Recent reviews by Rawrzington

It's Skyrim in space. Like Skyrim? Like Space? You'll like this. Don't like Skyrim or don't like Space? This isn't for you. Not sure if you'll like this but don't want to put down the money? Buy Skyrim on cheap. Play that for a bit. If you like it and think you'll like it in space, buy this.

You are looking at the grandpa of many survival and build based games. This game inspired Minecraft. This game is old and has a beard. In many European countries it is old enough to buy a beer and work in the mines itself.

I've played this off and on over the decades and very pleased with the release on Steam so far, though adventure mode is missing. Not all the features are in it yet and some things are missing or maybe were taken out in earlier releases. Still I've been having a bang up time. Like hanging out with an old friend. An old friend that you get into fist fights in the back ally with and kicks you in the balls.

The Good:

This game has a fun character generation system. Skills trees that are fun to fully build. You can’t be good at everything in this game. You can be good at mining rocks and ores, or good at refining those rocks and ores into better metals or good in crafting those metals into armor or weapons. You can’t be good in all those. So you have to plan accordingly for what you want to do. So you want to make a sword? How good the sword is will be determined by how good you are with making 1H blades, 1h hilts, and the use of what ever material you’re using. From 1 to 100 split 100 points between using bow, riding a horse, or using a sword? Pretty difficult to choose, but your character will be unique. It’s a unique and a very cool system. It has some depth to it, that can easily expand if this game grows/has updates, compared to pen and pencil RPG’s it’s shallow right now, but it still has room to grow. And that’s pretty cool, maybe with fixes to other things and the additional continents will add more content.

If you want to experience the character generation, the starting town area Haven, has PvP turned off. So you can experience the combat, crafting and character tree. You can explore a bit and level your character well enough to experience some of the parts of the game. You won’t be grieved or have to deal with the toxic people…but some of the cooler stuff you won’t experience in Haven, like medium or heavy armor making, horses, house buildings, etc. It can be a trade off, if the PvP stuff turns you off. If this game goes on sale, and isn’t a subscription, it might be a worth 10-30 hours to just play the tutorial area and experience the character generation and crafting system.

The Meh:

The grind isn’t off for any other MMO, but it’s very small area that you can actually do anything solo. You can be ganked anywhere, newbie areas you are less likely to, but still can be ganked.

The difficulty curve is steep, and the game is very unforgiving. If you like games like that, this game is worth climbing that mountain and rising to the challenge, but most people won’t want to spend a dozen of hours of playing lost because of a simple mistake or be ambushed by others. For most players, this is the reason why they won’t play the game that much if at all.

You pretty much have to join a guild to fully experience the game, and go do anything outside of the starting zones (outside of Haven) with a group.

They say that the developers are going to be adding more continents, but those don’t really address the major issues most players have with the game. Most people don’t get out of the cities because of the grieving to see much of the world itself. Adding other land masses they won’t see isn’t going to help the small player base from sticking around.

The Bad:

This game is less then half finished and is being made by some people who don’t know exactly how to make a full game or a good community. “Full-Loot PVP all the time” games are very very niche. Something this playerbase and designers might not fully understand. They are built for a certain group of players and don’t have mass appeal. But to keep the small player base for the game, you have to know what you are doing when it comes to taking on cheaters, hackers, exploiters and toxic players, and put enough content in to keep people happy, which the makers aren’t going at a pace the players who are sticking around would like.

They don’t put enough PvE content to keep people happy, so it’s often PvP grieving. There is very little in noob protection from the more experienced players. You have to grind a lot to do anything in this game and you get very little reward for doing so with such a high risk. Fishing or mining you might get ganked by a random group. 1v1 match? Nope, ganked. Explore? Good luck, somebody will gank you when you’re busy with something else. You're a noob and think that that player who has spend thousands of hours on the game and has end game level armor and weapons won't gank you because you really have nothing that could be of value? They'll probably gank you anyways.

This is the core problem. If there are two beaches. One where you can not kick over another persons sandcastle unless that person says it’s ok, and another beach where kicking over another persons sandcastle is allowed all the time. Eventually people are going to get tired of having spent time building a sand castle that will just get kicked over by somebody who’s bigger and tougher then them. PvP games all the time have a “you can be a jerk here” sign and wonder why jerky behavior doesn’t attract more players and then ultimately kills the game. You have to have content the jerky people can engage with so they won’t be as big of jerks to the new players and the new players can engage with and be challenged with.

