Recent reviews by Unimprezzed

I own a MM-76 Accelerator Rail Gun for station defense, since that's what Trioptimum intended.

Four cyborgs break into the Bridge.

"WHAT THE DEVIL" as I grab my dermal stim patches and my trusty railgun.

Blow one of the converted crewmember's torso apart, he's deactivated on the spot.

Draw my LG-XX Plasma Rifle on the second lobotomized servant of SHODAN.

Misses him entirely because it's experimental and nails a nearby Virus Mutant.

Have to resort to the Tachyon Mining Beam located at the lower level of Citadel Station.

"TALLY HO, LADS"

Two of the intruders are vaporized in the blast, the beam keeps going and clips a city on Earth.

Draw my laser rapier and charge the last terrified former human.

As a cyborg's kneecap, he will serve SHODAN well.

Just as Trioptimum intended.

A good evolution simulation game with some problems:
1. It's obviously still in Alpha, with a lot of features not implemented or have been implemented with bugs.
2. The game is a bit unstable and can crash.
3. The biggest one: The game has been abandoned by its developer. The last update was in 2020.

While it's certainly a fun game to do terrible, terrible things to artificial lifeforms and see if they adapt to it or not, it's unintuitive, broken, and mostly unfinished. It doesn't have a lot of depth and it can get repetitive after a while. In my experience, I'd try to modify the lifeforms that I'd want to create, only to see them die instantly because they couldn't eat, or be so exhausted by the act of breathing that they'd have little energy to do anything else. None of the values you can edit make much sense and there's no scaling to give the player a better idea as to what certain values mean. A simple tutorial beyond the tooltip for each value would have been nice.

I'd recommend it as a fun little game if it were $15 less and if its developer were keeping it updated, but alas, that is not the case.

EDIT: The developer came back, but hasn't posted an update since 2022. The points in my original review still stand.

Y'know that game that came out years and years ago? What was it? Something involving the radioactive decay of unstable isotopes? Anyway, this one is basically that one, except with better graphics, voiceacting, sound design, and AI, an expanded story, and all the tedious parts removed or modified. A labor of love, by fans, for fans.



One more thing: Xen doesn't suck anymore! It's an other-worldly experience in this game. Also, the final boss isn't a pushover who teleports you to another room when you hurt him.

How is this still being sold? This game had promise when it was still being developed, but Badland Studio hasn't been around since at least 2015. The game is dead, and still it's being sold on Steam.

Edit 3-1-2020: I did some further digging, and the story behind this game just keeps getting better and better. So apparently, rather than finish the game and deliver on Kickstarter backers, the developers wanted to generate revenue for a "side project" they were working on.

What was this side project?

A physical game store in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I'm not even joking. This actually happened.

Because of the *brilliant* choice to start a physical game shop in an era where online sales predominate, they went under and now that game shop is no more.

So basically, if you bought this game, enjoy your abandonware that was used as a scam to fund a defunct game shop. If you kickstarted this, oh man do I feel sorry for you.

It was a pretty good game. A shame that *every* game these days needs to be a "game as a service" meaning that when they don't want to support the game anymore they can just shut the servers down and leave you with a game that you can't play anymore.

This is an example of why "games as a service" needs to be banned with extreme prejudice.

Peter Molyneux has a track record of overpromising and under-delivering. In this case, he promised something revolutionary and delivered nothing. No, less than nothing. He promised another game alongside this one that was also abandoned. Their last update was in 2015, and it's been radio silence since then.

You play as a god of something (what you're the god of is never explored) and you start with your first few followers and expand outward into a new untamed world. You gain new powers as your people become more advanced, and can encounter hostile factions along the way. Sounds interesting, right?

Well, yes... But not really. You gain Belief from your followers, and to do anything in the game, you have to spend it. This would not be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the Terrain tool gobbles Belief at an alarming rate and is extremely finicky. It will either not respond to your dragging, or it will over-respond and end up wrecking that small town your followers made. Also, the game was meant to be a "Freemium" game, and it shows. Everything takes a long time to complete (a single large house can take 20 minutes), but you can speed up most actions with "gems," or the game's premium currency. Once you unlock farming, all buildings require grain and belief, and since grain can take two hours to grow...

Yeah, it's basically Black and White with the same wait-to-play mechanics of Dungeon Keeper Mobile. I'm giving it two thumbs down, but I'd give it more if I had more than two hands with which to show my displeasure.

At the time of this reveiew, it has been less than two months since the release of this hardware, so thing may have changed since this review.

Interestingly, the Steam Controller does not appear to have a lot of *official* developer support at this time. However, the fact that the user can map functionality to any of the multitude of buttons and control axes, along with the availibiliy of community mappings, makes this less of a problem. Furthermore, games that were built with the Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller in mind support the Steam controller as one of those controllers. In addition, the gyroscopes and accelerometers inside the controller provide something on par with the current console generation controllers. You'd be hardpressed to find a game pad for its price that has this level of control.

Now for the quality of the controller. It feels like a $50 controller. The controller feels sturdy, well built, and is kind of heavy, as though they worked to cram as much hardware inside the controller without leaving much space left over inside it. What I'm trying to say is that the Steam controller does not feel like a cheap controller at all. Don't be fooled by it only having one analog stick on it; it has two trackpads that have similar range of movement to an analog stick.

Overall, I love the hardware, as you'd be hardpressed to find a similar controller of similar quality at this price. Even my mainstay for periphrial hardware, Logitech, does not offer anything remotely like this. It takes some getting used to if you're coming at it from a Xbox360 / PS3 / Xbox One / PS4 controller scheme, but it'll grow on you after a few hours and then you'll figure out how to remap the controls to be more to your liking. Point is, I highly recommend this controller and hope to see more of it in the future.