Healthy Criticism (2026)

26/06/2021

This is the first game I have played where losing an arm is considered a flesh wound

+Visuals
+Audio
+Optimisation
+Gameplay

-Community toxicity
-Failure to focus objective
-Occasionally buggy
-No slider for NPC voice
-Bots are dumber than Patrick Star's pet rock, Rocky.
-Cannot choose preferred game modes
-Small map variety

I have fun playing this game in small doses but I would not be able to play it for long extended periods of time as it does tend to get repetitive. The map variety is also quite small.

Play as a medieval soldier, squaring up against the best of the best in various modes. Play in a free for all, team deathmatch, or defend/ attack the objective

I will start with the criticisms. The bots are plain stupid. They are some of the worst bots I have seen in this game. For the most part they spend their time simply standing around and not doing anything. This would not be as much of a problem if the empty spots in your team were not filled by bots. Usually the game does a good job at balancing out the players so that one team does not have more people than the other but that is not always the case.

You cannot choose your preferred game modes that you want to play. You are forced to either matchmake all of the modes, or choose your own server. More often than not, the game will add you in a server whose game is almost finished. Quite a few times I have joined the game only to be met with the end game screen.

Sometimes the game can be buggy. For example, as the defending team, our duke decided to disappear from the map, leaving the attackers chasing an objective that did not exist. Other bugs such as small connection issues and lag are present, as well as clipping through objects, pathfinding and various other smaller things.

The options menu does not separate post FX options and does not allow you to turn them off completely. They are bundled under one setting with "Low" being the lowest instead of "Off" There are also a plethora of audio sliders, except for the one that lowers the volume of the actual characters in game. It can get quite annoying when everyone is spamming the C command to let out a charging scream whilst on their way to get a flesh wound.

Lastly, the community right now can be quite toxic, as with most of the games I presume. It is quite impossible to use the chat and coordinate a game plan with your team as most of the responses you will get are condescending and "better than you". As far as teamwork is concerned, forget about it.

Overall however, the game can be fun. I enjoy getting my ass handed to me when I charge into battle with 5 people waiting to teach this old man a lesson. How many times do they have to teach me a lesson? Apparently not enough times.

I would categorise the game as easy to pick up, hard to master, unless you know the one thing that would make you overcome your enemies. The trick is to basically sidestep on your enemy's side and continue to circle around them as you bash their soul into existence.

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11/04/2021

Send this to a friend and don't say anything

11/04/2021

Evil Genius 2, World Domination, puts you in the shoes of one of the 4 evil geniuses in their grand scheme of global domination. Are you able to be in 2 places at once? No? You are in for a rude awakening in this case.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Music and voice acting
+Graphically appealing, Ultrawide support
+Variety of rooms

-Only 3 lairs
-Campaign is dreadfully slow
-Notifications and alerts are insignificant
-Important events have no alert
-AI is dumb
-Constant need of electricity and safe space
-Getting more gold is easy and tedious
-UI is an afterthought
-Research is blocked by campaign progress

Starting off with the good, this is very much a dungeon builder. It sticks to the formula of the gameplay genre. You are tasked with building a secret lair in order to mask your true intentions from the world. The voice acting and the music/ audio design are very well put together. So is the graphical appearance of the game with respectable graphical fidelity, performance, and Ultrawide support. Although I was not able to get G-sync to work with my game for some reason.

The amount of content here is also very respectable with a good variety of rooms that are necessary in order to maintain a very functional base of operations.

Sadly, this is about where my positive impressions of the game cease, and my critical hat is put on. After 3 or so hours of game, I actively noticed the routine is taking place and it was not a good one.

Firstly, the amount of lairs present in the game is laughable, with only 3 different islands. Granted, the world is your oyster right? You can turn those lairs into whatever layout you want, you might think. That is similar to RTS games having only 3 maps because your base layout will always be different. There is no viable justification in this decision to only pump 3 maps.

