Recent reviews by Sky Render

This is a fun little distraction that takes about 4-10 hours to finish the main story (depending heavily on your strategy), and has about 20 hours overall of content to get everything and bring the whole game to an effective standstill on further progress. It has a very charming art design to it and is one of the best incremental "idle" games I've played. Highly recommended!

I'd like to preface this with a disclaimer: Final Fantasy IV is not a bad game. It's actually quite good for the era it came from. But it is incredibly, unrelentingly, undeniably linear. It is good for exactly one run through the game, and holds zero surprises for you on replays. The most exciting thing you can do at this point is use the Boosts they added in to mess with money and experience drop rates, which literally just changes how long you have to grind and nothing else. If you like RPGs where the only thing you need to really manage is levels and keeping your equipment current, then it's great and you can disregard this review. But if you want options in your gameplay, there are much better choices out there even within the same franchise.

In its current state, I cannot recommend Slime Rancher 2. Quite a lot from the first game is missing, most critically some form of automation for getting food from the gardens to your slimes. The problem with having a dozen new varieties is that you end up needing a feature like that much sooner than the you did in original game, and its absence means that your experience rapidly degrades into a slime care loop that means you never leave the conservatory. In the original you started unlocking that means (drones) around the time that the ranch got a bit overwhelming if you were collecting every slime type. In this one getting overwhelmed happens as soon as you start collecting slime types from any of the outlying areas, long before you've done any meaningful exploration. And trying to explore the world with an even somewhat full conservatory all but guarantees that you'll come back to a mess of wandering slimes at best and a Tarr outbreak that consumes most of your slimes at worst.

There's definitely potential here, but until they address the inherent problem with having so many slime types to care for, it just becomes a slime care micromanagement simulator within 4 hours of play. They don't necessarily need to reintroduce drones to solve this problem, but they do need to address it just the same. More slimes with the same fundamental gameplay loop from the first game genuinely just causes endgame problems from the first game to crop up earlier in this one.

A sublime block builder game! The plot is fun, the characters are memorable, and the flexibility is off the charts for what you can make and still have it look good. I liked it so much I bought it again on PC despite having finished it on Switch years ago, which definitely speaks volumes to how much I enjoyed it.

Initially the game crashed every 10 to 20 minutes. Turns out it doesn't like 60FPS; turning that off fixed it, as did about a dozen shader recompiles (they go faster after the first two). Not that that fixed all of the game's problems...

The cast feels rather lackluster. The plot is about on par with most Star Ocean games (ie. forgettable and often derailed). Backtracking is constant, though at least there's fast travel. None of this is a deal-breaker for series fans, of course, because it's pretty normal for the series by now.

What will be a problem for series fans, though, is this: Item Creation is a shadow of what it once was. Most of the annoying mechanics from SO3 onward (paying for IC attempts, no clear indicator of what you can get from IC even after you do it, tediously long IC sequences, etc.) remain. As well, the massive array of IC possibilities has been pared down to only 7 types, and they're unlocked painfully piecemeal as you progress through the game's story. Instead of being a core focus of the experience, it's now an afterthought.

I will say this: exploration and combat are at least entertaining. It manages to nail a lot of the Xenoblade aesthetic, which is nice. Unfortunately it lacks the charm and variety of that series.

On the whole, it's a solid 7/10 experience. Inferior to SO2 in nearly every way, but not so bad that I'd say it's not worth playing.

Absolutely the best realization of Star Ocean: The Second Story to date. It has all of the classic features that made the game stand out, tons of upgrades to those features that make them better, and loads of quality-of-life improvements that bring the game up to modern RPG standards. If you're a fan of classic action RPGs and like comprehensive item creation systems, this is a winner!

On its own this game is great. Seeing the sights of the western side of the US, making deliveries, running your trucking business, it's all good fun. With a steering wheel accessory (preferably with pedals as well), it reaches a whole new level of amazing! Highly recommended for anyone who likes long scenic drives.

An excellent successor to Subnautica! It builds nicely upon the elements of the first game and enhances them (to a degree that a lot of the accessibility features of this game got backported to the original game). If you like Subnautica, odds are good you'll also like Below Zero.

An excellent factory-building game, on an interstellar scale! It's still in development, of course, but much of what makes games like Factorio and Satisfactory so fun is here: crafting, tech trees, automation, logistics, and sweeping goals to accomplish that require extensive planning (or a whole lot of spaghetti factory-building!) to make a reality. If you like factory-building games, Dyson Sphere Program is a must.

At last the game has reached stable release! On the whole it's a great experience, and a lot of the rough edges of earlier versions have been ironed out. It's not perfect, obviously, but no game is. I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish!