This game is a lot of fun, but holy cow this game is way too difficult. About a 1/3rd through the campaign, I could not get 1st place anymore. It would take as much as 10 tries in the races to get 1st. Outside of the crazy difficulty, the mechanic of causing extreme environmental damage to wreck your opponents is so incredibly fun. But yeah, it is just too hard after a while with RNG, the other cars just being faster than yours, and insane rubber banding.

As far as the rubber banding goes, I did one lap really well where I was 7 seconds ahead at the beginning of the lap. By halfway through the lap, I was getting passed by the AI.

Almost every single problem this game has actually is a result of the length and trying to get as much playtime out of the player as possible. The game is good, and Gears translates really well to an XCOM style game. But this purposely extended playtime means that you are playing very similar missions constantly, and your characters will never be maxed out by the end of the game.

Basically, this game takes between 25-30 hours to beat, which isn't crazy, but the issue is that between every couple of chapters you have to do 2-4 side missions before you can progress (this side mission stuff really kicks in during Act 2). These side missions can have 1 of 4 different objectives, but the objectives aren't interesting enough to be excited about doing them. The level design does help make these side missions less annoying to do, but yeah, it is still repetitive. There is one side mission type where you are collecting crates while being chased by missiles. I recommend doing that one every time just because it is the quickest side mission to do.

Also, the boss fights are fun. At the end of Act 1, you need to fight a brumak while all these other locusts keep swarming you, which was really fun. In fact, the last chapter of Act 1 was my favorite part where you are progressing across a really cool bridge for 20 minutes, before having to kill the brumak mentioned a moment ago.

I got to Act 2 chapter 7 (out of 3 acts) before deleting the game and moving on. However, after about a week, I wanted to play the game some more, so I redownloaded it and finished it.

Also, the story is fine, but given in such small chunks that it is hard to stay engaged with it. basically, every hour or 2, I would get a cutscene for the story. Out of the 30 hours to beat this game, right at 1 hour of it was cutscenes

I'm glad I played this game, but I would say that you should only play it until you have your fill, then watch the rest of the story on YouTube.

Good game overall, but there is just too much content to 100% the game for now. I may return to the game in a few years and wrap it up. After about 40 hours, I am at 60% completion.

I typically platinum Lego games. My favorite is Lego Jurassic World, which takes between 20-30 hours for me to 100%. In this game, the puzzles aren't unique enough from one another to justify platinum'ing this game. This game was a blast though for about 25-30 hours. Also, this game is actually genuinely funny.

A lot of bugs, and pretty mediocre controls. The spawns are also really bad, which doesn't pair well with the strict time limit to hit the ball each round. The level design is on track to be good, but sometimes, it just has things that don't make sense. I hit my ball into a loop (which shoots your ball in the direction of the hole with a specific force value), and my ball landed in sand because of it.

Usually my reviews are more detailed, but I can't be bothered to care for this game. I will note that I have about 1600 hours in Rocket League, which this game is HEAVILY inspired by, however, I don't play it anymore.

Last thing, I think this game could have been better as a single player puzzle style game, similar to "You Suck At Parking". I feel they kind of have the same target audience.

I played this for the first time after the 2.0 update. This game is much better than it seems to have been at launch, however, there are still major issues that bring it down substantially from what I thought was going to be a 4 star rating for my first bit of playing the game.

From watching old reviews and comparing it to my time on the game, AI is much smarter and more aggressive than they were at launch. Also, there seems to be more enemy clusters you encounter, and it seems you can fight more enemies at once than you could before.

Besides the technical issues this game has (which I will get into) a big problem I have with this game is how it actively works against completionists. There is a moment in the game where you go to a new map about halfway though the game, and you can not return at that point to get any collectibles you missed or do other side missions. Not only this, but there are two collectible that is must be obtained during very specific missions, which can only be redone if you do it on NG+.

I also really like the first map more (both has their positive elements though), but you will notice that the same buildings are reused a couple of times across multiple missions. For example, the movie theater has 2 missions where you go to it. One as a side mission, then one in the main story. The maps are pretty small for "open world" (The devs said the map is 27k square meters), but I don't mind it. The map is interesting, if only there was a little more to do in the map.

As far as technical issues, small bugs litter this game along with a lot of pop in, and A/T poses. I personally can look past stuff like this that doesn't affect the gameplay if the game is good outside of that. That's just how I am. However, there are issues with multiplayer where on two play sessions with my cousin (out of 6 to beat the game), my player stats did not save. So I lost my level, loot, and metric progression. It is important to note that story progression is only saved for the host. This is not what I am talking about.

Last thing I will say is that this game is much more fun with someone else (I only ever played 2 player or solo, not 3 or 4 player sessions). I actually never encountered a single network issue during the game at all. Everything worked flawlessly during the game with online play. The exception is the save progression that was lost with my character as the non host that I already mentioned.

All in all, the game is getting better. It is not a situation where the game can never be good, but it still has a way to go before it gets there. I would assume that the game is wrapping up any updates with how few people are still playing it. So this is probably about as good as it will get, but maybe I'm wrong.

I did not expect to like this game as much as I did. I knew it was a quality game, and I like park builder and simulation games well enough. However, this game was very good.

I probably only have two big complaints about it. First, there is no way to tell exactly how large your enclosures are square footage wise. This meant a lot of adding or shrinking fences to ensure they were the optimal size for the dinosaurs. Not having this info handy or at least a grid you can activate made it difficult to plan out the park effectively.

My other complaint is the game is too easy, but also too chaotic (near the end levels). Once I got to the 3rd island, I focused on getting 5 stars on every island on campaign, which was pretty easy. However, while the last level is still easy, stuff just happens all at once it seems too often. First my gates are sabotaged and opened, then dinos got sick while fixing that, then a tornado happens and destroys fences, then the raptors and dionicuses get mad from the storm and break their fences even if the tornado wasn't near them. All of this within 2 minutes. But then you go 25 minutes with no hiccups at all. It was very bad for pacing I think.

Outside of those two complaints, the game was a blast to complete the campaign on. Sandbox was good too, but I didn't try the challenge modes or DLCs (which there are many of).

This game was a major disappointment. It takes such a cool concept for a puzzle game and struggles to go in the right direction with it.

Mark Brown from the YT channel Game Maker's Toolkit talked about something that I really feel correlates with this game. It is a puzzle game, but it has very difficult platforming as well. Not generally an issue for me, but this game executes badly on it. But what Mark Brown said was some people will just want to do the puzzles, and some will just want to do the platforming. It is rare you can have both in there. Some games have succeeded at this (like Portal), but this is not one of them.

The ramp up on difficulty is pretty stark, and having to redo puzzle portions of a room because you failed the platforming section of the room is really irritating. Platformers aren't usually an issue for me (I beat both Ori games on 1 life mode), but this game is different just because this concept works against the platformer genre a lot (with just a couple of exceptions that were creative).

Platforming in this game is difficult because you have to activate very specific colors at very specific points, but the color wheel is very easy to accidentally select the wrong color on because of the number of colors. This isn't a game where you just have to push a button to change a state back and forth, there are numerous states that are possible. This game failed at staying focused on how best to work with this concept, which is very obviously making a straight up puzzle game.