Recent reviews by Timothy Biscuits

This game is an unfortunate little mess.

I love this kind of thing, normally. I enjoy video games at their dumbest - a little sugar rush I can comfortably play without breaking my concentration on a podcast, or a book, or just something more cognitively involved. This game is precisely such a thing, as honestly advertised.

The major, and critical, issue is the lumpy ass control scheme. Expendable has squirrelly Resident Evil type tank controls, wherein forward and side strafing movement occurs relative to your directional orientation. That means, in a situation facing to the left of the screen, you'd have to strafe to your right, per key input, to move toward the top of the screen (the route required to progress about 75% of the time). Pushing your key to go down or reverse (perhaps tellingly called "backpedal" in the key binding option menu) would, in this orientation, propel you to the right of the screen. Trying anything resembling twin stick movement is a fool's errand. Strafing movement is noticeably slower than forward and reverse movement as well, just adding more to the doddering.

Don't forget, there are 360 degrees of wonk to have to deal with here. If you get yourself really befuddled, literally unsure which way is up, I suppose that jumps up to 1440 degrees of wonk, in a sense. If it worked for the early era of the Resident Evil series (which it arguably didn't) it was because the pace of those games allowed for the lumbering movement. This is just moving like a golf cart for no reason.

My most successful and comfortable effort at control basically came from never turning my character from the default straight forward angle, simply strafing and positioning 'beneath' enemies on the screen and taking them on like a unidirectional Terminator.

To be fair to some extent, the game isn't so difficult or otherwise demanding or punishing that this actually ends up impeding progress as much as it would seem to. It's a silly shooty poot type of game with shmuppy levels of enemies made quite easy by the crumbly weakness of those foes and the fact that every surface in the game seems to be a pinata of ammo and health items. The controls won't get in your way of even killing the bosses too terribly.

But they will definitely get in the way of it being as fun as it could be.

This could have been just dumb fun, something I used to cherish at one point in time as a fun rental.

This game is irritating. In the spirit of recognizing how much it wasted my time, I'll try not to waste yours.

The basic premise of the game has some steam. You, your bow, and your yoyo arrow hunt so many bosses. Granted, most of the premise is lifted straight from Shadow of the Colossus. The bow and single arrow that you must call back, however, is nifty. I like that part. I also enjoy simply fighting bosses in a game.

The visuals and sound honestly don't please me. Both could've gone a lot further to be unique or creative in just about every way. A large part of this failing is in the design of all the game elements. Your character utterly lacks character, the worlds among the larger world are perfunctory boilerplate examples of the sort (a fire world AND an ice world?! Get outta town!). The bosses, you could probably guess most that will appear before ever playing.

Now, about those bosses, there's another problem, one far more pressing than uninspired design - most of them are abjectly irritating to fight.

A large part of the problem is that you're on the one hit death system. You'll die at least once, usually, figuring out what the boss does. Married directly to that issue is the fact that after each death, you'll have to trek back to the boss arena, often making rather time-wasting and (yes) irritating journeys plodding up steps to do so. And, of course, the longer or more involved treks from the checkpoint to boss often crop up before the bosses you might have to repeat the most, and those you'd least like to attempt for the 30th time. I didn't count, but that might not be an exaggeration.

While we're in this area, I can't figure out why we bothered putting so much empty world in here. It doesn't build or add to anything, and is needlessly open. The bosses could have all just been accessed from a hallway of teleports, and I'd have been happier.

Of course, the bosses themselves and the challenges to beating them are often just frustrating. Beating over half of them felt cheap somehow, as if I scored the finishing blow on just dumb luck (one hit kills for bosses as well, but a fight sometimes requires a prior hit to 'prime' the weak spot in some way). Luck - it hardly stinks of RNG, but the game often feels like it's a crap shoot and little more.

The controls aren't quite as tight as all this asks. Not bad, but hardly perfect.

I can't recall a lick of story to care about. There might have been something, but you won't care.

To beat each boss on the first or even third attempt, the game would scarcely be 45 minutes long. You know where your time ends up. I tried this game once, quit, tried again, and I believe I quit at the same point. A few early fights were quite fun. They tempt like a misleadingly good first date.

Irritating.

This little game really nails the feel of an NES title, standing above the countless that have attempted and failed that same goal. That isn't to say that those games fail at being good, just that there's so often something that undermines the effort at NES emulation - often, the problem is over-elegance in game design. This game, on the other hand, sticks to the lean mechanical limitations and sort of off-the-wall approach to making ideas work within those bounds that defined the NES. I think it could actually be worked to run well on NES hardware.

