Recent reviews by Butcherbird

Reviews keep calling this a 4X lite or Civ lite but it lacks a lot of things that most 4X games have, like fog of war, random maps, and late game tedium. I've quit plenty of Ozymandias games, but never because I was bored. Nah, usually it's because I forgot to adjust sliders or buy units. Little screw ups, especially in the early game, can cause big problems.

Would be nice if the game had a turn counter and a map editor. Might also be nice if the factions had a little more personality beyond name, trait, and icon/colour, but that might be getting into the territory of bells and whistles, and the simplicity is a nice feature. A random map generator seems like it could be cool, but I bet it would be more trouble than it's worth, because the balance can be pretty delicate.

I got the game for free via a subscription and liked it so well that I bought it on Steam to support the company. It's that good.

It's a genteel game for polite sexy people.

Such a slow game. Exploration is slow because your character, even when they're supposedly running, is in no hurry. I had to backtrack constantly because you cannot fast travel from indoors. Level design is primitive and it's easy to get lost. Most loot is worthless anyway. Frequent crashes mean frequent reloads. Levelling up is slow and skill checks are stupidly hard to pass.

People keep recommending this game and I keep trying to like it. It's not fun. Maybe this sort of thing passed for fun ten years ago but I was around back then and I don't remember games being this boring.

Yes, it's good. Stop asking.

Reminds me of board games like Talisman and Runebound, which happen to be favorites. It's a nice way to spend an evening simulating a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. So far the replay value is pretty good as there are different maps. Hopefully there'll be a sequel.

Certainly worth a play, but just not my genre.

This was my first taste of the episode genre, appreciate getting it for free. I liked how it reminded me of high school/early college. On the other hand, the main gimmick was basically reloading from a saved game plus a dialogue option. It was also over very soon. While I'm a little curious about what happens next, it feels like a Sims style ripoff where you have to keep paying to get the full experience.

The short version: a crunchy, violent, sometimes cheesy brawler-- vehicles, fists, and guns-- that succeeds in spite of itself. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a parody but some bits sure seemed like it.

Blah blah blah, light spoilers ahead:

For a triple A title this game cheaps out a lot. You run into the same NPCs, the same voices (few Australian), and if you drive a car off a cliff, landing in a tire-blowing, frame bending smash, you get to watch the same old animation of your mechanic tightening a nut on the engine. I probably watched that motorsexual crank that bolt at least 100 times. Each region has the same stuff, camps, minefields, a friendly fortress (you can build the exact same upgrades in each), and a balloon that allows you to mark enemy locations and fast travel. Why not a really high hill in one region? Or a radio tower or something? Why didn't the baddies trash the balloons? Max don't know, Max don't care.

But the core of the game is solid. Driving, once you upgrade enough so that you don't feel like a blimp pilot in a windstorm, is pretty good. Car combat is really good. You ram, grind, shoot, harpoon, and eventually blow the snot out of any car on the road with a fully upgraded THUNDERPOON. It's stuff like that that makes me wonder if they're joking around.

Once you're done hooning around, you hop out and smash in the faces of a (limited) range of enemies. Melee is less clinical than I remember the Warner Bros. Batman games being, you mostly attack or heavy attack (same button, I played with a controller, which worked really well, except for the sniper rifle, which is attached to your car for some reason). As the game progresses you have to use counter more often and against bosses I dodged a lot. You can also use a shotgun (good as an ice breaker), a knife (useful for when grappled), or, when you can find one, a melee weapon. Why doesn't Max just carry a sword or mace instead of scrambling around a room full of rabid cannibals to pick one up? Because then you'd miss out on the fun of killing people with your hands. Which is super fun. The sound during melee is well done, growing in intensity as you chain together blows to fill a rage meter, whereupon you start snapping necks and breaking heads against walls. The sound track is the usual brass and percussion. If ever a game cried out for heavy metal, this is the one.

Aside from the core, there's problems. I found the level design lacking in cues to help me find my way, leading to a lot of running in circles and the occasional resort to walkthroughs. Max is a jerk who keeps saying he doesn't care about anybody but helps them anyway, and stupidly leaves people who helped him. You don't get a choice about that, other than to switch off the game and not start it again. His motivation is to cross the Plains of Silence, but I don't know why.

Speaking of plot, and to circle back to why I think this might be satire, at one stage you have to venture into an airport to fetch the dumbest quest item ever-- it's a creepy environment and the game does a good job of building tension, so long as you don't think about why you're there. Once I got out of the airport, I happened to talk to an NPC out in the wastes. Sometimes they have something useful, but after a while they mostly they talk pseudo Aussie gibberish or say you're great. This was one of those and said something like "Crikey! Yer a true blue prophet of the wastelands, surely you are!" at which point my hunchback idiot friend piped up with *his* usual gibberish, ending with "...and don't call him Shirley!" A line from Airplane!, of course. No idea if that was intentional.

