Recent reviews by Thirdrail

In many, many ways, TemTem is an improvement on Pokemon, but it simply does not have enough monsters. It needs at least twice as many as it's got. And it's VERY grindy, which combines poorly with the lack of content. I'm almost 30 hours in, and I am so insanely tired of seeing the same ten creatures over and over and over. And, of course, like pokemon, not all of them are designed equally. Some are brilliant and cool and others are just a badly drawn squirrel. By the time you've fought your 78th battle with the badly drawn squirrel, you just want Thanos to snap his fingers and delete squirrels from the universe.

They also have some issues figuring what the hell they're doing. The devs, I mean. Like, it's an MMO. But it's all constructed like a single player RPG. And those are not actually the same thing, so it can get weird. Everything takes three times longer than it should, like an MMO. It is full of MMO time sinks. But it doesn't have an MMO amount of content, so the time sinks are even less engaging than they would be in WoW or XIV. And the cosmetic side of the game is a hyper-inflated disaster (cosmetics are the most poorly designed sector of this game by a million miles), so even just the basic act of customizing your trainer is constantly c*ck blocked by MMO time/money sink mechanics. And it's not an MMO, at all, you never interact with other players, the overwhelming majority of the time, you're just playing a single player RPG with the ability to see other people playing the same single player RPG, so it's basically a single player RPG with a bunch of clutter.

And, sadly, the TemTem people don't have enough good ideas of their own to really make their own game. TemTem directly copies some of the most exhausting parts of pokemon, like EV training, and 1 in 23098546934 chances of finding a shiny. These are ideas that COULD have been improved upon, drastically (the way TemTem replaces PP with the much better stamina bar), but instead Team TemTem just copy/pasted a bunch of garbage Game Freak ideas into their game.

Which, again, this game just doesn't know what it wants from itself. It is an MMO or a single player RPG? Does it want to be Pokemon or does it want to be TemTem? TemTem does not seem to know the answer to these questions, and until they figure out, this game is not quite ready for prime time. And it's not like Pokemon can't be improved. Monster Hunter Stories 2 is another non-Pokemon "pocket monsters" game, and it makes some huge improvements on the pokemon experience, while having a great story, lots of cool monsters, wonderful mechanics, and its own distinct identity. MHS2 is a pokemon game that is far better than actual pokemon game. So, what TemTem is trying to do can definitely be done. TemTem just isn't doing it.

(As I write this, the game is at 0.9.4, and launching for real in three months. I haven't completely given up on TemTem, I just wish it were more fun. If the game improves, I will edit this review to reflect that.)

I wasn't super impressed with this one on the Steam Deck. It has some massive performance issues, and mods don't work. It is a great game, obviously, but I'm reviewing stuff purely in the context of the Steam Deck these days.

Runs well on Steam Deck.

I always hear this described as an "FTL-like" and that's sort of misleading. It's like the structure of FTL applied to a gameplay model that has more in common with Pokemon Snap than anything. Whatever you do, it involves aiming your camera at something and keeping that thing in frame until a little bar fills up. Targeting, navigation, communication, everything... it always leads right back to you holding down a trigger and aiming your camera at something to get a lock. Which, frankly, I did not find very engaging. (It's like someone set out to make a far more ambitious game, and when they realized they weren't going to get that done, they lashed everything they had to their single functional piece of gameplay - aiming for a lock-on - and pressed the Launch Game button.)

But it does run well on the Deck, so that "Verified" is accurate on this one.

Excellent on Steam Deck. Runs well, looks great, and is an all-around fun game, assuming you like shooting things and navigating mazes. This has been my favorite Steam Deck game so far, and I'm not even a huge Doom fan.

I mean, what little there is to New World is briefly enjoyable, but I just can't think of an honest way to recommend an MMO that has zero story and zero charm. If you want an MMO, FFXIV is much better than this game will ever be, and if you want an online survival/crafting game, Conan Exiles does all the same stuff as New World, but better. The only good reason to get involved with New World is the PvP aspect of it, but even there, you're looking at a wonky, half baked system that excludes ten players for everyone who gets to participate, and I can think of many, many other PvP experiences that are more engaging than this one, including some that are on mobile devices. I will say this: if you feel the need to play this game, do it sooner, rather than later, because two years from now this game is going to be an unintelligible quilt of nonsense, like Black Desert Online is today.