The premise is simple enough; you are a person/thing who moves through a series of levels summoning three (typical) types of spirit/troop to fight for you. There's a story, probably.

Your archer/melee and shield/area bomber troops come with some rules to work around. This set of rules and the level designs and scenarios are the star of the game. There's a strong element of tower defense, insofar as luring enemies into death traps and arranging troops in little tactical scenarios. The game doesn't tend to bring along the stuffiness of that genre, nor is it punishingly limited in approach - you are, after all, a little wizard person on the move, and can play the bait if part of your strategy.

It all works a wee bit more like a puzzle game than a strategy game, but levels aren't tied down to single solutions. Levels are relatively short, but the great majority are very well designed, with a few bringing really novel ideas. There's a little collecting and upgrading, but the game doesn't use those factors as a funnel for the entire experience.

The default controls can feel just a little awkward for a while. They seem simple enough on paper, and there's hardly a need for a sheet to keep track of things. It's just the layout of using QWE to summon the categories of your summons, and then R to recall them in respective order. It's all too easy for your hand to migrate a little and to call up the wrong fella, or remove one. Sometimes, that error can be critical. AWD for troop categories, and S to recall would be more comfortable for many people. I can't recall if you can configure controls.

Visuals and sound barely need an explanation, really.

It's just plain fun, and it's satisfying to see your ideas work out. It's just a little condensed blast of pure video game for when you've gotten tired of having to dedicate weeks of your life and a priceless clump of your cortical matter to just have a rudimentary ability to play a game, anymore.

Neat.

I'm genuinely glad someone took a concept this elemental and simple and followed it through. It is at least complete. Now that it's been done, we can all move on.

I've played it for roughly 8 minutes. My best run - yeah, it's one of those games, although it apparently does have an end - is about 13 seconds. I don't know how many 3 second attempts I've burned through. Enough, too many, whatever. I did equally well earnestly trying as I did just blindly holding down one of the two keys that turns your little arrow. That's all on me, though.

It's just one of those games for those types who feel the deluded warrior need to get good at a thing because it happens to be a video game. I couldn't care less, myself. And at what, precisely, would one be getting good, you ask? Turning, is it?

There are colors (one at a time, mind you), radial motion, and "music".

I'm not trying to just be glib about it. I loved "VVVVVV" dearly, and this is equally well-made.

But, it's a screensaver.

And that's all that needed said. Permanent deletion is a freeing thing.

The last time I played this game, I was leaning toward a fairly enthusiastic 'recommended' review. Let's look at what I was planning to say.

The short: when this game gets going and the scenario is interesting (most are), it is a heap of detailed bits of fun, aesthetically and tactically pleasing, and victory is very satisfying. For the hardcore, it can be intensely hardcore. I had even found a simple suggestion to make it more palatable to people of more casual interest.

You've probably gotten wind of the timed award feature. This is an irritating feature of the game, but mostly inconsequential except in unlocking the bonus missions - a gold victory is necessary on particular missions to get to those. Well, I simply cheated a granted gold victory if I needed to, because I just wanted to see everything the game has to offer (generally why I play anything). I planned to recommend this route for those getting frustrated with the inability to just relax and slowly play through each map, using a strategy other than the prohibitively narrow solution that can earn each mission's gold victory.
I'm just getting too old to obsess over every little game decision in this way, damned for any little mistake. I don't need a video game to be a difficult part of my life. Much less do I care enough to maintain the pure gamer samurai ethics against cheating and all that. A simple code took the pressure off and dealt away with the prime issue the game presents for most people to enjoy it. Killing and looting everything was fun. Thumbs up, thumbs up, use the cheat to sidestep the time pressure, and enjoy the spectacle.

Fast forward.

I've reached a point at which my game is simply broken. I am somehow missing a unit necessary to complete a scenario. The game registers this absence as a death of the unit. Thus, upon start of the mission in which the unit is required to survive, I merely get an instantaneous 'mission failed' message, as key unit is "dead" from the getgo. I return to the mission in which I was supposed to have gained this unit, I play through it again. I can see the moment of possible fiddly game error, and I play the game carefully to try to overwrite the problem. It doesn't work. Once more, quickly. No dice.

As if being rushed to perfect every last move and decision within a turn limit wasn't an ironic enough way to utterly waste time.

