A Vacuum Full of Bees 最近的評論

edit 10/28/19, beat it, 100%'d it, heartily recommend it, go below my initial review for my edit

I'm a few hours into this game, and having a great time. The art is stellar, the characters are fun as hell(Razmi is just Daria with a tiger on her head), the music's good, and the gameplay is pretty simple, but frantic and not too punishing for a clumsy oaf like me who winds up mashing when things start getting out of control. Ajna's a fun protagonist who is unabashedly tomboyish in look and attitude, and the southeast asian stylings are really great to look at. I've just gotten past what I feel like is the "prologue"(I just woke up in a desert) and the game's been great so far. The platforming can be a little finicky but I eventually got the hang of the axe ledge grab and walljump well enough. The voice acting is also great for the most part. Zebei is a fantastic pragmatic foil to the idealistic nature of some of the other crew, too.

I'd definitely recommend this game if you think you'll enjoy the gameplay style. Give the demo a try if you're curious about it, though I don't know if it's really been updated with anything new since it first came out, so it might be a bit outdated.



edit: beat it, 100%'d it, my thoughts with relatively minor spoilers:

Finished it, perfected it, loved it. A semi-serious story with plenty of levity and hope to keep the bummer moments in check. The story, while not necessarily the most original, is totally fine and the ending was solid. glad that there's no obscene achievements like "beat the game with only 2 action/no defense buffs" etc like some games like to throw in.

In the end, Razmi was my favorite character far and away, followed by Ajna, Zebei, Dhar, Ginseng & Honey, and Naga Rider. Hilarious to see in the ending how obviously separated the obviously extra characters were from the main crew, literally on a separate panning shot from the main group. As someone who routinely played through Megaman X1/2/3 lemons/dash-only, the platforming was home for me especially on Mt. Sumeru, and I think I probably got a bunch of ringsels I wasn't "supposed" to get as early as I did through sheer perseverance. Also nice to see that there's like 5 extra ringsels than you actually need.

A few nitpicks:

- Some of the characters are obviously less fleshed out than others. The bard girl, I literally found her by accident when I was pretty much ready to go beat the game, and she's barely even around. Tungar and Phoebe are great together but they get like 4 conversations total. Baozhai gets a few scenes too but also kinda fades to the background later on. Was there a tier for an actual playable character? Curious if one of the less built upon ones was a backer character or not.
- Some indicator on the dialogue bubbles for OCs in the various Backervilles would be nice, so you can tell when it's an actual NPC that might be important to talk to and not some dude's totally original character who is On Their Own Important Journey. Saw a stream where someone stopped talking to NPCs in towns altogether due to the amount of OCs and completely missed the color scheme lady and Leilani because the streamer thought they were just backer characters. Probably would've skipped Phoebe too if she wasn't A: impossible to miss and B: they happened to see the icon on the map.
- The combat gets hilariously unbalanced later on, early on it's tough but relatively fair, but after you unlock the Haruka Hustle and everyone's HP skyrockets by like 1000% for some reason, it starts to turn into "mash all face buttons at once the instant the fight starts and the enemies can separate to just cluster♥♥♥♥ everything to death". This leads to lack of incentive to use the more complicated characters because they tend to only do marginally more damage than guys like Zebei or Dhar who can generally be mashed out and return results anyways. That and enemies with almost literal millions of HP sometimes, and things get silly.
- They should just have a static movelist page with every single thing each character can possibly do instead of the "quick and dirty" ones they show. I realize they tried to follow the Keep It Simple, Stupid mantra, but it's way TOO simple. Better explanations of magic/physical damage would be good too, I don't think they ever actually explain that or even mention there's two types of damage until Hunoch/Xiboch? Showing Ajna's various new moves as she gains new skills would be great too.

Outside of those, I really didn't have much issue with the game. The people freaking out about the genericness of the story and such are nuts. It's perfectly serviceable at worst, and getting the Obligatory Tragic Prologue out of the way within the first like 5 minutes then throwing enough characters at you within the first half hour to have a full party was imo really smart of them. Especially when one of those characters is Razmi, and having her be basically the main sidekick who gets in on most conversations.

