The Signal From Tölva
I really really like this game.
It’s not without flaws. One or two of the flaws are even pretty large. But the game is still really good.
First, the good:
The game is beautiful. The world is really well-crafted and varied enough that you will almost always have something interesting to look at. In particular, the day/night cycle with its moving shadows and gorgeous night sky is really lovely. Exploring this world is a joy, and you never quite know what you’re going to come across next: Wreckage of giant robots? check. Huge ships? Check. Ancient ruins? Check. It’s all here.
– Real player with 37.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Robots FPS Games.
A moody title screen, something about hacking, and you’re in control of a robot… now what?
Tölva took a while to get into. I was sold on this game through flashy screenshots of lasers and robots… but after a very short while I noticed that the weapons are dull and the enemies behave like… well, robots, but not in a positive sense. The ironically small scale of developer Big Robot meant this game could never be completed without skimping in areas where you’d otherwise see quality and variation. Animations are stale, encounters stay the same through the whole game, new weapons bring simple stat increases that keep pace with the strength of enemy shields. You get stuck on things, you get stuck in things, often it feels as if the ground and your feet are two magnets repelling eachother.
– Real player with 37.3 hrs in game
Grow Home
A relaxing and enjoyable adventure to help a little robot complete his mission.
Grow Home is an adventure platformer where you play as a robot called BUD. The planet you come from is in danger and the only way to save it is to harvest the seeds of an alien plant. Well it’s not as easy as it sounds. BUD only has basic equipment, he can’t do much other than climb, and since the plant is on the surface and your ship is a couple of thousand meters up, you’re going to have to work for it. You soon realise the only way to get back up there and collect the seeds is to start growing the plant as high as you can, collecting a few things along the way to help you out.
– Real player with 13.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Robots Adventure Games.
So some of you may have notice some Game Grump videos coming out in the Steam Train branch for Grow Home, and after I saw what you could do in the game I wanted to buy it for myself. It most certainly did not disappoint. Everything it allows you to do is satisfying. The 100% crystal upgrade feels very worth the trouble finding every last crystal. The parachuting mechanics are lovely and work exactly like you’d expect. There are a few very subtle annoyances with the controls but that is rather to be expected with a game that prioritizes in procedural animations. For instance, when walking along a vine you’ve created, jumping or jetpacking off of it at too subtle an angle actually doesn’t work, it forces your character B.U.D. to stay directly above the vine to ensure he lands back on it. This is frustrating sometimes if you get a really sturdy feel for how to control your character and want to get off of a vine with a jetpack but do not jump directly off of the side. I’ve even had this strange wind-force push my character to a specific side of my screen when I was jetpacking well above the vine that would try to ensure my landing on it.
– Real player with 11.9 hrs in game
Ring Miner
Another great lil simulation game from Stolk! The physics are robust and the interface is intuitive. Driving around and digging through asteroids feels good, but at the moment this is mostly just a sandbox to play around in. I’m hoping more missions and things to DO will be added in the future, but even in its current form it’s a good chill-out game for messing around in while listening to some music or a podcast.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Robots Third Person Games.
Ring miner is a space mining simulator in which you control a lander and a rover. You pilot the lander around a ring of space rocks (around Jupiter), find one that looks suitable (the next one in the ring), land on it, then explore and mine elements in order to collect each one in the periodic table.
This game has complete three dimensional movement, a gravity indicator to help with analyzing landings, the possibility to completely annihilate space rocks, and what is basically an infinite amount of rocks to mine. I have not played anything like this before and I think it’s pretty unique. Check out the gameplay video to see what I mean.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
TerraTech
Any Early Access game that listens to its community is worth buying. This is one such game.
Since I’ve bought this game around 15 months ago, I’ve been in a love/hate relationship with it. I’ve gone from a positive review, to a negative review, back to a positive review, and now I’m hopefully putting my final word on this…
When I first found this game it was like the re-creation of childhood memories of playing with K’nex and legos, building starships and vehicles and battling it out. It was a concept I wanted to program into a game myself in my early adult life but still haven’t laid a finger on understanding 3D graphics. The hype was real. I look at the minimum requirements…crap. I seriously need to upgrade. I buy it anyway…it runs, choppily, and I play the hell of out for a few months and love it to pieces. I build a rather large tech I dubbed Juggernaut with an onboard scrapper, refineries, furnace generators, and delivery cannons. I clash titan to titan with twitter invasions. I’d almost say the 3 fps slideshow due to my outdated computer made it more cinematic. I studied flight for days to build a successful quadcopter. I merrily flew around the entire planet, stopping occasionally to collect loot pedestals before blasting off again.
– Real player with 318.4 hrs in game
Edit:
I want to preface by thanking everyone who has taken time out of their day to read, rate, and respond to my personal hot take on a game I have stated I do thoroughly enjoy. It fills my heart knowing that while many of you could be doing literally anything more productive than taking the opinion of another voice in the vast internet noise with anything more than a grain of salt means that my time here has not been wasted. Honestly, I was not expecting to receive a whole lot of feedback, especially from a dev themselves!
– Real player with 270.2 hrs in game
Generation Zero®
Rating: 4/10
Generation Zero has a really cool concept, but sadly gets very repetitive after a while.
All the enemy machines are creative and pretty cool, only very few of them. They do however have some variations each which gives different weapons etc.
The map is gorgeous and really looks like Sweden, but after a while you will have looted the same few houses scattered over the map hundreds of times.
Three or four times my GF and I have started this game over, but we have never been able to finish it before it gets too boring and repetitive.