Another bit that I won't be forgetting soon is the oddest hallucination scene I can remember in a game, featuring a talking dog, my idiot mechanic, and Max's dead wife telling him he should marry a hooker.

There's a good deal of grind required, although some of the content can be skipped. Unfortunately, some can't-- I didn't enjoy clearing minefields, but I had to do some in order to get an important upgrade for my car. I did leave a lot of camps only partially looted and several untouched, but it still took me over 50 hours to finish. And it was worth finishing, or nearly, if only to see the hallucination.

I found the end game uneven, with a race in Gas Town that I found frustrating (I died probably three times more in that one race than in the rest of the game combined) followed by some pretty easy fights. Then, as mentioned, Max has a wierd dream, saves somebody and acts real nice for 5 minutes, returns to jerk mode, and has a rather tedious penultimate battle with a truck (I took breaks for repairs), finally delivering his last beatdown, ending up basically exactly where he started. Roll credits. I'm still not sure if they were kidding or not, but I had fun.

While I'm not as crazy about this games as most recent reviewers, I do wholeheartedly recommend this game.

* Always something to do-- crops to tend, ore to mine, fish to catch, people to see, events to attend
* Challenging (but not daunting) if you resist spoiler temptation (although checking out a short list of tips is a good idea IMO)
* Relaxing yet facinating
* My kids (5 and 8) like it and are impressed that I don't suck at it
* Very easy to get into
* For some reason, I really like that the fish behave differently on the hook-- you can guess what's on the line most of the time. It's the little things, I guess.

I never played Harvest Moon or any farming/casual title so I didn't know what to expect, so it's been a nice surprise how much I like it. I do have a few minor gripes but nothing worth a mention.

I picked this up on a huge discount during the summer sale and really got my money's worth. In fact, I find it addictive to the point where I should probably uninstall it and get some stuff done... nah. I've only played one, abortive, multiplayer game-- the other person quit. So this review is based on single player.

Long story short? It's a simplified Dwarf Fortress with a big dose of cute. Plus it has a campaign.

It's hard to put my finger on why I like Craft the World so much. I guess it's largely because the progression of the tech tree is well balanced so there's always something not far off to work toward, and usually on multiple paths. The tech tree itself is nothing special-- in fact, it's littered with useless items I only craft to level up-- but well balanced so that by the time I need some materials for the next tech, I've either already stocked it or it's near to hand.

The campaign is a series of worlds, and so far I've played grass, snow, desert, and "underground", although for some reason it gets rain. The successive worlds aren't exactly more challenging in themselves, but the monsters are more deadly. You seek out portal pieces, which are guarded by fairly powerful creatures, and once you go through the portal to the next world, that's that for the one you just played, so far as I can tell, you're on to the next one.

The game itself is not challenging, either, following the trend of recent games that have challenging moments but are difficult (or impossible) to actually lose. I'm not even sure if Craft the World has a loss condition. Every so often waves of enemies, individually weak but deadly in a pack, will assault your settlement. While I've seen images of impressive defenses posted by players, it's easier to just build walls several blocks thick and ignore the waves or treat them as a way to gain experience (the dwarves have skills like warrior and archer, among others, that increase through use) by picking off stragglers, aided by the handy Portal spell.

I do lose individual dwarves, though. Sometimes I have no clue how difficult a particular monster will be and it can kill with two or three attacks. The dwarves themselves are pretty dumb-- other player reviews deride this as bad AI but I consider it to be flavor-- and will sometimes fall in lava or ignore an order to retreat. A replacement soon appears, though, so all that's really lost is experience and possibly equipment.

There's a few things I wish were different about the game, although I wouldn't call them negatives to the game itself exactly. For one thing, the maps could be smaller. I'm pretty methodical, if sloppy, and it takes many hours to clear a map in campaign mode. The community could be stronger, too. For example, the game's wiki is sketchy. Of course, it's a fairly simple game, so you don't need a manual, but the game has hotkeys and so far as I can tell, doesn't bother to tell you about them. It would be nice if the opening quests in a new world in campaign were varied. It's been cut down a tree, dig a tunnel, complete the shelter, etc., same thing each time.

I've gone on too long, especially as I rarely bother reading long reviews myself. I just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game. Also, just felt that some reviews harp on bugs an awful lot when I haven't noticed any definite ones. The game is certainly stable.

Worth the download.