Recent reviews by menghao

In a nutshell, it's yet another base-building survival game. Under the hood it's a resource and colonist management game. You're working as a remote supervisor of sorts for these duplicant colonists sent to far-away planets, who inevitably end up getting teleported halfway into hazardous asteroids or similar interstellar objects. The only opponent is the hostile environment, which turns out to be deadly enough.

Originally what I wanted from this game was something like Factorio, where you automate things and then enjoy fine-tuning and re-designing your creations. Oxygen Not Included (ONI) certainly has all of that, and more, but they've been packaged into a slightly different mixture. It would be oversimplifying things to say that ONI is like Rimworld with a Terraria-like perspective, though that could be a pretty good description as well. Rimworld goes in a different direction with the focus on the wider world and interactions with its various factions. ONI forgets everyone else, and just focuses on living inside a small rock floating in space. It's not quite Dwarf Fortress in space, since the duplicant management closely resembles Rimworld.

Ultimately what elevates ONI from a meaningless 2D basebuilder is a combination of Klei charm and its layers of opaque, even cryptic simulations. The visual look and sound design is familiar from Don't Starve, somehow comically over the top while still retaining that bleak and depressed tone. The simulation layers initially seem like they're all completely separate, and as you progress in the game it becomes more clear how they're interconnected. These layers include things like ambient temperature, a few types of germs and bacteria, different liquids, and various gases. You can say that all of them have an effect on everything in the game, including each other. For a starting player this means that the game is a minefield of wrong choices until realizing how these simulated systems need to be harnessed and manipulated to survive.

The difficulty of the game seems rather slippery to define. You can choose the type of asteroid you get sent into, but some of the "harder" starting locations are actually easier than the default start if you know what you're doing. A big portion of the difficulty relies on the systems being opaque, and the UI being a bit clunky. It throws a lot of numbers at you, sometimes hidden in weird places, which makes it difficult for a beginning player to understand what's going to happen when they do something. If you take this type of constant confusion as a part of the Klei charm, then the game is perfect for you. If you play these sorts of games because you're seeking optimal solutions for problems, then things could get tricksy. I suggest watching a lot of lets plays of ONI before deciding if you want to buy the game.

If you compare ONI's chemical stuff to Factorio mods like Angel's petrochem and pyanodon's petroleum handling, it just doesn't compute. There are some of the same chemicals involved, but ONI doesn't use recipes in quite the same way as Factorio. Moving resources around is pretty trivial in Factorio, since it mostly takes time, but it can become a source of great distress in ONI. For example maybe you want to pipe some water close to boiling temperature. If you researched insulated pipes then you can control temperature leak into the environment, which can avoid cooking your base in the long run. Now you're running water just below boiling temperature to your devices, so hopefully you designed everything in a way that can handle this. If you have a freezing cold base then maybe you want for the heat to radiate to the environment instead.

Where exactly you do what kind of manufacturing has a lot to do with how you want to work with the environmental simulation layers. A lot of the time it feels like a Factorio made into a quirky puzzle game. I would say that this game is definitely not for everyone, however if games like Factorio and Rimworld were to your liking, then maybe ONI could be worth a shot.

Sometimes it takes a smaller company to make the game that Simcity was supposed to be, or at least a city builder as much fun as the old Simcity games. The simulation depth is alright, nothing too fancy and it's not too shallow either. The biggest word of warning comes with the hardware requirements: This game is a glutton for memory and CPU. WIth 8 GB of RAM it's barely playable on 1-2 plot sized cities. 16 GB should be the minimum and 32 GB the recommendation for a smooth experience. The memory requirements blow up especially if you ever dabble in playing with mods. Using Unity makes game development convenient, but it's not an optimized engine by any means. This game chows down on your CPU a lot more than it might seem from looking at the promo material. For example every individual citizen is simulated inside the town, which can be understood to be a bit of a computational problem in a large city, even if it just includes their current position and where they're going.

