A cute little spiritual successor to No Place Like Home, that does away with the farming and the semi-open world in order to focus on the cleaning. The drill is also gone and instead you destroy trash piles with water. Other than that it plays like an area of No Place, in that you burn through some piles of junk and uncover useful things, in this case quest items needed to progress.

That's really it. You use your hose and vacuum to clean up maybe a dozen of main campaign levels and a few bonus ones, and you collect items that mostly repair things after you've collected a certain number. Levels start small, but the bonus levels begin to really drag, and the main campaign lands somewhere in the middle. There are upgrades for your magic hose-vac, most of them pretty satisfying, especially as the game starts out feeling pretty slow, except for the endgame upgrades. They're hugely disappoining in that it really feels like the skill tree description promises more than what is delivered. You also unlockc hose and vac robot buddies, and using the hose-bot quickly became addictive to me. Wtih a few upgrades, that thing was cleaning up more junk than me.

It was fine. Cleaning up pile by pile, putting down my little cleaning buddy in order to clean on two fronts at once, grinding away at some upgrades. Just addictive and entertaning enough to keep me going and even managed to keep me just hooked enough to run two laps through the game, the second with full upgrades, to get the 100% completion trophy. I couln't get that final percent to register in most of the levels on my first run, so I had to replay the whole thing, which was a bummer but at least it was pretty quick with max upgrades. Perfectly fine while it lasts, probably perfectly forgettable.

This game was so much fun, but it's actually also not very good. It's charming and the designers have the right ideas as far as mechanics are concerned, but it's also painfully obvious that this is their first game and that it might have even started as a student project. I kind of loved it, but I have a high tolerance for severe jank if I like the ideas well enough. Beware if you're not like me.

The game itself is kind of a combination of a cleaning sim and a farming game, with a little bit of Slime Rancher DNA thrown in. The planet is full of junk rocks that not only contain junk (which you convert to one of the currencies, recycled material), but also have plant seeds and sometimes crafting blueprints. Your job is to use your magical tool that's a combined water hose, vacuum and drill to both clean up the various areas of the game and to grow crops and care for your animals. This sounds like an amazing combination for people who like all of the above things, but honestly, the only thing that truly works, is fun and is very addictive is the cleaning. It's just kind of exciting to crack open the door to a new area and see a sea of junk rocks and get to work cleaning them out one by one; drilling the rocks until the ground is covered in debris, junk and seeds and then vacuuming it all up. In a few areas, the dreary brown and grey ground is even converted to nice greenery as you clean up the area and complete tasks, which adds even more satisfaction than just seeing the area clean of junk piles.

The farming does start out nice, wich your typical seed lots you can put down and then plant seeds in, and the watering is actually pretty fun from the get-go and I didn't find myself pining for a sprinkler from minute one, as your magical backpack hose actually covers quite a few seed lots at once even without any upgrades, so that was nice. Maintaining like five chickens, five pigs and maybe 30 plants was a nice and manageable amount, but unfortunately, the farming goes off the rails and stops being fun as your farm grows, which never really happens to the cleaning half of the game. That part is addictive the whole way through, because it remains mostly the same except you obtain a better drill and a better vacuum so you can mine and suck faster and more efficiently, but the farming becomes kind of an annoying mess as you proceed. When you have too many animals, they tend to bunch up in one corner and pile on top of each other, making it annoying and stupid to try to fetch your eggs and milk, and the farm area is far too small (with no expansion upgrades offered) for the endgame when you're hosting like 100 plants, 15 pigs, 15 chickens, 15 ducks, 5 cows, 5 goats and 5 sheep, while also trying to maintain room for like 5 apple trees, 5 peach trees, 5 orange trees, the kitchen, the cheesemaker, the jam machine and the mayo machine, while also allowing room for the recycling and crafting stations and the large amount of storage chests you will probably end up building even though there's no actual reason to keep large amounts of vegetables, because the other problem is that there never is any climax to the farming. You have to grow the next set of crops, that become available as you access new areas by completing quests and unlocking paths through the game world, in order to get your tool and machine upgrades, but other than that, there's really not much point in growing 500 potatoes. You can use them to cook a healing meal, but really, this game is so easy and so low-stress and low-challenge that the only thing you'll end up cooking are stamina meals so you can sprint longer and more often.

Other than that, the game is kind of a mess of good ideas and sloppy execution. The tool upgrades are very satisfying and fun, and kept me hooked right by allowing me a stronger drill just as I started to feel a little bored with cleaning up junk and so on, and there were some very fun unlocks like the one that lets you suck all of your fully-grown vegetables into your inventory instead of picking them one by one, but the whole game is very obviously amateurish. No matter where you look, you'll see objects clipping into each other, floating in the air or why not enjoy seeing the skybox in the very obvious and large gaps between the door object and the wall object. That kind of jank is literally in every corner of this game. It doesn't break the game and I managed to complete everything except for one quest (that apparently always breaks if you leave the area before completing it and has been left that way since at least 2022), so the game isn't unplayable, nor did this obvious amateurishness really lower my enjoyment of the game as I was too focused on cleaning on all the things to care that a tree next to me wasn't connected to the ground, but I did have a chuckle when I checked the credits and saw that the game has one director, one "scrum master" (lol what), five "Unity developers" and SEVEN artists. That's insane because if more than half the work force are artists, this game really ought to look much better than it does. I'm guessing maybe this is a student team that took the same class and everyone was hired no matter how bad they actually are at their jobs, which would explain both janky code and bad graphics.

So, yeah, this game is actually kind of bad in many ways, but also very enjoyable since it's never so broken that it becomes unplayable and because it's so satisfying to clean all the things. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I was excited to hear that they have already made and released a semi-sequel that skips the farming and focuses on cleaning up and restoring nature (it's called Fresh Start) and I bought that right away since it was also on sale when I found out. If you like cleaning sims, don't mind a farming game that's only fun for the first half and then becomes a ridiculous mess, and feel satisfaction in seeing an area of a game go from dirty and awful to clean and green, you might enjoy this game as much as I did even though it's not actually a very good game.

