Recent reviews by Amy's All Right

I wish this had more than a simple up or down, because the specific issue POE2 currently has (currently in prerelease, for those reading in the future) is somewhat complex and unique.

The act 1 stuff is too well done, too cinematic. On a meta level, act 1 of games (barring soulsbornes) is where you're supposed to be learning the mechanics and mucking around. You're not supposed to have to worry too much about staying alive until the culmination of act 1, that's when the difficulty of games should be ramping up. The act 1 boss is where you apply all you've learned, and then you "start playing the REAL game".

The Devourer boss in the 4th area (start - town - forest - cave) is, in my opinion, roughly as mechanically heavy and cinematic as Merveil in act 1 POE. You have an intense, mechanic heavy boss that can easily chunk you for ~80% max health before you likely have more than 1 or 2 pieces of armor.

I want to stress that this isn't a simple "git gud" issue, this is a flaw on a meta level that's going to turn away a lot of players. Before facing bosses that have more than "a (1) skill that's hard to deal with" like with Hailrake or Fire Fury, you need to give the player a chance to get accustomed to the controls and to have a semblance of a starter build. Act 1 is doable yes, but...it's the difficulty you should be facing at an act 2 or 3.

Honestly as is I'd actually rate the game at a 6/10. It's beautifully done, but I have to dock 3 points from the near-total lack of new player onboarding beyond stating that systems exist, and another point for unclear systems (such as how to get support gems outside of the 3 available per specific gem, and how to activate/use spirit).

I'm not sure how to fix the too-cinematic act 1 bosses; It'd be a waste to just tone down their damage and health so people can punk 'em. It's a great game! Just...trips and faceplants at the starting line.

I went into this expecting something akin to Path of Exile. While it is somewhat similar, I was disappointed to find that it had better graphics, a skill system that you don't need a doctorate in math to comprehend, and endgame bosses that weren't impossible to tackle. Also, the fact that when I died there was comprehensive feedback on exactly what wrong was INFURIATING.

Like seriously, I go into ARPGs with the intent of being randomly borked in the middle of a map with zero information on what happened, before jumping back into the map and full clearing it without taking any appreciable damage leaving me completely in the dark about what's wrong with my build. What kind of incompetent game developer gives players even a shred of in-game context of what they need to do to improve their playthrough?

And if it was at least an easy game, that I could understand. If we're catering to toddlers than yeah, we need to make sure people know how to play. But this failing studio has somehow managed to make a game that not only isn't cruel to its audience, but also provides sufficient challenge to be entertaining.

1/10. Too much fun, too much replay value. I'd give it 0, but that's technically not a number.

Great game, I wish there were more secrets where you could both survive. My buddy and I play these basically as soon as they come out, and we just finished another playthrough.

TL/DR - This is the greatest unplayable game in my library.

Stranded deep is a fantastic game. The survival aspects are difficult without being dark souls, the crafting system is the right level of wonk and sense that you need for a fun but not tedious survivalcraft, the controls are simple to understand without being press-button-to-win, the enemies are balanced enough that there's going to be a bit of strategy on new islands even into the late game, without being unfair at low levels.

Unfortunately, the physics engine is a mess, and multiplayer has frequent game-breaking glitches. The game will decide that taking certain items (like logs or tree heads) into your hands means that the chest you were about to put it in needs to be yeeted into the distance, sometimes putting items into a secured chest on a raft will result in the item both having physics where it was in your hands while also being inside the chest, resulting in a tipped raft...meat isn't separated into cooked and uncooked, so if you eat too fast you might get poisoned by raw meat even if you had enough cooked meat in the same stack...

And when you get to the multiplayer, sometimes the game will decide that only the host needs to be able to interact with items, resulting in the other players needing to disconnect and reconnect (which temporarily boots the host to a 5 minute loading screen) in order to eat/drink what's in their hand.

This isn't even halfway through all the glitches I encountered, and my review is already too long. This game is glorious and has a heck of a lot of promise, but the frequency of the glitches mean it's not really playable in its current state.

If you're not already playing eve, you shouldn't.

Character skill progression, if you're doing things right, will be drastically outpaced by your in-game currency progression enough that you'll always feel you should be in a better ship with better weapons doing more intense gameplay.

Since skills are trained in real-time (albeit, while you're offline too) you won't feel caught up to your comfort zone of difficulty until you're already several months into the game and likely bored by it.

Eve is a game that should be a lot better than it is, and the only real draw is PVP. PVE is either boring or intense enough to pop your ship almost instantly, with seemingly random difficulty spikes even within the same difficulty level. A good example of this is the level 2 security missions, that are boring enough to almost run AFK with drones up until maybe 1 in every 10 or 12 missions that will throw a dozen times more enemies at you.

If you're not going into this game to do PVP, don't play it.

This review only really applies if you're afraid of the ocean IRL.

Gotta admit, the graphics are great, and it really does feel like crash landing in a hostile environment. Unfortunately, I was unable to really experience much of the gameplay/plot because it evoked the feeling of open hostile ocean enough to trigger my fears of the actual ocean within about a half hour (from my understanding, before I got into any of the actually intimidating stuff), and even behind a screen I was scared enough that I haven't been able to pick it up again.

All I can really say is, if you're afraid of the ocean IRL, don't get this game. Most games play the ocean as a vague annoyance or just another obstacle to defeat, but this one plays it "good" enough that the feel of it will absolutely trigger you.