Recent reviews by Wolfe

TL;DR: This game does not respect your time.

This game is okay if you are going to play it every day with friends that you know.

This game is not okay if you are going to play it occasionally with randoms online.

First: It's a grind. Upgrading your ship and stratagems will take a reasonable amount of gameplay, but unlocking armor and base weaponry will take hundreds of hours of gameplay to accomplish. They add new content on a ~monthly basis, so I would not expect to ever cross the finish line. Add to this that most of the weapons you grind for are sub-optimal in combat, and the developer's knee-jerk balance changes are.. often less than fun.

Second: An average mission will take about 30 minutes, in which you may get stuck in terrain, get locked out of bugged mission objectives, have your game crash, get disconnected, or simply get kicked by the host for any or no reason. Should you fail to get to the mission complete screen, the time you spent fighting for democracy is deleted. You get nothing. No credits, no experience, no progression.

At launch it was, to me, about 70/30 fun to frustration ratio. Currently those numbers have flipped, and frustration dominates. The nerfs to handheld weapons in favor of strategems, the janky terrain meshes, the client instability, the instantly-killing fire damage... All in all it's currently a thumb down from me, dawg..

The game summarized in one word: Unforgiving.

With a Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3070 the game runs fine on max settings without DoF, Motion blur, and bloom. No crashes in my first 6 hours. Turn off super resolution/scaling to fix blurriness. The city is indeed choppy (45-55 fps) but that's not the end of the world, and is likely to improve.

Microtransactions are not needed at all, they are shortcuts/bait.

Overall this is my cup of tea. I often get caught in a loop of starting over to achieve perfection, getting burnt out in the process. This game won't let me do that, and even the tooltips reinforce: you can't win them all, do your best and keep on.

The Good (for me):
The interactions with the pawns are neat. The combat has a high skill ceiling and a lot of cool combos. Forage-ables, enemies, and NPCs are easy to miss in the open world, favoring immersion over hand holding. Night time is DARK and your lanterns increase aggro.

The Bad (for anyone):
Mouse control is indeed bad, a controller is practically required. The mouse control is a 1:1 port from the controller stick code in that it treats your mouse inputs as if you are nudging a controller stick; it's like mouse acceleration on steroids. The "Main" save file occurs when you sleep at the inn, but it costs gold to do so, and it is moderately annoying that I need to spend gold to secure a fail-proof save state.

TL;DR: If you play games on Hardcore mode and the Witcher 3 is in your top 10, you're in for a good time. If you're on the fence, wait for performance and mouse control patches.

I never would have thought a turn-based resource management game would keep me up until sunrise, but here it is.

I'm not even really sure what other game I can compare this to, which is impressive in it's own right.

It's a well made, well thought-out game and I dig it.

A long-developed labor of love. Coded well and brilliantly optimized. Logistics with (optional) tower defense.

Many logistics games offer capitalistic competition, like Railroad Tycoon. Some logistics games offer no competition, like Satisfactory. THIS logistics game offers deadly competition; These bugs don't like your pollution, and they want you gone.

There's a beautiful synergy in Factorio between the bugs and the pollution. Efficiency is directly rewarded by being less of a nuisance to the local life. Inefficiency will beget inefficiency as you'll cause more pollution, upset more bugs, and waste more resources on defenses. And even though I enjoy the challenge of the bugs, the game's complexity is enough that I can still manage to get lost in the sandbox mode attempting to create blueprints for the most efficient factory designs.

In my opinion, a fun experience with a moderate learning curve to be enjoyed exclusively with friends. (Or solo)

If you're new, it's better to go looking for trouble than to run away from it. Getting chased for 20 minutes is a slog. Load your cannons, practice, and learn like a true pirate. Alternatively, you can use your charm or your guile to convince other captains to form an alliance. You will run into people who are toxic, as you will in any game, but you can often shut them down by giving them a compliment- try it.

I haven't tried nor would I personally recommend the non-PvP mode as it's not really what the game is about, but I won't knock anyone who just wants a chill sailing experience; there's quite a bit of story and lore if you're into that kind of thing.

You're all fur coat no knickers the game

This game is a gem, a marvel of game design. I can clearly see the studio behind it has experience not only as programmers, but as gamers; they have a seasoned understanding for what does—and does not—make a game fun. There exists challenge without headache nor gimmick, the learning curve is moderate and well-paced, the UI hides no information from you whatsoever, and the game respects your time.

At it's core, this is a logistics game. Closer cousin to Factorio or Tycoons than to SimCity or Skylines. The rogue-like elements are the buildings and resources available to you each run. You start each map with basic resource gatherers and must choose your available production buildings via card draw as you progress. Risk/reward comes into play- taking a bakery is a gamble if you cannot yet make flour, and moreso if you cannot yet grow wheat. Your main antagonist is the force of nature; as you explore and grow in population, so do the debuffs the forest weighs upon you. These negative effects are re-rolled for every map, and you are informed of the full extent of their effect at the start of each run, allowing you to plan and prepare for them.

Let it be known that i did NOT ONCE have to leave the game to find information on something. Whether via the tutorial, tool-tips, or atlas, this game's informational resources are *thorough*.

And here's a short list of specific game design choices i must rave about:
-You can highlight all buildings by production or workers, AND FAST-INTERACT WITH THEM while highlighted!
-Unassigned villagers == builders by default
-Simple/starter/resource buildings can be moved instantly, freely, forever
-Every choice-making menu can be closed and later re-opened without consequence
-Each map provides a limited variety of resources, yet most recipes offer multiple possible ingredients
-You can search any ingredient/product to show all currently-available options within your settlement
-The condition for victory is direct and obvious, however the roads to getting there are many, and the detours can be treacherous.
-(From my experience so far..) Luck has been balanced to help and hurt, but not make nor break.

This game's achievements have made my profile super sleek.

It took me 44 minutes to unlock thru "!" (Level 40-ish) with moderate distractions.

Do you remember asking your math teacher, "When am I ever going to use this !&%*?"
Well, one answer is this game.

Rise of Industry is NOT a casual city builder, it's a game about logistics. It's closest living relative is Factorio: but instead of bugs, your enemies are other factories, and you need money to win, but only one city buys iron.

If your idea of fun is sandbox mode, you might like to think twice..

If your idea of fun is #*@&ing frying your neural synapses through excessive use of force a little bit of critical thinking, then you shall enjoy this purchase, indeed.

Looks good. Feels good.

Except for fleshpounds.

They do bad touch.