Speaking of mods, the game is very moddable, and the workshop is stock full of everything city building related you could ever imagine. Some people have even done freelance DLC types of building packs, so there's a lot of variety in architecture and historical buildings available. With various quality of life mods and additional building content the game becomes surprisingly enjoyable. In general the base game has all of the Simcity stuffs from the past. You build a complete city with its services and public transport, and try to manage the balance book and the traffic that inevitably explodes everywhere. Early on the economic side seems challenging, but after realizing how to optimize your city a bit the money side becomes more trivial as the city grows and you essentially end up with unlimited funds. After learning how to make money, you then start the endless battle against traffic jams. The traffic is also a very fair opponent: If you have a congestion somewhere, it's pretty much always your own fault. Other than traffic, there's little actual challenge in the game. You can have disasters like asteroids dropping on the city and whatnot, if you really want them. Focusing on the creative gameplay is really what these sorts of designer/builder games are all about, and that's where Cities: Skylines delivers. If you decide to go for it, just be aware that you will want pretty much all of the DLC, at least all the major ones. The rock concert and sports team stuff are maybe less engaging for some, and you might not need all of the additional radio stations, but most of the major ones are very interesting and offer meaningful content for their price. Just like with other titles under Paradox' umbrella, their DLC model includes regular sales of about -50% for the older DLC and -25% for the newer ones.

A fun colony builder with programmable robots, featuring a huge amount of research and a variety of product chains for automation. The robots can be customized for a wide variety of tasks, which means there are usually numerous flexible ways to solve a production problem - Of course some of them more effective than others. Friends of Factorio will find a familiar satisfaction of building your own factory in this game. The overall mood is very cheery and the game doesn't seem to feature combat of any kind, allowing you to build in perfect peace.

The programming interface is quite clunky, but I think it does its job. A plethora of conveniences can be unlocked through in-game research, like copying and pasting bot orders, extended memory, larger working areas, faster bots, disposal of unwanted items, and so on. In that regard, it does get easier as the game goes on. The UI still remains the weakest part of the game. Another slightly weak part is that there is no challenge or time limit or anything like that working against the player, so there are times when you feel like there's not much to do in the game but to wander around and marvel at your factory. That passes eventually as you start to work on expanding the factory, unlock new research, or start building a previously unlocked industry. Part of this is because the UI is a little bit clunky here too, and you'll need to really pay attention when searching what you need to do to get some thing you want. I'm not sure if there is an actual end goal to the game, that remains to be seen.

Having followed this game since the freeware pre-alpha versions, I'm impressed by the sheer amount of development the team has put forth. If they can keep up this pace, the game should become much more impressive over time. Seeing how the opening screen alludes to this only being a part of the finalized product, the developers seem to be thinking like this. Even the much more limited freeware version was fun to putz around with, and this release is a massive content expansion to that.

Playing on Ubuntu Linux on an nvidia GPU, I've had one crash so far clicking around in the autopedia. The game runs on Unity and it used to have a native build in the freeware versions.

The game is a mixture of sokoban and a logic/programming puzzle with adorable graphics and a soothing soundtrack. It starts off quite easy and many of the puzzles offer various ways to solve them, but you also quickly get access to some real headscratchers in the optional levels, which were more tightly designed. The box can be pretty loose sometimes, since there is usually a need to modify the level itself to solve it, so the solutions can feel creative even while they stay inside the limits intended by the puzzle designer. The puzzles (at least in the early parts) are mostly built around one or a max of two tricks, and the necessary elements are mixed into the scenery. Some of the control mechanics for other entities in the levels kind of resembled puzzles from the Adventures of Lolo, back from who knows how long ago. All in all it's a very comfortable game that offers enough challenge to last for a while. An easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys puzzle games.

I bought this game in late 2011, and wasn't impressed. Trying it again now, a lot has been fixed and the game is much more enjoyable.

In a nutshell it's something like Grand Theft Auto (of the old variety) and Alone in the Dark making an undead little baby, spiced up with heaps of survival gameplay elements and an impressive variety of crafting options. It also features a ridiculously large playing area and multiplayer options. It took a bit of playing the game before realizing exactly how humongous the map is. I'm not sure about the exact numbers but it feels much larger than Skyrim for example, especially their relative sizes considering the speed of travel available to the player in both games.

