Recent reviews by Vinnie Farsheds

The game offers more depth than I originally expected. With the happy soundtrack it's a good game to play every now and then when you don't want to think too much

Satisfactory is a fun game, although a bit frustrating to play sometimes because I got used to the smooth gameplay of Factorio and it certainly takes more effort to setup a production line and keep good overview. But this is part of the challenge and feels rewarding when it all comes together at some point.

Graphics are decent and colourful. Ingame sounds just do the job as expected, but the soundtrack has some really nice tracks which help to a relaxing game experience.

Been playing this game for a month now, I didn't expect much of it but it was free and had a funny description.
I never expected an idle game to be so captivating. You can set assign the energy and magic amounts and wait until you unlock stuff, but there's so much to look into to optimize the progress. And patch 1.210 was released today which made me realize that just the patch notes of NGU Idle are better than some other games in total.

Pedro reminded me to drink enough water. He saved my life 10/10

Usually I don't have patience for tutorials and stuff. But this interface was too confusing and first. But doing the tutorial missions and watching some tutorial vids really helped to crash space ships more efficiently.

Simple and very enjoyable little game. It starts very relaxing and the music is very fitting. But if you get far in a level you can't afford to keep this laid-back attitude and will endure some very stressful moments with the constant bleeping of planes being too close but it's the only way because the sky is too full and you still manage to keep the planes in different paths. CRASH! You didn't notice the big fast one and a slow helicopter colliding on the other side and have to start over again. But this time you will really pay more attention.

The first Chime had nice gameplay but was a bit lacking in the amount of tracks to play. Now there's more music to choose from and I really like all of them. The gameplay feels not as relaxing as I expected it to be, I'm too stressed because there are a lot more different shapes than before and they're more difficult to fit in the perfect spot compared to the original Chime.

I still enjoy playing it every now and then, but I feel it would be better if you could alter more parameters in the gameplay to suit your playing style. I still recommend this if you like puzzles and music games.

This week Factorio my mostly played game on Steam, seems appropriate to write a review about it now. I won't write about the graphics, sound or gameplay but I will describe how I played the game, because that's the reason why I keep playing Factorio.

First of all, don't think it is too complicated when you see those complex designs on reddit. There are a lot of different solutions to improve your factory. Sometimes I look on the internet for a solution, such as a way to evenly balance items on the belts (the belt balancer), but the biggest part of my factorio is created by just building something and see what works well enough and improve when it is needed. There is no need to do things perfect from the start.

I have a similar advice on mods, it may seem smart to look into these and install everything that seems nice to have but it's best to just start playing and think of which things you want to change. I found it annoying to have a small inventory so I choose the BigBags mod to increase the stack size and add warehouse buildings to have more storage space. If you start with too many mods there are too much possibilities to explore and when you have a problem you don't know if it's in the basic game or one of the mods.

So you don't need to do everything perfect from the start. That's exactly what I did:
When I created my first factory I thought I designed my stuff pretty good, I noticed there were some inefficiencies but it was good enough. Then I found out that producing 1 blue science/min wasn't sufficient for all the research and it wasn't that easy to scale up because of my factory layout. Some time ago I thought it would be fun to load this savegame again and it basically was a big mess of belt spaghetti and some assemblers in between. Somehow I spent 19 ingame hours on this and the farthest I got was some small scale oil refining for the blue science.

With the second factory the train track design became much more userfriendly. Finally it was easier to scale up production. So my factory was much bigger than the first one, and better designed because I built everything around 'the main bus', a central line of belts which carry the mostly needed resources. So it's easier to scale up production on the side and you always have the required items close to where it's needed. I started using construction robots to place my blueprints so once I had a good design I could just place it somewere and it would be built almost instantly. And I got logistic robots to keep my personal inventory stocked with the items I needed often so I didn't need to craft these anymore. This way expanding my factory went much faster than before. This time I actually managed to launch the rocket in about 80 hours, because I was mostly just having fun experimenting and exploring instead of focussing on the rocket. I made huge improvements compared to my first game, but still far from perfect. I got 30k of belts in stock, and I thought it would be more efficient if I could somehow pause the production of certain items once I got a certain amount of them so the copper and steel could be used elsewere instead.

This became the main improvement of my third factory, I knew that the solution was in using a circuit network to pause production for a certain item but it seemed very complicated to setup, even after watching some youtube videos on it. I finally found out and gradually implemented these circuits in my factory to prevent overproduction. I also started creating production lines for items which I always crafted personally so far because I didn't need them that much before, such as roboports and laser turrets. But it became annoying to craft these over and over again when I started to create more outposts, so then I automated production of these, and prevented overproduction with circuit networks.

Once I got more outposts my rail network became more complex and I had to look up how to place the rail signals to avoid collisions and deadlocks. Then I made more blueprints to make it easier to make a complete outpost with turrets, roboports and walls. To make sufficient products to expand I needed more green and red cercuits, because 500 green/min was way too less. I made cleared some space at the end of the main bus, and placed some assemblers in a much more compact layout than my old circuit production. Made a blueprint of this and placed this again and again. Before I thought it would cost much more time but in about 15 minutes I completed this and added 2500 green circuits/minute.

My latest project was to find more oil, and I decided to move as far to the right as I could for a certain time and found some oil wells and a lot of very rich ore fields (ore fields get richer the further away from your spawn point). Then created some distant outposts there so now there would be enough resources to build this rocket. But my next project will be to automatically supply my outposts with repair packs to repair the buildings after an attack and also some laser turrets and walls, in case these are destroyed. I want to use a dedicated train for this, but want to prevent that all the items keep being loaded in the train wagon because it's hard to pause production that way if my storage chest is empty but there are 1000 laser turrets in the train itself, turns out it can be done with the Inventory Sensor mod.

Thankfully this game has a great community so a solution to your problems if often found, and if it wasn't possible in the game someone will create a mod for it. If you want a game where you have lots of freedom to experiment and solve problems in your own way, and like to have a steady feel of improvement while playing, which I tried to describe in this review, this is the game for you.

You won't find an RTS game with a better UI than this. Compared to other games the game seems slow but I'd rather have a dinner in a good restaurant than a burger in a fast food place after which you feel full but unsatisfied :)

UPDATE 24/11/2018
Just started playing again, now with the Forged Alliance Forever mod (FAF). Some nice improvements to make this run as smooth as newer games. Even after 11 years this game is still unsurpassed in terms of UI and controls.

Simple but very nice gameplay, and really good graphics :)