I've had a fantastic time with Starfield. This has become the bar to beat when it comes to sci-fi adventure.

This is one of the more expensive games there are. Don't let the free to play fool ya. That being said, I really like this game. You get to create your vehicle and go all mad max with it. The vehicles have weight to them so when you ram something it has consequence. The beginning can be hard since you don't have decent parts yet. But give it time and your garage will flourish.

Witcher 1 was good. Witcher 2 was terrible. Witcher 3 is fantastic. Not a Witcher fan boy here, in fact I almost passed this one up due to the previous game. I saw enough footage of people playing the game where I realized it wasn't the same game as part 2. As Mr. Burns would say.... eeeeexcllent!

The game is not perfect. In fact there are times it downright frustrated me. After awhile I didn't care about the pain points because the experience as a whole was amazing.

Cons:
-Small movements - When you attempt to move and turn to accomplish mundane tasks it can be a pain to line up to something. There are transition animations that play all the way through that can't be broken out of via user input. Annoying.

-Looting - You have to have the camera facing the loot AND the character facing the loot in order to grab it. Because of the Small movement issues, this is really annoying. Having the camera facing being the only prerequisite would have sufficed.

-Looking up and down - You can't look straight up or down. You can tilt to a degree which is enough for most tasks. This is annoying in combat when there are creatures flying above you. You have to rely on auto aiming for many crossbow shots which negates the perk to slow down time when aiming the crossbow. For some reason when driving a boat you can't look up at all. Looking down really sucks when you're on a ledge and can't look down to see if it's safe to fall.

-Candles - For some reason candles are prioritized higher than anything like a loot chest or dialog character. So if a candle is between you and a target, Geralts autism kicks in and he'll stand there turning on and off the candle instead of doing an intelligent task. There is supposed to be a patch coming to fix this issue.

-Selling things - The game practically throws loot at me. But merchants have only a small amount of money to buy the goods. I find myself traveling the world to sell off inventory and meditating often in order to give merchants time to restock gold. I wish Geralt could make friends with a merchant where I could dump all my loot and have him sell it over time.


Pros:
-Creatures - Each creature has a history, a family type, and ways to take advantage of it. It's pretty cool that over time I got to see that all the creatures of the world made sense and fit well. The hardest creature I've fought so far has been the stupid little drowners. Not that they are hard, they really aren't... but I keep misreading the attacks and getting hit, my fault.

-Combat - Combat is fun. There are two different dodges and it totally makes sense on when to use them. I haven't had any problems with movement here. In previous games I always stumbled when it came to using offhand items and magic. Not so on Witcher 3, the controls have been great for combat. I'm using keyboard and mouse. Haven't tried it on a controller yet.

-World size - The initial training area of White Orchard felt small and for some reason claustrophobic to me. After reaching Velen that feeling went away. At the time I thought that White Orchid was a significant area in regards to its size. Velen showed how big the game really is. It's really big. And packed with goodies like skyrim was. I eventually went to Skellige, the third map, thinking that this would be a small island to wrap up the story. This is where I learned that the game is much larger than I had imagined. Skellige is as big as Velen. The game isn't big. It's friggan HUGE.

-Quality - My experience with games this large is that at some point the quality level drops. Over 150 hours in and the quality level is still top notch. Kudo's to the developers, I hope you guys got a really long vacation and bonus for this feat.

-Story - I should say "stories". Sure, there's a good main quest, but alot of the secondary quests, contracts, and treasure stories are really good.

-Fun - There is so much content packed into this world. Even the mini card game is simple but deep.

-Visuals - The look of the world is beautiful fantasy. From rolling hills to Jagged mountain peaks.

-Weather - The tree's and bushes move when it's windy! It's scary at night, deep in a forest, when a storm hits and rain pelts down.


Favorite Moment
My favorite moment so far was when Geralt was on a contract for some monster that was killing folk near a village. I discovered clues and did my sherlock holmes bit to determine what the beast was. I tracked it down to its lair, applied the potions for this specific beast type and geared up for a battle. I came around a corner to find the beasts nest and... found the beast dead. ... ... Something bigger killed it and I didn't know what it was. My confidence at being prepared was shaken and I had to rethink the whole scenario. Eventually I was able to lure the beast out and defeat it, but it was a desperate fight. I loved the twist.