The setting remains consistently dark in mood. The soundtrack is excellent and goes a long way in establishing that mood. I found myself losing track of time while playing, always a good sign. That's something I can't say of other popular games similar in theme to Project Zomboid. The recently updated stable build adding vehicles to the game was a great addition that makes travelling between map locations actually somewhat feasible.

...Which leads to the downsides in the current PZ. The map is so huge, but it feels kind of empty at the same time. After ransacking your starting town you have an excellent expectation of what you'll find elsewhere in the world (mind you, I haven't actually had the time to venture out into the wilderness yet in 40 hours of play. I expect most of the development attention has been focused to the more urban areas). Some sort of scripted events might be an interesting way to liven up the world and fix this issue, with or without procedural and random elements. Line of sight is sometimes clunky with doors and bushes, or when traversing between floors. It may be a limitation of the engine but all buildings seem to be either one or two stories high. (A correction: There are at least a few four-story buildings in the game) While playing in single player mode the only moving things in the game in addition to the player character and their vehicle are the zombies.

The next big update probably is about adding NPCs to the game, which together with modding has the potential to transform the game to the next level. As it is, I'm thinking that the current vanilla game will serve for around one hundred hours of play in single player. Modding works through the Steam workshop and people have been very active in creating custom content: Maps, vehicle mods, everything. MP mods are a thing.

The game describes itself as the ultimate zombie survival. I'd say that the current early access version shows potential to fulfill that promise, though naturally it's not there yet. Even in its current form the game is surprisingly enjoyable.

Since its release, Stellaris has been an aimless game that promised a lot but delivered only haphazardly. I've accepted this as the Paradox model of development, where a new title takes a certain amount of additional development years after release before it becomes an interesting game. After the recent 2.0 patch, it seems Stellaris has finally arrived somewhere.

The main thing about the current Stellaris is, that it finally has some focus to its narrative. It's starting to resemble something like an EU4 combat engine with space skins, and with an additional colonizing stage to start every session. Before 2.0 I'd only play a little bit of Stellaris and then find something more interesting to do, but now I can find actual interest in finishing a session (I bought it at launch and have never seen the end-game content before).

The new mechanics are very gamey or gimmicky in nature, like you're artificially obstructed from doing space travel as you like and have to maneuver around and through bottlenecks to advance in wars. Which, by the way, feel like they just finish on their own more or less randomly during conquest. The hyperspace technology that every empire now starts with makes the galaxy function like a Risk board. That's a huge step away from the freeform "everything is allowed" feeling that the pre-2.0 Stellaris promoted, and which resulted in an aimless game experience that got boring very quickly. The worst part of the old Stellaris was that every war ever became a Battlestar Galactica ripoff, where the AI fleet would run for their lives around the galaxy and you would have to exercise some acrobatics to catch them. The tighter control of ship movement makes these kinds of situations less likely to persist, and you now also have the means to plan against it pre-emptively.

The music is still great as ever, and 2.0 even introduced some new tracks. The soundtrack is the high point of the game for me, one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time.

The game is definitely anything but perfect, however great leaps have been made towards making Stellaris an enjoyable grand strategy game. With a few more major DLCs Stellaris could become a game that you can sink 1,000 hours into.

It's Factorio. What are you waiting for?

It's a huge time sink, easily worth hundreds to thousands of hours of gameplay for those who like resource management & optimizing games. You build factories that build factories, you transfer transport belt on a transport belt, you build an automated storage status gauge from multi-colored lights, you find that your train network starts to rival any TTD constructs... Just go get it already.

Oh, and it features really extensive modding support with Lua scripting. Think the main game was complex? Think again. People have already done computers with memory cells and digital displays and so on, but that's just with the vanilla base game.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a bad game and I don't recommend it to anyone. Well, I suppose people who never played the old XCOM games might be able to enjoy this. I managed to play the vanilla game for a single hour before turning away in disgust, it's just unbearable how it looks like an XCOM game but feels rotten inside.

Then, accompanied with singing angel choirs, the Long War mod appeared. There's a lot of bad in it, especially stuff that was introduced in the latest beta 15 version, but you can fix it by choosing some second wave options. It's also a bit of a hassle to install the mod, but it's worth it. I hate it and I love it and it sometimes reminds me of why I was regretfully happy to leave XCOM: TFTD behind. The game drives me nuts but I still boot it up again, and again.

