Notes on the Deus Ex series

Deus Ex

To Be Written

Invisible War

Graphics

    Not amazing, not bad.  It's an original Xbox/PS2-era game, so I don't expect much.  Using the graphics mod I use, though, the textures aren't.... horrible.

Sound

    Again, middle of the road.  I don't think I've come across anything too great or too bad.  Voice acting isn't great, but it gets the job done.

Story

    Starts at a million miles an hour.  After the first cutscene, where Chicago gets destroyed in a terrorist attack (yes, the whole city, all at once, from one dude with a vial of replicate-infinitely-nanomachines, son), you wake up in your new home in Seattle.  It's under attack, and within the first minute of play, a guy dies, but you're still not in the combat part yet.  You escape the facility and get to the streets of Seattle within 15 minutes of play.  It's too fast and sets an excessively high "baseline" (read: first impression of the game's tone and energy).

Gameplay

    The best way to put it is "simple and janky".  Where the original Deus Ex had a wide range of augmentations, a decent selection of guns, an an inventory that doesn't suck, Invisible War instead puts its skill points into having no skill points, almost no augmentation selection, and occasionally inconsistent movement, like when crouch jumping into a window or vent.

Performance

    Framerate is decent (running through WINE, so I expect hiccups) and consistent.  Load times are short.  Overall, pretty decent.

Human Revolution

Graphics

    I like it only slightly more than Mankind Divided, so I slightly dislike it, mainly from its overuse of hexes and triangles, but it doesn't go so overboard on it, so I can tolerate it.  It does suffer from being too dark a lot of the time and from having a good 2/3 of the textures be some sort of brown, grey, or yellow.

Sound

    No obvious issues or notable upsides.

Story

    It'd be easier to like if the ending weren't so bad.  Overall, I'm fairly neutral on it.  Not counting the sudden detour for The Missing Link DLC, I think it flows well enough, and the plot point for going to the final level is significant enough to not feel like a total ass-pull.  It helps that there is some level of foreshadowing.  Minus the slow-as-molasses feel a lot of the time, the big issue is The Missing Link and the ending.

    The Missing Link explains what happens close to the end of the game, when Jensen goes off-grid for a few days.  It used to be a standalone DLC, but was put into the main game for the Director's Cut.  My big issue with it is that they didn't really change it enough to make it fit like it needed to.  It definitely feels, in gameplay and story, like its own thing that was never meant to be included in the main game.  Really the only thing that it does that makes it feel like it belongs is a bit that basically ruins the shock of the final boss.

    The ending is just... It feels like the devs don't trust you to understand the repercussions of your choices, so they explain it to you just in case you aren't capable of engaging with the story at its level, despite its overall simplicity.  You get 4 buttons: One for each of three Illuminati members whose message you may choose to spread, plus a self-destruct button to kill them and yourself to let the world figure it out for themselves.  The explanation of each option's results, before you even get to choose AND after you make a choice but before you confirm it, just took the ability for me to care away, since it felt patronizing to an extent.

Gameplay

    Overall, not bad, not great.  The biggest annoyance is that the game doesn't trust you.  Melee?  It locks you into a cutscene and is a one-hit-win.  Falling down?  If you have the no-fall-damage augment, it locks you into a cutscene and only gives you the control to stun people near where you'll land.  Seriously, I've had more than a few jumps screwed up by that cutscene thing when all I wanted was to have some control mid-air to land on a platform below where I started.

    It does definitely suffer from having too many toys and not enough batteries for all of them.  By not letting you recharge more than your last battery from empty, it discourages using your augments, despite them being the main selling point of the gameplay.  Melee taking a full battery is a major contributing factor, since it means that you can be left with literally no defensive options if you play wrong enough, or you can just be left waiting 20-30 seconds (depending on recharge time upgrade tier) just to be able to punch a dude.  Want to go invisible for 3-7 seconds?  Wait 20-30 if you're empty.  It makes long stretches of the endgame a slog if you're not dedicating a massive amount of your inventory to energy regen consumables, since you'll use your energy, run out, and have to wait so long just to get it back.

    The Missing Link is a massive difficulty spike close to endgame.  It strips you of your weapons and augments.  While it returns your weapons to you very early on, it's without the consumables and ammo you've been saving, so it leads to the rest of the DLC being pretty difficult relative to the rest of the game.  If you're like me (someone who likes to try stealth but is very, very bad at it, and sticks to nonlethal), you'll be burning through the ammo you get like there's no tomorrow.  Oddly enough, that the game gives you your weapons back so early can be a disadvantage, since it can leave you with large amounts of inventory space taken up by something like a laser gun that you've been saving to use on robots that you'll have no ammo for.  It also encourages budgeting your Praxis, since you won't have enough to do everything by the end.  IMO, were it not for it giving your guns back at the start, I may feel better about it, but as-is, it feels like it's taunting me by giving me my toys but no batteries.

