Recent reviews by PacketCharmer

I keep trying. I keep trying with mods, without mods, with alternate starts, with overhauls, and I've slowly come to the conclusion and then confirmed that conclusion: The only way to enjoy this game is to either be on drugs so you don't mind the repetitive sameyness or to be so depressed that it doesn't even register because you're dissociating so hard.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on Dungeon Painter Studio. First, let's be clear: The software had a 1.0 version and now a 2.0 version. They're very different but also very similar in certain ways. This review mostly speaks about the 1.0 version.

So, why do I have mixed feelings? Simply put, the program is in the strange position of being good enough to use but bad enough that you never feel fully comfortable using it. I've created dozens of maps over many, many hours at this point. My groups have always praised the high quality of maps I'm able to produce and making custom maps is the best way to tightly integrate your story and map designs together so they boost each other. At the same time, I've spent at least one hour out of every forty trying to get something to just behave. A lot of the times the program needs to be rebooted just to make it work right. Sometimes even basic tools like the floor-rectangle tool won't work right, and the only fix is to save, completely kill the program, and reboot it. It's not a long process, and once you know what you're doing you get a feel for how often you have to reset, but this is sort of emblematic of the problems with DPS 1.0: Issues with stability and polish hold it back from its potential a *lot*. Polish is a huge issue across both versions, with unclear dialogue boxes, vague instructions, and sometimes unintuitive workflows. So as far as direct user experience/design, things aren't great, but they're not bad enough for me to say they're *bad*. Like a tempermental lock, you can never forget that the flaws are there, but it never misbehaves so bad you really consider replacing it.

Now, leaving UX behind. Art assets. The real killer is that art assets from the community are enormous. People are putting out enormous amounts of content for free. While some of this is repackaged art (so don't sell your maps!), a lot of it seems to be unique and very coherent, especially content from FA. The art is great. However, adding your own art isn't really obvious on how you'd do it, and it's more complicated than it seems to be worth - I wound up just sticking my own file into the workshop folder because it was much easier than making my own distributed content. So "my library" is a feature I'd really like to see going forward.

Floor textures are sadly set in stone. You can't really seem to rotate the textures or offset them, which means that a number of more interesting possibilities like arrows converging on a point are only possible if those arrows are objects, not part of a floor texture.

Lastly, object positioning is good but not perfect. There are pretty severe issues with precision, which doesn't come up super often, but it happens often enough to be something I remember.

I haven't used 2.0 very much. Why's that? Because it's feature-incomplete. While 2.0 has lighting, it doesn't even have all of the tools that 1.0 had, so I can't really afford to work with 2.0 right now.

Despite all of this, and despite my needing to use Photoshop and Paint Tool Sai alongside this to really get the job done, I have to give this software my recommendation. Not because it's perfect, but because it can get there, and most of all because out of all of the tabletop mapping solutions I've tried, this one is just the most usable and least annoying. So, make of that what you will, and happy mapping.

Excellent for drinking soda - but it was really a great game before all this sillyness.

It's like dying light, except it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful where DL is actually pretty good. QTEs galore, bad combat, bad movement, bad menus.

Wow. What a ride. Payday 2, for a while there, was actually a decent game. Not so much anymore with the Crimewave 2015 update. Adding in a system of crates and keys alongside their already much-too-prolific DLCs, completely nerfing melee weapons, making money much harder to get... Sorry, Payday, but I spent plenty of money on you already, I don't particularly feel like spending a ton of money on "Safes" and "Drills" to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ weapon skins that reward your new pay to win strategy.

If I could get a refund on this game and all the DLCs that I bought, I would.