Going through the campaign is fun, for the first 3 hours or so. I remember distinctly, it was hour 5 where I saved and exited the game for the night that I thought to myself: This is shaping up to be a dreadful chore. The campaign is constantly telling you to complete objectives that are similar in manner for the most part. Worst of all is that the research tree is blocked by the progress of said campaign. Meaning, you cannot unlock the necessary technologies in order to unlock further real estate and expand your lair.

This is complimented negatively by the lack of notifications of important events throughout the world map. Events such as heavy attacks that are imminent and all you have to do is endlessly look at the world map in order to send your minions to said missions and prevent the attack. Attacks that usually are combined with pesky investigators roaming around, turning hostile at the sight of you being under attack. It does not matter which region those investigators are from, they always team up with the assault squads in order to take your lair down.

Not that the notifications are meaningful in any manner to begin with. Lack of context, an inexplicable timing issue where they are not in sync with what is actually happening, and a special way of not actually being presented in a manner that grabs your attention according to the severity of said alerts is frustrating. Being alerted of investigators arriving 2 minutes early is not helpful.

I would love to stand a chance against those attacks to. The AI is dumbfoundingly idiotic at times. I have guards sitting around on a table, waiting for the enemy to be detected by the cameras pointing at them. The purpose of sitting at that table is to confront any enemies that are spotted by the cameras. Adding insult to injury, there are a plethora of handguns available in the racks. Guns that will never be used by some of the guards that, again, for no good reason, decide that taking on a heavy machine gun enemy bear handed is a brilliant idea. They are not even bring a knife to a gun fight!

Moving further than the battle, your structures are in constant need of repairs. Ensuring that you have a large amount of technicians to constantly repair your equipment is a must in this game. No matter what the health of your prisons are however, prisoners will always escape after a certain amount of time. You will also constantly need to expand your base with electricity rooms, and occasionally gold. Electricity is a rare commodity in this game apparently.

The UI is also constructed in a very confusing manner. There is a pop up menu that contains options that could have easily fit in the screen without the need of that extra click. One of the options on that menu is a pause button. A button that is already present next to the fast forward button. Why? But I ask again, why?

Overall, this game is a nice game to play for no more than 4 to 5 hours.

09/04/2021

Age of wonders Planetfall is a grand campaign, turn based game. Battle against a number of different factions, or with them, in order to conquer the world or get obliterated by the more than adequate AI in higher difficulties.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Gameplay
+Amount of content
+Audio design
+Longevity
+Replayability

-Tech tree feels like an afterthought

Just imagine XCOM meets Total War. This is a grand campaign, hexagon based game. When battle is eminent, you can manually play the mission and be presented with an XCOM style turn based battle system. This is quite the gameplay combination. I am a fan of both game series and it is nice to essentially get both games in one package.

The amount of content is extraordinary. There are dozens of different commanders to choose from, a good number of different factions and an endless supply of maps due to randomisation. There are some campaign missions that will assist you with learning the ropes with multiple factions.

The audio design is well put together with great background music that does not get tedious, respectable voice acting and nice sound effects. Blasters feel meaty, acid weapons hiss through your speakers and laser attacks create vibrations through your subwoofer you can actually feel.

This is one of those games that will take you quite a few hours to get through the entire thing. Thanks to its replayability, you might not even have to worry about the DLC. I have no opinion on the DLC since I do not own them.

My only complaint with the game that is worth mentioning is that the tech tree feels a little like an afterthought. For the most part it is technologies that I never even bothered using. The main thing I was looking for was good battle abilities (only a handful) and unlocking new units.

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27/03/2021

This game has a lot of attributes and I am hoping to expand on all of them as accurately as possible. Thank you to the publishers freedom games for providing me with the key.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Gameplay
+Progression
+Unlockables
+Replayability
+Sound design
+Aesthetics
+Difficulty scale

-Reused rooms
-Lack of visual options

Dreamscape has you travelling deeper into stages of sleep, in order to discover yourself and finally find peace. Every time your character goes to sleep, you fight through randomly generated rooms, equip better gear, defeat bosses, and ultimately repeat after inevitably dying. At the end of each level you must face a boss in order to proceed. You are given the choice to skip that boss fight if you have already beaten it in order to reach your previous state quicker.