    The final levels, thanks to The Missing Link's difficulty spike, feel like a victory lap instead of a climactic end.  Not only does it return all your Praxis to you (so you go from maybe feeling vulnerable to feeling like a god), but it also returns all your weapons and ammo.  As it turns out, I had been saving literally multiple dozens of each nonlethal weapon ammo, so the second to last level was a silent sneakfest while the final level was a shooting gallery.  YOU GET A TRANQ DART!  YOU GET A TASER SHOT!  YOU GET A PEPS ROUND!  EVERYONE GETS KNOCKED OUT!  The final level also feels like a difficult downgrade because of the enemies: They're all effectively zombies.  Their simplicity makes them easy to avoid or manipulate, their limitation to melee makes them easy to handle from a distance, and their large numbers mean the satisfying feeling of knocking 6 guys out at a time with a single gas grenade.

Performance

    It's good.  Nothing really to complain about.  I got a constant above 60 FPS with WINE and DXVK.  Granted, I played on the lowest settings, but considering the performance penalty for both WINE and DXVK, I'd say it's still pretty good.

Misc

    The inventory kind of feels claustrophobic at times, with some things taking up FAR more space than necessary (the jars of energy being the biggest culprit.  They take 4 spots to fill 3 batteries while the other two energy things take one spot per cell recharge and they don't stack).

    I'll never understand why I can't use vending machines for stuff like energy bars or food to heal with.

    I finished this after Mankind Divided for this retrospective project.  I stand by my opinion of Jensen's character.  Almost no time is ever spent to show that he actually likes anything.  Even the most cynical, depressed character has to have SOME likes to feel like a satisfying character, but Jensen never does or it's too insignificant for me to remember.  The only things I can really even assume he likes is being sarcastic and Meghan Reed, and Meghan barely counts because she's literally the focal point of the story.

Mankind Divided

Graphics

    I dislike the style.  Having everything be hexes or triangles of UTTER SCI-FI is just annoying, and makes no sense.  They also changed the stun gun from a kind of cool design to "A pistol, but a little weird".

Sound

    Don't care either way.

Story

    Not good.  The point where it ends feels more like the midway point of a "finished" story.  Basically no real resolution, IIRC, but that's why I'm replaying it: I need to have it fresh to think about.

    Replay done.  I don't like it any more than I already did.  The story ends at the halfway point of a real story, leaving several loose threads with an obvious "Here's where the next game goes" kind of cliffhanger.  Some things are explained, some things aren't, but I just don't care.  The game lost me within the first hour, and it consistently pushed me away further, rather than pulling me back in.

    I hate, absolutely hate, without any limit, undeniably, with the fury of a thousand supernovae, unskippable cutscenes, especially when they're the four minute long train bombing sequence or the police stopping you to check your papers.  Screw that, screw them, and screw anyone who thinks "It's not that bad."  It is that bad.  If I already want to play something else, all those cutscenes accomplish is making me act on that desire.

Performance

    Not great.  At 1080p, regular dips to single-digit FPS, along with almost never getting above 30 FPS.  At 720p, I tend to stay above 30, but often dip to 20s, and still occasionally dip into the single digits, especially when looking at the augmentations screen.  RAM requirements are high, basically making me keep my browser closed while I play.

Gameplay

WHOO, BOY, WHERE DO I BEGIN!?

    All the new augs, minus the ranged hacking and maybe the Icarus Dash, are just not very good.  Whoo, I get yet another aug that takes rare ammo to do things I can use my guns to do.  How wonderful. /s

    Scratch that.  New augs are OP AF.  I wrote them off because of high costs or an ammo requirement, but one aug completely negates that: The crafting aug: It allows you to disassemble things like guns to get crafting parts, which in turn allow you to craft things like biocells or multitools, completely bypassing energy and hacking as mechanics.  TESLA, thanks to the ability to craft ammo for it, completely overshadows the stun gun, which doesn't have lock-on and can't be upgraded to have better range or multiple targets per shot.  I didn't use PEPS, the nanoblade launcher, TITAN, or focus augs, as they weren't aimed towards my stealth-nonlethal playthrough.  Ranged hacking lets you disable security devices, so of course it's powerful.  Icarus Dash is... Yeah, it's not very good, except as a guaranteed "This is where you can go" button, or as a way to run away fast.

    Melee sucks in every way.  It's a one-button "push to win" against most enemies, the only exceptions being enemies in exosuits and robots, but you can still win against exosuits by using EMP rounds on them first to stun them.  It also takes too much energy, and all of it is permanently lost, meaning that you can go down to basically no energy, leaving you no combat options if you for some reason run out of ammo or lose your guns.  They also initiate a stupid cutscene every time, as if I didn't actually want to PLAY the game, instead wanting to WATCH it.

    Now that I think about it, EMP rounds are a bit overpowered.  They shut down robots and exosuit enemies, can be used in silenced weapons, and aren't too rare.  Put a full magazine of these things in a silenced pistol and you've got both a powerful stealth tool in that you can disable cameras and turrets, and also a strong combat tool that allows you to completely disable the most threatening enemies you'll encounter for most of the game.

