Recent reviews by The Ultimate Potato

Comparisons to Factorio are unavoidable... but unwarranted. Satisfactory and Factorio have almost nothing in common. This game has a prebuilt map; the resource nodes have infinite ore; the combat is janky and entirely optional; there is no programmable automation whatsoever; and you are accompanied by a narrator. I have a better comparison. Satisfactory is Subnautica with conveyor belts.
Subnautica was an exploration game with base-building tacked on. It was dominated by exploration.
Satisfactory seems like an exploration game with base-building tacked on. It is dominated by base-building.
Both games require you to mine ore patches to progress through a mandatory tech tree, tied to the main story line.
Both games also have an optional tech tree, which you progress through via exploration (searching ruins for new blueprints).
Both games also have a predetermined map; fixed locations with infinite ore; and janky combat that is entirely optional.

Satisfactory, however, has no story. You explore only to see the pretty landscapes, and maybe to search for entirely optional technologies in ruins. There is a narrator who alternates between humorous, Dilbert-style corporate satire; and - frankly - a boring, repetitive and incoherent code-speak that never gets to the point. It seems that they never finished the story and just released the game.
On the main menu, the game asks you what world you want: grasslands, rocky desert, mountains or sandy desert. It doesn't make it clear that these are not different planets - they are merely different spawn points on the same gigantic map.

Ore patches are infinite. You are only limited by the mining rate of the single extractor you may place on them. As mentioned before - the map is gigantic. Ore patches can be literally miles apart. Unfortunately, long-range transport is unlocked surprisingly late in the game -- most players are likely to build multiple-kilometre conveyor belts that clip through terrain.
Regarding conveyor belts, another problem is that "smart" splitters are unlocked shockingly late into the game. Effectively, for the entire game it will be impossible to put more than one resource type on one belt! The only way to manage it would be to maintain a perfect ratio at 100% uptime (else you will clog your machines and have to manually deconstruct).
It will also be impossible to load more than one type of resource onto a vehicle (let alone to unload and sort). Want to bring extra fuel in the cargo? Tough luck.

And by the way, these "smart" splitters are just filters. They can't count, they can't send or receive signals. This is a factory-building game with zero programmable automation. None of the machines can be controlled except by hand. The only concern are ratios. All of your machines will be turned on all of the time. All of your machines have a separate conveyor entrance for each crafting ingredient. All of your conveyor belts will only contain one item type.

Speaking of ratios, though: the ingame encylopedia is excellent. There's an intuitive search function, and one of my favourite QoL aspects is that you can type math equations into the search function! You can just type 310/17 into the search function and then copy/paste 18.235 widgets per minute into all of your machines - and the machine will automatically convert 18.235 widgets per minute to 91.175% operating speed. Satisfactory absolutely gets the ratio part of the game right.

Perhaps where the game shines the most is scale. A basic crafting machine in Satisfactory is roughly the size of... 2x2x4 metres? This is one of the smallest machines in the game - and you will need hundreds of them! The impossible to avoid conveyor spaghetti and staggering scale of even a noob factory is a sight to behold. I love seeing screenshots of random people's endgame factories. They are all different, have some of their creator's personality, and are too big to fit on multiple screenshots.

The problem with scale, though, is that Satisfactory can't handle large-scale building. You must build these gigantic factories one small piece at a time. The (small) blueprint tool has to be unlocked. The big blueprint is unlocked around the same time that the game ends. But the worst part by far is building train tracks. You can only build them in what feels like 50 metres at a time - yet the map is almost 10 kilometres across.

I hate to say this about a game that entered early access 6 years ago (as of 2025), but I think it still has potential to grow. No idea whether the devs are planning to expand on the QoL... or on the equally tedious faux-story narrator bollocks that doesn't go anywhere. Seriously guys, put a story in it. Or at least make the narrator's speaking in tongues actually go anywhere. Even if you 100% the game with all exploration and all the hard drives - there is no payoff. The cryptic dialogue just runs out without going anywhere.

That said... Satisfactory has a lot of charm. It has humour, it has personality. It's janky and tedious, yet I liked it. Enough, even, to want to play through it a second time. Maybe one day I'll have an extra 80 hours lying around.

You need to come into this game with realistic expectations. I'm 50 hours in, and only just entered the midgame. And I'm going to give up because of how difficult it is. Perhaps I would have finished the game by now if I looked up the best build or downloaded blueprints... but I can't say for sure. Perhaps speedrunners will be competing for sub-30h times.

