Cliff Empire

Cliff Empire is a slightly futuristic city builder with an emphasis on limited room, logistics, and ramping difficulty. The ground is inhabitable, so you build three cities on three platforms (cliffs), specialize each based on the strengths of that cliff, set up trade between them, and then fulfill the resource demands of the people in orbit or survive natural disasters or hostile attackers.
The game seems to be made by a small team, as the UI and the rest of the graphics are rather basic, almost untextured, and there isn't a lot of content, at least not for a city builder. There is technically content for multiple tens of hours, but the further you get, the more the game starts to drag on.

My first problem with the game is that it doesn't allow for much creativity or strategic expression. You have critical stats, like food, water, electricity, and non-critical stats that are basically various luxuries. Each building consumes some room (which is also a limited resource), and possibly one or more other resources, producing one or more resources or stats in turn. But some buildings are just duplicate, larger versions of themselves, and some are eclipsed by other, more efficient buildings. It's never really a question of what to build, as you always just plop down whatever you need at the moment. Once you figure out the most efficient combos, you just repeat those forever.
There is also no point in keeping your people significantly happy. As long as people at least slowly join your colony, you can ignore all other luxury demands with no penalty. Orbital requests do require you to stockpile all items, at least on one cliff, but you can ignore non-resource-based stats like aesthetics and entertainment.

Secondly, after you get through your initial funds, the game becomes very slow. Every building costs money to build, and the only way to get money is through very labor-intensive buildings which are also incredibly slow, or more reasonably, by shipping large quantities of resources you don't need into orbit. This is, however, limited by there only being a short window during which you can trade resources each day, which also makes it quite difficult later on to fulfill orbital requests, even if you have all the resources - you just can't ship them in the limited time. Worse still, each cliff has its own money reserves. If a cliff runs out of money, you can't send it resources from another cliff, because it can't pay for them. The workaround is to loan them money, but in a cruel mockery, this will lead them deeper and deeper into debt, forcing you to loan them ever more money, because half of what they pay back is interest on the loan. It's comical, because there's no point to this mechanic. You can literally keep loaning more and more, regardless of their debt, which can grow to such astronomical proportions that it will be literally impossible to pay back.
To return to the topic of the game becoming slow, even if you somehow manage to solve your money problems without creating a debt loop of death, you will be gated by research. Unlike every other resource in the game, research accumulates at a fixed maximum speed, with the longest ones taking over an hour even on maximum (7x) speed. This is what makes the game take multiple tens of hours, as the endgame (I'm not sure if there's a win condition, I quit after I was just idling on 7x speed most of the time) requires you to research many of these very long researches.

Overall, the game has several very major flaws which are mostly balance issues. It may sound like I absolutely hated this game, but it was actually very fun to build the city up until these problems ruined my enjoyment. Clearly, many aspects of the game are very well designed, but it feels like the developer just ran out of steam before managing to polish everything up. Despite the lack of content, and the unbearably slow endgame, I enjoyed it for well over 10 hours. For this, I will give it a partial recommendation.

The Outer Worlds

I really have to stop giving AAA games a try. It's not them, it's me. I gave The Outer Worlds a try today and... I don't even know what much to write about it.

It's a story-driven RPG with a lot of FPS combat. Many people compare it to Fallout, but say it's worse. I wouldn't know, since I've never played a Fallout game. As far as I got, which wasn't very far, I didn't really see anything that makes this game unique.
You progress your character by getting new equipment, upgrading it, and leveling your character and slotting points into whatever weapons and skills you want to excel at. Standard RPG stuff. There are stealth and bullet time mechanics, allowing you to sneak past, or into, enemies, and also allowing you to slow down time briefly, to give you an edge in combat. I think you mostly shoot at enemies, but combined with stealth, perhaps more melee-oriented builds are also possible.
As for the story, conversations with characters influence certain events, and you may have extra dialogue options available based on your stats. That system might have interested me if the story had in the slightest. There are strong attempts at hyper-capitalist humor, but I didn't encounter any jokes that I really found funny.