The progression is made satisfying by often picking up new items to improve your damage, resistance and mobility. The map layout and enemies are also randomly generated each time so you never play the same map.

There are a lot of items for you to unlock and find throughout your adventure. You will get the chance to also unlock more items to find in the world, as well as unique rooms and how frequently they will appear in your adventure. When you are awake, you must travel between various places in the world and strengthen your character in all sorts of ways. You will also meet unique characters that will give you improved boosts in battle, the more you get to know them. Of course all of this happens by simply playing the game.

The audio design is simply tremendous. The music is absolutely adorable and a pleasantry to listen to. The sound effects are mellow and at the same time pack the necessary heat to emphasise what is going on.

Following that note, the aesthetics are a treat to look at as well. Lacking some complex details such as faces, the way those details are designed to be lacking adds to the overall quality of the fidelity.

The difficulty scaling is adequate to say the least. The game definitely requires a few playthroughs in order to unlock more items and strengthen your character further. Without such upgrades, it will be extremely challenging to be effective in progressing through the levels, and in turn the story.

My main complaints with the game thus far is that there are no visual options besides one, and that some rooms are carbon copies that are reused throughout the world. This would not had been such a big deal, but the levels themselves are not consistent of more than 10 or so rooms. The developers should focus on designing more rooms for further variety. This is a game that needs to be replayed a lot of times to reach the end. This results in the user having to see the same rooms over and over again. I would prefer to see those rooms in separate playthroughs, rather than the same stage.

Overall, this early access title is very well put together. There is already plenty of content to be had. With some work on adding more variety to the world, I am eager to see what else the developers have in store for us. So far, it is absolutely worth your attention.

27/03/2021

I was going to be a lot more critical about this project at first, but as I was playing more of it I realised that there is still a lot of work to be done, and this is not the final product. Once this game comes out of early access however, it is a no holds barred match.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

-Well optimised
-Nice aesthetics
-Large in scale
-Challenging (this could go either way)
-Helpful resource tracking for upgrades
-Sometimes funny
-Great options selection, as well as accessibility tweaks

-Quests can be a chore
-Combat is lacklustre
-Slow progression
-No music while in the world

Normally, firing up a game like this in early access results in my relatively respectable computer chugging away to maintain 40fps on a game that hardly looks better than a title that came out 4 or more years ago. On the contrary, it is important to mention that this game ran at a constant 120fps, my monitor's refresh rate, and never dipped below that from my experience.

In Dysmantle, you task yourself with escaping a world that is riddled with zombies and find yourself back in the safety of, well, no zombies trying to kill you. Developer, and publisher, 10tons have done a great job creating a vast world with ample of exploration to be had.

You will kill zombies, break down objects around the world to gather resources, upgrade your gear, and level up to unlock blueprints to make you stronger, more viable, and unlock new abilities such as fishing and new weapons.

The combat is kind of unrefined and lame at the moment. All you do is try to avoid the very obvious attacks of various enemies by constantly kiting them, either by walking away or by strafing around them. The automatic locking feature does not always work, and manually trying to lock on an enemy does not work either, at least as of now.

There are various campfires around the map, and you will respawn at the latest one you sat at when you die, If you die before recovering your loot from the previous death, you will lose that loot. Similar to how a soulslike game would behave.

To my surprise, ultrawide resolution seems to be working perfectly here. No distortion or stretching, no weird artefacts or flickers. I do wish however that the levelling up was not as slow as it is.

This is mostly all there is to the game so far. What we have gotten up until this point is definitely worth taking a look at, especially at the asking price plus the occasional sale. The developers have not given the impression of wanting to abandon the project so once this game fully releases from early access, I will be taking a closer look at the final product.