In vanilla Factorio you could just wing it. You could create "so-bad-it's-good" spaghetti and reach the victory screen. In Space Age you can't. Else, you will spend hours upon hours putting out fires and manually de-clogging stoppages, or addressing base-ending biter attacks. And by the way - in addition to costing a rocket - it takes several minutes of real time to travel from planet to planet (from base to base). In other words - if you have a job and play Factorio on the side then this game could take six months to beat.

You will have to consult excel for correct ratios, and plan your factories/spaceships in blueprint mode (or on paper) before building them. If that sounds like you then you should get this game as soon as possible.

I can appreciate how incredible this game is from a technical and game-design standpoint. However, it's just not for me. I was not ready for how difficult, how involved, and how many hours this game would take. For some people, though, this may be the perfect game. I can see many a person sinking 2000h+ into this expansion.

The next time someone asks whether you've beat Elden Ring - ask them whether they've beaten Factorio: Space Age. This may be the hardest game on Steam, after Dwarf Fortress.

By far the most accurate simulation of political power I have ever seen. Crisis in the Kremlin is in a league of its own as far as showing the gritty, cruel, unintuitive... and mundane reality of power.

I suspect that the game could have been made in Microsoft Excel (with VBA templates). The gameplay is not the point. It's also unplayable without a wiki. What's incredible, however, is how you are presented with an Excel spreadsheet game, where the spreadsheet lies to you, depending on the "corruption" level in the country.

This title is absolutely unplayable for almost all audiences because of, for example, having to go to the map every turn, having to click 50 countries to see if any has unrest over twenty, and clicking "military aid" on said country. Repeat every single turn for a hundred turns... Remember that this is a $4 game, a port of a 1990s grand strategy title, and made by a young Russian studio with a small budget.

The game's setting is historically revisionist, but this is... juxtaposed with fantastical elements. The game starts in 1985, yet it's possible to land on Mars in 1988 (despite flight to Mars taking >4 years... not to mention actually building the damn spaceship). Likewise, it's possible to develop, produce and deploy ground-attack nuclear missile satellites; magically defeat the microchip embargo and develop soviet computers out of thin air; create an automatic, computerised, totalitarian social credit score system; and even achieve a fully automated "real communist" economy w/ 4-hour work day for all -- if you beeline for one of these technologies, you can fully implement it between 1985-1988. Though, perhaps the most fantastical is that centrally planned economies are long-term viable in this game, and can function with neither grain imports nor Western technology transfer :^) The game clearly doesn't take itself very seriously, so the revanchist/historical revisionist elements look comical. I don't know whether this is intentional (to placate censors) or whether they tacitly believe this stuff, but either way it contributes to something fun. You get a wet fever dream of what Russians wish the Soviet Union were like - yet even this science fiction dream is still brimming with incredible violence, corruption and political murder.
Also, the "ultra hard" difficulty level is called "Solzhenitsyn" (and the tooltips quip about how this difficulty level is what things would look like if Solzhenitsyn was right), which I find hilarious.

Russians seems unable to make AAA titles. However, their indie scene is spectacular. I absolutely recommend this game for anyone interested in a spot-on accurate simulation of political power. It's also a good crash course on late Cold War history. You will spend a lot of time google-translating Russian wiki pages to know what any of the buttons do, though.

I loved this game to bits — but you probably won't. This would be a "neutral" review if Steam allowed it.

As far as I'm concerned, Potionomics is a few UI and QoL updates away from a GOTY contender. But, in its' current state, you have to really want to play it.

I will write a proper review another time. The rest of this "review" will focus on developer feedback, but you're welcome to stay if you'd like.

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Filters
The game has well over a hundred potion ingredients. The ingredients each have five elements, from A to E. There is an extremely primitive filter in the brewing menu, which allows you to, for example, only show ingredients containing element A. Which means that this filter will show ingredients satisfying all 16 combinations of [A,B,C,D,E] which contain A. For reference: there are 31 possible combinations of [A,B,C,D,E]. So, on paper, the filter is less than 50% effective?
The problem could be solved by modifying the filters to have three states: [NULL/DOES CONTAIN/DOES NOT CONTAIN]. Also, by adding a "sort" function. Sort by: [ELEMENT/TOTALELEMENTS/QUANTITY].

Ingredients also have five traits: taste, sensation, smell, look, sound. These can only be good/bad. Filters "sort of" exist, but they're not very good. If you filter by smell, you will only get elements with the smell trait – both good smell and bad smell. To make things worse: If you have the enchanted smell boost active, it becomes completely impossible to tell whether an ingredient has a good smell or a bad smell, because the tooltip is changed to "enchanted smell". Taking such an enchantment may make it impossible for you to complete a special order. Again, it would be nice to have a [GOOD ONLY/NOT-BAD/BAD ONLY/NULL] filter.

Shop UI
There are no filters in the shop. None, whatsoever. There is also no shift-clicking, no right-clicking, no multi-selection, no sorting by quantity or price, etc. At least there is a tooltip to show you how much of each ingredient you have at home, that is very nice. But, honestly, I should be able to multi-select twelve ingredients with right click and press "confirm" once to buy the whole stock. Right now, that can take hundreds of clicks, and twelve confirmation screens to do.


There are other issues with the game such as not knowing what items to upgrade your tools with, or an insufficient tutorial – but those can be solved by playing with a wiki, or by writing things down. Hundreds of clicks per shop, or manually sorting through 100+ ingredients every five minutes cannot. A freeplay mode would also be nice, I guess?
Fingers crossed for future development. There really is quite a delightful game buried under all of this clunkyness.

EARLY ACCESS: The game is in a *bad* state. You have to be really motivated to put up with the tediously pointless micromanagement. There is a ton of potential, but we aren't there yet.

Another point is that this cannot be played casually. I suspect that a single campaign takes about 40 hours to complete. If you don't have that kind of time then I would steer clear.

Terra Invicta is a standalone game from Pavonis Interactive - an indie game studio, formed primarily from the creators of the fantastic Long War mods for XCOM 1 and 2. Following a Kickstarter campaign, they created a grand strategy about aliens invading Earth.
At first glance, it looks like a very watered-down version of Crusader Kings. But then you realise that this game has correctly modelled orbital mechanics, and requires you to learn delta-V, transfer windows and orbit types for the purpose of spaceship combat. Then you learn that you have to design your spaceships in an incredibly meticulous process, in which you select the weapon type, engine type, fuel type, armour type, armour thickness on the front/side/back and even the type of armour, various additional modules, etc. And all of this you have to balance against the weight of the ship (affects delta-V), the cost of the ship, the cost of the fuel, the cost of the ammo... It's spreadsheet porn. Finally, you have a surprisingly open-ended spaceship battle side of the game, which you can autoresolve, or play manually.

As for the politics on earth, you have about four agents to manage. Everything is a modified dice roll. The modifiers can be something as simple as popular support, but you can also pay resources to increase the likelihood of success. Other modifiers are, for example, how destabilised the country is, how much public support you have, how rich the nation is, etc. Agents have stats such as persuasion, espionage, science, security, etc. Agents start off with an occupation, for example "diplomat" or "mercenary". A diplomat can improve relations, but cannot attack things, while a mercenary can attack things by default, but not improve relations. However, you can attach organisations to your agents, which unlocks new abilities. Say you use your diplomat to take over Iran, and use this influence to attach Hezbollah to your diplomat. The diplomat can now attack alien assets or attempt assassinations, based on their "command" stat. I think the idea of sending Hezbollah to waste some ayys is a very strong selling point.

There is criticism, however: the current state of QoL is not acceptable. There is far too much repetitive clicking that serves no purpose. The game is tragically unbalanced, and the only viable strategy is to play Western nations, because controlling them costs the same amount of administrative points as controlling anywhere else. Finally, you end up with strange things such as low-democracy countries being unable to invest in military tech level (???); or the well-intentioned but poorly-implemented climate change mechanics leading to countries having a -20% modifier to their ENTIRE ECONOMY for no reason (with no explanation), as early as 2023. They could've made alien plants grow faster from climate change or whatever, but instead we get a hamfisted, nebulous, and unfinished mechanic.

I like that they tried to model economic development vs societal inequality; I like that high scores in democracy lead to your nation's unity moving towards a resting point of 50% which can be good or bad; and I like that they attempted to model short term gains vs sustainable development and pollution/climate change. But at the end of the day, countries are on a one-dimensional spectrum from "totalitarian" to "full democracy" - where one is better at literally everything (including military!). And the player has the same totalitarian control over all countries, anyway, regardless of how democratic they are. I feel as though the game spends too much time haranguing about exploitation, climate change and inequality - and too little time on programming an economy that would convincingly model this. It all feels arbitrary and scripted, and the person who feels most alienated as a result ends up being the player.
(Given a certain, bizarre undercurrent in the XCOM modding community... it would explain a lot. I don't know whether these are the same people, though.).