What a game! What a lovely game! Yes, this game is so good I have to resurrect old Fury Road quotes. Just the other week, I was commenting on how I liked The Ascent more than it deserves just because dualstick shooter RPG is pretty much my dream genre, but there are very few to choose from. I had Black Skylands on my wishlist, but really, I only bought it because of the unusual top-down camera angle and the steampunk airships, not really realizing that it was going to be an open world dualstick shooter RPG.

It is and I love it! You ride your airship around, take on main quests or visiting side quest islands only to explore or help people out with something or other. You can go fishing for rare fish to trade for weapon mods, for your arsenal of guns with a wide build variety thanks to an enormous amount of mods. I absolutely loved riding my airship full speed into a dock full of enemies, jumping off without slowing down and blasting those fools as my ship drifted off on its own and I did it almost every time I landed on an island. Hell, I loved doing almost everything in this game.

So, let's face the obvious thing. This game is not pretty. It will not attract you with its visuals, and the visuals made me assume that this was going to be a janky like student project level game with neat ideas but awful execution, but the reality is that this is a kind of ugly game that's highly polished. All throughout the learning phase of the game, I was constantly gleefully surprised to find that the game offered this or that feature that made the game more fun and/or convenient. You can fast travel not only between islands and the main "fathership", but directly to your own ship from anywhere on an island, which is just enormously convenient and time-saving when it comes to the boring trek back to your ship after you've cleared an island. The tablet that houses all of your information is clean and easily usable. You can track quests, put down your own markers, tweak your guns and your ship and read lore. All of this is standard stuff in today's market, I know, but those features also tend to show up in major games made by like 300 people with a decade of experience and it's rare to see this large amount of QoL in a little indie team's first game.

The flow of the game is such that you can fly around freely and either follow the main quest or head to the side islands, and I found it naturally easy, in a way I can't quite put into words in this review, to see what would be a main quest island and a side quest island, so it never happened that I had mistakenly cleared a main quest island before I was going there and only once had I cleared a side quest island before the side quest sent me there. You explore the island and solve a few side quest puzzles that I found enjoyable even though I mostly hate puzzles in my action games, hunt for resources used to upgrade your crafting stations at home base and, of course, do lots of dualstick shooting with a large variety of different guns that you customize to your liking with mods, and I liked doing all of it. The level design for the islands is consistently well-crafted, and I especially liked the sections that required you to do some little dodge roll and grappling hook acrobatics to reach tricky areas for a mod chest (which are addictive to collect because you always want that +++Damage in order to destroy pirate fools who dare stand in your way even harder).

I'm just rambling and I feel like I won't manage a coherent and detailed listing of everything I liked about this game, so I'll just summarize and say that I loved almost everything about this game, and playing through it from start to finish was a real joy that never left me bored. I just loved going from island to island, shooting, puzzling, airshipping and looting, I loved that enemies were finite and that defeating all of them liberated the island and reinstated peaceful inhabitants, and I kind of wanted this game to be like five times bigger and longer. Apparently, the early access version was quite different and was going to be more of a survival game with farming, more of a give and take between liberated islands being taken back by pirates and stuff, and the end result is very scaled down in that it's a semi-linear RPG with a clear start and finish and some side questing along the way, and farming has been completely stripped from the final game, but as I never played the EA version, I can't find myself too bothered by it. The idealized version from the early betas does sound like it could've been cooler, but it's understandable that they didn't earn enough during EA to be able to realize that far more ambitious vision and I very much enjoyed what's on offer here.

The worst part of the game is the plot and the writing. I was super disappointed early on when it became clear that the threat isn't actually the sky pirates, but an alien parasite species that wants to devour the world. Theyr'e called "the swarm". Yawn. We've seen that a thousand million times, from The Borg in Star Trek to The Flood in Halo and so on, and so on. Sky pirates would've actually been much more unique and fun and I don't think this game actually needed a spectacular multiverse ending involving alien gods and such. Just a big bad sky pirate to defeat would've been perfect. The actual craftsmanship of the writing is also quite questionable, and it's too often obvious that the writers aren't native english speakers. For example, one of the final mission descriptions is "Go to the Kain's fort", which is obviously some janky english and that kind of broken grammar permeates the whole script. They really ought to have asked an EA backer to proofread the script for them, since the overall good but not quite perfect grammar shows up and ruins the immersion and appreciation of the story nearly constantly. On top of that, there are certain things that translate extra poorly, like how I believe that they tried to write the main character as kind of a stern follower of the rules, but their attempt at writing stoicism just turned out to make her kind of a rude asshole. At several points, I marveled at how, wow, my character is a total dick for no reason, and I don't think that's on purpose since other characters in the game adore her and no one comments on what a cunt she is.

I'm giving this game a very high score because that's how much fun I had with it, which is to say a lot of fun. Is the game perfect and free froim bugs and jank? Absolutely not, but there was nothing big enough to ruin the enjoyment for me, and I loved every hour of this game. As soon as the (admittedly kind of wonky) tutorial was over, I fell in love and never fell out. Maybe the game's somewhat short length, for the genre, at only about 15 hours worked to its favor and maybe I would've been annoyed if the game dragged for 50 hours, but that's just another strength if so. They don't seem to be doing much on social media right now, but I hope the team is quiet because they're hard at work on a bigger and even better sequel, because I can't wait to play more!

Actually worthy of the hype! Even though there are some typical Ubisoft annoyances, which they're always good at including, I found myself really enjoying this one and having a hard time giving up playing it until I was completely done. Lost Crown is an aesthetically pretty game with a main protagonist that's enjoyable to control and some really cool audiovisual experiences.

The first and most striking thing is the visuals, and I constantly enjoyed seeing the absolutely massive city sprawling in the background, or a crumbling statue frozen in time. I really enjoyed both the navigation and visuals of most areas, my favorite being the "Raging Sea" area, which is so cool that I feel like maybe I shouldn't spoil the discovery, but I'm going to anyway. It's a fierce storm at sea that's been frozen in time, so ships splintering, crew flying off deck, masts breaking in half, all eerily still as you run through. In fact, time is so stopped that you run on the surface of the water. It looks and feels so cool! (Now, the goal of the area is to unfreeze time, which is a huge bummer, but thankfully, they didn't bother animating the first part of the level once time is unfrozen so even though it makes no sense with the story, the first half of Raging Sea remains stuck in time so you can go back and enjoy it while grabbing collectibles.)

