in Quake2rtx.

As a game, so far this is one of the very few games, that sucessfully gamifies a lighting engine AND that renders it with ray tracing. Why this is not more of a stelath/thief/assasin game is beyond me!
As a game, this is WAY too monotonous and repetitive in scenery and gameplay.

To have rtx here, you must enforce directx12, by making a link to the .exe file, and editing it, adding the -dx12 parameter to the link to the .exe so that the .lnk links to something like:
"c:/this/game/sucks/rtxsweeper.exe" -dx12
instead of linking to
"c:/this/game/sucks/rtxsweeper.exe"

This is a common issue along almost all rtx games, for no good reason.

This is only for people, that want more acessibility for minesweeper, as in, larger buttons wirth silly audible feedback, in a barely-3d-set, and some unnecessary context around the basic game.

this is not for more purist-people who like minesweeper or rtx, because:

RTX-sweeper is a very bad implementation of rtx,
on top of a very bad implementation of minesweeper,
on top of a very pretentious and superfluous and unnecessary and condescending"narrative",
on top of overall bad/lazy game and ui design (cant blame a free game for most of this)

All of this can be excused for a free game, BUT why toes it look like it should be 40 mb small, when it is 1000mb in file size?

how to make this better?
how about every flag is a light that you drop under a water surface, and you have actual caustics like in quane2RTX?
how about you do not use a cartoony oversaturated sytle that is very well lit everywhere, that just todally does NOT coexist with rtx at all. at least use pastel tones in the shade, so that you have SOME visible radiosity.

Stil la good first person shoot game.
Lowpoly rtx does work aestetically, but tends to look uncanny.
Underwater flare means, you suddenly have some fuzzy caustics.

a good coop shooting strategy game game with good 3d editor for wild vehicle customization and good mathmaking.

You can tell the smarter matches by having much longer discussion and voting times.
This is where players actually learn from their silly mistakes.
The most common error is that idiots can not help but
- run around alone all the time
- act paranoid against everyone who follows others AT A DISTACE, to not be alone or to at least catch a murder in the act.

Like every competetive and coop multiplayer game, this game is always ruined by the other players.
at least this game tries to embrace that fact.

If the game setup is "cooldown less than 15s" and "player speed faster than 1,25" it is safe to report the host for cheating, if not for making a setup in favor of impostors.
This game is cheater ridden, and most cheaters will simply always play as imposrot/antagonist and insist on fast movement speed to hide their tracks.
It is quite common to see the host of such a game to be impostor 3 times in a row with a 3/15 chance being a 1/1 chance by cheating.

My favorite factory-citybuilder.

What makes this better than most is:
- very relaxing as it intentionally lacks any fail states, competitors and hostiles.
- The graphics is sompler than in most similar games, and that is mostly for the better.
- building in 3d is very well done (on a simple grid, similar to TransportTycoonDeluxe)
- every factory has a list of products, and can product multiple items in parallel
- progression is mostly constrained by a population limit, that slowly increases with supply/science.
- this is a cityBuilder that simulates marble physics (long straight wooden shafts increase in speed on straight tracks (and when going down), as it pretends that there is a downward slope on a plane. This adds a lot of strategy in facor of building long straight lanes, and items on that track bounce off each other (losing speed, but only reversing if they are on an upward slope)
- progressin is the least linear. Factorio and DysonSphereProgram fall in the same trap of having different colors of science to be produced and transported as HARD GATING. FactoryTown has very few hard gates, and is a good gamedesign example of SOFT gating (much closer to Rimworld, but factorytown has a better techn-tree than rimworld).
- FactoryTown logistics systems are smarter and more object-oriented (and cheaper) than in Factorio. it comes with free basic arithmetic blocks, no need to build a half-adder in redstone, BUT you could.
- inserters and filters are FREE and smarter.
- great design in terms of recipes, though ideally-placed-pastures and cotton fields and trade-posts dominate your factory-layout.
- the immobile random-seeded trade posts are a great recent addition.
Trains/cartTracks are easier to set up than in dwarf fortress.