Maybe. That is the correct answer, which Steam will not let me choose.

Would you recommend this game to other players? Maybe.

Root is easily the most counter intuitive game I have ever encountered in all my years of playing games. If you have any previous experience playing war games, in any format (digital or table top), almost everything you know is wrong. It's all presented as woodland warfare, but in reality, it's more of a racing game, because you're not really trying to win battles or control the map or defeat opposing factions, so much as trying to do your thing faster than everyone else does their thing. The other team can control two thirds of the map, and you can still win by collecting blueberries fast enough. (That's a joke example; collecting blueberries would make far more sense than some of the things you can do for victory points in Root.) It's a weird game. I've both won and lost matches without having any real idea what I was doing, particularly with the Woodland (aka Rebel) Alliance, the game's most obtuse and baffling faction.

What Root (PC) is best at, honestly, is letting you try an expensive, hard to find, board game before you spend a fortune on it and/or go crazy trying to find a physical copy. My (educated) guess is that for about 90% of players, this pc version is the right version of Root, if a version of Root they must have.

For the record, if this game were any more than $15, I would have expressed my "maybe" as a "NO", but since the stakes are so low, particularly compared to the permanently out-of-stock and thus wildly overpriced board game it's based on, I'm willing to err on the side of "yes".

Wingspan is like sitting in a bathtub full of baby seagulls while someone massages your scalp with a pair of soothing prairie chickens.

I DO recommend Far Cry Primal, but only with a bundled set of disclaimers, caveats, and concessions. Let's cover those first...

1) Ubisoft/Uplay. An understandable dealbreaker for many gamers. You have to be signed in to Uplay and Steam to play, even though Uplay is a useless ghost town everyone hates. But Ubisoft doesn't care. Because they're Ubisoft. Being THE WORST is just what they do. Sometimes I try to imagine what the Ubi offices must be like, and when I do, I always envision a bunch of unregistered sex offenders sitting around in cubicles chomping their own sun dried feces.

"Yo, bro, you wanna bite of my mookie stick?"
"Naw, bro, I got a peanut allergy, I best chomp my own."

So, instead of drowning this collection of human detritus in the nearest bathtub or waterlogged old tire, you have to give them $60. Assuming you possess a human soul, this will make you feel dirty. #foreverunclean

2) The core game, played on default settings, is just another crummy, shallow, hand hold-y Far Cry game. If you've played one, you've played them all. The spear and the dingo won't change that.

3) Technical issues abound. From what I can surmise, Primal inherited some pretty massive frame rate and memory leak problems from Far Cry 4. My rig overpowers Primal by miles, and yet there have been many times when I could only play for half an hour, before crippling frame rate issues forced me to restart. Sometimes I'd make it all the way to a couple of hours, but most of those forced resets landed in the 45 to 75 minute zone. Ubisoft was, of course, too busy a'chompin' to offer any tangible assistance, despite my requests for help. Luckily, I was saved by a kid on youtube, who had posted a video about how to tweak the problems away in the .ini and nvidia control panel. That was a complicated hassle in its own right, but I was lucky enough to have a set up very similar to the one in the video, and in the end, it did fix my issues. Completely. There's no gaurantee that's going to work for you, but, hey, feel free to utter a prayer to whatever gods you worship and take the leap, if you're feeling frisky.

And now you say, ok, Third, I get it, and I'm still potentially willing to navigate this circus of failure if there's a fun game on the other side of it, where I get to run around as a cave man!

And I say to you, excelsior!! For those that survive the many trials of the feces chompers can find something very special at the end of their stinky, half broken rainbow.

In Survival Mode (which was added post launch), with almost all of the interface turned off, Far Cry Primal becomes a fascinating and unique experience. It's just you and the wilderness.

You have to eat, and sleep and stay warm. It's survival-light, really, but that's the correct setting for what's going on here. Unlike many of the true survival games, where survival mechanics overwhelm everything else, Primal's realism has a much lighter touch. The food and shelter considerations only add to the organic feeling of being there, among the Wenja (your tribe), without ever hijacking the experience.

