Recent reviews by Liana

Never seen a game doing so good at actually simulating a civilization and ecosystem. The game revolves around the fact that each player can only take one specialization (and more later at a rate of one every x day), forcing collaboration between different players who can make different things.
Combined with a deep government and laws system, this game has a lot of interesting things going on.

On the other hand, it's too grindy. You need an absurd amount of resources to build a functionning house.

Some of specializations are more important than others so you often end up with a few people running the economy while people taking some other less useful (but still necessary) skills are left behind because they can't compete. This is realistic because in real life the same thing happens, but from a gameplay point of view it can get very frustrating to always see a few players rush to get to the top of the tech tree in a few days.

I don't normally review games but as a warning, this game is full of technical issues:

- The game frequently has freezes that last a while
- Detection of gamepads for local multiplayer was completely broken and we had to add a 4th fake player to make it work after a long time trying to figure out what was happening, and the menus could only be controlled by the mouse and keyboard despite player 1 being on gamepad
- It sometimes also just crashed on me.

Review made after playing a few hours during pre release stress tests.
I really like Temtem. It is the first attempt at a pokemon type mmo that is actually worth playing.

Battles being 2v2 by default makes the game a lot more strategic than pokemon, which is pretty cool. It notably opens up more room for combos and usage of status effects, which the game utilises well. The game has also reduced randomness a lot compared to a typical pokémon game so that things like sleep for example aren't completely unpredictable.

The design of the monsters, both artistically and in terms of gameplay, is so far really good too.

I'm particularly happy that the game allows choosing pronouns and includes gender neutral. Also the main rival is non binary I think (uses they/them).

Only things I don't like in the game is that it still has that obsolete mechanic of random battles while walking. It feels very annoying and tedious to be unable to walk anywhere without getting attacked. I much prefer what modern pokemon games do where you can see the monsters in the grass.

At the moment the game is unplayable due to server issues though, I hope they will sort this quickly because having a failed launch can be very damaging for an mmo.

I think El Presidente might have me arrested if I don't review this game positively.