Reseñas recientes de constantcompile

Forestation appeared to be a simple little puzzle game about drawing a continuous line. Unfortunately, the added element of "secret trees" turns what should be a logic puzzle into a trial-and-error test of your patience.

At about 20 seconds into the trailer, you'll see the mechanic in action - white tiles appear out of thin air as the cursor is dragged over them. What the trailer doesn't show is that there is no way to know where these invisible tiles are. This means that unless you consult a guide, you are clicking and dragging every single edge tile in every direction until you find the "magic tiles," and irritatingly moving around the mouse until you find the exact path you're supposed to take (complete with dead ends, for added frustration). Unless you find these "secret" solutions, the level is not considered fully completed.

That would be bad enough, but some puzzles don't even incorporate the invisible tiles - they are wholly unsolvable unless you click and drag from one specific tile to a second specific tile directly adjacent. Go to the Community Guide for this game and look at Level 20 part 3 and Level 21 part 1. There is absolutely no information given to you in the game itself for how to solve these levels; you are forced to consult a guide.

Who thought that this was a good idea? I'm reminded of "moon logic" solutions in old point-and-click adventure games, which would force players to call overpriced toll numbers. It doesn't add any charm, it doesn't even net the publisher any money. All it does is force players to rely on the guide - and if players can't find the solution to a puzzle unguided, the puzzle creator has failed.

These inane, unknowable "secrets" ruin the experience of Forestation. Not recommended.

A short, solemn walking simulator about civilization in the abstract. No voice work, nice music, decent low-poly environment.

It could REALLY use a speed boost toggle, as the empty land between setpieces is quite dull. I honestly browsed my phone while I was travelling from place to place. Still, I like it well enough to not refund it, despite two crashes upon reaching different artifacts.

I purchased it at 80% off, $1.59, and completed it in about an hour. YMMV, but I feel I got my money's worth. Recommended.

Contrary to some reviews, mouse controls are included and quite intuitive, once you understand them.

Remember that this game is a mobile port. To move Lara with the mouse, you click-and-drag Lara to the space you want her to move to. Unusual, I know, but remember that the game was built with swiping in mind. Controller support was tacked-on, and is actually my biggest gripe with the game - it's hard to know exactly which direction you're supposed to move the thumbstick when you're on walls, and so I often resorted to using the (more precise) mouse for these sections. I do wish there was WSAD and D-Pad support though.

The levels have a gorgeous low-poly aesthetic and the difficulty scales well, with spikes in only a few areas (mostly toward the end). There's no penalty for using the hint system, which is great: it walks you through step-by-step, and allows you to disable it and continue on your own, once you figure out what you were doing wrong. I'd go so far as to say this is the most well-implemented hint system in any puzzle game I've ever played.

So yeah, the controls aren't great, but they aren't terrible, and the game overall is very well done. Recommended.

Are you wondering whether you should buy this game if you aren't willing to sink quadruple-digit hours into gitting gud?

As someone with a comparably scant 43 hours invested, I can still recommend this game for anyone looking to pick it up, grab the achievements, and then put it down. I estimate you could do so in about 30, or even as little as 20 hours, with some luck. There are only three DLC packs you'll need: Supersonic Fury, Revenge of the Battle-Cars, and Chaos Run. Roughly $16 total cost ($10 game, $6 DLC) if you buy at 50% off, which is quite a bargain.

Completing the achievements for this game will give you an enjoyable romp through the different game modes, and only a few require online play - as a filthy casual pleb, I found the All-Star bot difficulty to be challenging without being overwhelming, which is more than I can say for the 1v1 online opponents that were doing complex aerial juggles in both ranked and unranked. (The matchmaking leaves something to be desired.)

Recommended.

The core idea of this game is great - an idle clicker combined with a shmup to pass the time between clicks. Brilliant. But the details of just about everything turn out poorly.

In practice, "shmup" is probably a misnomer in this case. There's relatively little actual shooting. And most of that shooting won't be at enemies, but at asteroids, because farming crates is the most money-efficient use of your time. But the spawn rate of crates is very low, so you'll want to destroy asteroids as quickly as you can, because the money you get from them is so tiny as to be meaningless. That also applies to races, enemies, even boss battles - absolutely everything that gives you money outside of your buildings, gives you so little as to be worthless.

So it's primarily an asteroid-destroying, crate-farming game, with intermittent periods of purchasing buildings and thinking about which buildings deliver the best ROI.

But there are more problems. Even if you purchase health, energy, and weapons upgrades very soon after they become affordable, you'll keep finding your ship to be oddly frail - several times, I was completely surprised when my ship blew up. And the loss from this is significant - when your ship blows up, you lose all of your middle managers (up to 36) which each give a flat 3% improvement to your rate of income. About midway through the game I lost 29, which essentially halved my rate of income, and I never managed to collect that many again.

There's more to do, but none of it is very fun. There are quasi-pixellated minigames that seem ostensibly intended to reward crates, but they give so few rewards that you're much better off farming asteroids. Have I mentioned that this game heavily incentivizes you to farm asteroids? Farming asteroids isn't very fun.

Not much about this game is very fun. They've decided on this 90's-esque theme which is great from a music standpoint, but doesn't jive with the graphics. Also, from a lore standpoint, you basically play as a selfish jerk who ruins planets and populations purely for your own benefit. So that's not ideal.

Unfortunately, all in all, I just can't recommend this game. The core premise is good, but almost nothing else is. And that's a shame.

If games like Proteus and Dear Esther are "walking simulators," Quarantine Circular is a "talking simulator." The problem is that it's not a very good one.