    Energy is generally not very well-done.  Some of the most powerful augments (invisibility, for instance) have almost no permanent energy cost, while melee has a very high permanent cost.  IMO, I'd rather permanent cost be completely removed, instead opting for a system where you can regenerate some energy quickly (the current minimum, 25 energy, would be a decent start) and have the rest of the energy slowly regenerate up to your maximum.  This serves two purposes.

1. it allows you to restore energy as you go around outside of "dungeon" areas without needing to use consumables, allowing you to be completely ready to go into a new area after some downtime.
2. It allows the relatively risky melee attack (you have to run right up to an enemy, which can be dangerous thanks to the amount of damage surrounding enemies might hit you with) to be used more than once after you run out of energy without using a consumable biocell.

DLC

    A Criminal Past starts off good, removing your ability to use your augmentations, forcing you to rely on stealth and your wits.  Sadly, it undoes that quickly, starting the riot just as the hostility of the prison even had a chance of sinking in, and you're offered your augmentations back before you can really have a use for them.  I'd rather it have lasted longer before you had a chance to reactivate your augs and before the riot began, since that was the interesting part.  After that, it's basically just the main game in a red or yellow jumpsuit, plus an effect of either pain or fuzzy vision when you use your augs.

    System Rift feels like it belongs in the main game, thanks to it not really being different from what the main game offers.  The later third or so is interesting, featuring heat sensors instead of normal cameras and introducing the Breach, but it's neither good enough nor long enough to be of much note.

    The microtransaction DLCs are all just bad.  You pay real-world money for an in-game benefit you can only ever use once?  Yeah, you get the skinned weapons multiple times, but those also apparently don't work like normal unskinned ones as far as picking up ammo, so you need to keep an unskinned one anyway just to pick ammo up from enemies' weapons.

    I guess I'll throw Desperate Measures in here as well, even though it's free.  It's just another main game mission, really.  Hell, it specifically fits in with the main quest.  If it's not part of the normal game if/when a "Director's Cut" rolls around, I'll be surprised.

Misc Notes

    I hate Jensen's character.  He's basically just "slightly sarcastic man who didn't ask for this".
    I will never stop hating the stun gun redesign.
    The mobile app would have sucked anyways, but now the game pushes you to download something that doesn't exist anymore to experience content that you can now experience for free on YouTube.

The Fall

Graphics

    Not great.  The textures are okay, but the model and animation quality is very bad.  I swear, I've played PS2 games that have better models and animations than this.  The Jak games come to mind as good examples.

Sound

    The only real major complaint is the voice acting.  It wasn't phoned in, but rather telegrammed in.

Performance

    Roughly on par with my experience for Invisible War, but they're both through WINE, so I can't really say much on it, really.  It was consistently buggy, though.  A notable bug that was there the entire time was that my mouse had a noticeable list to the right whenever I tried to move it any direction.  Try to aim up?  How about aiming right, with a little bit of up?  Left?  You're fighting the bug.

Gameplay

    It's watered down Jensen-era Deus Ex.  I like the inclusion of a crossbow as a silent ranged weapon that could either be non-lethal or lethal, but there really wasn't much to the game.  It did, however, prove that your protagonist is better than Jensen in one way: You can actually increase the amount of energy you passively regen from empty.

Story

    It's unfinished, and I don't mean in the Mankind Divided "Oh, it leaves off on a cliffhanger and doesn't feel like it ended" way.  I mean that it literally ends on a "To Be Continued" screen.  This game ends at what feels like the end of Act 1.  The Prologue is the tutorial, while Act 1 is you finding a source for your drug addiction need for Neuropozyne and getting a short-term hook (Belltower selling a competitor to Nupoz that kills people) and a long-term hook (Your old terrorist buddies appear to kill an inspector as you're dealing with the short-term hook).  If the story were finished and told in a good game, I think it has the potential to be fairly good, partly because you're not playing as a guy who doesn't need Neuropozyne.

Misc

    I thought I'd hate this more than any other game on this list, but so far (after Mankind Divided and Invisible War), it's actually not too horrible.  Overpriced, buggy, unfinished, and with excessive mobile design?  Certainly.  But, for some reason, there's a quality about it that makes me more forgiving of it than Mankind Divided.  Maybe it's the knowledge that this was a mobile game, maybe it's that I paid the equivalent of $1 for it, or maybe it's that it actually gets on with the gameplay.

    I'd like to reiterate that this guy can upgrade his passive power regen in a way Jensen can't.  Come on, Mister "I Never Asked for This", step up your game!

Hollaring about Hacknet

    Hacknet was recently given away for free, so I took advantage of that and tried it.  I beat it, and now I'm writing about it.  Funny how that works, huh?

Couple things to preface this with, as usual:
• I like the idea of a hacking game, but I've not found one I really liked yet.  Uplink comes close gameplay-wise, but the resolution issues keep me from enjoying it much.
• I play on Linux, so I may have performance issues or bugs where you won't with other, more well-supported operating systems.
• This one will be light on screenshots because the game doesn't change drastically over time.  If you see a couple screenshots, you've seen most of the important parts
• I'm a hackerman IRL, so you'd better take me seriously or I'll get my dad at Nintendo to ban you forever from Steam.