27/03/2021

Endzone world apart sets itself apart from other city builders by introducing a radiation hazard that is quite tricky to combat and can eventually overrun your community if you are not adequately prepared for it.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Unique radiation mechanics
+Cool graphics
+Customizable skirmish mode
+Scenario mode
+Quality of life improvements

-Bad tutorial
-Unintuitive audio design
-Large maps are relatively small

Endzone world apart is yet another city builder, but certainly a unique one. Amongst the necessity to survive against the elements, radiation is among one of them.

Starting off with the radiation. It is a harmful element that will slowly increase in severity as time goes by. In that time you must prepare yourself to combat it. Actions you can take include creating protective gear for your villagers, generate medications such as herbs and iodine tablets, and ensure you have a steady supply of the requirements for those items. Additionally, you must have cleaning crews that keep key buildings and supplies radiation free.

The aesthetics of the game are pleasant to look at. I specifically admired the change in texture appearance one the rain had gone over a patch of land. Weather effects are nice, house models are distinguishable, and the environment is fairly well put together.

In free play mode, you can select between a certain pre configured set of difficulty levels that will each tailor to the target demographic. You can however customize each difficulty level by altering mostly anything about the game, even the frequency of enemy attacks at your base.

The scenario mode has a few chapters you can go through that follow a story. You must progress through the objectives to get to the end of the story.

You will find nice touches all around the game design that improve the quality of life. Those details could be hard to find. For instance, if you select a production building, all identical buildings will also be highlighted, displaying what they are producing. The recycler for instance. It is one of the most important buildings you will erect. Once you select one of them, any and all other recyclers will display which materials they are producing so you can easily micro manage your production line.

One huge complaint I have about the game is the tutorial. During the tutorial, you must follow each objective and complete it before the next objective unlocks the corresponding building related to it. Until then, all buildings are locked. Even the decorative buildings. This causes the research centre to be locked. That in turn locks the mines, which are imperative to mining iodine, which is used for iodine tablets to combat radiation poisoning. I should not have to consult a wiki during a game's tutorial. It feels like the tutorial was slapped together as an afterthought during development process nobody went back to take a look at the monster they created.

Lastly, the audio design is nothing to write home about, and the largest map size could have used a few more pixels in size. I feel that the largest map design feels small. Usually, city builder map sizes can be outrageous. Banished map sizes were silly big. Even if they do not get fully utilised, they were available.

Overall, Endzone is good fun. It has a lot of hours of pleasure to provide. The radiation mechanics set it apart from the competition and will surely feel like a breath of fresh air from your typical city builder. We all know that early access is riddled with city builders at the moment but not often do they come out of early access in a respectable manner. This is definitely a good game.

27/03/2021

Nova drift is a top down space shooter. And it is a good one.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Quality, and quantity
+Music
+Upgrade tree
+Hundreds of possibilities

-Can get repetitive on multiple plays
-Some upgrades do not make sense

Nova drift does things very nicely, and it is still on early access. Here is the quick run down as there is not much to say about the game, but at the same time a lot to do in it.

In nova drift, you take control of a spaceship and your goal is to survive by avoiding enemies, anomalies, asteroids, obstacles, and the sort. Every time you level up you are prompted with a pool of abilities to choose from. Each ability you choose can be further upgraded to a total level 3, level 2 having 2 options to choose from. Choosing one option locks the other one out forever.

In addition to upgrades, you can also choose from a variety of weapons, bodies, and shields. You can also choose to forego a shield for the added benefit of a stronger hull.

There are a lot of abilities and equipment to unlock as you rank up by simply playing the game and getting as far as possible on each playthrough. Try out a variety of combinations to see what works best for you. Some upgrades feel like an afterthought. As you upgrade your abilities more, you are introduced with drawbacks. Some drawbacks are easy to live with, and can be counteracted with picking up abilities to make up for them. Some drawbacks however are so severe that the certain upgrade would simply make no sense to pick up. The only way to find out what works best for you is to pick something up at least once.

