BlightedPlatypus 最近的评测

A good solid game in general, with some great high and deep lows, which left me conflicted after beating the game.

I approached this game as kind of usamerican-centric take on the 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R.' at first. The game quickly proved me wrong however, with the complete lack of... human element in the game, lets put it that way. There's no warring factions vying for power, no clashing ideologies each interpreting the exclusion zone in their own way, no hostile nor fellow zone dwellers who influence your day to day survival. There's just you, and there is The Zone. And your trusty sh*tbox automobile in between.

Gameplaywise this is a rogue-lite game at its core. You prepare for the incursion into the Zone, collect resources and loot everything valuable that is not bolted down as you drive through series of maps, fend off or evade various hazards or deal with various mischief the Zone throws your way, and when there's no more space in the trunk or you hit a dead end you extract back to your garage. In the garage you spend your well-gotten gains to patch up, upgrade your car and garage, get yourself better/new tools. And then you go into the Zone again. Rinse and repeat. There's zero gunplay, and very little combat - what you will do most of the time is throw flares to distract some huggy explosives or scrap some nasty buggers with a circular saw. Most of the dangers are environmental or invincible and make you work around them or do some prep work before brute forcing them. Car driving doesn't suck, which is an achievement in itself.

Audio and visuals are gorgeous. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, 'Roadside Picknick' and 'The Electric State' are the most prominent. The latter one is in every frame of the game: rural, foggy landscapes, looming shapes of megastructures on the horizon, inexplicable mechanisms side to side with mundane life. Soundtrack for the most part consists of moody ambient drones serving as a set piece for your current situation. Important story events and sequences are appropriately accompanied by more action-packed rhythms. But the main star is the diegetic radio in the car that immerses you deep in the game with a wide selection of wonderful music by various artists.

Storywise it is... good with a coupe of caveats. There's several characters in the game story, none of which you meet in person. You as a silent protagonist usually do as they tell you through the radio. Most of the background lore about the Zone is randomly hidden in the various pneumonic tubes, storage cabinets and toolboxes. Character voice acting is great, thankfully, and really sell you this group of people who were living in the Zone and knew each other a very long time.

As I said before, this is a good solid game. The problem with is in my opinion is that the whole premise of the game (surviving the anomalous Zone and finding out its secrets) clashes very badly with rogue-lite game loop and completely linear story.
The maps are littered with various points of interests, which hold resources and lore documents/tapes. These are usually science lab bunks and towers, shacks, gas stations, security gates and or abandoned cars and trucks. There's not a lacking variety of them. After a while, you just see them all, all the same, even when you venture deeper into the zone, and you know precisely what loot they hold. It all blends.
There's also the matter of the geography. Although Chornobyl's NPP was located in quite a rural place, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has proper mix of desolate wilderness (The Swamps, The Dark Valley) and industrial urban areas (Wild Territory, the city of Pripyat, the NPP itself). In Pacific Drive there's I think 5 or 6 preset important maps which were designed with certain points of interests and story beats in mind, but they are few and far in between long numerous resource-focused drives. There's a single 'town' called Sierram that doesn't feel like a town at all. What baffles me is that it is fictional, apparently. The game can't form coherent 'spatial identity', so to speak. I am not American, I've never heard of the place before playing the game. But the game world would really benefit from more numerous permanent landmarks, even if edited and swapped for gameplay convenience or legal reasons.
As for story, it is completely linear. Your character has zero agency through the whole story, which is an integral part of 'Roadside Picknick'-inspired stories. There's no sidequests at all aside lore-hunting, which is at full mercy of luck. You play as a delivery driver who got stuck in the Zone against their will, and you don't even offered a choice to leave the Zone in the end.

These two things really undermine the whole game for me. Still, this is a nice game that wasn't afraid to go its own way and put an unique flavor on a 'zone exploration'. Just don't expect S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with a car, as I did.

Practically a Terraria clone sprinkled with a "RimWorld/Dwarf Fortress"-style settlement management. The caveat is that is takes the worst from the both worlds.

I will start with the latter part. You can recruit/find various settlers and assign several different work orders to them like managing a forest, animal handling or farming. It's one to one from the RimWorld, with zones, work orders, priorities and bedroom assignments. And that's it. You have what basically is a bunch of one-dimensional slaves to haul and craft. Borrowed diet and grades of meals from RimWorld baffle me the most. This is in-game automation of menial tasks which become irrelevant and self-serving several hours into the game.
Speaking of automation, all crafting orders have to be done manually. No strategic bird-view of RimWorld, where the whole settlement is at your fingertips. You can assign a storage or a workstation to the settlement, but still you need to haul your slow avatar to the workbench or anvil to make "do X thing Y times" orders.