Unturned

The graphics aren't amazing. Rather, they're simple and don't pretend to be otherwise, and their relative simplicity and the colorful nature of the game help to contribute to that DayZ-reverse-aged-until-it's-a-primary-schooler vibe it tends to give off. Zombies have a variety of clownish and normal faces, just like the players. Darkness is dark enough to matter without being completely unmanagable and daylight is a welcome sight. Like many other survival games, low health tends to give you a heavy desaturated effect and there's nothing like the relief of suddenly being restored to color by horking down a few bottles of advil. Like many other voxel games, some of the features can be poorly optomized: I wouldn't turn foliage off of its default setting, for example, unless you're not playing on a potato like mine, if you value your framerate.
The zombies, unlike in many games, are faster than you unless you sprint. Also unlike you, they can jump and move without running out of stamina. I'm not sure the decision for the moment to have jumping take 10 stamina is the best, but it does serve to force you to carefully strategize when and where to use your precious yellow lightning bar. Zombies will only slowly catch up, so it's possible to run halfway down and then let it regenerate before having to run again.
Melee in this game is a little weird. The voxel engine means you'd better be facing your target directly at all times to get a good amount of depth perception, and like many other zombie games where you can move and attack at the same time, any situation can be greatly improved by your good friend the 's' key. Backing up and smashing in the necrotic conga line that's forming with your trusty fire axe is a frequently used tactic when you simply don't have enough bullets to deal with all of the little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I wouldn't say it's a perfect system, fighting without a reach weapon - that is to say, fighting barehanded - will hardly ever go in your favor, but that's something of a given with zombies.
Ranged combat in this game is fast, smooth, and responsive. Unturned doesn't bother with realistic weapon sway or any such thing so it's very simple to just tap the skulls off of everyone in one of those aforementioned shuffling conga lines, and things feeling quick and responsive as they do doesn't hurt. Like Crysis, there's a button you can hold to quickly swap attachments, ammo types, and that sort of thing - quickly changing your battle rifle from a 6X scoped weapon with a thick muzzle brake to a suppressed close quarters weapon with a tactical flashlight and holographic sight is fast and smooth, and shooting from the hip is feasible without making aiming down the sight valueless.
Inventory
Ah, grid inventory systems, the bane of my life. Unturned starts you off with 4 inventory slots, and you'd better like those 4 because that's all you get until you can find a little student's mustard yellow knapsack and shove cans of food into it. The inventory, being an inventory with limits, is probably the game's weakest point. Items are right clicked to be swapped with, mouse wheel doesn't scroll consistently and crafting can be buggy if you don't have spare inventory slots to work with. Once you get one of the larger travel packs, though, things become relatively painless, though it's equally annoying that you're required to level up your crafting before you can make inventory storage items and place them down.
Crafting in this game is a little iffy. Like many games in development, they haven't included a way to discover recipes within the game and unlike the much more serious and painful cousing 7 days to die, don't include any way to quickly recraft a well-used recipe. The amount of inventory space required to craft everything is high, so you'd better be prepared to throw lots of items on the ground until you've got some crates and then a chest or some lockers.
The worst part of these, and the only place it goes from klunky to downright bad, is in how reloading magazines happens. To reload a mag you craft it and a box of bullets together in your crafting menu, or two boxes if you've gotten your filthy hands on a military rifle. However, (and this may well be fixed soon) the crafting system that normally shunts a complete item into your inventory will happily recraft rounds into the same magazine, burning through boxes until you realize what's going on. Magazines take one slot each which means if you want a rifle and three mags there goes most of your inventory space.
Early Access is less of a problem here, as the development team is highly attentive to the playerbase and is constantly polling them and fixing bugs. Some people I know won't play a game at all if it's early access but this game is either the exception that proves the rule or the proof that the rule is invalid.
Multiplayer is easily integrated, what with single player simply being running a local game server and from what I've seen it's exactly what it should be. You can host your own server with ease, pick PVP or non, change the difficulty, specify if gear from other servers should cross over to yours, and pick between maps, though the only two choices right now is a small canadian island and an arena map. More maps are planned, as the game is only in its infancy.
The existence of a gold account system is possibly the single largest other complaint I've heard. Fortunately, it seems that the benefits are 80% cosmetic and 20% hanging out on a gold-only server. You get twice as many skin options as well as a slightly tweaked UI, and access to double-loot mode for people that hate survival games. The lack of influence this has on normal games is promising and a decent way to encourage donations for perks without making it so casual nonpaying players suffer for it.