Recent reviews by The Swollverine

10/10 would destroy the planet again and again.

If you are around 13 years old, or have very little experience with games, then you will probably love this game—it has a lot of great features, that if you don't know any better, are going to be a lot of fun.

If you are used to games like this, you will probably be disappointed after the novelty wears off. Here's my scoring for different features, with comparisons to other popular games and how I'd rate those features:

• AI/Automation - 2/10 (Satisfactory 8/10). The pals in your base will almost never complete longer tasks (like making medicine, or a bunch of pal spheres), even if you manually assign them to it. Even if you stay there the whole time. They're just shy of useless and aggravatingly so. Pals will also put objects into random chests (the closest one to where they are at the time), and there's no way to stop them from doing so—not even by locking the chest with a passcode. This means you get garbage into every single chest, so organizing items nicely is not an option. Your Pals will be sure to screw that up for you. It's horrible if you desire any semblance of sanity.
  
• Building - 2/10 (Valheim 8/10). There is almost 0 incentive to build anything, with the exception of if you just want to build to build. Pals don't need to be inside. Your bed doesn't even need 4 walls to work. The basic building blocks leave no room for creativity. The unlockable build pieces are kind of all over the place and don't offer any variation with the actual structure of a building. The build tool is really clunky and difficult to use. They have made a recent improvement related to overlapping pieces, but that came with other bugs. It netted positive, but there's really no reason to build anyways, so just skip the frustration.
  
• Caves/"Dungeons" - 3/10 (Valheim 6/10). This is basically a running simulator with a ton of empty space. The loot at the end isn't anything great/interesting most of the time and the boss pals usually don't do much extra except be freaking huge and unappealing to look at. Their stats are often the same as any ol' pal so don't help you in the base. Maybe combat is better, I dunno.
  
• Combat - 3/10 (Dark Souls 3 / Elden Ring 9.5/10). You can run, jump, dive, and shoot. If all you play is console, you'll feel right at home with that mediocre list of options. If you prefer any kind of depth, prepare to find combat simply a nuisance. Pal attack moves are re-skinned with different colors then called something else. There's still a good 30+ different ones, but once you learn what they are the repetition becomes glaringly apparent. Most abilities are super easy to dodge, and you could basically stand still half the time. Plus, the long delays between skill use make combat feel like watching Dragonball Z when Goku stares at Freeza for 5 episodes without anyone throwing a punch.
  
• Crafting - 2/10 (Valheim 6/10). You will get better work benches to make things faster. But because your Pals are mentally handicapped, this won't be any sort of great improvement. You also get no decrease in material cost, so the only real incentive to even making those work benches is the base upgrades. Don't even get me started on crafting medicines.... Oh, and if you'd like to know the stats on an item before you make it, well you're SOL, bud. You won't get to see almost anything about the item until you waste your time and resources on it.
  
• Items - 3/10 (Stardew Valley 6/10). Meh. Nothing very interesting. Everything feels under powered or unnecessary. The weight limits are atrocious. I basically put my first 10+ levels into carry weight. What about a hand cart I can pull, or a pal can pull? SOMETHING to look forward to instead of making all of the ore in caves basically worthless to mine—because you'll fill up on weight after 1 node, and there are like 10 nodes per cave. TIP: set up your base where there are ore nodes to avoid this altogether.
  
• Key bindings - 3/10 (Factorio 6/10). They are clunky and awkward. Prepare to rebind (which wasn't even an option for 90% of the keys until recently) for a while. There are much better ways to do just about every key they have except WASD.
  
• Landscape - 8/10 (Satisfactory, since v8.0, 8/10). Very pretty, by itself. It gets more interesting the further you go from the starting area, too. Whoever did the landscape is just about the only person/team worthy of praise. There is an attempt at depth for this game, and it comes with adding hot/cold areas you will need special armor/equipment on. Neat, right? Not really. It just makes the vast amounts of travelling you have to do more tedious. The items aren't hard to get/make. The extra armor you carry will just take up room in your set amount of inventory slots. The mechanic falls flat, IMO.
  