Honestly, I feel like I got what I expected. This seems very on-par with most AAA releases, few as I've played, and perhaps even better due to a relative lack of bugs and other problems. It's well made and seems to mostly accomplish what it wants to. Still, I find it entirely bland and boring, both in terms of gameplay, as well as the story. I wouldn't recommend it. Unless you're looking for something very standard and average, which is what big publishers always seem to be going for.

Kubifaktorium

Falling a bit behind schedule these months. I have multiple longer games in progress at the moment, so I managed to fish out one of the lower rated games on my wishlist for this week - Kubifaktorium.
It's a game that starts out as a colony sim, seemingly taking a lot of inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, but then starts to add pieces of automation in as play progresses, this time taking inspiration from Factorio. While it's well made for a small team, it essentially delivers a heavily watered down amalgamation of the two games without doing anything new.

The game loop is quite simple. You first clear the land of its natural resources and use that to start your little colony. Then you put up farms, pastures, and groves to grow the resources yourself. You need drink, food, and housing for each of your colonists, and if you want to keep them extra happy (and thus productive), specific types of food and decorations / leisure activities around. These extra requirements get more complex as time goes on, but I generally found that trying to satisfy them takes more time than the colonists being more productive saves, so I just ignored that part of the game.
I didn't get too far into the automation part, but essentially you just set up alternate versions of your facilities that work automatically, once you get past the hurdle of making metals and the automation parts manually. It's not really all that different from the first half of the game, because your colonists are already "automatic" if you think about it.

In the end, despite trying to combine two of my possibly favorite games ever, Kubifaktorium made the common mistake of doing multiple things badly, instead of doing a single thing well. It doesn't have even a fraction of the depth that makes Dwarf Fortress so fascinating, nor is the automation nearly as satisfying as in Factorio. There is significantly less content, and further still, I think the two genres don't even mix that well, thus leading to a game that's less than the sum of its parts. Overall, I can't think of any real reason to play this over many other games from either genre. There is no merit to trying to combine them here, and I would thus not recommend this.

Throne and Liberty

Another new MMO, another timely review. It's Throne and Liberty this time around - another Korean MMO, as they seem to be the only ones still actively making MMOs. It's already been out in Korea since the start of the year, but just released in the West.

I won't be dwelling on the various launch difficulties of servers being full and connections being dropped. If anything, they cleared those really fast, basically as soon as the peak hours passed. I already experienced no queues, game-breaking bugs, nor crashes on the second day.
What I will be mentioning... is how this game has hands down the worst new player experience of any big budget MMO I've played, possibly ever. It's a common example of a game trying too hard during the early stages. You're immediately rushed into the action with a full bar of skills that you have no idea what they do. You're immediately fighting some big bosses, and there's a ton of NPCs around, who you, as a character, are supposed to be familiar with, and it's throwing all this story at you while rushing you along, and expecting you to make informed decisions on what kind of combat style you want to use, and...
It's just overbearing. There's nothing wrong with a simple opening, where you're given a basic attack and one ability and you get to kill 5 skeletons to just get a feel for the controls and the gameplay, and then the game slowly opens up as you go along. I really wish more big games did that.

Now, I quit quite early on, as the story was completely uninteresting, somewhat because I felt like I was dropped in the middle of it and nothing made any sense to me, but also because of the overwhelming expectations they set on me, and because the combat felt really weak. There was no "weight" to my attacks, nor the attacks of the enemy. I get to strafe around while my character (*shudder*) automatically attacks the enemy, spamming through my entire number row as it comes off cooldown. Auto-attacking aside, having 10 skills might be fine after you've played the game for 100 hours, but not right at the start.
I didn't get that far myself, but from the reputable opinions of the people I played with, the game remained laughably easy even as the campaign progressed, and the progression systems were really obnoxious and trying to get you to pay way before you even got to end-game.

All in all, Throne and Liberty isn't just a generic Korean MMO, it's a bad one. From combat, to progression systems, to story, everything was below average, and I have absolutely no desire to see if it would improve if I trudged through it. While I hate to wait another year or more for even just a mediocre MMO release, Throne and Liberty is absolutely not worth playing. I'd recommend you pretend it never existed, and keep on waiting for the next thing to launch. The next might not be good either, but at least now I have hope it won't be worse than this.