Last Words
I gush about the game because it is worthy of it. It has flaws, but the mechanics and beauty of the experience wins out.

Update: I came back to play this years later. It's still really good.

I got into Robocraft on a whim, expecting to try the free to play game, check it off the list, and be done with it. Hours later I realized that it had me. It's good. Real good. It carries the torch of Chromehounds from way back in the day. It has more options for creative freedom though, and it only takes around 15 seconds to find a match.

You build a vehicle from Minecraft like blocks and add prefab pieces like weapons and wheels. Each block has its own armor while each prefab piece is specific to its function. Then you take the vehicle into team pvp battle. Every block and prefab can be destroyed when it gets hit so you need to put thought into vehicles or you may find yourself without propulsion or weapons.

The types of vehicles that can be made are pretty extensive. Wheels for rolling, wings and thrusters for flying, hoverpads for floating, spider legs for crawling up mountains, tank treads for steamrolling, and even sleds for rocketing along. Or combine a couple to make flying spider tanks or a rocket racecar.

The devs add things to this game on a regular basis. It's pretty cool to see the game grow as fast as it has been. The only knock I have is that gameplay tweaks for balance take awhile to be addressed. They've done a good job so far on that point, but it's taken awhile to get the balance to where it is now.

I just started to play this and have been very surprised at how fun it is. Though at level 2 I found a bug that prevents me from playing any more. You beam down to the Academy after doing some space tutorial missions and my ability to beam back up to my ship was missing. I searched the hud for a good long while and found plenty of buttons to buy stuff at thier store, but no way to get unstuck. There's also a transwarp feature that was greyed out. Effectively imprisioning me at the academy.

I attempted to ask people how to get back but was all but ignored in local. I attempted to use the Zone chat and found that unless you give them money, you can't use this feature. I had to make a hot chick character in order to get the Star Trek community to even acknowledge me. I learned where the Beam Up button was supposed to be. Which it was not.

I went to the forums and found that I could not post because I was new. I looked to see if anyone else had this issue and sure enough I found posts that were from years ago that had this same issue. From what I can tell there has been loads of content created for you to buy, but bugs like being forever stuck somewhere have not been fixed in years.

I've submitted GM tickets in the game and on thier website but I am doubtful that it will be responded to since it has nothing to do with thier store.

It's too bad they don't support thier players. It was fun while it briefly lasted.

EDIT:
I was wrong, GM's did in fact send an email response. Here is the response to a 3 year old progression stopping bug.

===
"Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. We are sorry to hear that you are having issues with beaming out of Starfleet Academy.

Unfortunately, with being such a new Character, if you get stuck within these first few missions, you may need to re-create your Character. We also advise following the tutorial in the order it was presented and refrain from deviating from any of it until you have finished all the tutorial missions. In addition to that, please let the cinematics (if any) run to the end to ensure that the mission updates correctly.

Once you get to Earth Space Dock, please be careful not to beam back to the Academy avoid this issue again.

We truly apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
===


It makes me wonder if a max level character that runs into a bug like this would have to delete his character and start over as well.

I really like Endless Space. The battles were surprising at first at how simple they were, but they never got old. The tech tree's and planet colonization is also very cool. My only real gripe is that there seems to come a point in each game I've played where many hours before the conclusion where you already know if you are going to be destroyed or are going to walk all over the other races. I do wish that it was more of a struggle at times rather than a inevitable conclusion.

This goes for part 1 2 and 3. This is the best Sci Fi rpg I've ever played. It's like a space opera with some cool combat and fantastic story. Special note: Part three has comp-stomp multiplayer and it is also awesome.

This one was a lot of fun. Building up resources, leveling tech, exploring space, and pretty fun battles. I'm hoping that there is a part two at some point.

I hated the controls on this one. I played through all the tutorials and could not get my armies to simply move forward. Instead they would cluster ♥♥♥♥ around and get themselves killed. After 10 hours of forcing myself to try to like this game I threw in the towel and deleted it.

This game is pure comedy gold. The characters are so rich with personality and the story is so well told and intriguing that I found myself rushing through puzzle bits to get the next morsel of the tale. I got stuck a couple of times on the puzzles but eventually got through them once I figured out the tricks. Overall a solid, solid game.