All done with that. Who needs this? Permanent delete is a lovely feature for keeping oneself from being tempted to bother again (thanks, Steam). On to something else.

This is a tentative recommendation and it comes with a few possible outcomes for you.

In short, I feel that this game is quite too long, its quests ultimately too repetitive and grindy, and the whole of its content stretched way too far to cover the size of the game underneath. The microcosm gameplay of shooting up a camp of enemies and running around and looting the aftermath, however, is a compact joyful blast.

In essence, you zip around the world with nearly flawless control and game fluidity, shooting and maiming and blowing up the world's unsavory denizens - the vast majority of living things in the game. There aren't too many types of these enemies, many are effective palette swaps of others, and they're not particularly bright, but there are lots of them and they hit fairly hard. They explode into an almost unmanageable confetti of reward items; consumables, money, and random equipment generated within the familiar color code rarity system. Even with the maximum of carrying capacity expansion, it would be a fool's errand to play packrat and try to capitalize for every last dollar with these items. It's a bounty to sift through with purpose.
Sometimes, this is all done within the context of a specific quest, and the terms of gameplay really don't change much in those cases. Quests are not designs of nuance or much interest. Shoot this, bring back this, and little else.

In all, your interaction with the world is about as limited as the quests. Few neutral or friendly NPCs that there are, a meager fraction of them can really be spoken to to any effect, and none do much at all, ever. There's not a lot to do with the world besides jump on it or trade with it. It's a monster box full of piñatas.

Leveling up is satisfying when it happens, but to play with the aim of leveling becomes a ponderous and unrewarding grind a short way into your game. To max a character, levels, individual stats and weapon category expertise, I couldn't even imagine the slog. Surely, someone has done the numbers on this and produced some efficiency guide, the very existence of which tells the story as I read it. And thus we mark the real downfall of the game.

I loved the first however many hours of the game, and then, upon discovering limitations and repetitions of ideas, the returns diminished greatly. By my exhaustive and thorough finish of this game, and all of its DLC, as I had purchased them together, I was just TIRED. Having kicked through the opening area of this game, I had a projective excitement to get to Borderlands 2, and any other games. It's been a long while, months or maybe even years, since I finished this game, and I still feel an awful distaste for the prospect of jumping into any more of this. Your mileage absolutely will vary.

Now, given price bundling and various game editions, my thus recommended course is probably the least money-efficient way to address this series, but alas - I recommend just trying this base game, then moving on to DLC and other games a la carte. Play it all the way through, see if you've still got an appetite for it. Take the DLC one by one, and just dose until you can't stand it anymore.

The visual and audio presentations are stylish and nice. Little need be said.

Concerning the rest of the presentation, the story is utterly negligible and uninteresting - the fact that there's a telltale series based on this franchise is beyond me. Thankfully, it's hardly the point of the game.

The touted humor is by and large a regrettable dud. It's about what you would expect from something stewed up in gamer/internet culture. That comparison doesn't bear for the actual character of the humor - it's not made of memes, to say - but rather the quality. Not good. It reached a point at which continued interaction with any character became directly proportional to my displeasure with that character - player character included. The quips are just not funny, and the tone of it is limited and irritatingly soaked in cartoon sarcasm.

It's serious fun to play one (wo)man army. It is. And then, at some point, passing through the same areas and enemy layouts for the 50th time (perhaps an understatement, actually), it stops being so much fun. And then there's still heaps of these games left, all kind of existing as a blurred continuum of "more THIS". A lot of people wholeheartedly recommend the second game over this one. I haven't played it to lend an opinion, but field that option as well. Bite off what you can stomach, either way.

Ugh. I get a feeling from this game akin to the feeling one gets when reading a book and realizing the author didn't get enough input from an editor.

A quick sidestep before the meat of the review - the gameplay here is your standard turn-based RPG gameplay, with a little odd element here and there to expand the conventions of that type of game. The little innovations to the gameplay (often novelties) are mostly good ideas and improve upon the RPG Maker basics (fairly certain this game was made with that engine, but I accept that I could be wrong). However, it's abundantly clear that the game is decidedly all about its presentation. On to that.