For a game with this much complexity, a SERIES of tutorial scenarios will also be important. The current tutorial is not acceptable (plus it's glitched).


I'm quite impressed with what they've done so far, but my "recommendation" is... going out on a limb. We'll see where it goes from here. It's definitely in Early Access.

I quite liked this extra campaign/expansion pack. If you enjoyed the base game then this DLC is a no-brainer.

Keep in mind, that this is much harder than the base game. Do not play on ironman - you will restart at least five times (and there's no achievement anyway).
(The mission where they're pouring beer into the river is the hardest mission in all of Hard West. Ignore the time limit, and just focus on surviving.)

This would be a "Neutral" review, but Steam only allows "Positive" and "Negative" reviews.

Hard West 2 is not a turn-based strategy game. It is a puzzle game with RPG elements. Someone described it as a series of manicured encounters, interrupted by story elements. This is the best description I have come across. The selling point of this game will be the story/flavour aspects. Not the gameplay.

A character only has enough action points to shoot once per turn. However, if you get a kill then all of your action points are refunded. That's the central premise of the entire game. To find a solution to the puzzle, in which your character moves seven times in one turn.
The in-game tips even encourage loading an earlier save, and retrying the mission with a perfectly-tailored loadout (now that you have prescience of what enemies you will face, their exact spawn points, the map geometry, etc.). So, it's a puzzle game.

Comparisons to XCOM are completely insane. Stop it. HW2 is an entirely predetermined and linear experience.

HW2 gives off the impression of having a larger budget than HW1... with predictable results:

• The game has been streamlined to appeal to a wider audience. Some of the simplifications are understandable (removed reloading/ammo management). But some decisions make no sense (the wound/permanent scar system is gone... I hate to see such a cool and innovative system removed - its' removal actually detracts from the morbid/creepy vibe of the Hard West).
  
• The cutscenes have a higher production value. They're still sliding 2d panels, but more vividly illustrated/animated. It looks like they had more budget for artists. Consumables and trinkets also have actual art instead of monochrome.
  
• They hired a lot of talented voice actors. Unfortunately less than half of the dialogue is voiced. This gets in the way, especially since the same conversation can alternate between the same participant being voiced, and being not-voiced. Hear that silence? Time to start reading! HW1 only had the narrator (except in DLC), and there was a lot of reading. But you always knew when to read, and when to listen.

HW2 is a bit different from HW1, but describing gameplay differences makes little sense when gameplay is not the selling point of either game. However, the the flavour, and the worldbuilding are superb. If you're okay with that, and with the price tag, then it's a recommendation.

It's exactly what is says on the tin. Good game for those of you with difficult careers who are too tired, and just want to unwind with something uncomplicated after work.

Either that, or a good game to play while listening to audiobooks.

Very good tool for learning the Japanese alphabets. Tailors itself to your individual ability, and will show certain characters more often, depending on where you need more practice. I especially like that it stealthily teaches you actual words while you think you're doing symbols alone. Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to learn this horrendously difficult language, or if like me you just want to learn phonetic gachi ♥♥♥♥posting.

EDIT: There has been a significant amount of post-launch support, and the developers are moving the game in a good direction. I'm happy to switch this review to positive.

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I'm at a stage in my life where I can throw away this kind of money, but I still don't know what I was thinking.

This is essentially a very polished flash game from 2007 Newgrounds. Or maybe it's a 2021 early access title on Steam, masquerading as a final product.

The core gameplay loop is very interesting, and the devs have done a very good job with the audiovisuals. However, QoL is non existant, and the UI is a complete slog (in addition to ghost clicks and bugs). Most of this game is opening the workshop menu, watching the transition animation, clicking on "clean tractor", clicking it again since it didn't register the first time, exiting the menu, watching the transition animation again, dragging the "clean tractor" card onto the board. And repeating this process every single turn for cleaning your silos, cleaning your press, cleaning your bottling machine, etc. Every item in the game gets dirty after being used, so you literally have to do this every turn.

Who is this game for? I guess if you are used to pre-2000 strategy games with miserable levels of micromanagement, you're interested in wine in general, and you care about the graphics/soundtrack slightly more than about gameplay - then maybe the game is for you. But the price tag is still outrageous.