    With that out of the way, let's get started.

Do it look nice?

    Yes it do.  While it's not highly customizable, there are a few themes to choose from, and I think most themes do look very nice.  Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a way to choose one at the start, and you can't easily know where a theme you may want is or if the theme file you're looking at is going to be different from the one you already have.  Pretty much, the Theme Switcher you get later on is the best option for trying the themes, but again, you can't really know if you'd be downloading a new theme when you find a file unless it's specifically named to be a different one.

It does look pretty, though I'd like some customization.

    The sound design would be fairly difficult to screw up, and I'd like to report that the developer has not gone through the effort required to screw it up.  It's almost entirely music, and while I don't think it's amazing, I was often too focused for it to get old to me.  There are other sounds, mainly the beeps of any traces on you and the sound of your computer suddenly shutting down when a trace finishes.  There is one very notable use of sound elsewhere, but it's a spoiler I'll get to in the gameplay part.  That use is really, REALLY FRIKKIN GOOD, OKAY!?

    I do have to point out the font size, though.  There is an option menu choice for it, with three choices: Default, Medium, and Large.  Sadly, the text size does not affect the notes, so I regularly found it a little difficult to read my notes when I set the text size to Large, since I don't like to run games under my native resolution, thanks to too many games forcing my monitor to the resolution instead of scaling, which breaks my multimonitor setup.  Outside of that one issue, though, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of visual issues to me, unless you really hate a gradual red thing dropping down on your screen when you get fully traced.

"THE GRADUALLY DROPPING RED SCREEN OF DEATH" may not be catchy, but it is accurate.

    Performance, similarly to the sound, would be hard to screw up.  Similarly, I have good news!  Yeah, I've had good performance with no slowdown throughout the entire game.  I've had one singular crash, and that was during a long session, so I'm not going to say the game is prone to crashes or anything.  It's entirely possible that there was some other circumstance that caused the crash.

    I can't really get behind most of the story.  It ends with an amazing bang, and it starts with an interesting idea (dude died, and is now teaching you how to hack through the glory of premade scripts), but the middle part is almost devoid of interesting developments.  There is one mid-game development that's kind of cool, but it's not that great.  Hell, you could argue there's really not a story between the tutorial and the midgame part, then from the midgame part to the very final few missions.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that there's a second way through some of the middle part of the game.  It's slightly more interesting, but not much more.  Now back to your regularly scheduled review.

Just Play the Damn Thing, Already!

    Honestly, the gameplay is where it falls apart for me.  The basic gameplay loop is:

1. Get a Contract
2. Probe the target system
3. Run programs to defeat that system's security
4. Do the simple task your contract tells you to do

    I think the gameplay loop is often too simple, and I found myself getting really bored with the gameplay by endgame.  There are three "capstone" missions that I think really shine, but they're a serious minority of the content in the game, and even they suffer from the hacking gameplay, since the things that make them good are the non-hacking parts.  To be clear, the hacking is not very fun to me, but those missions force you to think for yourself.  You'll be searching emails, reading other files, and going to a few different computers to piece together the solution, rather than "Hack compooter and delet fills."

    Your hacking tools are far too simple.  Often, you just type the program's name and the port it's to attack ("SSHCrack 22", for instance), and it runs passively while you either wait for it or run something else.  Early-game, this gets boring fast.  Late-game, there are firewalls to keep you busy while your programs do their things, and you'll be going through your rotation of programs as they finish and free up RAM.  Even so, I found late-game to still often be boring, since it's still relatively passive for you, the player.

It doesn't get too much more complicated than this.

    The terminal is also not very great.  I'm no hacker extraordinaire (or am I?), but I have worked my way around a terminal enough to get used to a few things that this game doesn't have.  For instance, I will often use a command like "cat ./FILENAME", and the "./" at the start will often trip up the in-game terminal.  I also dislike that there's no actual text editor in the game.  You aren't meant to use one often, but it'd still be a nice inclusion for the few tasks where one would help.

    I think one of my biggest issues, though, is that there isn't much in the way of upgrades to your kit.  In Uplink, you can upgrade your CPU, your RAM, your hard drive, your modem, and even a couple other unique things.  In Hacknet, I often wished that I could upgrade my RAM, since I was constantly running out of it trying to get my hack on.  Yeah, it's likely partly due to balance, but the solution would be to make late-game servers even more difficult to get into, maybe requiring some out of the box thinking.

TAKE ME DOWN TO THE SPOILER CITY, WHERE THE TEXT IS BIG AND I RUIN THE STORY

    Here, I'm going to spoil what is possibly my favorite mission in the entire game.  If you're never going to play it, feel free to continue on.  If you're still interested in the game otherwise, skip until you see the heading that tells you the spoiler is done.  Seriously, this mission is great, and you'd be doing a disservice to yourself to get spoiled to it.