If none of the upgrades available in the limited amount pool of upgrades does it for you, you can re-roll for a new pool. You pick up re-rolls by defeating high ticket items.

27/03/2021

I am incredibly amazed with this game. The end product is very well put together and it is bound to attract all sorts of gamers with various preferences in their game types.

+Music
+Progression system
+Unique concept
+Art style
+Replayability
+Challenge

-Can be unforgiving

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

Broadly speaking, this is a real time, tile based, tactical adventure that borrows inspiration from FTL (Faster Than Light) and combines the unique gameplay with a deck system. The cards serve as power ups that you use in order to obliterate your enemies while trying to survive by avoiding their attacks. You must read and avoid their attack patterns, all while you try to lure them in your attacks and surface victorious in the end.

The card variety is very satisfying. As you progress through the levels you can acquire mew cards with more advanced skills, that can also combine their effects with other cards for maximum carnage. You can also acquire perks that give you flat boosts that last throughout the campaign, such as a revive, increased mana, a health boost and so forth.

The art style, although not extreme by any stretch, is pleasing to the eyes. Bundled with, albeit not necessary but still present, ultrawide support and high refresh rates, it is easy to get immersed in the game.

The audio design is very well designed as well, with the music department standing out with pride. The tracks in the game are did not feel like a repetitive filler, but rather a nicely articulated score that will satisfy the ears.

The game is quite challenging. It is easy to pick up, moderately easy to learn, but quite difficult to master. Having to plan out your attacks while at the same time avoiding the enemy attacks and occasionally trying not to kill friendly units that will provide perks in the end of the round if they survive, bundled with the occasional object that is either present or created by enemies, man that is a lot of brain power required. Or at least it might sound like at first. If all this sounds scary, trust that it is not.

One step from Eden is quite a unique game. The developers must have thrown a bunch of video game elements and types into a hat and drawn a few of them and made a game out of it. The end product? Exemplary.

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27/03/2021

Forza horizon 4 is, in my opinion, the best open world arcade racing game to come out as of the past few years. The vistas create an incredible scenery, the music is not offensive to the ears, the amount of races and content can keep you busy for quite a long time, and the amount of different vehicles you can purchase is more than healthy, as well as the upgrades for them.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Visuals
+Handling
+Audio design
+Optimisation
+Car selection
+Amount of content
+Upgrades for cars
+Seasons

-Menu can be clunky
-Some cars are DLC only
-Connection issues
-Some rubber banding

Starting off with the visuals, all I need to say is that the game still looks breath taking. The hills, the scenery, the nature, the lakes... everything is blending in with each other in a manner that makes you wonder, how is this game so good looking and also optimised so perfectly?

The game's handling scheme is, I am happy to report, not another ridge racer. Additionally, unlike Need for Speed Heat's handling where the vehicle will come to an almost complete stop as soon as it turns sideways to take a turn, no matter how fast it is going, in FH4 you actually need to utilise your breaking skills.

There is a healthy variety of radio stations to choose from. When Groove music was still a thing with Windows 10, you were able to select your own music to play during your sessions. Now you can choose between a good amount of stations, and even turn them off of course. At this point I would usually complain about how annoying the music selection is. To my surprise, the music is actually not offensive to the ears. For the most part of course. Some radio stations have too little of a song selection so it does tend to get repetitive unless you constantly switch the radio stations and rotate.

The optimisations for this game is incredible, with an overwhelming, in a good way, amount of settings for the visuals, the audio and the gameplay as well as the difficulty. No complaints there. Ultrawide support is immaculate.

The amount of cars crammed in this game is not the highest in a videogame, but it is a very generous amount for sure. A plethora of vehicles to choose from, as well as upgrade and change visually. Some of the higher ticket items have little to no visual upgrades you can apply to them, but most of the lower cheaper vehicles with less licensing fees tend to have some visual upgrades, a body kit, or a combination of both. All vehicles can accept performance upgrades, engine swaps, drivetrain conversions etc.