There is no causal players to this game. Causal players get burned out very quickly and that’s not good for the health of any MMO.

As it stands, once you’re done with the PvE stuff, joined a guild, and made a house, leveled your character build how you want, after you’ve mined enough, and fished enough, what is there? Go ganking somebody else probably, and not be ganked yourself, so you gank new players. This is like a level 100 player beating up a level 10 player. It’s only going to be fun for the level 100 player and a very small niche amount of level 10 players will still want to play to get to level 100 themselves.

The developers are saying they are going to making this a subscription game, which I don’t see as working out. Most people won’t pay for more than one month of the game because the grind and unforgiveness of the game will turn most off. For most players once a player spends 50 hours in game, dies the first time to somebody else, whether it was a fair fight or not, loses everything, they’ll turn off the game.

Fixes:

I’m not a professional game designer. Take with a grain of salt.

Instead of one server, make 2 servers and have one be PvE with PvP optional. This is a major troll in this game, and most of them hate this idea. I know this goes against what the developer wants, and what most of the community wants, but the way the developer is running the game, and the way PvP works in this game, the game will burn down to just a few dozen players before they can put everything they want in the game. PvE server would be larger, but it could pay enough for the game to be completed, could have the PvP server be more competitive, and have room for the casual players.

More PvE content (which hopefully the new continents will have). Otherwise it just encourages grievers to grieve when they've finished what little else the game has to offer. Bullies to bully and people who want to do anything else the harder task of having to deal with grievers who are bored.

The learning curve for this game is steep. It will take a few 50 hour games to understand everything to just have a good chance of making it. Even the best well planned out strategy can be upturned by the random events. If you like strategy games, this one is a huge one, and will take a long time to master.

It's Myst. It looks nice. It's VR, which is amazing.

Good as an introductory game to learn Shogi...but not advanced play.

One of my all time favorite games on the PC. Developers keep adding new stuff. Not at a break neck speed of big studios mind you, so that's ok. Slow and steady progress. No battle passes so far, so that's good, lol. (edit: now they have battle passes. but they are the best, it's free. things you don't get are put in with the other random cosmetics when the season ends, so you can earn things from seasons you missed. honestly the best type of battle passes I've seen.)

The game's humor is funny and doesn't take itself too seriously. If you like dwarfs/squats, and you want to go against good value tyranids, this game is pretty good.

This game is all about team work. The classes really can compliment each other if people work together. Grab a copy for yourself and friend and dive in. I suggest green beards start with the gunner or driller classes as they have some heavier weapons. But check them all out for yourself.

For new players. There are 5 different difficulties in the game, and I suggest you do not play at difficulty 4 or above before you get a class to level 25 to unlock perks and get a feel for how the game actually goes. I've seen many reviews for this game where people say it was too hard, but that's the thing, the levels actually matter. Also pay attention to the mission moddifers. Some missions might have more boss bugs, and some might have you die for lack of oxygen. Which could really make your playing experience frustrating when you're new.

Most importantly this is a team game. At higher difficulties you really have to know how to play as a team and develop some good habits and strategies. Your teams success or failure will hinge on that at higher difficulties. So again, if you just start out, don't go full on hardest difficulty. You won't have a fun time.

One of the great things you can do later on is customize your guns with over clocks, which will give you some added boosts to your playstyle to hep take on those hard difficulties One of my biggest gripes about this game is that it does take a long time to earn these and they are random. So you have to really grind for them and hope you get the right one.

=[ROCK AND STONE MINERS]=

Did I buy this game because it looked interesting? No. Did I buy this came because my NZXTCAM kept misidentifying the games I was playing for this game? Yes.

A delightful game for children and adults. Doesn't have a big replay value, nothing much changes as far as mechanics or strategies, but it's wholesome and even the most novice of players can jump in.

I'm about 30 hours in, and love it. Some actions seem to be repetitive, like some things in Minecraft or similar games. But there's a lot of space to grow (pun intended) and add more as the years go by. I'm also not sure if I'm out of the tutorial yet. I just found out about Space Freighters. I had to clue those where in the game. What's next? Attack run on the death star? Running into the Enterprise? Idk, Again, I don't think I'm out of the tutorial yet. I'm not sure if you ever get out of the tutorial or if what I thought was the tutorial was a tutorial. You just start playing...and kind of never stop.