    At one point, close to the end of the game, you'll get a special mission: A family has contacted the hacking group you've gotten into to make a request, that request being to euthanize a family member on life support.  The family member was hospitalized, in great pain, and generally wants to die.  His family want to grant him that wish.  Enter you, the guy who's to do the task.  Your mission, if you accept it (because you can go "Nope, I'm not getting into this dark shit") is to attack the man's wifi-connected pacemaker, disabling it in some way.

    This mission is amazing in many ways.  The gameplay isn't just "go here, hack thing, win game."  Instead, you need to read company memos to find passwords and notes on devices, you need to search for certain files, and you need to kill a man using the very tech meant to keep him alive.  This mission is where the sound design is brilliant.  When you're connected to the pacemaker, you hear the "beep" of a heart rate monitor.  It's a small touch, but it adds a lot.

    So you accept the mission, go through the long and relatively difficult task of killing a man, and you're at the final step.  I finished it, then stayed connected for a little while longer.  The screen, mimicking a heart monitor, starts showing ridiculous results, as if someone just told a pacemaker "Higher numbers means better numbers".  And then, in a few seconds, flatline, both visually and aurally,

    I may be sucking off this mission more than it deserves, but it worked its charm on me, and showed me that this game is definitely capable of some great moments.  The entire time was stressful, not because the tasks done were themselves stressful, but because I allowed myself to get immersed, so when this mission came up, I didn't just take it as "imaginary kill a dude, kk?"

Yarr, there be no more spoilers here

Yeah, there's a 4Chan-style imageboard site in-game about hacking, and I'm disappointed I can't participate in the shitposting myself.

So, What Do I Think?

    I think the game has some charm, from the easter eggs (IRC logs from bash.org and minor things, like your ISP help number being that of our real world AOL's) to some of the mission design.  I just think that there isn't enough variety in gameplay to warrant a $10 pricetag.  It's decently long, but most of that time was spent doing busywork for the sake of busywork, IMO.  The capstone missions aren't enough to save the overall mission quality from feeling boring.  Graphics are good, music is okay, and the story gets really good at the end but is boring before then.

    Overall, I'm glad I got this game for free, because I wouldn't pay the $10 pricetag for it knowing what I know now.  Honestly, I don't think it even deserves a $5 pricetag.  It just relies too much on the busywork missions and simple gameplay loop to feel satisfying most of the time.

Mini Review: Super Hexagon

    Super Hexagon is certainly a game that exists, and it has since 2012.  I just don't even know why, but it is.

    Graphically, the game is very simple, and for good reason.  I already struggle to keep up with it as-is, and I don't think I could play it if anything more complex were added.  The reason for the problem is that it spins like there is no tomorrow.  There is the problem of those black bars on the sides if you're playing widescreen, but it's not a dealbreaker, in my opinion.  Each difficulty also has its own color palette, which is a cool little detail.

    I do have to mention that I'm not sure how good the game is for those with epilepsy or who suffer from motion sickness.  I don't have either issue, but even my head hurts after maybe 15 minutes of play.

Someone left the spin cycle on "Super Fast" again, didn't they?

    Gameplay-wise, it's exactly as you see in the gif.  Use left and right inputs from various options and avoid running point-first into walls.  You can touch the sides of the walls without losing, so you're save from hitting a wall that's already passing you.  If you hit a wall head-on, the run ends and takes you to a summary screen.  From there, you can push Space and be right back in the action after a short lead-in.  There are three initial difficulties: Hexagon (Hard), Hexagoner (Harder), and Hexagonest (Hardest), with three unlockable difficulties if you last a minute on the original three: Hyper Modes of each, which are even harder.

    The standout thing is the soundtrack.  I really like it, and each level has its own track.  What is probably the best part is that the tracks don't start at the beginning of the file each time.  Instead, there are predetermined points in the track that the game will start from at random each try, so you don't have the problem of hearing the exact same part of the same track each time.  It will get repetitive if you struggle for long enough, but I think the quality of each track and the differing start positions definitely help in making that less of an issue.

    Overall, I do have to question the $3 price tag.  It is polished fairly well, but at the end of the day, there isn't much gameplay.  Yes, the gameplay that is there is certainly engaging, and the game is fun, but there isn't much to it.  I honestly believe that, not counting the quality of Adobe Flash itself, there are many better Flash games out there that are free.  The soundtrack files are readily available in a data folder in the game's install directory, so if you can snag this for $1 and you really like the soundtrack, it may be worth it for that.

Shouting at the World About Starbound

    Starbound hit its 1.0 release July 22, 2016.  I had it from Early Access for a decent amount of time before its full release.  I want to talk about it.

    Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm going to warn you ahead of time of a few things:

1. I like mining, building, exploring types of games.  They aren't best-of-all-time for me, but I do like the genre.
2. As mentioned 5 sentences ago, I had the game in Early Access, so my thoughts on the Early Access version will affect my thoughts on the full version.
3. I play on Linux.  I may have experienced bugs or performance issues not present on other platforms.

    With that out of the way, lets get started.

It's so Pretty!

    Graphically, the game is very nice.  The pixel art style is one I'm getting annoyed with because of how often its used, but it is done beautifully here.  Most, if not all, sprites and effects are very nice, and the backgrounds are also great.