Your character, who is not the prince but just some guy named Sargon, is also a joy to control and the movement abilities you obtain are just plain classic metroidvania fun. The first one you get is an air dash, which for me came in with the perfect timing just as I was saying to myself that this game sorely needs an air dash. The game also rather tastefully withholds the double jump until nearly the end, which can be a risky gamble in this genre, but I felt like it really worked out and that it also came at the perfect time, just when I had started to feel that there were a few too many rooms or situations where I'd need some kind of vertical assistance.

The game also offers an ability I don't think I've ever seen before in the genre, which is the shadow ability that allows you to drop a copy of yourself at your current location and teleport back to it instantly. The game successfully uses this in exploration, puzzles and combat, and I found myself confused often, only to remember that I can do the copy teleport thing and then the room went from seeming impossible to seeming very natural and logical. You also get an ability that reminds me of Ashen's teleport arrow, in that you can throw Sargon's chakram and teleport to where it is.

Lost Crown also offers an easily understood and readable map with just enough guidance to be helpful, but not so much that it becomes a Ubisoft marker fest. You can buy maps for treasures you haven't found, but the game waits to offer them until you've explored enough of the area by yourself (I'm not sure what the exact requirement is). If you love markers, the game does offer a baby mode that shows you everything on the map, but I never turned that on and can't comment on it. I also appreciated the game's extremely helpful screenshot mechanic, where you can take a quick screenshot that gets a marker on your map, so you can keep reminders of which corridor needed an air dash and which needed something else, or if there's a puzzle you can't quite figure out. It's basically like writing things down yourself except as an in-game feature. It's especially helpful for my scattered ADHD brain, so I enjoyed that feature a lot.

Speaking of the map and exploration, I really enjoyed how much of this game requires some serious acrobatics. While there are perhaps a few too many large and uninteresting rooms that get boring when you have to pass through them to find a health upgrade or some such, there are enough cool rooms that make up for it, and the good rooms often offer some seriously challenging, but not maddeningly difficult, platforming and acrobatics sections. The game really lives up to the parkour part of the Prince franchise and does not disappoint, to the point where I've seen people complain that there's too much of it. Personally, I don't think there is such a thing as "too much" backflipping, climbing and wall running in a Prince game. That's what the franchise has always been, since the very beginning in 1989!

So what didn't I like and why isn't it getting a perfect score? The small thing, to start with, is that I didn't really like how the plot unfolded and I didn't love the character designs or the in-game models. Especially Sargon's mentor looks and moves like a model from a PS2 game. I won't spoil what it is, but something in the ending also felt like a major plothole and oversight, that made the story make less sense than it could have. Also, the whole sewer region can go to hell and whoever designed that should not be allowed to work in misison design. They can go do some other task on a game and they shouldn't be fired, but they shouldn't be designing areas and missions. The Depths is just a pain-in-the-ass area where everything poisons you, enemies have annoying movement patterns and, worst of all, there's a long section where they take your map away and not only do they do that, the game has to taunt you about it by having the thief show up in every room, giggling at the fact that you don't get to use a map.

Those are the minor complaints, though, and the major complaints are with the combat, which I could just never truly get along with. I found the game easy enough and I managed to beat every boss on the second try, after spending the first try studying their patterns and feeeling like I was never going to beat that boss (especially Menolias), but I never truly enjoyed the combat for two reasons; the dodge kick and the conditional cancelling. The dodge kick is when you sprint or dodge (which is the same button), Sargon does an acrobatic little kick if you attack or attack cancel during the dodge, instead of tearing into his 3-hit combo. This made it needlessly painful for me to dodge and strike quickly as Sargon would always do the stupid kick instead of regular sword attacks and the kick isn't buffed by my sword amulets. I really wish the dodge kick wasn't in the game at all.

As for conditional cancelling, I mean the fact that you can dodge cancel out of your attack if your opponent readies a fast attack, but only during the first two of the three combo hits. If Sargon initiates the animation for the third attack, you can no longer cancel and have to see the attack through. I don't think this works at all and could never learn to master it. I believe that if your game offers cancelling, it's either all or nothing. Either it always works or it never does. Having it kinda sometimes work and sometimes not is just confusing and frustrating to me.

Oh, and speaking of amulets, this game's wholesale borrowing of Hollow Knight's charm system really doesn't amount to very much. There's a variety of amulets and I guess you could possibly create buidls if you really wanted to, but the game offers no reason to and you're obviously just meant to use the ones that buff melee and special attacks, because everything else is so clearly inferior.

The final complaint is that there were quite a few moments where I really had no clue where to go, like for example when the hint girl tells you that you should check out either the pirate zone or the forest zone, but really, you're supposed to go straight to the forest because the pirate place requires an ability you get from the forest path. I wasted an embarassing amount of time trying to figure the pirate area out because of this, and this sort of confusion happens a couple of times throughout the game's near 25-hour runtime. In the end, though, this one didn't bother me that much because there's always the internet if you're truly stuck and can't figure something out. The difficulty spike bosses didn't bother me either, because every time that happened, I could overcome rthe issue by backtracking and finding a few more health upgrades and that allowed me to defeat the previously seemingly unbeatable boss and that's just how this genre should work.

In short, a very good game, the rare Ubisoft surprise from the studio that almost always delivers their most surprisingly good games (so maybe it shouldn't be that surprising), with a few flaws that hold it back from being a masterpiece. Even with the mistakes and flaws, this is still far better than you might expect from the company and anyone who likes Prince games or metroidvanias should play this if they haven't already.

I wish I liked this game more than I do. I wish it was better and more finished. There is something here, that something that makes you stop and notice that this game has the potential to be something special, but there's just so much of it that doesn't work out for me.

The special part is that this game clearly has heart, soul and an obtuse message the developer wants to convey. Since you ride a metro into the dungeon and fight bosses named things like "Depression", I'm guessing the story is an autobiographical one of being stuck in a routine they're not happy with, but I haven't seen a single in-game story note aside from the one in my home base in 10 gameplay hours.

