Dalek Thal

A word to the wise, as you say you don’t normally buy games - do double check whether your Mac is new enough for the game. I don’t know exactly how specs work on mac, but I would hazard a guess that anything older than, say, 2019, won’t be able to play it.

Ffs, there’s no conspiracy here mate, the game is meeting expectations. The problem is there are a lot of trolls trying to tear it down because trans people are in it, not that the writers are calling out bigots.

Seems they’re starting to, given Dragon Age won’t be using the EA App

Please don’t be Bioware, please don’t be Bioware…

That’s fair, I apologise for being as defensive as I was.

Honestly that’s 100% the right way to play it - it is such a laugh, the writing is really tongue in cheek, and the gameplay is really, simply fun, so I really think you and your mate will love it!

Quite a lot honestly, but the trailers are really awful in terms of advertising what the game actually is. It’s a survival game with management sim elements, using creature collection as its core gameplay loop. It feels weirdly cohesive in terms of mashing together these styles - kinda like Dave the Diver in that regard.

Far as I’ve been able to tell, it was first announced in 2021, so it’s been in development since then, at latest.

There’s no evidence whatsoever of AI use (lot of accusations, but actual devs have spoken out and challenged them). Really strikes me that there’s a non-zero number of people who feel somewhat threatened by this game’s existence, considering the death threats the dev team has reportedly been receiving.

Far as I can tell, the original port’s apk isn’t region locked, so much as the play store page is. Either that, or people who didn’t buy it before the netflix port went up can no longer view the page.

Link doesn’t work in Australia I’m afraid - lots of corporations have a big thing for giving us the shitty end of the stick.

Really? How? I’ve been wanting to play World of Goo again but the only version available is the netflix one

Honestly it’s a combination of the battlepass system and the stage design causing constant, very fast-paced combat. The stages are too small, so players are funnelled into the middle of the stage. This also causes spawncamping if the matchmaking is even slightly unbalanced (which it is most of the time), as one wipe will allow a team to push all the way into spawn.

Previous Splatoon games were very good about this - most stages were abstract shapes, with a lot of terrain, meaning combat was rare, and the game encouraged painting over fighting as painting would net the most points on a per-match basis. Splatoon 3’s new maps are all thin, straight lines, which forces players into that central killzone.

The battlepass, along with some very poor decision making around the results screen, which shows the winning team celebrating, means that losses feel bad. The matchmaking similarly punishes winstreaks by forcing losestreaks, usually matching you against people above your skill level, but on a team with players below your skill level. Whilst this is very addictive, it makes losing feel genuinely awful, and a losing streak causes tilting due to the FOMO of the battlepass.

Hope this writeup makes sense. I view Splatoon 3 as a genuinely bad game because of these factors, and greatly prefer Splatoon 2.

Categorically disagree. I am a grown arse adult. Splatoon 3 tilts me like no other game, due to some very deliberate FOMO game design decisions and a very poor matchmaking algorithm. Whilst there’s no real money store in the game, it has a lot of other problems that make it just as bad as Roblox imo

Cool, does this mean they’ll actually fucking sell the thing in Australia, or is it just forever going to be dodgy resellers?

FWIW, AAA is not typically defined by budget, but instead by the presence of a publisher and methods of release. If you go by standard definitions, as a completely independent developer who crowdfunded the game at the start, Larian’s actually indie.

Honestly mate? Buy it. This isn’t a AAA game; this is a AA game made completely independently, without microtransactions or lootboxes or any of the many bullshit practices of modern gaming. The studio deserves your support.

It does have a multiplayer component, but it’s co-op. The game can be played in its entirety either way, and indeed, the single player experience is fantastic. So’s the multiplayer experience. The former is similar to Dragon Age Origins, and the latter is literally Dungeons and Dragons. Both are fantastic, and both are worth playing.

Don’t skip it. This is a deeply special game, and if you’re sick of the AAA bullshit, a great way to show the greater industry is by supporting it. Vote with your wallet.