The game is definitely nice-looking.

    Musically, I can take it or leave it.  The music quality is okay, and it fits the basic idea of a space exploration game, but not the tone Starbound specifically sometimes sets.  When you have the few friendly NPCs spouting lighthearted dialogue or you see the penguins in the central space station hub of the game, it's a little weird, in my opinion.

    Sound effects are good, generally.  They aren't exceptional, but I don't remember any off the top of my head that are specifically bad.  I do get annoyed with the effects that play when you run out of energy or fully recharge it from empty, but that's because I hear them very often.

    Performance is generally good, with exceptions.  It's not common, but I have gone down below 60 FPS enough times for it to be of note, and the biggest issue seems to be when collecting a liquid or when I hover my mouse over the giant gate behind Esther, the main questgiver.  The gate thing is particularly bad, dropping me from ~60 to the low teens.

Check the top right to see that cinematic 11 FPS.

    At first, I was going to complain about the UI, but in reality, I think the issue is more about the use of the UI, rather than the UI design itself.  Your inventory has 5 tabs, each with 40 slots, each tab dedicated to a category of item.  Towards endgame, I almost always have the crafting materials, blocks, and food tabs full, since there are so many materials and types of blocks, and food doesn't stack.  The hotbar is two sets of 6 pairs of item slots.  Each pair acts as a left and right hand set, and you can switch sets with the X button or an icon in the top left of the hotbar.  I have two main gripes with the hotbar.  The first is that the pairs aren't all that useful, thanks to two-handed items taking both slots.  Every object that is placed in the world, such as torches, take both hands, even if they don't make use of the right click for anything.  The way the pairs work means that it's possible to only be making use of half the hotbar, which is a common occurance thanks to two-handed weaponry, blocks to place, torches, etc.  The other complaint is the switching of sets.  You are never told that you can do it, and it adds a step to accessing things you may need to access quickly.  I've had a lot of times where I go from my general use set to my combat set, but need to place blocks, and it takes me a lot longer to do so than if I were using a more standard hotbar.

The current hotbar.  That icon in the top left is the "switch item set" button.

    And finally, the worst part about the presentation: The story.  It is painfully bad, both in its writing and objectives.  I actually like the missions parts, since they take you to somewhat unique locations, but everything else is very, very bad.  In order to progress the story, you will be required to find settlements of each species and scan items at each one.  While the primary selling point of the game is exploration, mandating it with a scavenger hunt that is hosted by RNGesus immediately shoots the fun of exploration in the foot.  No longer are you exploring to find anything that may or may not exist.  You're filling a checklist, and a boring one at that.  And your reward at the end of the story?  The absolute most pitiful excuse for an ending ever.  I genuinely feel like my intelligence has been insulted by it.

    It should say something that my favorite part of a story in a game about exploring a procedurally-generated universe is the stuff done on premade maps that are fairly heavily scripted.

Wow, okay, harsh.  How does it play?

    Not very well.  Movement is average, largely because it's hard to screw up movement and the tech abilities aren't good.  The most creative tech ability is the morph ball distortion sphere, which puts your character in a small ball that can fit in tight spaces.  Otherwise, you have a few lateral movement abilities (dash, sprint, short range teleport) and some vertical ones (double jump, delayed high-movement double jump, and a quadruple jump with almost no vertical height).  Each category can only have one at a time, so no, you can't dash into a sprint or do a normal double jump into a series of smaller jumps, ending with a rocket jump.

    Combat is thoroughly unsatisfying.  Melee barely ever feels like I'm doing anything because of an immunity period enemies seem to get at the end of a combo, and ranged combat is absolutely unfun because it uses the energy system instead of ammo.  The energy system means that you can't make use of your ranged weapons for a few seconds if you run out of energy, since it only "unlocks" after it fully recharges, which means you spend around a third of the time of combat either switched to your melee weapon or waiting for your energy to regenerate.  Endgame is really the only point of the game where I feel ranged combat is even slightly enjoyable.

    Crafting is even a downside in this game.  To explain somewhat, I need to explain what I consider passive and active crafting.  Passive means you can set it and leave it, like Minecraft's smelters.  Active requires you to remain in the menu to craft, such as Minecraft's crafting tables or basically any Terraria crafting.  Got it?  Cool.  Literally everything you can craft in Starbound is done with active crafting, which wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the wait times.  Yes, you have to wait in the menu while you craft.  Just queued up 1000 (max stack size) glass to smelt?  From what it feels like, you will be waiting around for 500 seconds (it feels like it crafts 2/second),  You can't queue up other things to happen when it's done, and you can't just leave the menu.  You have to sit there the entire time and wait for it to be crafted.  A nearly 9 minute wait just to craft a bunch of glass is unacceptable.  Any other game would make it passive or instant, and for good reason.

    I'm putting this in its own paragraph for the emphasis: I crafted about 700 fired clay, thanks to wanting to do something after having collected a crap ton of clay blocks while mining.  It took nearly 6 minutes of real-time waiting, and I have the video evidence to prove it.