And the former part. The similarities border on blatant copying. Where do I start? Characters and their inventories separate from the world, acting as a save files? Running around, breaking stuff to loot cave systems and different biomes? Equipment modifiers capped at exactly 4%? Tool progression through better ores and loot? Don't get me wrong, none of these are bad things in themselves, or a excuse to throw tantrum about how "Terraria did it first so no one else should be allowed to implement features this way". But when I take take every little bit that makes this game and look at them as a system, I can't see anything other than Terraria. The only difference is that it is top-down rather than sidescroll.
Oh wait, no. There is another one. It is worse in every way. Yes, Terraria has 10+ more years since release compared to this game, which got a 1.0 version a month ago (at the moment of writing this review). Yet, considering how one can see the primary inspiration this game has in every pixel, why not borrow something more important? Fluid controls with shortcuts. Biome-specific loot tables for chests. More interesting enemies rather than hordes of bullet-spongy shamblers who do nothing but waste your health, ammo and, most importantly, your time (that's because they don't drop anything 4 times out of 5).
I haven't even gotten to the first boss of the game, because the only weapon I looted in my 6.5 hours of gameplay is some stone-flinging hammer that had the same damage as a ninja star. What I got in droves is a Mysterious Portal. Which summons the first boss. Game really wanted to make sure I had a dozen Mysterious Portals at my base rather than weapons and trinkets to fight it.
Then I found underground desert biome, which had noticeably harder enemies. I found a chest there, opened it and it had the exact same loot as a chest I found walking 10 meters from a spawn point. My game-closing thought was "What's the damn point?".

Mayhaps I am too harsh to someone's passion project that's been in development for quite a while now. So, here's truly personal nitpick to the game. Spritework and attack animation reminded me too much of Stardew Valley. And I DESPISE Stardew Valley.

Long story short: nine ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with a boat destroy the entire Japanese navy.
The game throws your torpedo boat into large-scale naval conflict. And no matter what you try and do, you are a small fish among the sharks. Even if you go on full Rambo, you simply won't have enough ammo and repair kits to smash into scrap everything you see and survive.
But fret not! You are very nasty piranha with a ravenous bite, able to kit your boat for EVERY aspect of naval warfare.
Air defence? Eight 20mm autocannons. Land invasion? Duct-taped rocket tubes and a howitzer. Wanna cosplay a proper warship? Here's M3 37mm gun without stabilization (good luck). ASW? Barrels packed with explosives, no sonar though. Task force armed to the teeth? Four long cigars or ten short for a submarine-like raid. Want to risk flopping your boat with every shot? Two whole 3-inch dual purpose guns. And if that's still not enough firepower - give every crewman a bazooka and an ammo vest.
Unfortunately, the game is still work in progress. and has a great amount of minor shrotcomings which I think could be improved. After you get like 100k resource points, death becomes a minor setback: there is no equipment that is expensive enough to spend budget this big. Enemy variety is lacking. The only capital-class warships I met are like Furutaka-class CA and Ryuujou-class CVL which are not that hard to sink "Silent Hunter" style, to be honest. Enemy boats could have randomized armament. Allied force may have strategic objective, but I often have a feeling that american fleets and task forces just... do things. Go from point A to point B, get intercepted by air raid from nearby fortress, capture strategic point, go back, repeat.
The thing that surprises me the most - regular enemy fleets are completely oblivious to your presence on the strategic map, even the carrier task forces which theoretically should have close air patrol. Moreover, when the battle starts, enemy fleet suddenly remembers that it is supposed to go in some formation other than the one it spawned with. But the damage is done - I just lob 4 acoustic torpedoes at the formation breach, and several escorts and capitals go entertain the fishes at the bottom of the sea. I sunk CA and CVL with a solo boat without support with just one load of torpedoes like that. And it was too easy. Radar usage should be punished a little more - you turn it for a second, get the bearing, turn it off, and enemy forgets that there was a hostile radar sweep deep inside its zone of control. And I haven't met a single boat patrol or a fleet that would actively engage me like air squadrons do.
Performance wise it's still an early access game - it works alright and there's not much to add. Only thing that tanks my FPS is detonation of cluster-like anti-air shell when fired by several destroyers at the same time.

But I digress. These are all small nitpicks at what is essentially a enjoyable and solid gameplay loop, where you play as an "underdog". And hey, it's MicroProse. It will go better from here, all they need is time.

Glorified alpha-test with so many underdeveloped mechanics. Military action is a complete joke, international trade does not exist for a half of a game session, big chunk of gameplay is just waiting for some research to complete. Yet my biggest gripe with the game is that often times major events happen out of the blue: no saying on the matter, no chance to intervene, not even a pop-up or notification. And by "major events" I mean not stuff like "country X started investment project in country Y, who is by the way your rival", nooooooooo-o-o-o-o-o. By this I mean "snaps fingers oops, your Washington province belongs to US now, get f-ed, moron, should've assembled Canada faster".

