Recent reviews by Grimnir Smith

Man, what a bummer of an update to b42 after two years. When I saw the unstable update dropped I was legit excited to dive back in and explore what's new, but the first conversation I saw was about the loading screens.

All of the loading screen art was replaced by what is pretty widely considered AI slop touched up to hide the obvious imperfections.

Indie Stone, you have throngs of fans with fan art pouring out of the walls. You could have done so much better. And no, it doesn't look awesome anyway. It looks like AI slop.

Icarus is a deeply troubled game with a rough history from the creator of DayZ. The game engine fluctuates wildly, and the grind is significant. The gameplay loop consists of losing most of your progression to repeat the same basic survival game tasks of grabbing rocks and sticks, making a base, getting ore, making better tools, and eventually completing an objective before going back to space to start over again. You do get some progression, which eventually you can buy your way into temporary gear to skip most of the basics, but not always. Some missions will have you needing to process gold ore which is around T3 tech in order to craft whatever is necessary. The rewards for doing so is very lackluster. Although, last I checked you could just cheat in all the currency you need to buy the temp gear, dunno if that's been patched.

There is some level of modding, but it's not consistent and patches are so frequent it was never worth getting into.

How I prefer to play is just an open world map on a private server that my friends can hop on and we can roam around gathering resources and building a megabase.

The problem with that comes back to the bad performance that really hasn't gotten much better over the two years of updates that I've seen. When your base gets too large or there's too many lights, too many pets and mounts nearby, the performance just tanks and you start getting all kinds of weird bugs. Whether that's torchlight crushing you into single digit FPS, or invisible rocks that you've already mined away, or phantom nodes that you mined before and get nothing for mining again repopulating the world.

It's not very persistent when stuff like that happens and sours the experience.

I am reluctantly recommending it because while it has a bunch of warts and flaws, they are constantly updating, and any of my complaints couple be fixed. I won't know until I give it another run.

This game is good, but it's being outshined by the market over the past couple of years from better games. They may have taken too long in Early Access.

As I'm writing this I'm watching the cinematic of vikings attacking a castle in the firelands, and I have no recollection of anything like that. Last I played the firelands was a wasteland with nothing of significance in it. Although, the last time I played the mistlands weren't complete yet either. Maybe it's time to dust this copy off and give it another run. But also, do I really have the time...

If you haven't given Valheim a spin, it's got good bones. Worth the money. Just a bit outside of the hype cycle.

Easily one of my favorite SteamDeck games just for the depth of gameplay and simplicity of control. There's a lot to be said for low-fi graphics in the current year. Sometimes simple can be better. Tons of replayability, a full round takes anywhere from 30m to an hour. Saves as you play so you can drop it whenever and pick it up later. Lots of variety, and surprisingly a good amount of mods to keep it fresh over the years.

It's an older gem these days, but still very polished.

Pretty relaxing and chill farming game with some basic combat and exploration elements. Big mods that extend everything about the world in multiple directions. It's really not much more complicated than what you see in the trailer, but the vibes are cozy. I'm pretty sure this is where cottagecore came from.

How can you not be slightly enamored with a group of indie devs that call themselves The Fun Pimps?

7 guys and fries was forced upon me by friends who assured me it was not simply a jank survival game, but one of the best jank survival games out there. I was skeptical. Then I found the youtuber scene and got hooked. Now I make my own mods and run my own server and it's almost certainly my top played game of 2024.

If you're not into it yet, this is a great time to be. Big content updates are on the near horizon and visual fidelity has improved drastically with the past couple of updates. Tons to do, and the modding community is insane.

I love how the turbo streamers that have racked up 200 hours since launch are starting to burn out already and I'm just in Act 2 vibing. I didn't make it to end game in POE1 either, and that's fine. Let GGG cook, this game is fine so far. By the time I start doing maps, if I even get that far, there's gonna be another 10 balance patches and things will be all that much more different.

Easiest 30$ I've spent all year.

Very early access still. Not much of a game yet.

Wait for a while, this one needs to cook. Will update!

- It's July. I've played nearly 100 hours. The majority of complaints I have with the game are unchanged, and the development pace is glacial at best. The greatest sin currently is calling this a social sandbox MMO, but providing very little in systems to support it.