    "Surely exploring in a game where the biggest selling point is exploration would be good, right?"  Have you been reading this review?  The answer is no.  A large part of the problem is that every planet and biome feels like a reskin of another.  There are many structure designs and environments to see, but the functional difference is basically nonexistent most of the time.  And the moons suck.  Ever wanted to be chased around by an invincible monster that instantly kills you on contact?  If you answered "yes", congratulations!  You may get your wish by collecting literally any amount of fuel on a moon.

He's coming for that booty.

    You can also do miniquests for NPCs in settlements.  These are usually "Go here, kill some things or talk to someone, come back", but you may get lucky and get a "collect some stuff and bring it back mission", which is AMAZING (/s)!  Occasionally, when you finish a mini questline, the NPC will offer to work on your ship.  Get enough crew members this way, or by hiring them in the hub location, and you can upgrade your ship's size.  It does nothing except give you more space and allow you to hire more crew members, since your ship is only really useful as a mobile home base.

One step forward, and a train ride back

    As I've said, I've played this game back in Early Access.  In my opinion, the game has actually regressed in quality from its earlier versions.  Nearly every aspect of the gameplay was better in some way.  The hotbar used to be a more standard 10, plus a dedicated pair of left/right hand slots.  If you were holding something that was one-handed, you would automatically equip the right-hand object as well, meaning you could have a one-handed melee weapon in one slot, a pistol in another, and a flashlight in the right-hand slot, and always be able to see what you're doing without putting the flashlight in multiple spots.

An example of the old hotbar.

    Planet exploring used to be slightly better, too, mainly on ice planets.  There used to be a temperature mechanic, where you could explore a cold planet, but you needed to use heat sources to not die.  Even on non-frozen planets, night could get cold enough to make use of the mechanic.  It even took into account heating from the planet's core, so the deeper you went, the warmer it got, and the less you needed to worry about freezing to death.  This was removed in favor of a version of the system we have now, where you need an item to survive on a planet with extreme temperatures.

    Your ship's SAIL used to have some personality.  Yeah, it wasn't exactly what I'd call "good", even on a charitable day, but it added a somewhat unique feature to each race outside of the looks of your armor, ship, and items that can be placed.

So, to summarize

    I don't think there's a single thing this game does, outside of graphics and audio, that is done competently.  The combat is unfun, the exploration is shot in the foot by a lack of things to find, the story is outright insulting, and even the crafting is bad.  Basically everything done by Starbound is done better by other games, including earlier versions of the same game.  I cannot recommend this game under any circumstance outside of if you can get it for free, and even then, I wouldn't waste my time with it.

The Pew Pews and Boom Booms of Satellite Reign

    Satellite Reign was free at Humble Bundle recently, so I picked it up.  And now I've beaten it.  I have thoughts I want to share about it, so here they are.

   I'm going to preface this with a few things, first, so you know where I come from with this review:

1. Top-down games aren't usually my style.  I'm more of an FPS/RPG dude, and while this game does have RPG elements, namely XP, skill points, currency, and a variety of items and upgrades, the base gameplay isn't something I actively seek out.
2. I play on Linux.  There may be some issues I have that you don't, simply because the devs focus on the Windows version more.  Just be aware that some issues I may mention may not be in every version of the game.
3. I personally value gameplay above everything else by a very large margin.  I don't care about story, graphics, or audio unless they are done badly enough to impede my enjoyment of the gameplay or they are good enough to enhance it.

Presenting: The Presentation!

    The story is fairly minimal, and isn't anything to write home about.  A company has developed technology that allows people to respawn, like in a video game, and your task is to travel between the city's four districts, gather experience, gear, and upgrades, and kill the CEO of said company.  Short, sweet, and provides an in-game excuse for your ability to respawn.  Once you finish the tutorial, though, you are given the story very rarely.  You get a short message when you first enter a new district of the city, plus one when you reach the final area of the game, totaling maybe 6 total messages.  Even for me, that's very little, but I'd rather too little than too much.

    Graphically, though, I think the game is fairly good.  Enemies of the three factions are easy to tell from each other, thanks to their armor being solid red, white, or purple.  That also means that they are easy to tell from the environment, if the health bars didn't spell it out enough.  I find it difficult to tell lasers and bullets apart from each other in a firefight, but if you have the time to tell the difference, you aren't in a situation strenuous enough to need it.

One of the best things about the game's presentation?  Its explosions are pretty.

    The soundtrack is fairly good.  It doesn't stand out at all, but they definitely have the right style of music to go with the sci-fi style of the game as a whole.  It also has the nice feature of changing tracks on the fly to fit whether you're in combat or not, so you have the higher-energy track during the higher-energy parts, and a lower-energy one while you explore the city or are sneaking around a restricted area.

The sound effects are also good, but my god.  I don't know if I should consider the cacophony of sounds during a firefight a good or a bad thing.  It gets loud and definitely chaotic, to the point where I had to turn my system volume down a notch or two for comfort, compared to where I normally have it.  Good for getting across the idea that you are in DEEP, bad for your ears.  Yeah, let's leave it at that.