Considering ever increasing graphic and simulation fidelity of more recent Paradox releases, this game will be in this sorry state for several more years. By this point it will have a plethora of feature-adding DLCs costing ten times the base game. But then there will be no point of buying because the financial commitment is too high, and without DLC packs base game is a barren wasteland of subpar gameplay and basic versions of what should be game-changing features. Did I mention that every story-focused DLC will be outclassed by a free mod, but you'll HAVE to buy it because something something advanced trains or powerblocks or some other game mechanic that's castrated in the base game?

This review is no longer about Victoria 3 specifically at this point. Stellaris, Hearts Of Iron 4, now this. New game installment of Europa Universalis is on the horizon. I kept spending money on disappointments. No more.

Don't bother unless you have a few hundred bucks you will not regret throwing in the digital shredder.

Not exactly a F.E.A.R. game, often times plays more like modern online competitive shooter.
Main campaign is somewhat short, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Combat simulation is okay, when you still need some more hours of raw gameplay if there was a way to adjust music playlist without touching combat sim spawnlist, that would be nice, or maybe I'm just dumb and missed this option somewhere.
As for the story... This game is very heavy on a "show, don't tell" approach, so it's very easy to miss important story beats on your first (or even second and third) playthrough. And I'm not talking about dialogue or some documents, but more about things and phrases developers put in plain sight seemingly for no particular reason. But it's a very interesting puzzle, and when you piece it together, what unravels before you hits like a truck.
Soundtrack is terrific. Although composer uses certain leitmotifs almost every track, which makes it sound samey, it fits the themes of the game perfectly (that being the unending cycle of violence and brainwashing).

The only thing that bothers me is voice acting. It's a "so good it becomes bad" situation for me. I appreciate their undoubtedly masterful effort to bring genuine peril and fear in characters' voices.
But. While I become desensitized to graphic violence, I couldn't say the same about auditory one.

I still hear the screams.

it's a great shooter. Go play it.

So, I picked "Triple or Nothing" pill (3.0 times all player's stats and 0.3 times all enemy stats) at the first level.

Bought "Schizo" pill (displays pseudorandom text above your crosshair) at the shop, just for fun. Twice.

I read "Press "L" to turn this text off" promt generated by "Schizo" pill effect.

And I pressed it.
The promt didn't lie.

Wasted my best run so far. No regrets.

We have a love-hate relationship, this novel and I.
Decent voice acting, drawing is good (for my taste), CG is bearable (yes, there are scenes w/ CG-glider).

The story though. It gets horrendously boring. SO boring that "Watch 20% of the cunscenes" achievement after >15 hours of thoughtful reading about naive "slice-of-life" stuff made me drop this novel instantly.

All choices represented in the novel are all about character romancing.
And these "romanceable" characters are even worse:
1)Tsundere wheelchair-meat(douche)bag
2)[INSERT_GENERIC_GENKI_CHILDHOOD_FRIEND.JPEG]
3)15-year jail sentence
4)15-year jail sentence (x2) no, I'm not joking
5)Autistic Nietzsche-superhuman who can't take proper care of themselves but still looks like some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sex machine.

I gave this VN another chance once, I swear. But it didn't make it.
I would rather read Planetarian or Eden* again. And advise you to do the same.

Surprisingly good blend of World of Tanks and Battlestations (naval part), which inherits all highs and lows of both games:
- Great variety of game mechanics (limited ammunition, manual control of all ship's armament, submarine warfare, etc)
- Submarines
- Proper aircraft control for every ship class
- Night battles (that's something unique)
- Horrendous dispersion mechanic, which made me abandon WoT for good
- Somewhat unrealistic acceleration/movement physics
- Similar to WoT leveling system

There are two big issues with the game you should know:
1)Unless you live in North America, be ready to face permanent uncomfortable ping. Yes, NA server only here.
2)There's just not that many people playing. Add up the previous issue and you'll get half dead multiplayer with inconvenient (for great amount of potential players) online peaks.

I honestly wish this game to be alive and thriving, but these are just wishes.

What am I doing with my life... This will not return Monika...
Why...
HighRes wallpapers are good though. One can easily print this stuff 1080x1920 Monika face, for example. And I'm not joking. and hang it like Sayori (sorry, Sayori) in your room. Flashback inducing soundtrack is great as well.
But literally it's all fan only stuff as it says, worthy if you liked this VN.

I'm sorry, Monika
I'm so sorry...