There is a ton of feedback with a lot of sensible requests for changes to systems, but they just don't seem willing to make simple changes to adapt to player feedback that have been present since the wilderness alpha back in April. The vast majority of patch notes have been bugfixes to be fair, but there is a lot of low hanging fruit being requested that should be rather simple changes. My fear is this development team will end up being stubborn in their vision to the detriment of the game they're trying to make.

I'm currently not playing, will watch future patch notes, but have not been impressed with any progress so far.

I bought this to exclusively live on my steamdeck as it finally has an offline mode and development was ended. Now they're adding DRM so they can sell DLC. Hard pass. It's never getting updated until the DRM is removed.

TL;DR - VERY GOOD. I will nitpick a couple things, but make no mistake this is the most feature complete Early Access game I've ever played. Fantastic natural pacing for players of all skill levels. Content is gated by quest completion that you can accidentally through exploration. Fully voxelized world means terrain is only blocking your path if you let it. Base-building nearly anywhere with a novel system puts many other dedicated survival games to shame. Limited fast travel is augmented by your multiple bases being a travel point, that can be picked up and moved as you wish. Combat is simple enough to get by, while the parry system and stamina management gives skilled players a way to clown on bosses like an Elden Ring pro. No mounts, but the fast travel points are non-combat puzzle towers that open up the map with more and more advanced gliders. Flight is always cool, and the final glider is a treat. Biomes are vast, some enemy types are persistent and samey, others are region specific.

This game should be a template for epic survival adventure games. The only game I recall being similar was Outward from several years ago, but that wasn't nearly as well guided in narrative and lacked the depth of crafting and building. Outward was both a far more punishing game, but also flexible with mods and difficulty options. Even so, it was much harder to get into and didn't hook me for the long run.

Enshrouded is not terribly difficult, and thus lacks difficulty options. It provides an excellent balance of pacing and challenge, where if you're someone who excels at the game, you'll also find more difficult as you progress faster through the game. This also rewards players that prefer exploration, crafting, and base building, as all of the non-story elements provide XP as you go, making a safe gameplay loop of pushing the story ahead, then recuperating and working on the base, crafting, gathering resources, and farming, while still gaining levels to effectively make the next challenge that much easier.

My only real gripes are with the magic system. When using a staff, you collect a bunch of spells in the form of usable charges as inventory items. These take up quite a few slots, and they're not as simple to create as arrows. The nature of a spell-based system also implies some weakness system that's not readily apparent when you're fighting enemy types. While you could sus it out, there's no persistent ability to determine at first glace which spell you should be using, nor a bestiary to learn in-game. There are a few "eternal" spells that don't get consumed as you use them, but they're prohibitively expensive from a mana cost perspective to use unless fully geared and spec'd into magic. Otherwise you get maybe 3 casts before your mana is spent, and the enemy is still at half health.

Comparatively to the melee and ranged side of the combat system, magic is cumbersome and requires depth of specialization to fully embrace it, and I haven't really given it a serous run yet to see how it actually performs. Nor would it be fair to give it a shake now, 20 levels into the game. I assume when fully geared into it, things are a bit more functional, but considering how often enemies are already on top of me, melee really is the default state of combat. Bows do reasonable long-range damage without being spec'd into Dexterity for any damage bonus, and the quick-shot/cast system does make it simple enough to fight off flying enemies. I do make use of wands, as those don't require spell charges, but the very limited range effectively has you in melee anyway.

Considering the availability of multiplayer, and the several talents in the magic side of the tree, it feels like the magic system is more intended as a support/distance character that can heal and pepper enemies while a melee combatant has them engaged. But, since the multiplayer is bound to the host-players quest progression you're almost dissuaded from joining other players. What the post-game story looks like I may come back to review, but that would be the ideal place to add in multiplayer open world concepts that expand on base-building and persistent threats.

Of course, this game is in "early access". This game feels feature complete from start to 40 hours in and the final chapter of the game in front of me. I can't imagine what it will look like in another year if they continue to push more features. I have experienced a single bug where i got stuck in a jump-attack animation that eventually killed me. The AI is a bit daft, but I like having the option to cheese bosses anyway. A couple enemies (matron, berserker) are a difficulty spike in tuning, but that's intended. There's really very little to complain about in the grand scheme of the game.

Here I thought Palworld was going to eat up my time over the next couple months, but Enshrouded is definitely winning that battle as well.