I don't often 100% games, but I 100%'d this. Forager is great, it starts out as a slow survival game that you gradually automate into a capitalism machine while your drones obliterate everything in sight(except the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nonaggressive animals!!!!). Though I think it'd be a better purchase at 10 or 15 dollars, I did enjoy the game a lot but 20 seems a tiny bit high.

would like something to auto-bottle fairies and such instead of trying to target them amidst a mass of things flying around at all times, an option to separate a stack in half so I can sell some stuff without selling all of it or tiny bits at a time, and some item that auto-kills critters because at a certain point there's hundreds of the damn things.

I have had an absolute blast with World, after bouncing hard off multiple previous entries in the series. The monsters are a joy to fight, which is important when that's the main draw of your product. The atmosphere of each environment is engrossing, and the monsters really feel like they belong there. It can be surprisingly relaxing to just head out on an Expedition with no quest or goal in mind and wander aimlessly through each zone, collecting materials for crafting, doing some bounties, catching some fish, or going after the monsters that happen to be in the area at that time on the fly with no faint limit or time limit(aside from when the monster itself decides to leave the zone). Each zone being one contiguous location instead of chopped up into several smaller bits like previous entries really helps give it a lived-in feeling, like coming upon the remnants of a turf war between two monsters that happened while I was busy halfway across the map with something else is a neat touch. Monsters, especially the notorious Bazelgeuse(Bagel Goose), often get wrapped up in your fights with other monsters, and can sometimes provide a much-needed distraction or deal a hugely damaging blow to the one you're focusing on. The weapon systems are extremely varied and unique, with many weapons using completely different mechanics making them akin to fighting game character selections when you pick which to use. I personally have only ever used the Greatsword, there's something so totally satisfying about landing that last overhead wallop with it that sends a monster crashing to the ground, stunned. I have heard from other folks that pretty much every other weapon system is fun to use and engaging. Collecting materials to build and upgrade each weapon can be difficult and the requirements of some extremely rare drop items for later high-end craftable gear can get super frustrating to acquire, unfortunately. Same goes for certain consumables, though there are alternative options such as the Melding system to acquire rarer items you need using lesser-desired items you already have. I run the game on a pretty beefy system, but even at lower settings I've heard the game runs pretty well. The only complaints I really have about the game running well is it's a big CPU hog, and the textures in cutscenes can be real nasty, but I hear that's a bug that's set to be fixed in an upcoming patch. Otherwise the game runs at a buttery smooth framerate, dynamically lowering object/texture quality ingame to keep the framerate steady, and the load times are basically nonexistant. The longest load time is when you first boot up the game, and even then it's like 15 seconds tops. Every other load time is so fast you don't even have time to read the loading screen tips.

edit: I should mention I play the game entirely solo, I have never done multiplayer. I am not a fan of the faint limit being tied to all players, so one goober can ruin it for everyone else if they're bad, which I've seen plenty of times on streams. The Palico system, your cat-shaped AI buddy, is very helpful in fights, acting as a distraction, support, summoning helpers, looting extra monster parts mid-battle, etc. Plus dressing them up in the various goofy or cute outfits is nice. I just wish there was a dog option. A Palicorgi, if you will. Odogaron's armor makes them look like some sort of ancient japanese wardog thing, but other than that it's all cats all the time, which sucks. I'd totally buy dog-shaped AI buddy cosmetic DLC.

Overall, Monster Hunter World's been a real surprise. I'd caught some streams and felt it would be worth trying myself once it came to PC, but didn't expect to fall so far into it, I think as of this review I've got 150 or 170 hours in it, beaten the story, downed every optional quest, found every food item(except a few different boozes), captured/slain every tempered monster, and still have fun playing it. I heartily recommend this game, and can't wait to see what new zones, monsters, and systems they add in future updates/expansions!

Stellaris is a fantastic first attempt by Paradox, well-regarded for their historical strategy games, to get into the sci-fi 4X strategy genre. They've added massive amounts of new content, much for free, over the course of the game's lifespan and most of the DLC is absolutely worth the buy as well for the added options they include such as Megastructures from Utopia and the Planet Nullifiers from Apocalypse. With the Cherryh update they totally revamped the gameplay making combat actually interesting and territory control far more nuanced than the rather arbitrary way territorial borders expanded and contracted in the past. Waging war is no longer a piecemeal affair, if you've got the influence you can lay claim to an entire enemy's territory and conquer them in one fell swoop, but if they're good at defending, they can wear you down and force a stalemate via War Exhaustion. These changes and more have dramatically changed the strategic layer of the overall game, and the way combat is no longer "the side with more guns wins", with combat disengagement leading to wounded ships being able to fight another day, and offering options to improve or damage those chances. The fleet manager allows far, far simpler warfleet management with no more awkward clicking around to every starbase to queue up a few ships each, instead you can just hit reinforce all on a particular fleet in the fleet manager and new ships will be queued up to the closest starbase and automatically rally and merge with their given fleet, eliminating some of the worst busywork in the original game. Overall the 2.0 version of Stellaris is a fantastic purchase and the upcoming Distant Stars expansion will, according to their word, increase the amount of various story content and events almost twofold, so I am absolutely looking forward to that since I've put hundreds of hours into the game and still find new events occasionally even now.