– Real player with 222.4 hrs in game
This is gonna be a long review…
The Positive:
So this game like many others released in 2019 was plagued with bugs at the start, some of them game breaking. The developers have worked REALLY hard making the game better and adding more content. I only see a minor bug roughly every 12 hours of play now a days and they can usually be ignored.
The gun play feels good and breaking of the different parts/armor of robots is almost therapeutic, especially when you learn all the parts and know how to disable specific functions to make a fight easier. The story while simple feels realistic and gives you a lot of freedom to do what you want and explore where you want. The game is beautiful! It looks better than most games released this year and the atmosphere is amazing! There is a really good balance in difficulty that makes every engagement feel dangerous (at least when playing solo) and even the most crazy fights don’t feel impossible with proper planning, prep work, and knowledge.
– Real player with 180.2 hrs in game
Grow Up
Grow UP (Platformer-Adventure)
There is so much going for this game that I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I’m going to try! Grow UP assumes that we’ve played Grow Home. If you haven’t played the first game, I highly recommend doing that first (because it’s fun!), but it is not a requirement.
I was expecting the sequel to Grow Home to be the same kind of fun, quirky and delightfully-charming adventure that I enjoyed the first time around, and I was not disappointed! The basic gameplay and overall feeling of the game is the same, but the devs have included some functions and additions that beautifully expand on that which we already know, making Grow UP even more fun to play than the first game!
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Grow UP is the polished-up sequel of Grow Home. Similarily to the Portal franchise the first game was mostly just an experiment while the successor is a full-budget game. Has everything improved since our last journey with BUD the botanical research robot? Here’s a short list of pros and cons:
PROS
+A Whimsical adventure game with lots of places to explore and things to experiment with. The game is fueled by the player’s curiousity.
+Don’t need experience with the first game to be able to play this one. It’s very easy to get into.
– Real player with 17.5 hrs in game
Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This was a beautiful game. It’s a game you could theoretically finish without much effort and time, but the world, the side characters, and the cultures played so deep a part in the story that I found myself sinking 200+ hours into it and not thinking twice. There is so much here in lore picked up in scraps and holograms hidden on your travels.
The thing that stuck out to me the most here was the relationships. Helping the people of the world was as important to the story as anything else, and it comes full circle
! at the end when those people that you choose to be compassionate to (or not) show up in the final epic battle (or they don’t, depending on how you interacted with them) . There are as many opportunities to show compassion and to be human as there are to kill things. It is such a human story that sets itself apart from your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. It’s exploration and mystery as much as it is combat. It’s learning about people and cultures as much as it is learning about the machines, the world, and the secret of what Zero Dawn really is. This is not to distract from the story which was absolutely unique and incredible in how it unfolds, especially as you get closer to the heart of the truth.
– Real player with 226.4 hrs in game
Horizon Zero Dawn is an awesome and fun game, definitely up there at the top of my list of favorite games.
It feels a bit like a fusion of the Tomb Raider reboot series and The Witcher 3 to me. Many of the game mechanics seem very familiar from either of the two but are somewhere in between. The climbing especially feels like somebody wanted a TW3 like game with climbing, was inspired by Tomb Raider (or Uncharted for that matter) and implemented a light version of that. Saying this however is not to diminish what the game achieves in any way. The net result of it is a very entertaining, fun to play set of game mechanics, from combat to stealth, a bit of crafting, riding, etc. (As with the other games many of the combat subtleties you only really learn on the harder difficulties.)
– Real player with 149.3 hrs in game
Prometheus: Omex Rising
PROMΞTHΞUS is a singleplayer/cooperative game that takes place in the distant future, where humanity has taken an endeavor to a distant sci-fi planet, known as Orpheus. Here the player fights super-advanced and intelligent AI that reacts based on your actions within the game. Survival is the key element in PROMΞTHΞUS.
Redaxium
I believe the there’s just too much shit in this world. Whether it’s video games or cereal, there are endless variations on the same few basic concepts. This has made us complacent: we stay squarely in the middle of our comfort zone, scared of the unknown, unwilling to explore the outer rims of this rosebud of life. Well how about for once you strap in, jack off, take a chance and head straight into the danger zone? Welcome to Redaxium, population: you. Perhaps you’ll discover yourself there. Perhaps you’ll discover that the game sucks. Does it really matter? Only one way to find out.
– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game
5089: The Action RPG
Quick note to anyone who hasn’t played the previous games, I mostly intended this review for people who’ve already played 3089. However, you do NOT need to have played any of the previous games to enjoy this one, and if you dont care about story I would actually suggest just skipping to this one (or 4089 if you prefer the look of the gameplay). I do have an old review of a previous game on my page that describes the style of gameplay, but I don’t no how helpful that would be when there are plenty of better reviews on this page. The grappling hook/hoverboard/other movement options are all REALLY fun to play around with while taking potshots at enemies, so if you want you could play it like Just Cause. Oh, and pro tip: If it ever does feel like it’s getting grindy, do something to progress the story, kill a Surveyor for surprises, or change the type of equipment/playstyle you use.
– Real player with 299.1 hrs in game
5089 is an open world game, and as far as I can tell is effectively infinite. Regions are measured in levels and there’s always a higher-level area to rush into. Beyond that, the player is free to take any avenue they want to get the job done.
I’m a run’n’gun player. Get the long-range energy launcher, a low-velocity high-damage weapon, and have at the enemy. I spend a lot of my time running about and shooting. Or, just as often, I’m slipping across the landscape in a hoverboard, Floating on the surface and cruising at whichever direction I set. Only aircraft are able to keep up with me while I’m using the hoverboard, which is important when it’s time to turn tail. An important fundamental in the face of some dangerously explosive enemies.
– Real player with 161.6 hrs in game