There's a certain cinematic approach in this game that I appreciate. The stark way that some scenes cut away from past memories to the game's current day have style, and display an eye for presenting with some vision. This is accentuated - and confirmed - by the good presentation timing and off-the-wall music, which is always interesting, and often quite good. At the end of the day, the music is likely my favorite aspect of the game, seeing that it never becomes marred by the game's sour determination to ruin itself. Everything else succumbs to a certain attitude that's entirely too satisfied with itself. We'll come back to this.

To make the nature of the problem absolutely clear, it's not what you might perceive as deficiencies in the game - the technical, graphical, and gameplay limitations, likely, for those wary - that ruin the game. Those things arguably make the game's character stronger - I would argue it. No, it's the too-reliable narrative and tonal direction of the whole thing. It's the way that every scenario seems to be written down a minecart track, plumbing to the same shallow thematic depth. You can feel the minecart hit the wall in any scene, incapable of going further or in any other direction, and those successive thudding sounds quickly reveal and locate the limits of the developer's writing abilities.

If you're diligent in exploring the game, you'll find a little side scene in which you're asked to put out a fire with a nearby bucket of water. Oh, but the bucket you'll use is full of accelerant, and now a nearby group of children are rapidly becoming quite crispy! The guy meant that bucket way up off screen, up there, you idiot! You fetch it, off screen, and return to little lumps of black ash. I bet you just can't stop laughing.

Of course, the clinch here is that you can't replay the scenario and get the correct bucket. The game doesn't permit the scene to play out any differently. It really MUST show you what it's got up its sleeve. You'll never believe it. Wait 'til you see.

Surprise elements are welcome, but gotcha elements exhaust patience. If you make a habit of trying to yank the rug out from underfoot, even a dog will quickly learn to stop bothering with walking on the rug.

A game developer is a game developer, and not a writer by some default. The developer here often succeeds creatively with limited engine capacities - playing something new on the thoroughly explored piano, in a sense. The writer manages to steer that gameplay goodwill and creativity unerringly toward its blithe and uninteresting ends and often completely squanders good gameplay ideas at the behest of dull and sophomoric pop nihilism. Rather, you could say that it forces a player to sacrifice its best ideas at an altar of fire, only to then point and say "look, it's burning". You want to put the fire out? Sorry, can't do that here.

You're meant to be impressed and to laugh there.

To further the issue, the game attempts subjects far, far outside of its grasp. Clunky and broad writing punctuated by a self-indulgent nihilism even lower than the dismal "Rick and Morty" can't contain the always dark themes at hand. No, neither the story nor the writing are good or deep. Play if you like creatively souped up RPG Maker gameplay that will often design to frustrate and sabotage those gameplay elements because, hey, it's all at the service of that story and the mood.

The best thing going for this game is the audio. I like the sound design, and I really like the music.
Allowing for that, I suppose I can say that the graphics take the red ribbon, being very nice overall, but I wasn't as charmed as so many other reviewers have reported.

The controls are so simple that they don't bear clarification other than to say that they are perfectly sufficient in their minimalism - that is, the button configuration is sufficient for what minimal range of actions you can actually perform in the game. The game can not only be played entirely with one hand, but using two would be a complete waste of a hand. Let's touch on the issues that implies.

Through direct control, all you do in this game is move your monarch around and spend gold. This is a sidescroller, at that.
Gold is the game's only resource, everything else a means to obtain it or build from your stockpile of it. Move left and right and throw money at problems. So what's with the touted exploration?

You start with nothing and work toward... well, it isn't made clear what. 'Survive', you surmise. This part of the game is a deliberate part of its design, and it's a fine part of the design. There's some fun to be had in throwing money at an encountered thing to find out what it does, if it isn't fairly clear from looking at it. However, let's try this out. You run into a rock, and 'working' it results in... an archery platform! Not necessarily an intuitive input/output, that. These can be developed into towers with costly subsequent upgrades. We'll have more to say about towers in a minute, but for now, note: rocks are where you can put towers. Similarly, little mounds of dirt allow for a wall. Wells, farms. A specified place for each.

Once you've worked out the handful of such features in the game world and what each does, it might behoove you to do a run around any new map in the safety of daylight to see where you'll have your specified and select locations for those limited assets to build in the later stages of the game.
The game generates a randomized (but always disappointingly similar) layout of these features on each new game. And plainly, yes, you can be dealt an utter crap layout. Two farms in a row offering no defense worth, and no usefully close wall spot at the outer edge of your kingdom to protect those farms, for example. Start with that knowledge. You can start a game that really probably won't work well at all.

