Production chain games trigger my obsessive nature (Factorio) and I can burn out on them once they become a chore (Shapez). So, combining one with a cosy experience piqued my interest. And right until the last stage of the rocket, I didn't get obsessive, which is a refreshing experience for me with this kind of game. Little Rocket Lab's gameplay doesn't revolve around puzzle elements like fitting production chains into increasingly difficult and tight spaces (Infinifactory) or production chains that get ever longer and longer. Instead, Little Rocket Lab has lots of smaller temporary quest-based production chains all packaged into a cosy setting.
5/5
This game is intended to appeal to four types of player, explorers, puzzlers, combat lovers and fantecy lovers with its arcanepunk style setting, but it does that badly in a way I found facinating.Very few people picked this up on launch because the game presents as a bland shooter with little strategy. Shoot the blue guys with the blue spell, shoot the green guys with the green spell and shoot the red guys with the red spell. Unfortunately, this is how the game plays out.There is variation with the coloured spells as each colour has three different weapon styles. For example the green spell has a gattling gun style, a homing and a regular shooting style. None of which are present with the other spell colours. Switching between spells and interacting with your inventory to switch loadout is annoying because the game rewards constant switching of active weapons and all parts of your **** you are the kind of gamer who loves exploring structures and finding secrets, you will be disapointed as most of the time you will only be allowed to discover secrets later on in the game and at the start will contantly be told "you don't have a spell for that". Your only way to get through to the cool exploration and puzzle part of the game is by playing through a good chunk of the game's combat. Once you are in to the later part of the game and have the spells needed to participate in the exploration and puzzle solving parts of the game, you will be rewarded with special combat encounters that are very challanging. If you love combat and don't care about the exploration and puzzle elements, then you won't reach these extra challenging combat encounters.I liked the characters and found their interactions fun, but sassy characters are easy to write and core the story becomes harder to care about as it goes on, with characters forgotten about and additional elements added later on that make you question your understanding of the world. But if you love world building, you will find it infuriating that there are so many characters stading around looking like they are talking to each other, but you can't talk to them and they are having silent conversations with each other, as if the developement team forgot to add their dialogue.There is a good game buried under the poor combat feel, the missing dialogue which would helpe with world building, the annoying crafting system which lacks any depth, but the game lacks gameplay polish for anyone to be able to find it. However, the game looks nice, and it is just a shame that this and a couple of character interactions along the main story are the only aspects that can be appreciated. Please avoid this unless you want to experience a game designer's conundrum.
Watch Dogs is not just another GTA clone. It attempts to create an open world game that is more intellectual. GTA would never be like Watch Dogs due to its lack of sophistication and obsession with gang violence. Walking the streets of Watch Dogs' Chicago might initially look and feel like GTA, but it is quite different. For a start the game provides you with the names, occupation, salary and some random bit of information (maybe they are into dog grooming) of all the citizens you walk past on the street. This humanises the citizen a little, but the citizens will help you in a minor way if you don't kill them on purpose. Because if your reputation is good with them then they won't immediately report you when they see you with a gun or when driving recklessly. This means that you start to respect the lives of the people around you, something that I haven't experienced in an open world game before. Normally my favourite thing to do is to drive down a pavement and kill as many joggers as I can, but in Watch Dogs I haven't done this because I don't want the hit to my reputation. I actively avoid killing people in car chases and avoid using explosives and causing collateral damage. Many reviewers have complained about the unnecessary stealth sections, but in a similar way to the encouragement to not kill civilians, I found this to be a refreshing change to both GTA's gang warfare and Saint Row's madness. It encourages more of a Splinter Cell style of gameplay where you explore the area, setup your encounter and then execute a plan, often with gadgets to aid you. Watch Dogs is not about killing hookers or running around naked. It is about exploring a more realistic city and manipulating its systems. The hacking in Watch Dogs is more limited than I would have liked. I really wanted to steal from the rich and give it to the poor, but this isn't possible as you can't give money or dig into a civilian's life like that. The citizens exist, but not beyond their name, age, occupation and income value. These aren't people you can follow home to meet the family. It would be overly to be able to be more intrusive into the civilian's lives, but obviously this shows the limitations of the current game simulation. Hopefully in sequels Ubisoft will start opening this up, but at the moment you are limited to playing with traffic lights, blowing stuff up, changing traffic lights, controlling automatic bollards and playing with computer controlled bridges. For the PC version you need to get the graphics patch as Ubisoft has purposefully changed and degraded the graphics on the PC version of Watch Dogs to make it look similar to the console releases. To achieve this they removed a few shaders, changed the fogging effects, the lighting, shadows and degraded the texture quality. Get the community graphics mod, trust me. Plus it runs better with the mod. Some of the side quests are a little lame, but it is a big game with many different side missions, Chess puzzles, drinking games, poker that you can partially cheat on, slot machines that you can't hack, gang racing matches, gang hideout missions and random crimes to stop. One of the unique Watch Dogs experiences is driving around and then having another player invade your game. This takes the form of another player connecting to your game and you having to find them before a progress bar reaches its limit. Then when you find them, you have to chase them down. This is a fun and sometimes an annoying surprise, but refreshing and different as it doesn't feel scripted or forced. Hacking is the central theme of the game and this enforces that theme more than anything else that Watch Dogs does. There is an Android and iOS app that allows tablet and phone users the ability to connect to games and play a cat and mouse game where the app user tries to control the city resources to catch the hacker, but as the hacker I had so many disconnects that it wasn't worth my time to play. I suspect players were disconnecting before I won the matches because Watch Dogs takes experience points from players for poor performance. Some of the characters in Watch Dogs lengthy story are cool like his sister and nephew, and his ex partner Damien, but Pearce himself is very bland and although given a reason to hunt down the people who tried to kill him, the game never shows why he is drawn to hacking as an individual or why he is called a vigilante and not just a normal hacker or criminal by the police. I would have liked to see more motivation and more demonstration on the vigilante part of his character. Or even an explanation of how he got the vigilante label.