And that's my first major complaint. This game is in the Undermine and Hades school of roguelites, where you have to unlock literally the entire game, and it's a very slow dripfeed. You don't even get any first-run freebies to give you a taste of how unlocking works and what's to come. It takes hours until you've gotten access to a few weapon choices, but about half of them are so locked that the game won't even tell me how to unlock them. There are 193 items to unlock and after playing for ten hours, I have 28 and I still don't know exactly how to get more. I can see that they're tied to the secrets system, and that you can talk to the gardener to see your secrets list (which is very nice), but I don't really know how to speed things up and I still don't know if all of these amazing items that really change up the game and allow for crazy builds are super rare or if I need to spend another 30 hours unlocking things before I gain access to them, but I've developed such a low tolerance for these "unlock the entire game" roguelites that I really struggle to stay inerested. You know what one of the most brilliant details of The Binding of Isaac is? The fact that while the game also has several hundred items to unlock, far more than Revita, you can still find Brimstone and Tammy's Head on the very first floor of your very first run. In fact, Brimstone is a lot easier to find until you dilute the pool with mediocre unlocks. You have to give me a taste of what can happen in this game without demanding a 20-hour entrance fee if you want me to like your game.

At first, I really enjoyed the HP system, since this game asks you to sacrifice HP to do more or less everything (pick up items, upgrade items, etc), while also affording you a combo system (which you also have to unlock, by the way) that gives you a resource that fills a bar and not only allows you to heal back HP you've lost through combat or obtaining items, but also lets you create new HP slots if your HP is full when you heal. This seemed, at first and on a surface level, to be a very interesting mechanic, especially for me since I get really hooked on mechanics or challenges that require you to focus up and not take a single hit ever. Reminds me of my shmup days and trying to beat entire games on one life (which I rarely even attempt anymore). However, this system doesn't quite work out to be enjoyable for me, simply because the game isn't generous enough with HP and the resource used for healing. If you take every item you can find, which is the fun part of a roguey game, you will find yourself losing more HP than you can gain, but I never feel like I find anything awesome except for the spinning bolt (which is my favorite since it does big damage and is easy to use) and the +50% crit chance one. Oh, and the explosive shots one but I was really disappointed that it has friendly fire and that it's too easy to hurt yourself with it. I guess, as I wrote above, I have to unlock the cool stuff and I really don't have the patience. In 10 hours of play, I should've found at least one really cool thing that was more exciting than +50% crit. While that extra damage is awesome and my best run ever was +100% crit with some extra bonuses, +crit, +dmg and +hp are kind of boring things to find in a roguelite even if they can be vital. Where's the run-changing items I've been told so much about? Yeah, so, I have to spend 30 more hours unlocking them and I don't want to do that. I guess that's what I keep coming back to and why I have to give up on this game.

It doesn't help that I think the game generates rooms that are either pretty boring, or sometimes, on rare occasions, create downright unfair and annoying scenarios, like how the game somtimes loves to put the little ranged enemy that backs up when you get close beyond a spike trap with no platform for you to land on, meaning you have to dash over the spikes to get close enough to the monster (if you love using the shotgun like I do, anyway) and hope that it doesn't decide to back up as you fly over it so you have a safe pixel to land on. Another thing that doesn't improve the experience is that it's the same bosses every time with no variations.

I do have to throw in a special commendation to the simply fantastic music that fits the visuals and the personal style. It's a varied soundtrack, but the most noticeable and memorable are the french cafe in an old movie type accordion songs and the synth banger in the first area that very much reminds me of parts of the VVVVVV soundtrack.

It's sad and disappointing. This game is special and it could've been a classic if the developer hadn't given up on it. There was going to be a huge overhaul patch and the most exciting part of it for me was going to be improved room generation, which might have made all of the difference and kept me playing, but there was some kind of conflict with the publisher or something like that, and the lone developer gave up on the game. As it stands and for me, I can't keep spending time on this game since it hasn't allowed me that kind of run that gets you hooked to see it happen again, and because the unlocks take far too long to present themselves, so it is with regret that I'll have to be moving on to something else.

Ziggurat had its time and place as one of the first FPS roguelites, but it was also kind of barren, repetitive and ultimately boring, so I was hoping that the sequel would be bigger and better in every way. At first, it seemed like it might be since it boasts a new and somewhat unique "campaign" mode, but really, this is just Ziggurat II in every possible way, including the fact that it's still kind of boring.

I do love how fast and agile your character, no matter which one you choose is, and how you can zoom through levels quickly and easily. The "guns", aka wands, scepters and, in one category, actual guns, all feel good to use and throwing a plus-shaped formation of stars (from the top of a staff) at monsters does have a different and unique vibe to the shooting that gun games don't quite have. This game also has a soundtrack that punches far above its weight and sounds like it's for a much more ambitious game. Some seriously solid orchestral movie adventure music here! The campaign is also pretty cool in that you have to beat two or three regular runs and then a special run to both unlock something special (mostly if not all playable characters) and proceed to the next chapter, which is something I'm not sure I've ever seen before but I mostly like it. The game does also have infinite and classic roguelites modes with no metaprogressison.

The problem is that unlocking is quite slow, levels are very samey with too few rooms (as this is the kind of roguelite that only combines pre-made rooms into a level as opposed to generating new rooms) and, since unlocking is slow, you spend a lot of time using only the same weapons. So same rooms, same weapons, unlocks don't feel like they do much since they add so little (+4% wand damage per level, yay) and ultimately it all combines to just feeling like a chore after doing some five to seven hours.

I did enjoy those about seven hours, and I'd like to say I'll keep this installed and go back to it on very bored sunday afternoons just to see what the game is like with all of the metaprogression unlocked, but I really don't think I will, and any game that makes me feel like I really don't want to do this when I enter a room and am alerted to the fact that it has monsters in it. If I prefer a room to be empty so I can just move on, I'm just hooked on getting more metaprogression unlocks and not actually enjoying the game, so this is getting uninstalled. Ziggurat's time and place has come and gone.

I think I like this game more than it deserves, and because I've loved cyberpunk nearly my whole life. From reading Gibson to watching Johnny Mnemonic a hundred times as a teen. My most-wanted book is an original copy of the original cybperunk anthology, Mirrorshades, and even if it's only kind of tangentially cyberpunk, The Matrix was the first movie that the power of internet piracy allowed me to see before it opened in theatres. I especially love dirty and grimy cyberpunk, like what The Ascent offers, and as such I enjoyed myself even though the game overally isn't really as good as I'd want it to be.

The second big thing about this game is that it's an action RPG centered around dualstick shooter controls, which is something I've wanted for over a decade. The only other similar (kind of) game that I can think of is How to Survive, which had an amusing if janky first game and a terrible sequel that no one should play (as well as a new spiritual successor that looks pretty good). And the shooting in The Ascent is pretty good, even if there's far too much of it.

There's really nothing at all wrong with the core ideas here, and in fact I appreciate them quite a bit, but there is just so much about the execution that felt bothersome nearly the whole way through. This game has your typical RPG structure where you run back and forth in a semi-open little world and perform various tasks and errands, and the writing is at least solid enough that it feels like I'm partaking in some cyberpunk subterfuge as I navigate the various floors and economical classes of this world's acrology, but one of the biggest problems in the game is how slowly your character moves! They're so slow! I suspect that this was out of necessity, as in the game engien can't load assets fast enough if you're allowed to run or for that matter pan and spin the camera, but at the same time, you can move faster by constantly rolling and at least the PS5 version can keep up with that. I never noticed any egregious pop-in when I rolled around the world, but doing that is also exhausting. I don't want to hammer a button to move around quickly and it was a huge relief when I finally found myself economically secure enough that I could start using the taxi service to fast travel around the game (as it allows you to call a taxi from and to any exterior location).

With the taxi and my endless amounts of credits solving the traversal issue, I bounced back and forth. Upon first launch, I immediately loved the game. Then I quickly got sick of the slow running and the large scale of the small world (meaning the world isn't huge, but there are comparatively long and empty travel paths between quest objectives). I liked building my cyberpunk woman with dreads and unreasonable facial implants that don't seem to actually do anything beyond looking cyberpunk. I liked messing around with the various imaginative guns, even though I ended up spending most of my time with the Recoil and the Overwhelmer simply for DPS reasons. I appreciated that there is transmog for the fashion victims, even though I didn't really end up using it and I thought the best armor I found looked pretty cool as it was. And your character is so zoomed out, with no camera options available, that I didn't even really find myself noticing their outfit or gun skin anyway. I was invested in the story and wanted to find out the answer to the mystery. Even though I hated the slow running and felt like a lot of things didn't come together, I didn't hate the game overall and wanted to see it through. And, as I type, I'm only about an hour into the DLC and I still want to see what it has to offer. I especially liked how one part of the DLC changes the camera angle to be very oldschool top-down, like I'm playing Dreamweb or something. Oh, yeah, the game does that and changes camera angles when it has something cool to show you, which I liked. Any time you approach an overlook location, the game knows that you'll want to see the cool stuff and shows you it.

However, the game was also very tiresome due to the aforementioned slowness and how can't you solve things like running between the elevators with a taxi ride (since the taxi just takes you to the middle of that are anyway and you still have to hoof it), and above all, the absolutely incessant spawning of enemies really took a lot of fun away, since this game doesn't do hostile and neutral zones. Just any time an enemy sees you, you'll get attacked, and aggroing a gang member means that 25 more of them will spawn immediately. And they're everywhere. I like the shooting and I think the cover system, where you can crouch down behind cover and press a button to aim over it, was pretty cool, but because enemies spawn from everywhere and the game absolutely adores spawning enemies behind you, it felt simply boring that I couldn't get anywhere without being accosted like 5000 times by 5000 dudes who I've already defeated 5000 times, and the absolutely non-stop surprise spawns from behind, coupled with various mortars and other attacks meant to force you out of cover, ultimately meant that the cover system ended up being useless. There's one piece of cover in this arena, and there's both attackers from behind and grenades being lobbed at me, and the mortar enemies launch a new grenade the same frame as the previous one explodes, so there was no time to ever sit behind cover and be safe. I get that this is the idea, but then why even bother with the cover system if I can basically never use it?

There's also the lore and story, which seems to have had a lot of work put into it with a rather expansive codex and many ideas seemingly inspired by both Gibson (like referring to the city as "the sprawl" and such) and Shadowrun (various aliens and possible hinting at supernatural things), but still doesn't feel like it quite comes together. This is a big spoiler, but I felt like it was kind of a whatever plot point so I'm going to spoil it and say that it just felt weird that the fallen "Ascent Group" megacorp had a backup routine where the AGI created another AGI and a whole other corporation in case the original corp fell, but then...why are there diehard corporate loyals for this new made-up corporation? Did the AGI just materialize them too? Also, why is there japanese everywhere? I know "because cyberpunk", but nothing aside from neon signs is japanese in this game. No japanese culture, no asian characters from what I remember (everyone's white or an alien), just neon signs in japanese because that's what you do in cyberpunk. I also felt like the story of you constantly being some form of lackey felt unsatisfying. At first, you're a corporate slave working under the "stackboss" (basically the local mayor) and then you "graduate" to being a corporate lackey instead of just a slave. At the very end, you're granted freedom, but that's not really the plot I wanted to play? I want to be a rebel or some kind of criminal that takes down the megacorps, not an assassin for hire for one, and I feel like that's not the story this game sells with its advertising and art direction. Like why are slaves even allowed cyberware, a "netdeck" for hacking and guns? Those should probably be highly outlawed for slaves in this world for it to make sense. It also has to be mentioned that it's just plain odd that the entire script was written and even had the voices recorded for it before they decided to add a gender choice to the character selector. At first, the dialogue is neutral and I even noticed one line where the text said something like "Good to see you, my boy", but the audio engineer had cut out the "my boy" from the voice lines. But they just stop doing that partway through the game, and by the end, my female character kept being referred to as a man by literally everyone. That'd be fine if this was intentional gender politics, but it's clearly not and they obviously just tossed in female characters close to the end of development without going through all of the dialogue to clean it up.

Oh, and maybe this should've gone in another paragraph, but the weapon system really stops making sense after the first 5 or so hours. In the beginning, you can experiment and mess around with various weapons, like I did, but once you and the enemies level up (note: they don't scale, the game thankfully uses classic "high level enemies in high level areas" logic) and it becomes necessary to start using components to add to your firepower, the choices become more narrow with each upgrade you pick until you are left with just a few choices viable for endgame. Basically, I can't use this new Mk1 gun I found because it's so inferior to my Mk10 I've spent the whole game upgrading. It doesn't help that you have to either run around aimlessly and hope to run into bounties, or go to a specific area (Scrapland), to farm components and that they forgot that maybe you should be allowed to purchase basic components since you need so many of those in order to experiment with guns. The fact that superior components, the ones you use to max out an already highly upgraded weapon, are rare and permanently limited (as in you can only upgrade a few guns per lap of NG+) is fine and makes sense, but basic components really should've been super common to allow for more experimentation. It would also have meant that we'd have something to spend leftover credits on, since I ended up finishing the game with like 500k I couldn't spend on anything.

I liked this game and I'll be buying the sequel, if we get one, since the end of this game promises one by having a sequel hook after the credits. I also just now read an article that claims that this game sold well and that the company sold for something like €30 million, which should mean that they have more than enough time and budget to make a bigger, badder and better sequel. Wikipedia claims that the original investment for this game was only about €100k and there's no way that's true, because even though this game is remarkable in that it's extremely pretty and was made surprisingly quickly considering the core team credits are only 12 people (with a bunch of outsourcing of various things raising the total number of people who worked on it), that amount of money only covers one year of salary for one person in Sweden, including taxes and fees. What I mean is that this team can do very impressive work and even though this game was uneven and had some major flaws, I do hope that the claims of influx of more money is true and that they have a chance to develop a sequel that delivers on the promise of this game. There is something here, and cyberpunk fanatics will probably find much to love, but this game also just ain't quite it. If you don't love cyberpunk as much as I do, you should probably deduct at least a star from my score.

I really enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, it can get annoying, but it's also such an obvious labor of love with many charming little design ideas and quirks that I couldn't help but love my almost 100 hours with it.

The big thing is how you interact with the game and the world. Astroneer has a quirky and unique interface where you interact with the world with your character's backpack in a way that's going to sound very complicated in text, but is actually quite elegant and clever in practice. On a controller, you can move around and pan the camera as you'd expect with the sticks, but you can also press a button to not only bring up your backpack, but also summon a cursor for precise controls, which allows you to more exactly interact with mineral stacks you've mined or machines you've built. You can bring up the backpack to enter precise mode, grab something, click down the backpack and get a clearer view as you move the item you picked up. You also have a terrain deformation tool, which is reqally just a videogamey magic mining tool that lets you erase the world voxel by voxel and if said rock voxel happens to have malachite in it, you'll obtain some you can smelt into copper. The tool also has elegant and ismple mechanics for not only destroying the world, but building it so that you can shape the ground as you please.

Related to the controls is that everything has a little plug on the back, even natural resources you find in the wild, which clearly communicates that you can stick tihs red plug into red holes in your various machines and storage units. The controls and the visual communication just click together, even if they might take a moment to figure out, and the elegance and intuitiveness really doesn't translate well to text, I realize, but in practice it's often a joy to control and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

The game itself bills itself a survival game, but really, you don't have to care about eating and sleeping and you'll only die from lack of oxygen (and a few pesky plants that can attack you), so I consider it to be more of a My First Factory Game. Like Factorio for Dummies, such as myself, who have never played one of the more hardcore factory sims. You start by mining composite and resin, with which you build simple things that allow you to build more advanced things so you can mine more advanced ore and so on. The game's got a pretty steady and obvious progression curve that feels so good that I didn't mind completely rebuilding my base with my new gear a whole three times. At first, my base was chaos with just whatever I had just unlocked placed down, and then I rebuilt it with some flattened ground as I had both unlocked new machines and figured out how to sculpt the world a little better. Then I managed to unlock the large shredder, destroyed everything with that and erbuilt it with some endgame machines and platforms (which are used for all of your devices as the platforms have some mild automation to them, meaning things like how a smelter will automatically grab any unsmelted ore that's placed on the same platform as the smelter). I never do that, and it's a testament to how much I like the game that I not only rebuilt my home base three times, but I also built some fairly respectable bases on about half of the seven planets (while also not really feeling like adding another 100+ hours building full bases on all of them).

That's really about all there is to say about this game, honestly. It's basically No Man's Sky, except with a much more reasonable ambition level for a small team and that works much better out of the box with less crashing and other issues. Instead of the entire universe, Astroneer "only" offers a solar system with I think five planets and two moons you can visit, and that all have different ore and such so that you have to fly between various places to expand your home base and for example set up an iron mining operation on the glacial planet so that you can bring huge stacks of iron back to home base and build more advanced things with it (or smelt it into steel to build even more advanced stuff). It's a hardcore tinkering game where there's always something to do, tons of running back and forth to fill up on aluminium while your soil centrifuge creates resin that you can use to build even more things. And then you remember that you also had to jet to that moon real quick to further effectivize your mining operations there, which ends up with you accidently spending two hours there moving things around, driving your various mining vehicles and just joyriding on the hoverboard because that thing is tons of fun. It's basically a nightmare for ADHD players, but in a mostly good way, because I found myself being sidetracked constantly, and needing to bust out a notepad to remember what I needed to bring to where, but I was always entertained by the mechanics, the visuals and the atmosphere.

There are negatives, of course. Towards the end of the game, I was fantasizing and wishing for a button to "dump all backpack minerals into smelter" or some such, since even though the control scheme is unique and charming, it gets real old to manually move 50 stacks of malachite or whatever. I'm sure this is much better on a mouse, because the game offered little to no sensitivity options for people who had gotten used the controls but wanetd fasted movement. I think, maybe, that one of the mouse sensitivity controls (since even the PS5 version of this game offers mouse and keyboard options) slightly sped up the cursor even with a controller, but that's only slightly and the cursor ends up feeling painfully slow once you're 50 hours in. I also thought that the skill tree and the 3D printer menus really needed a overhaul, as they're very horizontal and it's quite difficult to get an overview of what's available. IF you want to use the small printer to make a medium storage silo, but you've previously used it to create a drill for your rover, the best move is to put the required materials in your backpack, interact with the printer and then just hold right on the d-pad until you notice the "required resources" box light up (because you have the materials in your pack). I would've preferred a regular, vertical list or a box full of icons or something, because it gets real messy when you have everything unlocked and the creation of things isn't anywhere near as elegant as the interaction with them is.

The biggest negative, however, is that you can't truly automate your assembly line. You can move materials around automatically, but in a way that's kind of cumbersome, and I decided that no way was I going to try to build an automated line for the chemical, uh, thing that converts for example graphite and hydrogen (or whatever gas it was) into graphene. That means you have to automatically feed multiple ores AND gasses and setting that up is possible, but also a major pain. The huge issue, however, is that you can't infinitely mine ore and I think it's a big mistake that the ore extractor doesn't simply cheat. By that, I mean that you have to actually place the extractor on a real deposit, which runs out, so you have to move it when it's done, and I think the extractor should've just magically created ore out of thin air, as in you can place one in your base, tell it to create malachite and now you have the possibility for true automation of the whole line. Instead, you have to move the enormous and cumbersome extractor around with your buggy, fill up huge resource containers and then automate from the container on. There never is an unlock that lets you mass mine huge amounts at the same time, and there never is one that lets you automatically collect ore either, which feels like a bummer ending to a very engaging and entertaining game. I wanted to end as a space mining god, but instead the game just kind of fizzles out as you realize that automation is either impossible or a huge pain to set up and even though I enjoyed the game enough to completely rebuild three times, I wasn't into the idea of doing it a fourth time.

Speaking of endings, there is a story that emerges as you play, and I have to spoil it to tell you how bad and disappointing it is. So stop reading if you don't want spoilers! You see, the plot, as it is revealed in an endgame quest that was patched into the game in one of its many updates, is... "It was all a dream." Yes, the universally most-hated ending in any story is the ending here. Technically, they tell you that you've been playing a simulation, but really, that's just the scifi nerd verison of "it was all a dream" and it sucks. So everything I did was for nothing? It was all just make-believe as my consciousness lives in a simulated solar system? Why would you write that? Thankfully, the plot is a very minimal part of this game and it's really a wonderful and entertaining busywork game.

In short, I really recommend this game to anyone who thinks it looks interesting and I might even come back to this game in a year and see what major updates its had, as it's still getting content and new features even after all this time. I realized the other day that the game has been out, including early access, for over seven years, so it's nice to see that it's still being updated. I had quests added to the game as I played in march of 2024. If you're even reading this review, you should probably just go buy it! It's so cheap on sale and I think you'll have so much fun. I did!

Zapling Bygone does some cool things, like the otherworldly atmosphere and lore and how it's always cool to play a tentacle monster that can walk on walls or punch as it walks (since it has many tentacles!), but this is not a gaming experience for me. Confusing level layouts, unfun upgrades and, worst of all, blind navigation where you only unlock the map after beating an area and the game does nothing to help you figure out what you've already explored or not. That's a nightmare for my ADHD brain so I'm out after just an hour or two. I do believe that this developer has a great game in them, though, so I don't feel great about hating this game, but I do. Next game!

Delightful game! In fact, it's so full of little surprises that I'm not even going to say very much in this review. This game is a constant stream of experiences, big and small, that will make you smile and comment on how that was neat or clever. Or sometimes neat and clever. If you're even looking at reviews for this game, you're probably the right demographic to love it and should probably just get it.

I will detail one thing, though, because there is a rather massive flaw holding this game back from a perfect score, and that's the shoehorned roguelite system. Astalon is a regular metroidvania with all the elements you'd expect, except for save rooms and healing. Both are nearly non-existant and the idea is for you to die, buy metaprogression upgrades with your accrued currency and then restart, except it's the exact same castle down to the fact that minibosses retain the damage you've done to them before you died, so the roguelite aspect is entirely pointless and just leads to wasting even more time running back to where you were than other games in the genre do. This game is still a 15-hour experience to just clear, and a 25-hour experience to do everything including the bonus modes, so it's not too bad overall, but stay away if you value your time or can't handle repeating areas to progress.

Other than the roguelite flaw and the fact that boss rush kind of sucks, there really isn't much to complain about here. Charming, creative, clever and neat!

This game is super cool...until it isn't. I've never asked myself what Tony Hawk would guns would be like, but these developers did, and I'm kind of glad that they did, even if I didn't love the whole journey. There is some serious fun to be had here!

It plays exactly like Tony Hawk with guns. You either know exactly what that means and want to try it, or you think the whole thing sounds dumb. I guess it kind of is, but the first 80% of the game is hilarious, compelling, challenging and fun. And it certainly doesn't hurt that the game looks like a Moebius drawing in motion. All it needs is more of a banger soundtrack - maybe something like what Hotline Miami did - for it to truly be Tony...Guns? Murder Hawk? I don't know puns.

The problem for me, and what made me want to stop playing, is that I loved the little circular arenas where the challenge is to not get shot while racking up a huge combo of both kills and tricks, but that's only about half the levels, and the other half is large, involved levels where you have to find (comparatively) complicated paths just to keep up with the killing, and that brought me back to too many hours of trying to platform that exact thing in THPS games, and how unwieldy and annoying it can get to try to control an always rolling character with exact precision. So, yeah, I loved and completed all the challenges in the tighter levels and felt very bored by the large levels.

Since this game came with PS+ and I paid very little for it, there really is nothing to complain about here for me. I got me some 3-5 hours of THPS nostalgia throwback with guns and amazing art and that's awesome.

Actually pretty good for what it is, which is a throwback to circa 2008 with ridiculous armors, stories and anachronistic weapons, but I don't think I want to play more than the couple of hours I've already played. Looks good, plays well, is goofy and pretty much nails what it's trying to do, but is only for people nostalgic for games most people forgot, like Dante's Inferno. If that game was your ultimate jam back then, this will probably satisfy on several levels. I'm just personally good with a few hours of linear levels, basic unlocks and extremely mach cutscenes where overly muscular men say manly things.

Cute enough little minivania. You run, jump and shoot a little, but not that much, and the twist compared to other games is that you always respawn in the middle, and the world is built with this in mind, so that it's almost never a problem to run back to where you died. Progress is constantly saved, even after you complete the game and reload your save, so that 100% can be achieved, which is possible in an hour or two. I played it on breaks (probably unusually long breaks for most people) at work and finished it in a two work days. Pleasant enough, even if it doesn't really do any one thing exceptionally, and even if the final few rooms were a pretty frustrating, but also satisfying, experience. Small and perhaps forgettable but enjoyable while it lasts.

I'm always excited for a new Kingdom game, but at this point, I think I'm more in love with the idea of Kingdom than any of the execution. I can't belive this series has been going for almost a decade and I also can't believe that the original 2-man crew has ballooned into about 15 people and Kingdom: Eighties is all we got out of that company expansion. This is all you have to show for a decade of only working on one series?

That said, I do want to start by saying that I do love the idea of Kingdom. It's so pretty and serene, and I love the combination of relaxing and challenging gameplay that is very simplistic at its core but still involves a lot of quick thinking and planning. All you do is ride left or right while choosing what your workers should do next, and that simplicity can get dull in the long run, but is always refreshing whenever a new game comes out. It's just so cozy and nice to load into a new Kingdom game, dropping some coins to recruit your first few followers, give them some tasks and then head into the great unknown (meaning randomly picking left or right) to explore, find the correct route and hopefully to find some starting budget in the form of a treasure chest, and then heading back to begin your slow expansion of the area by juggling tasks between the left and right sides. From there, expanding your kingdom's borders, recruiting as many workers as you can and hopefully finding cool new vehicles or other minor level mechanics like how you can find and adopt an abandoned dog in Eighties. I love the first few levels of a Kingdom game!

However, at this point, we as players and customers really have to start putting our foot down and asking what it even is this developmeant team does. I believe there was an original-ORIGINAL version before what is now being sold as Kingdom Classic, and including Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties, that puts us Kingdom 5 with the standalone release of Eighties. If we count Shogun, Dead Lands and Norse Lands as separate sequels, that puts us at Kingdom 8, and I don't see why we shouldn't count the expansions as sequels since new area, new graphics and a few minor new mechanics is what a "real" Kingdom sequel is. The only real differences between Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties is the things I listed (and the fact that Two Crowns is the only one to feature co-op).

So, we're at Kingdom 8 and they've FINALLY managed to nail worker behavior. Even though I've played these games since I got the very first original version in some bundle a decade ago, it's been a rough ride, because I find Classic and New Lands to be borderlines unplayable today, due to how dumb your workers are in those games. It took them three games to finally figure out that maybe archers should be heading back to safety at an earlier time in the day so they don't get killed completely out of your control. I don't know how they've coded it, but that can't have been deeper code than "if time is X, start heading home" and all they needed to do was change the value of X. That took at least three games for them to figure out. We're now at Kingdom 8 and finally, FINALLY, builders can act intelligently and won't run out to their guaranteed death if they have tasks queued up at night. How long until they figure out that it's kind of dumb for archers to become permanent members of a knight's squad, which means they won't hunt and make you more money if you recruit nights? Will it take until Kingdom 26 for these devs to figure out that it might be nice to be able to cancel tasks?

The incredibly slow evolution of this series aside, Eighties is actually a step backwards as well. No co-op this time, even though I don't think anyone understands why they didn't just build this on the Two Crowns codebase so they could keep the work they'd already done. The hermits are also all gone from this one. The little guys you could recruit in previous games that would tag along to the next island if you recruited them, and they had unique buildings like the bakery and such. All of that stuff is gone, and Eighties only has archers, builders, barriers and a couple of new features. It's like scaling all the way back down to Classic, while also adding overpowered laser towers and changing the siege ballista to a dumpster the player can control. I do like this latter change and how it raises player agency and involvement, because with the new dumpster, you can be much more dynamically strategic with when and how you destroy monster portals. In previous games, you had to recruit knights and then time the attack so that they could make it back, which was a different kind of strategy, but I think I very much prefer being able to choose when to attack and not being held back by needing to slowly expand in order to create a short enough route for your knights. This, however, also makes the game quite a lot easier and the level is always over once you achieve access to the dumpster. From then, it's not a matter of if you're going to win, but when, at least on every difficulty except the highest one. Oh, and Eighties completely gets rid of the fast-travel portals from previous games, for reasons unknown to everyone except the slowest dev team of all time, which makes the latter parts of stages become a real drag as you slowly (SO slowly) trek from side to side.

We've also got to talk about how this dev team is so extremely slow that they made an 80s homage and released it in 2023. Come on, synthwave and "the 80s that never was" hype was in 2013. I went to a couple of synthwave shows in 2019, Carpenter Brut and Perturbator, and that was years after I had stopped actively listening and had gotten bored of retro 80s, and I only went as a throwback to the years prior where I had still cared. These devs are so late with this game and their references are so tired. The really weird thing is that I didn't really spot any homages to The Goonies or Explorers, or any other kids on bikes movie? The references are the usual and very overused Robocop, Back to the Future, Transformers and, well, there is a hidden and annoyingly hard to find bike that's an ET reference so I guess that counts. This isn't really 80s: The Game, it's actually Stranger Things: The Game, and it seems like the team don't actually know the references Stranger Things is making. I guess maybe this dev team is all around or under 30 and never actually lived the 80s.

All in all, I do still love the coziness, simplicity and chill atmosphere combined with light strategy in these games, and I had a good enough time with Eighties over a weekend of beating every difficulty and unlocking every trophy, but they have got to step it up and it's remarkable that 15 people took this long to make a "sequel" that actually mostly just regresses from previous entries by leaving out too many established features and introducing too few new ones. I enjoyed myself, it was a good 15 hours or so of gameplay, even if levels always dragged too much at the end due to the lack of fast travel, and I will buy the next Kingdom game as soon as I can because I always like the first half of it and only get frustrated by the odd design and coding choices in the latter half, but really, I still have to complain about how this series has only taken baby steps forward in ten years and that it seems like we will never get the actually fully realized version of this game. It'll just always feel like a beta of a fantastic idea in the hands of just downright impressively incompetent developers that don't seem to be doing this full time. If this is just a side project, then that's fine and I respect it, but Eighties makes it seem like the team is an actual company with a name and staff that do other things than game dev now, and if that's the case, they have got to step it up and release the true version of Kingdom already. They could make Kingdom 10 the version where all workers finally behave intelligently in all situations, where traversing the latter half of levels doesn't take too long even with fast travel, where you can cancel tasks and where the game can be something grander and deeper that I can't put my finger on since I'm not a game designer. The basic design deserves so much better than the extremely slow and often sloppy development this series has seen.