The prime issue there is that expansion of your kingdom seems to require your building of SOMETHING in the direction in which you're trying to expand. Two defenseless farms may be all the option you have.

You have no more control over your valuable subjects than to pay them a coin to join your ranks. On being paid and making it safely back to your keep, they'll grab a tool - and thus lock themselves permanently into a role - from whatever tools are available at your keep, seemingly at random if there are more than one type available. And then they'll do whatever the hell they want within their possible behaviors, hopefully choosing the behavior that makes you some cash.
Don't need any more builders? Want to ensure you get some archers from the fellows heading toward the tool racks? Then don't have any hammers available, and make sure to get some bows. This is hard to do if you've already supplied hammers, as you can't change, undo, destroy, or even cancel an unfulfilled command for anything in this game. Your lemmings' whims will guide the composition of your little nation.
This bit can get even more complicated when you're gathering such small numbers of unhired villagers at a time (usually about two), using your often scarce supply of gold to hire them, and you've randomly obtained a bunch of unneeded tools from somewhere while you were away. It's the merchant with the donkey, I've learned. You pay him, he seems to bring random handfuls of tools. Pause for a moment; why does one need to beware these very arbitrary things to succeed here?

But let's reiterate - you can't change, undo, destroy, or even cancel an order. Where does this fully leave you in trouble, exactly? Isn't this just a design choice that punishes for sloppy plotting? Well... towers.

Build a tower. Let an archer take home in it. Upgrade the tower, allowing two more archers into it. They shoot at some bad guys at night, quite effectively to be fair. Neat, seems like a smart investment.
Now move them out of the tower, toward a more advantageous tower further out toward the enemies. You cannot. They're locked. Did you choose which tower they nested in? No. You cannot choose that, other than to adapt the tool rack runaround of only providing a preferred tower placement, requiring arbitrary map foresight.

The only way I've found to move an archer from a tower is to upgrade the tower from under his feet, barring it off under construction until a builder decides to toddle along. In the meantime, it's a gamble as to where that archer will flutter off to. Might just hop right back in when complete. Also, when completed, your new tower will then absorb more archers than previously. Tower fully upgraded? Stuck.
And remember, you can't get rid of those towers. Enemies won't even destroy them. Plan way the hell ahead.
As well, tower chaps don't bother to do much hunting, if at all. All of those archers locked up in the numerous towers you built usually watch rabbits and deer just amble on by without a shot in their direction. It bears mentioning that hunting is one of your better few ways of making money. I relied on it often. Let that sink in.

So one of your total three strategic structures can be situationally detrimental, even useless. This is because the game requires you to play around the mechanics of using those very towers, like it asks of you with everything. Play around this or that mechanic, and be damned for using it any other way.

Catapults will occupy some of your builders and slowly make their way to the outermost wall, no exceptions, even if that wall has just been ordered under construction and offers no obstruction to enemies. It disincentivizes building a wall further out after you've built a catapult in many of the randomized configurations of the wall/farm/tower features. And unfortunately, catapults can be necessary to stop certain heavy waves and enemies.

Put all of this together. What are you actually fighting against? Notice I only just then bothered to mention the game's enemies. Well, for the record, they can quickly become an overwhelming pain in the ass, themselves, particularly as you have no way of selecting for priority targets. Should they swamp you, you get to start your kingdom all over, plunging you back into the doldrums of slow early development.

Restart. Restart. Restart. Between escalating waves of enemies and your NPCs with a gathered intelligence equal to a tub of sour cream, you'll preemptively choose to restart aplenty as you grasp more and more of the game's parameters and you start to see signs in those subsequent games of barreling towards unwavering doom.

The game works in the early moments, and then it just doesn't. The less you know about it, the more fun it is. And most importantly, the control you have over the game is simply nowhere near granular enough to deal with micromanaging around the game's obtuse mechanics, especially as those contentious factors increase into the game.

If I decide for some reason that I need to keep a bunch of ants on a sheet of paper, I'll probably use everything at my disposal to do so. Not just one hand.

Boy, this thing.

Let's quickly dispense with the less relevant bits here.
Yes, the game looks reasonably nice, even if most of the aspects of the visuals seem to suffer cut corners. For example, the animations are nice... what animations there are, anyway. Sprites look remarkably static a lot of the time. Most of the sprites look oddly like vending machine rub-on tattoo designs. I actually like some of them.

I don't know what the game sounds like. It can't possibly matter that much. Podcasts and music had more worth, so that's what became of that.

