Recent reviews by Robo

Is the game fun? Yes. Do I want more people to play it? Yes.

Do I think it deserves a positive review? meh, not really?

Sure the game is fun and enjoyable, and there's no singular thing wrong with it to ruin the experience, but there are *a lot* of small and/or minor things which all add up into a lack of polish.

Most of these things aren't gameplay blockers or major annoyances, so I still can recommend it, but there are just *so many* small things adding up that I never had a chance to forget about the problems, such as:

- Unexplained deaths and/or vehicle damage: for the most part the game is quite forgiving and you don't often take 'accidental' damage, but when you do it is always severe and unintuitive or unexplained
- Unreliable part controls: putting multiple parts working together or using them in a way the game didn't expect can often lead to controls simply not working, or very weird behavior that doesn't make sense. I found myself having to *delete and re-build* and re-configure the part controls to fix it in some cases.
- Obviously wrong physics behaviors: in multiple occasions I have had situations where the physics simply break down, such as the main chassis of a solid vehicle splitting in half and rotating *instead of* the turret on the aiming servo, which somehow remains still???
- Missing keybindings and controls options: in a game all about configuring your own vehicle and the way it works, and in every other game I've seen of the genre, I expect to have simple things like being able to bind extra mouse buttons (4/5, forward and back, etc) or reconfigure all of the game's own controls.

Luckily, none of these issues were major enough to stop me from enjoying the game, so I can still click 'Yes' for Steam, but I really hope that the devs will spend some time cleaning up the edge cases and making the foundation of the game rock-solid before moving on to adding fanciful new campaigns or content.

This is a very different 'train game' from what I was expecting...

This game does very well at narrowing down the scope and getting rid of all the extra 'fluff', keeping just the interesting and relevant strategic aspects of building a train network.

What I didn't expect is how often the rails themselves as a resource were a bottleneck - unlike power or concrete or <etc>, you can't just make more by moving cargo, you have to keep towns happy over time and let them grow, so it's a unique challenge to satisfy the passengers with the limited resources you start out with.

In every other 'train game' that I'm used to, the rails themselves were almost free, extremely cheap and could be laid out en masse (e.g. just to reserve some space or plan some future expansion), so making the network ideal on the first attempt almost never happens, and you have to go back and rework old sections as demand increases gradually.

Luckily this is made fairly easy with the decent controls and construction tools, but the one part I just don't currently like is that I have to worry about placing things before a town grows into some area that I had plans for, or under some existing rails that I needed to replace.

gnorp.

heh.

minor spoilers below:

Given it's named an 'Apologue', I suppose I was expecting some sort of 'moral of the story', such as something about depleting a limited resource, becoming content with existing production, etc....
But no - it's just more shards all the way down!

Ah, who am I kidding, why would I care about morals? Keep on hitting that rock! The pile must grow!

Congratulations! You've connected every node to the network and saved the day! But where do we go from here?

What's that? They added a new node? But we've run out of addresses! With a whole 8 bits in the address space, what do we do? NAT? IP-over-Tunnet? Reverse Proxies?

How do we expand on a game that is so great *because* of it's simplicity? What comes next for a game which is so great because it's so boiled down to it's roots?

I want more, but I have no idea what that might be!

An absolute masterpiece of cooperative play, DRG retains it's creative and skillful design over many seasons and new content.

If you hear a ROCK AND STONE! in response, you know you'll be among fun company.

While I DO like the game itself so far, I DO NOT like the requirement to run an independent launcher + require extra Paradox services. I buy games on Steam because I can trust them for a cohesive and friction-free experience, having 3rd party terms and accounts is not something that should be encouraged for games on Steam. Additionally, the *external* terms include an unreasonable clause of "we can update these terms whenever without your consent or notification", which is never a good thing. It is a shame that Paradox is the only problem with this game, since the game itself has been so far enjoyable.

For Linux users: use Proton 8, Proton 9 causes crashes when attempting to use multiplayer functionality.

The dedicated server runs alright in plain old wine.

Update #1 (May 10):
The comments on this review are an interesting read if you want to hear both sides to the argument, I personally like the game *enough* that I am still playing it (so long as the terms of service don't get worse) but I just can't recommend it, because companies should not be allowed to change our legal rights without notifying us.

There's an active group on the game's discord that is doing work to port the dedicated server into a docker container and plenty of people discussing linux support there as well. The devs *do* acknowledge proton and linux users so I'm not super worried about something like anti-cheat being added in later on that would break it.

This is a reasonably good use of a DLC, cosmetic items that don't impact any core gameplay and of course, a HAT.

18 files, ~100MB

MPEG / MP3 Audio, 192kb/s CBR Join Stereo @ 48.0 kHz
Embedded cover art image/jpeg 256x256

This game is close to being good, but it's got one big flaw that is hard to deal with.

The resource and inventory management system works, but you collect resources by going slow and thoroughly, and once you proceed forward there is no way to go back and collect anything you missed. In this regard, you end up going painfully slow and taking forever making sure you've collected every last hidden floating item.

Then comes the story, combat, progression, etc... which encourage you to speed forward and progress faster, giving you a sense of urgency that is completely at odds with how the crafting and inventory system lead you to play.

The conflict between the two major parts of what made this game interesting enough to try in the first place kind of let me down. I hope they can revisit the core game design and perhaps add in alternative solutions, either to speed up item gathering (and make it difficult to miss things) or slow down the story / aggressive pacing for those who enjoy the more relaxed parts.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this game, as it's controls are absolutely horrific.

To start with, there does not even EXIST a keybinds menu, you are just forced to accept them as is, and unless you have a perfect memory, the game is 100% mouse-driven and thus absolutely sucks for me to play with wrist problems. I can't even disable edge panning or use WASD instead of arrow keys. (Which I don't have by the way! I type on a split keyboard!)

The combat system is quite intricate (as it should be), so don't expect it to be anything like other RTS games. My only prior points of comparison were along the lines of Civilization for strategy and Planetary Annihilation for RTS, and neither of them offered me any transferable knowledge about how to play this game.

Unfortunately, the controls for your army/navy/air are not great either. Tasks I thought should be simple like queuing up troops to move across water force you to come back to re-issue new orders after one step, or how you can't set the behavior for planes on a carrier until the fleet is deployed...

Overall my issues with this game far outweigh it's pros, so I only end up playing it in order to participate with friends. I am perfectly happy managing politics, economy, production, supplies, etc, but as soon as I have to actually fight anything more than a simple land border the game just doesn't feel fun due to the unintuitive controls and difficult organization of forces. I'm not a huge fan of historical war games either, so I haven't bothered to look into the modding scene at all as it just won't be worth the time investment for me.