Organic. In almost every circumstance, organic is what Primal does best. The combat, for example. In a game with a spear, a club, and a bow, the combat is never going to be the centerpiece. And it's not. Fighting feels functional, at best. I find that accurate. You're a bunch of primitive hunter/gatherers, not ice age warlords, and the combat reflects the fact that you're using primitive hunting tools to engage in warfare, at the times where warfare happens. The big game changer of interpersonal conflict is not a grand contraption like a massive rocket launcher, or the guidance lens for an orbital laser array, but, simply, fire. Good old fire. It's what keeps the wolves at bay.

In this case, literally. All of the conflict in Primal takes place on a steep incline. A couple of wandering tribesmen are easily dispatched with a few jabs of your spear. Encounter a little pack of fussy dingos and they are likewise fodder. In these types of fights, the game can seem too easy. But add just a few more tribesmen, or substitute a trio of wolves for those three dingos, and you've gone from academic to intense. Add a village. Meet the wolves at night, in unfamiliar terrain, far from the nearest campfire. Now we're all the way to overwhelming, and we haven't even reached the game's true leviathans: big animals. You don't want to make them angry. A wooly rhino or a bear will come down on you like an angry mountain. I've never been killed faster than that time I thought it would be a good idea to shoot an arrow at a moose. The hooves were real. It was like being the floor at Riverdance.

Luckily, most of the animals are only hostile if you mistreat them, and most predators can be tamed, assuming you can isolate them from their pointy friends, and you've been keeping up with the homework at wild kingdom charm school. The taming is a lot of fun, if vaguely reminiscent of pokemon. Tougher animals need to be worn down before you bait them, but once you get them interested in the free snack, it tends to go pretty well. A lot of the joy in Primal comes from these furry friends. They're fun to pet. And since you've got the interface turned off, they're also vital to exploring safely, as their growls and yelps provide a kind of sketchy biological radar. It's another great example of how beautifully organic the experience of playing Primal can be. Correctly optioned, you're never looking for an icon, or following a trail of magic waypoint lights. You're being there, in the forest, scanning foliage for danger, listening to your companion for clues, listening to the myriad calls of the wild around you, deciphering what feels like a breathing world on its own terms, in its own language. It's a wonderful, unique experience.

There is a story, and it's a fairly simple one, befitting of the simple cave folk it concerns. There are a few named NPCs, and what they lack in numbers they make up for in sheer lunacy, most of the time. Without spoiling the game's scripted moments, I will simply say that they are a fairly memorable group of people, with similarly memorable interactions. There are collectibles to stalk, and rare beasts with different pet skills, better pet stats, or, just finer pelts. Your village can be upgraded and expanded as you find and recruit more Wenja. Aside from a few NPCs, they don't really interact, but they're fun to watch in an ant farm kind of way; the villagers without real speaking parts get up to all kinds of domestic shenannigans as they pursue their daily lives. And there is the owl, your friend and totem, who would be useless in the default game, had we not agreed to kill that interface and play survival mode. In our version of the game, where no icon pops up in your HUD to inform you of nearby people, quests, and locations, the owl, with his flight and keen eyesight, is an invaluable scouting tool. (And a lot of fun to inhabit and fly.)

I feel as though I've said almost everything that needs saying here, so I'll close with a few notes on killing the interface, because you probably want most of it turned off, but not all of it...

Leave your health bar on. If you turn your pet's health bar off, you can still tell when it's injured because you will have an option to heal it. Your health bar has no in-world equivalent, so if you turn it off, you have no idea when to heal yourself. Leave the environmental prompts on. If you don't, you'll spend ridiculous amounts of time on simple things like looting or trying to align for grapple throws. And finally, leave the thing on that tells you what you're picking up. You kind of need to know what resources you're accumulating, and even if you didn't need to know, it's still silly to suggest that you wouldn't know what you're putting in your own bag.

***A quick thanks/credit to my friend Matt, who coined "unregistered sex offender".

I would wait. Two to six months from now, this game will either be dead from lack of players and/or not being Overwatch, or barely surviving because Gearbox came to their senses and made it free to play. Either way, you're better off waiting. It's not a bad game, but it's not a particularly good game either. The character designs range from interesting to idiotic, but all of them are utterly uninspired in terms of functionality, the combat is flat and two dimensional compared to any game with a decent map designer, and it needs *at least* four times as many multiplayer maps as it has currently to even reach the minimum variety requirements of a shooter. Are you the parent of someone who worked on Battleborn? If the answer is no, then I promise you, there is nothing here you need to rush to see.