Your sprite (one of six mildly different titular mythical birds) follows your mouse pointer as opposed to being snapped to its position. You can zip your hand around the screen faster than the bird will move, but it's really fine. On a controller, it feels pretty much like you'd expect it to. You never have to manually press anything to fire on either scheme, as your fire is always just streaming forth by default. The autofire actually makes sense, given the gameplay.

And, on that note, we come to the relevant bit. The aforementioned gameplay consists of many, many levels which, taken individually, all look exactly the same. You are on the bottom of the screen, shooting upward. The arena never introduces anything more than a different cosmetic background, which will roll glacially by. Just a big empty screen, no scrolling levels, objects, etc.
You don't fight streams of trash mobs, but only bosses in the game. The boss or plural bosses - up to four at a time - never really break from their pattern of drifting in an elliptical clockwise path, like on a conveyor belt. They even stay consistent with the spacing between them. Take a look at the video. It's like fighting a sparsely filled motorized tie rack.

Your first level will sensibly consist of one such boss - let's say it's a chicken. The bosses each have their unique shots and patterns of attack, which generally get more intense and screen-filling in volume as you weaken them - a process that never seems to take anything less than about 15 seconds of sustained fire per enemy. I could be off on that timing.

Your second level, maybe they'll throw a genie at you. The genie has a different (albeit small) arsenal of attacks. Same movement, of course. Seems to have the same amount of hit points as the chicken.
Your third level, you get to fight a chicken and a genie at the same time.

Yes, that becomes the fairly rigorous pattern for this game.

Let me also tell you at this juncture that there are 100 map levels, and then 100 further challenge levels that unlock the last character upon completion. The challenge section is essentially a button with a counter that just goes up as you beat the challenge levels - and to be fair, so is the map. The map levels seem to have set boss configurations, and the challenge levels just randomize four bosses every time you start it.

So on level 20 of the map, you'll perhaps fight a dragon, a genie, a pallete swap of the chicken, and a gargoyle. It just scales right up as a new enemy is introduced. And hey, when every enemy is a boss, and they're repeated and reconfigured ad nauseum, they're still special, right?
You'll probably face every grouping of bosses to be drawn from the game's stock of bullet flinging vending machine tattoos. If not, close enough.

And fling heaps of bullets, do they ever! Plenty enough to kill you often enough, anyway. Some homing shots, some area denial shots, lasers that cut off the screen, and tons of the handful-of-dry-dog-food sprays abound. It's a one-hit-death dodging game, naturally - start the fight over upon death.
And with the mechanic of bosses getting more intense in firing more bullets, the only mathematically sensible answer is to always try to eliminate bosses (and thus sources of bullets) one by one, and avoid 'enraging' too many bosses to more prolific states of shooting.

This means that every level has the same rhythm of chasing down the first boss you kill (usually mirroring their big oval, so fun), resulting in the brief period of highest bullet density, and then just slowly easing the pressure off of yourself as you shuffle the remaining bosses off the screen. And no one boss is ever difficult on its own.

So, here you go. Enjoy playing the game of slowly-make-the-fight-easy-going-in-a-circle-wearing-down-synchronized-swimmers-with-weak-bullets one or two hundred times.

There's a little bit of something worthwhile here multiplied to fill a quota. Yes, I feel stupid having played it for 12 hours. I wonder if I didn't leave it on or something, but I feel the waste nonetheless.

There is a fairly good chance that your experience with this game could be very close to mine.
I got this game in a bundle, so it wasn't something I had looked into and had built up any idea to compare it to upon playing. If anything, it just sat in my library for a while. Initially, I had figured it to be just another MMO, something I'm not normally too keen on at all. It was actually finding out about the settlement building and all the crafting aspects that got my attention.

So I tried to dive in and see what I could start. I started my little server to play solo.

It took some amount of time to get a grip of the controls and UI in their full extent. Almost methodically, I just clicked and right clicked through all of the bits of the UI, figuring out what was what. All told, this took some time. I don't think it ends up being a totally useless setup, but you get in your own way a lot doing this, then that, then that. At the very least, it's worth noting, as have nearly all of this game's negative reviews, that default setup requires you to hold the left mouse button just to look around with mouse aim.

How fiddly.

From this point, I'll just do a play-by-play, hopefully providing a sense of the fiddliness and tedium, as it amounted to in the end for me.