In its predecessor, Subsurface Circular, the conversations involved AI units speaking to one another. This made it much easier to overlook stilted or unnatural progressions in the conversation - "robotic" dialogue makes sense if it's coming from two robots.

In Quarantine Circular, the extent to which conversations are railroaded becomes immersion-breaking in that it cannot be ignored. In just the second chapter, I had a human character looping me back to the beginning of a conversation because two unrelated points that I made, which he had heard twice now, were chosen in the wrong order. But if he hears one sentence for the third time, and hears another sentence for the third time - both verbatim, simply in a different order - he is now convinced?

This is not how conversations work. It felt much more like an old text-based interface, finding out that the command prompt specifically wants "use key on door," after "open door" and "unlock door" both didn't work. The mechanics of progression are painfully, distractingly transparent. You are not allowed to proceed to the all-important, world-fate-deciding decision until you play the stupid word game for which your conversational partner expressed mild interest.

Another point that Subsurface had in its favor, which Quarantine doesn't, is the presence of actual nuance in which outcome would be the best one. In Quarantine, any and every point in favor of a hostile and tribal approach is immediately refutable. You have one approach that has potentially huge upsides and very unlikely downsides, and not pursuing this approach will likely result in distastrous consequences - and you have already seen evidence that this is the case. And you have another approach that boils down to ignoring all of that in favor of arrogance and hostility.

That Bithell would choose this time and this political climate to "both sides" the question of whether to shoot first and ask questions later or to not do that is inexplicable. In my first playthrough, acting as the top-ranking character, I was railroaded into picking the least-qualified, least-trustworthy, least-likable character in the game to act as my diplomat for an extremely sensitive situation and was presented with NO ALTERNATIVES.

This was, to borrow a phrase from Yahtzee, "pants-on-head" stupid. If you were to argue that decision was made with incomplete information, I would ask how we're expected to believe that the full extent of previous conversations had not been monitored and recorded on a CLEARLY technologically-advanced vessel with real-time AI processing and translation of different languages.

You know how some games have "escort missions" where you need to protect a dumb-as-bricks NPC while they seem to actively move toward their destruction? Quarantine Circular is like that, except you're selecting the least-terrible option of three terrible options that an NPC is considering, only to discover that those terrible options aren't actually options, they're a checklist. And you chose the least-terrible option first, but it gets worse from there. But that doesn't matter, because the dissatisfying ending has been predetermined anyway.

Quarantine Circular is as inexplicably poorly executed as it is inexplicably poorly written, and it's an absolute shame that this is the successor to the quite likable Subsurface Circular. Not recommended.

AER is a relaxing, low-key game to unwind with in 20-40 minute stretches.

It's not an action game by any stretch of the word; most of the game is spent flying through beautiful low-poly landscapes and reading paragraphs of in-game lore.

Grab it if you want a chill way to spend an evening.

I recently finished this game after a long hiatus, stemming from frustration with its difficulty.

All of the complaints about its difficulty are totally valid. Here's what I recommend to ease you into the game:

• Start with Rogue mode, not Career mode. Everything you acquire in Rogue mode is free, which takes away the pressure of finances.
  
• Unlock the "Rook" suit as quickly as possible. It has 15 health and comes with a FIX-10 powerup, which lessens the pressure of health.
  
• Prioritize disabling Repair systems first. This means any systems you destroy will stay destroyed, which lessens the pressure of time.
  
• Once you do start Career mode, remember there is ABSOLUTELY NO IN-GAME BENEFIT to completing the last level with a big stack of surplus cash left over. The only benefit to having spare finances is that they serve as extra "lives" in case you fail, but it is FAR FAR more efficient to have a successful first attempt with a bigger budget than a successful second attempt with a smaller budget. Your goal should be to BREAK EVEN, only saving money when spending more seems totally unnecessary.

This will get you comfortable with all of the nuances of the factors in CRYPTARK and makes it less likely that you'll feel overwhelmed. It's very easy to unintentionally make this game more difficult than it has to be - fretting about how much money you're spending predisposes you to entering a battle with an under-equipped suit.

Once you are comfortable with the game, you'll find there's a lot to love. Gameplay is fast, challenging, and you feel like an absolute force of nature when all is going well. The setting, story, and characters are well-written, and the motif of the game comes across brilliantly.

I am worried that the developers haven't been very active in the past several months. I wouldn't say the game is "abandoned," but I do feel the developers' focus is on this game's sequel, GUNHEAD. As such, there are a few bugs that are notably unaddressed; for example I had to wipe my save file to re-earn two artifacts because their achievements hadn't unlocked the first time. That only cost me a few hours, but there it is.

That said, this is still a very skillfully crafted game, and I highly recommend it.

A promising game that, unfortunately, seems to have been abandoned.

There has been no activity from the developers in many months, and the existing game feels incomplete.

If you're curious, look at the stickied forum post with their Trello roadmap. There were plans to implement bugfixes and - I am not kidding - THE ABILITY TO SAVE YOUR GAME IN STORY MODE - but it looks like those aren't happening now.

Currently, if you play a level in story mode (the levels can take 2+ hours to complete) you have to do it in one shot - no saving. Also, there is an existing bug that results in all of your in-game achievements being reset. Those are serious flaws that are there to stay, now.

It's a shame, because this game was a good look at system input-output inbalances that resulted in particular resources pooling or diminishing. You might still consider picking this up if that's your jam, because there really are very few games that have that focus, but otherwise I really can't recommend it.

Good game to unwind with, in 10-15 minute intervals.

Another reviewer called it "Necrodancer without the music," which I think is an apt summary.

The biggest drawback is that monster spawners like Portal Mushrooms and Black Goo can force you to descend floors through sheer attrition.

I'd still call it a good way to spend 20 hours. Recommended.