The Hero Shooter/MOBA Shooter is going to be a wildly oversaturated genre by the end of 2016, and Battleborn is not going to be one of the winners of the inevitable battle royale that will ensue. Not with a $60 price tag, and not in anything like its current state.

*** If you find this review short, or less than comprehensive, it's because of my continuing efforts to refine game reviews for the modern era. As gamers, we need to move forward. Imagine if every time a movie critic reviewed a romantic comedy, they started by explaining what a romantic comedy was in the first place. It would be both moronic and excruciating. Yet, that's exactly how most video game reviews are still written.

My goal is to only tell you the things you might not know already, or to offer a perspective you might not have considered. In a world saturated with screenshots and let's play videos you don't need me, or anyone else, to explain Battleborn (or any game) from the ground up. No more than you need someone to explain what a science fiction movie is before you watch Star Wars.

Stranded launched with a major bug in the raft. That was Friday. On Tuesday, the devs showed up with the hotfix. Not only did they fix the raft, they improved and patched a whole laundry list of stuff. And added whales! Attentive and competent.

Why is this the first thing I'm telling you about Stranded? Because it's Early Access, which means "Dev Attentiveness" is everything. I couldn't even think of reviewing this game until we'd seen them in action, at least once. Now we have seen them in action, and it was quite impressive. Not unlike the game itself.

Stranded is a beautiful little shipwrecked simulator. It's very basic right now, but what's here is all well done, and they've got some clever ideas.

Crafting, for example, forgoes the usual subscreen, and revolves around you piling up the materials on the ground, in physical proximity. Want a spit to cook by your campfire? You can't just build a spit and place it. You can only do it if the materials are right there, next to the fire. It's tactile. It's vaguely clunky, but it's very organic. You feel like you're really standing there, trying, like Robinson Crusoe, to forge a life out of sticks and palm fronds.

The islands are another interesting design choice. They're very small, and fairly anemic. Sticks and rocks and Yuca twine. The vast majority of the game is actually out there, under the water, with the sharks. Old shipwrecks and reefs and lost containers and such. The sharks are scary. If you're from the ocean/shark phobia branch of unreasonable fears, like myself, you will find the sharks, and their obligatory accompanying obo (edit: piano) music, genuinely terrifying. The sum of all this is that you're in a hyper relaxing tropical island coconut eating game, but if you want to get anything done, you have to get in the water, and play an intensely stressful horror game with roaming bull and tiger sharks. Neat stuff.

It's all gorgeous, as the screenshots suggest. You'd never know the title was indie, or early access, by glancing at it. I thought the whales were good news, not just because whales are cool, but because it shows us that these devs are invested in their wildlife. Anyone who's played The Forest can attest to how much a robust ecosystem adds to a setting like this one.

At this point, I only have one major complaint, and that's the ocean. The ocean is too calm. It's beautiful, and the part where it has depth and you're constantly trying to figure out what's below you is amazing and immersive, but you're way off in the pacific someplace, and sea is calm as can be. Even the Gulf Coast of Florida has itty bitty waves. After the great rolling oceans of Assassin's Creed Black Flag, and the slightly less mountainous but still very rolling seas of this game's own indie cousin, Salt, the planar ocean of Stranded is like a dead rat in the punch bowl. In most games, it wouldn't matter so much, but the ocean is the star of Stranded; it rarely, if ever, leaves center stage. The fact that it is lifeless as a dish towel never stops feeling wrong.

Aside from that, I can't think of anything to complain about. Had they not just introduced the whales, I would worry about the sharks being too large and scary, and wish for a wider variety of sharks, including all the relatively pleasant ones that fill the real oceans. (Back in the 70s, sharks hired Steven Spielberg as a PR guy, and it was kind of a disaster. It would be nice if Stranded helped them dig out of that, a little.) But, whales. There's probably all kinds of critters coming. If there are still no nice sharks a year from now, I'll come edit this paragraph.

TL;DR - Great start on a shipwrecked simulator. Devs seem to care. All is beautiful. Oceans too flat. Sharks need friends. Safe to buy.