So gathering what's in my starting inventory and what the tools do seems obvious enough, so I set off to cut down a tree. Start with wood.
It took... too much time and too many clicks, frankly. Right click the tree, choose cut down. Not enough work? Do those motions again. Again. Ah, I have a log!

Okay, so the material has to be in one's inventory to work with it. Okay, even though logs are rather heavy and carrying more than one tends to encumber you like a gut full of whiskey.
Trying out the various tools on the log, I make some kindling - that'll be useful, I'll need a fire surely. Now I make a... oh, no, I failed to make a plank. Try again. Okay, made a plank. This log doesn't contain enough material to make these other options... so I have a remaining hunk of log, a spare piece of wood, kindling, and a plank in my inventory now.

What can I do with the plank? Let's... mmkay.

*Half hour of spiralling Google searches*

OKAY..... so I need a LOT more trees cut down to logs cut down to planks for the house AND a few shafts to make a MALLET, with which I can then start to work on some flat land to make plans for a house...

Mallet first. Select knife, click create, construction materials, and then shaft. Okay, logs whittled down to shafts, one shaft gets cut into a mallet head. Now I select the mallet head, click on the shaft to create ma... okay, that other shaft doesn't work, fine. Make another shaft. Mallet head, click shaft, create, and mallet... okay, I failed to make it. Failed again. Ah, fiinally, I have a mallet.

Christ, now I need to deal with a mountain lion...

I now have a littering of wooden bits and pieces and a dead mountain lion in my inventory. Let's... to hell with it, let's cut up the mountain lion. KNIFE. MOUNTAIN LION. BUTCHER.

I failed to make a paw, head, something else - Christ, how many items can come from a mountain lion in this game? I made meat. Fine, meat.

I'm waaaaaay encumbered, so... drop stuff? Jesus, I have about 40 different things and material byproducts littering my inventory. Drop half of everything. Thieves can steal stuff until I have a house? Fine, whatever... Let's finish the house, and I'll stack up my lincoln logs, and tool parts, and sawdust, and mountain lion meat in it.

So, house... I have my mallet. Mallet, let's plan a building on some ground. Not flat enough. Okay...

Select shovel. Click ground. Flatten. Dig, flatten, level. Oh, I can't level, I have to be on flat ground to level.

Mallet, go plan on my now flattened ground. Not flat enough.

*A shorter episode of Googling "wurm flatten ground" and the like*

Okay, so... I have to make sure that the slopes to and away from the square's corners and tile borders are all evened out to say flat, doing so by digging and dropping dirt where need be.

*Minutes of buggery with digging dirt and hitting the "flatten" and "level" commands*

Encumbered by the dirt piles I'm carrying from digging... okay, and now I have piles of dirt, and meat, and sticks, and logs basically just scattered like a bomb went off.

Hey, the mallet finally planned a house on that square! Let's see if I can plan it into a slightly larger house with the square next to it. It did! I have a two tile house frame now! Something is happening!

Now, let's get greedy and try a third tile house. Oh... my carpentry skill is too low. Fine, I'll take this step by step. Progress is rewarding.

Okay, mallet, let's right click that frame and... 'finalize house plans'......

... My carpentry level is too low to finalize the plans that I started?

*Google*

Okay, I deleted one tile of the plan. FINALIZE. Okay, it finalized, no change visible. Let's try building a wall.

I don't have large nails to do that.

Nails. Hm. Nails, that means... metal, which... blacksmithing...

*Google*



This was the point at which I just called it quits. The graphics have no character or wow, the sound is actually nice at times, mostly considering some of the music. But, those are footnotes. Everything just takes too much in this game.

I'm sure I played it wrong and all that jazz. Fine admitting it. But the fact is, I've actually leveled ground and built and installed such things in real life. It was immeasurably more fun, more rewarding. And I'm not going to suggest that comparable aspects of building in game and in reality actually took longer in the game, but the tedium and overcomplication of doing them through the layers of UI certainly tested my patience more than it could have ever been worth if I'd kept going.
After all, it's not like the UI is just part of the early game doldrums of a survival game. Rome wasn't built in a day, but when it was done, Romans happily killed damn near everything they saw.
Killing that mountain lion wasn't exactly fun. It was... tedious. This is just the game through and through.


I can't totally reconcile that the depth and detail of these operations sounds good on paper to me, but in practice just makes the game an utter chore. I think it just requires that I commit way too much to... you know, a video game.


TL;DR - go back and read it.