If you are looking for a good space 4X strategy game, pick up Stellaris. Don't let the mad Chinese reviewers put you off, they're review-bombing the game right now due to a chinese localization that was hacked into the game and was broken with a recent patch, so they've started negative bombing the steam reviews.

Extremely good game. A little slow to start, but once you get your first few mobility upgrades via various equipment pieces and vehicles, it really starts to open up. Some bugs and quality of life issues(mining speed for the drill arm and other minor things like that), but those are easily quashed by basic modding. The game magnificently captures the beauty and abject horror of the ocean, with creative creature designs and some really just nightmarish monsters when you really get down into the depths. I think the spider/crab/mars attacks martian-looking critters are probably the creepiest I've seen so far. The story is actually really great too, I was surprised to get so into it, and it went to some places I didn't expect. I've not yet finished it, but I'm getting there, and the journey has been well worth the price. Definitely get this game, whether on a sale or not.

edit: beat the game, still rules, buy subnautica

I am greatly enjoying my time with No Man's Sky. Whether it is worth sixty dollars or not is entirely subjective, but so far I have been getting my money's worth. The language learning aspect of it has been my favorite part so far, I was able to learn enough words to piece together some of what one dude was saying, he was panicking about accepting a marriage proposal, I told him to just do it and he gave me a big reward for helping him out. I would've just had to pick what to do randomly if I hadn't learned part of the language. The narration of everything is really great too, very "captain's log" style.

I like a lot of the little critters I've encountered along the way, including one horrific little rat-dog with nothing but massive jaws for a face, and when he opened his mouth-face to utter his terrible screech-cry, he emitted a green glow from inside his mouth which lit up the darkness like a firefly.

It's not a perfect game, but honestly, if Sony hadn't marketed this like some AAA be-all-end-all, I think people would've been much, much happier with what they got. And if they continue to add stuff, it'll only get better. I am really impressed at the variety of stuff I've seen already from a team of only 15 people.

I haven't had any performance issues outside of it not booting initially, this will probably be fixed quickly but all I had to do was disable fullscreen(fine since I play windowed anyways). That and disabling vsync allowed me to run the game at max settings and get a solid 60FPS on a powerful pc(980ti yadda yadda). I absolutely love the lack of load times outside of first booting up the game and jumping to a new star system. Being able to putz around from planet to planet without ever hitting a loading screen really, really helps with just getting into the rhythm of the game.

After 10ish hours or so, I'm happy with my purchase so far. I've not even left the first solar system, mostly just learning the ropes, exploring each planet in the system, and learning the alien language as I go. It's a really, really chill game, very relaxing. Whether you feel it is worth the full cost at this point in time is up to you, but if they continue to add content from here, it'll only get better for me.

Somehow they did it

I dunno how

But they somehow made the Doom reimagining good, and like, not just good, but effin' FANTASTIC

Doubled the speed from the trailer, tripled the execution speed too, and everything flows seamlessly, fights are intense and super tough, it feels almost like good ol' original Doom, but in 3D!

Worth it. Become a TRUE DOOM MURDERHEAD. RIP AND TEAR.

edit: beat it, still completely owned, buy doom

This game is incredible. From the mind of one man, who made all the art, music, story and gameplay, comes one of the best Metroid games I've ever played(my favorite game series, sans Other M). Now, that's being a bit disingenuous, since Axiom Verge very much adds a lot to the Metroid formula, though makes no bones about where its inspirations initially come from.