• Look/feel (overall) - 3/10 (Satisfactory 8/10). This game has 3 very distinct, very different designs which look like absolute garbage together. You have a very realistic looking landscape, buildings, and work benches. Then you have these cartoony Pals that are all puffy and doofy looking. Then you have a cyber/tech-like interface. Each element by itself is fine, but together it's an absolute eyesore. It's like 3 different teams were making 3 different games, and decided to slap all the assets together and call it good. I just cannot express enough how much of an absolute tragedy it is. Gross.
  
• Longevity/End-Game - 1/10 (Raft 5/10). Meh. This is a "step-and-repeat," as we call it. You won't find anything different/unique later in the game. It's just the same basic elements repeated again and again.
  
• Multiplayer - 5/10 (Valheim 6/10). This runs better than Valheim (lag-wise), but lacks are real reason to play with other people. You don't get more resources, you have to split chests, there aren't interdependent skills or items that help your teammates... it's just playing together to play together, which can be great, but doesn't really offer anything. It does run fairly smoothly, though.
  
• Pals - 7/10 (I have never played a game with Pals/Pokemon, so cannot compare it to anything). There are some neat variations here, with over 100 pals. It's a good amount and they all look/act pretty unique when out-and-about in the world. As mentioned above, their active skills are on repeat, though. Also, their passive skills are assigned randomly and you'll almost never get this combo: a positive trait, that applies to that pal, which applies to the way you want to use it, that isn't outweighed by negative passives. You'll have to either be very lucky, or capture well over 30 of that same pal to get anywhere near what you want. Expect a lot of Direhowls without any speed buff, and Tanzees that hate to work.
  
• Raids - 2/10 (Factorio 6/10). I have never bothered to build a single defensive piece, because the raids are so easy. My pals decimate the enemy 2 seconds after the raid comes knocking. Most of the time just me with my 1 active pal will destroy everything without the raid ever reaching my base. Also, you can build somewhere that's hard to get to and the raids will never get there. I think it would be a lot more interesting if raids were more difficult, more consistent, and you had a separate "military" pal box, where you could specifically place all of your defensive pals and not take up room in the pal box for workers. Or perhaps specific buildings for defense that allow you to assign pals, rather than a large general one. I dunno, SOMETHING with more depth and interest than what it is.

Like stated before, you will probably like this game if you've basically never played something similar before. If you have experience in games with much more depth and intrigue, then prepare to be disappointed, as you are likely not the target market.

This is Planetbase with a new skin, and Planetbase was a garbage game that is about 1/3 done. They made maybe 2 improvements in Dawn of Man, but still offer almost nothing in the way of quality of life options, balance, a menu, etc. Don't waste your money on this trash pile. I can't see myself supporting such a lackluster game company again.

Madruga makes 1/3 games. They are pretty with fun concepts. That's where the development seems to stop, though. Their games are missing typical elements, quality of life options, balance, and overall quality. Both of their games are done to the point of where an early access game might officially go into Alpha and get released. Madruga seems to think that's a good place to stop. I mean, they don't even have in-game menu options. This game is kind of fun, but ultimately lacking in just about every area. This would be fine at a $1 price point. Other than that, you're wasting your money.

The absolute best VR exploration game there is. There are some minor problems with inventory and menus, but otherwise a very robust and solid game with plenty of fun!

This is, by far, one of the best games in the last 10 years. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and I've been gaming since the 80s.

Incredible. Does exactly what I need for my D&D campaign, and it's still in early access. I'm really looking forward to all the updates to come!

Prepare to lose your Life to Cracktorio.

You have been warned.

Not regretting the $0.99 I spent on this game. I'd probably spend at least $5 if I knew better. ;)

This game is really called "Dust II."