There is also a plethora of content in the form of events, challenges, races, drift zones, barn finds, speed traps, jumps, you name it. So much so, that the menu can get a bit overwhelming, especially at first. There are so many things to do that are time sensitive and seasonal that you simply get lost in the menu.

Up next are the seasons. Every week, you enter a new season. The most important thing to know is that in winter, all the lakes are frozen. This is important because it opens up the path to travel to otherwise unreachable places on the map, such as islands. During the spring time, there will be a lot of rain that will affect your vehicle's handling. Other than that, the changes are visual.

Onto some of the criticisms I have about the game. The clunky menu was brought up earlier so I will not linger on that. What I do want to mention however is that some cars are locked behind a DLC paywall. You are also offered the ability to purchase all vehicles in the game without having to pay with the in game currency, but I highly advise against that. With the high cash flow in the form of wheel spins, cars gifted constantly, and the generally low cost of vehicles, you will never need to worry about money after a few hours in the game.

The past few days, I have been constantly trying to join a live session, but to no avail. I am not sure if that is because of a low player count on the PC platform, or due to Microsoft's services always being horrific. The game does support cross play between the two PC versions and the Xbox platforms as well.

Rubber banding unfortunately is a thing on this game. It is not as painfully bad as NFS Heat, but it does exist and I condemn that fact. No freebies on this one.

Lastly, before I close, I have seen a lot of people criticise the game and leave negative reviews on Steam due to lack of cross save. My general wondering to that claim is, if a person already owns the game on the windows store, why purchase it again on steam? For full price? It makes no sense in my opinion. I would love to hear a rationale on this.

Forza Horizon 4 is currently my favourite racing game to play. The very few shortcomings are heavily overshadowed by the strengths it brings to the table.

13/02/2021

Foundation is a city builder that combines elements from banished, and city skylines, two of my favourite, and arguably, the best city builders in the market.

Curator Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721/

+Good ideas borrowed from cities skylines
+Relaxing music
+Easy to get into
+Areas of opportunity can make for a lot of content

-Tutorial is not easily laid out
-Early Access related bugs
-Still clearly a lot of development to be done

Foundation starts you off on a plot of land, similar to Cities Skylines does. After earning enough coin, the main currency of the game, you can expand by purchasing more land. It is crucial that more land is purchased for expansion in order to maximise profits and earn access to mineral deposits such as iron and gold.

Residential areas for your citizens are also similar to CS where you determine a plot of land can be used for building houses using a brush. The citizens build houses as needed and also automatically upgrade the buildings depending on their class level.

You earn gold by selling food and goods to your citizens but also by trading your resources with other factions. Trades like those happen automatically and are incredibly easy to set up. A little more expansion on the trades would be a good idea in order to make it a tiny bit more challenging and add some more logistics to it.

There are missions you can take such as delivering a certain amount of goods to either the people, the king, or the clergy in order to receive more favour points from each faction. The more points you have, the more unique buildings you can unlock. That is however one of the two criteria that determine whether or not a building can be unlocked.

The other criteria is the status of your citizens. Every beginning of the month, you are able to promote your citizen class to a higher grade. Each grade gets progressively more expensive to achieve, and costs more gold coin than the previous one. Buildings unlock by having more citizens with higher status. As your citizens' status increases, so will their needs too. It is important to keep your citizen's needs fulfilled in order to avoid them leaving your establishment. It is quite easy to keep their needs fulfilled however since there are really not that many needs to begin with. Think of Anno when you picture this mechanic if you have ever played that game.

From there and on, the game is pretty self explanatory on how it works at its core. You gather resources, you build buildings to gather different resources and so forth. It is nice to see all these mechanics from the three giants squished into one game. I am not sure if the final product will represent this idea in a better way, but although this early access version of the game is quite rough around the edges, there is premise to be delivered here.

Healthy Criticism

26/06/2021

11/04/2021

11/04/2021

09/04/2021

27/03/2021

27/03/2021

27/03/2021

27/03/2021

27/03/2021

27/03/2021

13/02/2021

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