That's all well and dandy, but how does it play?

    The game is unique, I will give it that.  You control four characters in a top-down view of the world.  Think XCOM, but real-time instead of turn-based, and not tied to a grid.  You go into restricted areas, get your characters into a heavily guarded room, get out, and wait for the heat to die down.  Of course, this means you have a mix of stealth and pew-pew choices, and you can actually go from one to the other fairly easily, or even mix the two to an extent.  If you want to kill a guard, you can sneak behind them and deliver an instant-kill execution shot, which only alerts other guards if you are spotted or using an unsilenced weapon.  You can also start a firefight, which will only alert other guards if one manages to get a call out for reinforcements or they are close enough already to hear the gunfire.

    The way the game handles interactable objects is very nice.  Your Soldier and Hacker can each interact with certain things, like consoles, for various effects, like locking a door.  There is little more satisfying than pulling off an infiltration by turning the sentries against their owners, running through the door to the objective in the chaos, and disabling it from the other side to keep the enemies away for a little longer.  I mean it, the interactions in this game are genuinely cool to make use of.

    The variety in weapons and upgrades is fairly small, but still what I'd call good.  There are a decent variety of gun types, and there are also three categories those guns fall into: Ballistics, Laser, and Plasma.  Laser and Plasma excel at different things, while Ballistics seems to be the middle of the road type.  There are also a good amount of different kinds of gear and augmentations.  You do have limited space to carry all this stuff with, though, so you have to make the choice of what you value most and on who.  Does your Infiltrator get that immunity to poison or the fast recharge on their energy for more frequent use of the invisibility cloak?

You like the idea of setting up an explosive, throwing a grenade that keeps the sound from getting out, then exploding the now silent bomb on a door to get to the other side?  That's a thing you can do.

    All that has a caveat, though: The AI is rock stupid sometimes.  The pathfinding is a bit odd, occasionally sending someone at a dead-end that never was a valid path.  You also can't be sure that your characters will even be able to hit an enemy, since they don't seem to be able to tell that the pole right in front of them is in the way, and will keep them from hitting the guy 30 ft away.  I've actually had characters go down because my Soldier took their rocket launcher and launched that rocket a grand total of 5 feet ahead, where it hit the barrier a friendly was sitting behind, destroying the cover, the friendly's health, and any semblance of strategy I was using.

You sure THAT'S where you want to have an explosion, man?

    The issue I have above all others, though, is that your progression is generally limited to "You can do the same thing as you could, but better."  Your hacker can be upgraded to hack into people's minds better, which allows them to do the same thing, but to higher-tier enemies.  Your Soldier can be upgraded to rewire higher tier transformers.  Your Infiltrator can stay invisible longer or deal more damage with their katana.  Your Support can use their scan-vision thing with a larger radius or heal more at a time.  Other than giving one character the abilities of another, that tends to be it outside of equipment, which isn't class-limited.  While, yes, the game introduces things like sentries and mechs, the end result is that you end up doing largely the same things over and over again.  Most infiltrations past a certain point amounted to getting my Infiltrator in, equipped with the tool that lets them hack using the Hacker's skill level.  They go in, deal with the guards and cameras, then open the door for the friendlies to join in, rinse repeat until the job is done.  It didn't matter if I got spotted because everyone is combat-ready, so I can hunker down or escape if need be.

Performance Anxiety, eh?

    This isn't going to be long enough to warrant the heading thing, but I do consider it important enough to point out with one: The game does not run well whatsoever.  I recommended it to a friend, and they couldn't even play the game at an acceptable framerate when it was calm.  I was usually hovering between 20 and 30 FPS, with heavy action dropping the game to the teens, along with needing to keep my browser at one tab to keep the game from taking up too much RAM.

    The game is heavy, even at the lowest possible settings.  Do not expect great framerates unless you have a computer with seriously impressive specs.

It's also a bit buggy.  I've had the occasional character clip into a building, and there's a fairly annoying bug/oversight that happens if you have too many characters hacked for direct control.  The game seems to only be able to give a certain number of characters the ability to reveal the fog of war, so if you exceed a certain number of controlled characters, you may end up having to control others without being able to see enemies they may encounter.  That is fairly bad, but it didn't happen often enough to be an issue, largely because I'd keep most of my characters in groups, so I'd at least have one person with vision in each group.

You see that blue dot in the top middle?  That's one of my characters not providing vision.  They're supposed to be providing vision.

We need that number score!  What is it, man!?

    I'm not going to give this a number score.  I'd rather you read through this whole review because it took forever to write that will tell you more than a number score ever could.

    Overall, the game gets a decent recommendation from me.  It has enough unique about it that it stands out, assuming you can put up with the performance issues.  The story is basically nonexistant, but the graphics and sound are good, with the gameplay being really satisfying when you can pull off the tasks you need to.  It does get repetitive, thanks in large part to the way the game handles progression, but it does have enough unique combinations of how things are laid out that I could barely notice it.