Through abilities such as teleportation, the Address Disruptor(a gun that creates NES-era visual data corruption on objects and enemies, similar to if you put an NES cart in wrong), the drone, and other abilities, it expands on the standard 2D Metroid gameplay in a huge way. The lack of a run button is kind of a bummer, but that's a minor quibble, and the only major gripe is that teleportation requires a double-tap in the direction you want to teleport, which means trying to do this on an analog stick is pretty much luck-based. I wind up going sideways when I want to go up, up when I want to go sideways far too often, but there's other means of movement that I can resort to to avoid that.

The graphics are incredible. Using a faux-8-bit style with setpieces and bosses that fill the screen(or beyond!), I would say it is a visual combination of Metroid and H.R. Geiger. Every single tile and object is covered with minute details, from dents and rust on bosses and enemies, to throbbing veins in organic scenery. The Rusalki are incredibly unnerving looking, as you'll see as you play the game. The gross organic look of many objects and enemies mixed with the technological parts of others makes for horrible techno-organic nightmare machines. Backgrounds and terrain are lovingly detailed, and the special effects are straight-up surprising. While I've been following the game for a while and thus knew about things like the Address Disruptor's effects, or what a boss death looks like, these things will likely shock a new player with their "oh, right, this is a modern game!" effect.

The weaponry is plenty and varied. Not all are useful, plenty are gimmicky, but most have their time to shine. I wound up sticking with the starter weapon for long range, and the Kelver for close up for most of the game, switching to about a half dozen other weapons throughout the game for specific reasons. At the end I still hadn't found a full half of the total weapon count, so I'm eager to get back in and track them down.

The music is outstanding. The boss fight themes are all frantic and intense, and the general world exploration themes are fitting to their respective zones. I am definitely going to buy the soundtrack once it goes on sale.

The story starts off as basically Half-Life 1. Lab experiment goes wrong, you get teleported to hostile alien world full of horrible death creatures. Trace is a pretty interesting character whose reactions to things are pretty justified. The Rusalki, your "narrators", essentially, are alien AI and have different personalities themselves that evolve as the game progresses. By the end, I was mostly satisfied with the story, and a few sections of the game blew me away(the Hallucination section, in particular, was one of my favorite parts of a game in years). Athetos, Trace, the Rusalki, they COULD have had more fleshed out stories, but I think it was fine as it was. There's more to the story in hidden notes and such, possibly a true ending as well? Not entirely sure, still haven't collected everything as of this review.

Game time clocked in at around 12-13 hours total for a 70% playthrough for me. I'm the sort to fumble around trying to find secrets though, so an 8-10 hour playthrough wouldn't surprise me, and there's a speedrun achievement for beating it in 4 hours, so there's that. It's definitely a much longer Metroid game than most Metroids tend to be.

Overall I'd say this was a 10 out of 10. The only complaint of mine, detailed earlier, is for a single movement ability that works most of the time. I was constantly exploring new regions and surprised by the variety in terrain, the music is great, very fitting, and only gets better as the game goes on, the gameplay was fun and very varied while providing plenty of options for weaponry, the visuals are some of the best 8-bit style graphics ever made, and the story is perfectly serviceable. A must-buy if you enjoy Metroid games, or platformers in general!

Basically a feature-complete game, if you didn't tell me it was early access I never would have known. Balls-hard roguelike with an amazing soundtrack as expected from Danny Baranowsky, with a unique and frantic playstyle based around the beats of music. I highly recommend this game as-is and any extra stuff they add to it over time is just gravy!

PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS REVIEW IS OVER TWO YEARS OLD AS OF THIS EDIT. The information may not be correct anymore and apparently they have patched things into the game since. Please keep that in mind when reading this review! I still recommend the mobile version though

original review:

The mobile version of this is far superior. They've taken the microtransactions out of the original game(Frontiers still has them) and the ability to earn the gems as you play to get useful items to make the harder levels more manageable is nice. Something on top to earn even if you don't perfect a level. The PC version not only lacks these(I can't imagine trying some of the endgame bonus levels on hard without at least one extra gold bag to start me off with or an ice wand), but it also has frankly unacceptable load times, with the average for me being 45 seconds or so. Which is ridiculous for a glorified flash game/mobile game on a pretty strong PC. Being able to hotkey reinforcements and such is a plus, but it doesn't outweigh the handiness of the touchscreen. I made it a bit over halfway through the campaign before deciding the PC version's not my thing.

Get the mobile version. IOS or Android, either one is fantastic. I would recommend not getting this on PC though.