Recent reviews by carbohydrated caterpillar

Devs have been silent for nearly a year. Afaik it's a studio composed of possibly only one person, and they had some personal issue in 2019 which made them delay the Village update until Oct of 2020. Content dropped at a snails pace before then, anyways. At this point it's safe to say we're not getting any more updates and development is done.

No problem. Life happens, however the game is definitely not worth buying in its current (and final) state. The dev promised the game would include much more than it does, the store page is quite misleading for new buyers.

The lowest it seems to go on sale for is $13.99, which is why I'd recommend sailing the high seas to experience this game. It's worth downloading and checking out the but there's really nothing beyond that.

Game has great core mechanics, but you can experience everything in an hour. Worth $5 and not much more. Even a rudimentary level editor would increase the game's value/replayability greatly, but anything like that is absent from what you get.

game takes less than 10 mins to complete and is really stupid, but hey it's free

among us

AI is rigged in your favor on the easier towns, then is very clearly rigged against you on the harder towns. They'll fold at tiny bets easily whenever you have good hands, and bet super high when you're not strong/attempting to bluff.

Don't know why it couldn't just be fair across the entire game, it'd be much more fun that way. AI seems to know what you have most of the time.

This is a 10 year old game, so I'm not sure why I'm even reviewing it.

I have absolutely no clue how anyone could possibly gain any enjoyment or satisfaction whatsoever out of playing this game.

WHO enjoys playing this? How do people get entertainment out of it? I'll never understand.

this game makes me so horn e that i want to drink 7 glasses of water on a tuesday

Odyssey Update: Changing to negative. Odyssey sucks




The base gameplay loop has a lot of content that's mostly repetitive after you've played 100+ hours, but still greatly enjoyable for a first-time player. There's a steep-ish learning curve in terms of ship management, upgrades, and docking which can be overwhelming for new commanders. If you're purely minmaxing, there's nearly no reason to do anything other than mine asteroids, despite heavy nerfs. Combat and most other missions give you a fraction of what you make mining.

The gameplay experience you get with ED isn't really replicated anywhere else. I'll pull an IGN and say it really makes you FEEL like you're piloting a spacecraft in the future.

The game has a great story, there's an overarching large-scale narrative that spans the entire playerbase, and the Elite universe has nearly 40 years of incredibly detailed lore.

The developers are just so lame in the way that they barely *actually do* anything in regards to this. They sit on their massive pile of narrative content like a dragon hoarding gold. They've been on a steady pace releasing one or two big features/narrative exposition dumps a *year* since 2015. Imo this isn't really acceptable for a games-as-a-service model, especially when DLCs are a hefty price. The last DLC "season pass" was $30 in 2015, which added one or two features a year for the next 2 years. It's quite insane that a studio the size of Frontier (~600 employees) have such a slow release schedule.

TLDR core gameplay loop is great, includes a lot of grind but it's quite fun and unique. Expect to get a good chunk of time out of the content that's included in the game when you buy it, then check back once a year ish for pitifully small content drops. A ton of untapped potential in this game/universe that we all hope will be done justice someday.

Entire game is literally just bots going all-in on every hand. I'd imagine if you get marginally above the starting amount of money there are actual players, but for a f2p player it's completely unplayable.

I love weird and niche RPGs. I love FPS. I love Source games and mods.

I don't like this game. Its campaign feels more like you're playing the empty shell of a game than an actual game, it's very hard to explain. Levels are massive and empty, mostly containing waves of randomly spawning enemies rather than fixed encounters.

Later-game you can do some pretty cool stuff with abilities, but the gameplay loop pretty much remains the same.

Also some QoL stuff like an atrocious saving system and some missing options usually present in Source games

(Contains spoilers)

This is baby's first VR game. And although it kind of needs to be, it's really disappointing. If you're an inexperienced VR user, you'll likely think this game is god's gift to man. I don't fault you for that, but this game is certainly not worthy of most of the praise it receives.

Yes, the art and design are amazing. This is without a doubt the best looking VR game that currently exists. Sound design is great, visuals are great, everything that's present in the game is quite polished on the surface. The problem with this title is what's below the surface, the fact that there's nothing there.

Mechanically is where the game falls the flattest. No melee combat, no real interaction with enemies, no complex physics. You can't even pick up or manipulate ragdolls without your hands slipping off of them like a greased pig. Even being able to beat zombies up with chairs you find lying around would have made the game infinitely better. Instead, you have 3 guns with no punch or impact (the shotgun feels good sometimes, but it's still quite binary-feeling mainly due to how enemies react to it) that feel like shooting Half-Life 1 weapons in ultra HD. Enemies were quite bullet spongey on Hard, but I felt like if I played on anything lower they wouldn't pose a challenge whatsoever.

The reason for these shallow mechanics is that Valve knew that a lot of people were going to be buying their first VR headset to play this game, and didn't want to overwhelm them. This is quite fair, but they really just didn't include many things that would have made the game better across the board.

The gameplay loop consists of entering a (completely linear) area, scavenging for resin/ammo, killing typically 1-3 enemies, solving a "puzzle," then leaving. This feels great in the first couple chapters, but when you realize you're just literally going through the same motions for the entire game it starts to suck very fast. There are a few cool ideas played with like the zombie that can only hear sounds you make, but even those felt drawn out and not executed very well beyond maybe the first few minutes of experiencing them.

HL2 and its episodes were primarily gameplay oriented and didn't have much in terms of exposition or cutscenes, and HLA has even less somehow. You directly interact with a total of 5 NPCs throughout the entire game, and you only see them for a few minutes each at most. Russell does some nice worldbuilding over your radio throughout the game, but you're just listening to him talk like you'd listen to holotapes in Fallout 76.

This game barely has a story. You learn there's a superweapon in a floating ship, you play the entire game (which consists of slowly making your way to the ship,) then you enter the ship and learn that it's not a superweapon, it's Freeman. Then you release Freeman and find out he's actually G-Man. The ending of HL2 E2 is retconned and Alyx is gone, setting up a sequel. Credits roll.

Yeah, it was really damn cool to see that they addressed E2's ending in *some* way. We've all been waiting for that for 13 years, The rest of the game has absolutely no significance to the overarching Half-Life plot/lore, though, since nothing notable happens. This doesn't even matter that much, though. Half-Life games have always put gameplay first before story. If this game had stellar gameplay, the lack of much overarching story absolutely wouldn't matter nearly as much.


VR games need to be designed so they showcase all the strengths of VR, and let the player interact with the game in ways that flatscreen games do not. Half-Life Alyx is an on-rails shooter that doesn't play to nearly any of VR's strengths. When it does, it feels absolutely magical, like being able to play a piano or shooting Combine with energy orbs like a Vortigaunt. I just really wish the game had more moments like this, rather than just consisting nearly 9 hours of walking through beautifully designed abandoned buildings doing the same mundane stuff over and over again. You could play this game on flatscreen and get relatively the same experience as you would in VR.

An important footnote here is that Valve didn't fully understand their fans' expectations for this game, as important features like smooth locomotion and physical ladder climbing were only added at the tail end of the game's development cycle. I am quite confident we'll see HLA's missing features like melee and better physical interaction in their next "FPS" VR title. As much as I love VR as a medium, I truly believe Half Life 3 would be much better realized as a flatscreen game than as a VR game, unless it's completely different from HLA.

3/10