Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

Apotheosis is an incredibly ambitious mod, and does actually manage to achieve many of its goals. The elites and invaders help break up all enemies feeling the same and can add more interest to combat.

I honestly really love the conceptual idea of socketing gems, a way to imbue gear with abilities you can find through exploration and combat. I also really like the fact mobs have more variety added through elites (although I will get into the issues I feel there are with the execution of this later). This mod is a treasure trove of interesting concepts and ways to improve systems in the game, however it fells like this mod would be better if it thought about how these would interact with other mods.

My issues with this mod start at the balance, but in my opinions hint at some deeper issues when this mod is viewed from the standpoint as a small side addition to many packs as it is often treated. As a mod that is often treated as a side mod, this mod does a lot of things in questionable ways, for example the elites/invaders can often be so fast it's incredibly difficult to escape them, or have so much regeneration it is almost impossible to kill them with your gear at the time. This, in my opinion, often draws from the intended experience of the pack/game because it interrupts the players focus, forcing them to deal with some threat when they may have just been trying to build or explore.

On the other hand, for combat focused packs which are designed to make a player try to become as powerful as possible and feel as 'cool' as possible, this mod does really work, however I feel this is a narrow scope for the usability of the mod. This leads on to understanding how this mod is balanced, because it isn't balanced around vanilla gameplay, it is balanced around taking everything and scaling up both damage and health in roughly equal proportions. While this can make the player feel powerful, and lead to cool moments, it often makes other mod's content get overshadowed as spells become underpowered or modded bosses become trivial. This is fixable with configuration, but out of the box as it is in many packs it can be a large issue.

You should try this mod, maybe in a small pack or in a combat/RPG pack, but please, don't shove this into any old pack and expect the balance to work. I recommend this mod to those that don't mind sinking their teeth into config files to make sure their mods work correctly together.

While this mod cannot hold a torch to it's new rewrite, that does not mean it was not a good mod on the versions where it existed already. I would heavily advise staying away from the original MCreator version however due to serious stability issues.

'Oh The Biomes You'll Go' is an interesting mod, many of it's biomes are unique and I feel have more character than mods such as 'Biomes o' Plenty'. However, in my opinion, many of the textures are... lacking. Most trees don't provide much utility for building unfortunately and although the biomes are often interesting they can sometimes look discontinuous.

This mod often doesn't work amazingly with other biome mods, with much repeated content or biomes that have no business being together being placed immediately adjacent, however this is to be expected to some extent with how large this mod is.

Despite all the problems I've described with this mod, most of the criticism comes from a place of love as this is a mod I have played with a lot, despite it's flaws. I would recommend this on older versions to people who are bored of vanilla, but if possible play it's rewrite first!

Malum is a mod I should've tried long ago and for some reason I've only just gotten around to it. The ability to collect different materials from every enemy with a scythe is amazing to add more reason to explore and do things that may have once been monotonous annoyances.

This mod has a really good grasp of trade-offs, use the scythe and get extra resources to do magic or use conventional weapons and get bonus damage and the ability to use ranged weapons. Use totems to replenish your hunger or keep food on you to make sure you're protected wherever you go. Sure, you could do both but then you're wasting inventory, which in Minecraft is often very limited.

I'm not normally a huge proponent of magic mods, I often find them very disconnected from the main gameplay loop of Minecraft or many packs, but Malum does a great job at making its systems feel interconnected with the Minecraft world.

This may now be my favourite magic mod, we'll have to see. I would highly recommend to people who like magic mods and want a fresh new experience, or to those who are trying a magic mod for the first time!

This mod helps prevent so much unneeded frustration caused by losing items to cacti or lava happening to be nearby, or because someone else just happened to load the chunks you died in for too long before you got back yourself. Furthermore, because this doesn't place a block like most other similar mods it is more robust and can generate a corpse in almost every death situation.

The only weirdness with corpses is because they can be pushed around by fluids etc, it is possible to lose the corpse and struggle to find your items on some occasions, but this is only a minor issue. Corpses also often cause some issues with mods that affect player rendering, but this isn't really this mod's fault.

I'd highly recommend this mod and it is my go-to gravestone-esque mod!

This is a genuinely good modpack that does deliver on the promises it sets out to fulfil.

I do not however feel like going too in-depth about the gameplay itself in this review, because I would like to instead take this space to warn potential players of how this pack has several intrusive ads in place.

The main menu, pause menu and option menu all have flashy buttons advertising the 'company' behind this modpack. They even removed the mod options button from the main menu and instead moved it to the very bottom of the settings menu; just to replace the main menu one with a giant banner that leads you to an ad screen advertising their newest packs, socials and professional portfolios.

I genuinely do not understand why some modpack creators feel the need to play pretend company with a professional 'studio' name, marketing material, job advertisements (unpaid, of course), social links on every site and so on.
It really makes the mod or modpack in question appear and feel like a corporate product, even if it's a hobbyist love letter to the game. Why can't we just be hobbyists hacking away at a video game we like? Why does everything need to be a business now, or borrow the aesthetics of one? This somewhat soured me on this modpack.

Goblin's Tyranny is one of my favorite mods due to it's art style. While can seem underwhelming out of the box. The cute designs and implementation can charm you all the way. A unique implementation of goblins that frames them as a bit more complex than expected.

An incredibly "compounded", configured pack about making/automating different colored Materia, and ultimately making the Rainbow Materia. My first chance at playing with the Curvy Pipes mod, which definitely makes for an experience, the automation/loop is one of the best I've seen. Using Custom Machinery, the pack is curated into doing x thing at x time, and then upgrading (or ignoring) your previous setups with the new "content" unlocked each tier.
One of my favorite packs, ngl. Might do another playthough when (if) 2.0 drops.

My fav mod ever! You can do so much! Mining machines, factories, trains! its so cool!

I love this mod! It makes it so easy to have a lot more space in my chests! When I go to build something massive it saves me a lot of space too making multiple trips only take one or two!

I am the Dev by the way, I think this is a pretty cool mod :D

Most horror mods really... aren't good. They have no story. Jumpscares only. BTS is different. The first part is horror, intense creepy and spooky atmosphere, the second part melting into a full-blown adventure. I won't spoil anything, but it has A whole story, while only part 1 is done, to see and partake in. Dialogue and all. Characters interacting and straight up cutscenes. Truly amazing. Great atmosphere, great music, great design and interesting moment to moment gameplay. Can't wait for more!