Summary: too imballanced and slow for professional play, only fun casually.

This game lacks any option to save/load a game in process.
Even games against the AI can only be surrendered, (or won or lost).
Game performance is bad (slow ai) so you definitely need that nonexistant continue.

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Time travel, and tokens with different movement constrains along the 2 more domains, makes chess more bearable.
This is surprisingly fun, but even the SIMPLE visuals quickly crawl down to 3 fps during a devensive game with 30ish timelines.
As this is turn based, the past of every timeline is determined, and anyone traveling into a determined moment adds another parallel timeline.
Therefore, 5d chess solves the grandfather paradoxon by prohibiting it (the boring way) and not like [acron], that solves better for superpositions

Beware, the diagonal of vec4(1,1,1,1) in 4d space only has a length of 2, therefore "strave jumping in 4d" is sooo much worse
, which makes the queen just too strong, anbd that imballances every game, unless the setup replaces any queen with the weaker "princess" token.

- Beware fatslob-impostors (this game gets solved fast)

Beware, the 2 most common game modes, [default] or [turn0], are basically solved,
Because offensive queens are way too good (and predictable) in these starting configurations, these setups is a BORING one sided newbie trap
, as it has basically been shown, that there is only one way to play this setup for a quick win.
DO NOT FALL FOR THIS, do not play these modes ever, and shun them ill they get removed for shame.

Anything else is the same as playing against that one boring ass "Fatslob" looser
, that constantly and only plays the same AgeOfEmpires2 setup over and over on multiplayer since 2000
, just because it is the most biased setup, that he could find, with more hills on his side of a slim passage
, that looser just rushes for defense and range, to just "win" (almost) every game: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fatslob https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6neti7pIFo
When a game has a valid starting setup option, that one person has proven to be barely losable for decades, that is just pathethic.
This scenario is real, and it is worse (and more common, and also the DEFAUST setup) in this deterministic turn based game, removing the "barely/almost".

And of course this game attracts such complete loosers (that only play with unloosable stacked favors) like ♥♥♥♥ attracts flies
, as it gives the FALSE appearance of being an unsolved game (not like checkers)
, but the queen can move and control SO MUCH in this setup, that it is basically solved to be "white always wins", and "this is just boring".
for more and more starting configurations.

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The [defended pawn] starting configuration seems much more balanced, strongly in favor of rooks, this quickly espands into a mess of over 20 timelines.
Sadly even the strongest ai setting fails to cope with this scenario, as it quickly gets too complex for AI, the ai acts dumb and suicidal.
ALSO, having many long active timelines slows the ai down to a crawl (games take HOURS), and 1 hour may soon oonly fit 5-10 turns.
In a game without game state saving feature.
All this while only using 33% of cpu (ai fails to multithread, in a game of parallel timelines).

Therefore, this game only is fun casually, in any not-yet-solved game mode (till that one gets solved, too)
Trying to optimize/solve this game ruins the fun in this game.

Very unique in being an assembly-line-maker on multiple planets around multiple stars. This goes voe a grandure aestrtic. mostly sqware tiles on sphere surfaces work nicely most of the time.

a playtrhopugh is relaxing/flow and its a nice time sink of a neverending logic optimization challenge.

Very similar to factorio in terms of themes and resource recombinations, research and general theme.
Very similar to FactoryTown, in that you can build conveyors in 3d and flatten land, but not buildings, and here you cannot raise mountains.

Very different from Infinifactory, in that infinifactory is a neat looking piece of crap. that only has multiplayer going for it, but it even lacks a random world generator.

Very different from all of the above, in that it lacks boolean logic switches (besides filtering inserters and filtering splitters), it has no accumulators, and no triggers (unlike Factorytown, which goes overboard with visual scripting tokens)