It's great. The peacetime options have always been the weakest part of EU4 and this DLC packs all kinds of things to do while waiting for your truces to run out. I've always thought of EU4 as a sort of arcade game with how easy it is to conquer land. This patch increases the costs of gaining new territory, which is a much more sensible way to curb incessant expansion compared to the (still) idiotic and abusable coalition system. Building new infrastructure to your lands is no longer something you're 'forced' to do to remain under magical monarch point cap, since it now only uses the most abundant and flexible of mana points: pure cash. It's like you want to upgrade your stuff! What a novel concept. Common Sense is the best thing that has happened to EU4 so far, though you don't absolutely need it since most of the critical stuff is included in the free patch. I suggest buying it since it means Paradox will keep pushing out more DLC to what's slowly shaping up to be the best nation management game in the history of computer gaming.

Note: The game feels really slow and it's one of the bugs (AI issue) that is supposedly fixed already and will be in the first bugfix patch.

I'll replace my old review with a new one since the game has changed so much.

The 1.8 update along with the release of Art of War DLC brought with it a great number of changes to the game that might not seem like much for someone just getting into Europa Universalis 4, but they're a monumental switch in mentality from punishing the player to making the player more involved. It's like there's another side to the coin and it feels like it always should have been so.

This refers to the old contrast between war and peace -- The game didn't have much to do other than waging war and the peacetime was only so that you could declare on someone else as soon as your war chest allowed.

At its core, the game tells the history of the world from 1444 to 1821. The catch is that every nation is played by a player or the computer and they all reach for global domination in their own ways, bringing the world into ahistorical scenarios very quickly. Want to have the British Isles controlled under the French crown in 1500? That's possible. Want to have the French territories controlled by Great Britain? That's just as possible, but probably not until quite a bit later than 1500. In my first game with the Art of War I attempt the former, having diplomatically vassalized one of the Irish minors after a lot of improved relations, monetary gifts, and such. They had fabricated some claims for provinces in Ireland and also on parts of Scotland, Wales, and England -- As their overlord I could declare a war to take over these lands. The crucial first war was declared at a moment when England was fighting against another Irish minor, having split their troops between Ireland and England. After you have them in your jaws, don't let go! Fast forward some years and Leinster is on the verge of annexing London. After they have stabilized their holdings they will of course absorbed back into their overlord, fully integrating the British Isles under the command of France.

Advantageous situations can be crafted in similar ways across the world, using alliances, coalitions, and various kinds of peace treaties to forge your way ahead.

The 1.8 patch removed the "standing random revolts" mechanic from the game and introduced the concept of autonomy instead. Autonomy means how much of the land is in your actual control after it resides inside your borders. Provinces with high autonomy will be as useful as a piece of wasteland, though the people will be happy to be under your "control" when they're left to their own devices. The autonomy will slowly tick downwards during peacetime, or you can forcibly make it go down in exchange for the people being quite upset with you. Upset people start to build up towards a rebellion that you can somewhat follow as it develops and finally erupts if you didn't handle the situation well enough. In the old system areas with angry people had each their own random chance to rebel individually - Now the rebels of one cause all unite under their banner and rebel at once when the tipping point is reached, and their demands are usually quite extreme like independence for a certain piece of land, which turns the rebels from a random annoyance to a potentially credible threat.

Other than that, the non-warring features of the game include technology research, handling trade in the trade nodes and keeping your country generally in the green, building improvements in your provinces, sending diplomats around the world, and various smaller things like handling random events and the Papacy if you're a Catholic nation. The Holy Roman Empire exists in the game and has unique mechanics, Japan is a sort of mini-HRE with its warring daimyos. You could play as a Horde in Asia or a nation in Africa just as well. India is a boiling kettle and the South East Asia features several interesting countries along with Ming in the area where China now exists. In the Americas there are loads of Native tribes to play as, or you could try to form Arabia amongst the power struggle in the Middle East. There are a lot of options on who to play as just inside Europe, which used to be the focus of the game. The 1.8 patch added loads upon loads of new provinces and country tags to every area of the world outside Europe making them much more interesting to play as.

In conclusion, this is the only game that I'd recommend to everyone.