Minecraft Mod & Modpack Reviews

I HATE playing MC without dynamic lights, but most mods either have a performance-heavy version of dynamic lights built-in, or you have to get a separate, poorly-built dynamic lights mod.

No longer!
Lamb Dynamic lights is by far the best dynamic lighting mod. Not only is it fully configurable (not complex values or settings, but clear, understandable, important settings), but it is also FAR less-performance heavy as the other mods. Even with a powerful system, dynamic lights usually cause a noticeable FPS decrease, or I have to set my dynamic lights on "fast" or "low quality" mode, and they still affect performance and don't look the best.

Lamb Dynamic lights look great, run perfectly (not sure about slower systems but tested far better than other mods on my system), and don't cause any stutters, lighting issues, or crashes, even with shaders and other mods enabled.

I never thought I would leave such a long review on a dynamic lighting mod of all things, but this deserves it.

Highly recommend!

Primal adds a small, curated, and high quality selection of real world animals into Minecraft. It boasts impressive visuals, logical gameplay, as well as good variety across all biomes.

When it comes to enhancing the feel of the world, Primal does a fantastic job at making the ecosystem feel more alive. Alongside the new mobs, it also tweaks a few animals from the game such as the rabbit and dolphin, such that vanilla animals do not feel out of place.

Unfortunately, the mod lacks a good amount of content. Not to say that it isn't worth your time, it almost certainly is for those who want to spruce up their world with fauna, but there isn't much to do with the fauna. Each creature has one or two usually mundane features.

If I had to compare it to Alex's Mobs, what I would consider its competitor, I would say Alex's mobs takes quantity of content, but Primal has much higher quality under its belt.

What started as one of the best modpack series, one of the most popular for large and kitchen-sink modpacks, has since fallen from grace.

When All The Mods was first created, there were only thousands of mods to choose from (at most), and most were new and good.
At this point, there are literal hundreds of thousands of mods to choose from, (mostly bad or we've all played them before) and ATM will either choose all the wrong options, or just cram the same 500 mods we've all played before into the pack.

The quests used to be fun and exciting and a challenge, and now it's just pages and pages of grinding.

Mods are fine, performance sucks, it's just gotten bigger and more-performance heavy, while not really improving the ATM series or concept. Play the other All The Mods modpacks first, even ATM 9 is better.

It seems to have very much fallen into the quantity > quality trap, and I hope they improve with next versions.
I do have to say that the tech mods/aspects of the pack are slightly better than some older ATM modpacks.

Every single modpack every created seems to want to be like Roguelike Adventures & Dungeons. RAD is one of the best modpacks ever created, with a perfect balance of everything, and no boring or repetitive or complex tech or magic like many other modpacks try to cram in.

Truly turns minecraft into a Roguelike, Adventure, & Dungeon game. So many other modpacks also take away the Minecraft feel, and RAD does the opposite, it somehow makes it feel MORE fun and MORE minecraft-y. Performance is fine for how big (and less modern) this modpack is.

Every time I ever get a new modpack, I deep-down hope that it is similar to, or as good as RAD.

I highly recommend, go check it out if you haven't played it yet!

Great modpack, one of the first that brought me over to 1.12 modding and other newer versions, and is a huge inspiration/reference for any modpack I play today. Not too techy, not too magic-y, perfect balance of everything I believe. I wish the new version of this modpack was just as good.

The separate pathway focus meant having specializations that you can uniquely help your group in, this made our playthrough very enjoyable as we had different roles throughout our progression

fairly competent for a kitchen sink pack but DREADFULLY unfocused. features progression for the sake of progression, several mods that trivialize resource procurement and management (looking at you, mystical agriculture), and absolutely no substantial goals after the dragon. apotheosis and mystical agriculture make any task in this an absolute cakewalk. fun with friends for a while but like what isnt. a grimly frictionless experience.

I've been playing the modpack for a long time, it's one of the best, if not the best, I've played so far. It doesn't feel repetitive and it's entertaining. There's always room for improvement, but it's mostly a matter of personal taste.

GAMEPLAY: The animations are very good, and the interaction with the environment is very natural. Everything has its purpose, which I appreciate and makes it interesting. However, I would like the environment to be more dynamic, although if I remember correctly, they've already considered this, judging by the posts I see on their Discord.

PERFORMANCE: It's very well optimized. It's true that at the beginning, when you enter the world, you should let it load a bit before moving, otherwise it stutters. But after that, it runs very well, even though I have a low-to-mid-range PC.

AESTHETICS: The aesthetics are very well done. There's a great variety of things and buildings, and the lighting and sounds are very good. However, after playing for a long time, the structures become somewhat repetitive. In my opinion, I would like a little more variety, if possible.

VERY GOOD MOD AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

From an adventure standpoint Aquamirae really has it all. Once you've determined you want to engage with it, it is not at all hard to do so: just find a Deep Frozen Ocean, and enter the Ice Maze where you can definitely get lost if you play without maps or coordinates.
The atmosphere here is really good, and you're not just running around to your goal, you really have to pay attention to how you travel, as the water itself, not just the creatures in it, is dangerous.

The structures are challenging but fair, and are still engaging when you're taking on the content in multiplayer. Each comes with unique loot or snippets of information on what else is out there for you to discover and interact with.

The Cordelia boss fight is one of the better boss fights I've seen in this game, and you get a useful piece of armor that I wish was required in more places than just the Ice Maze.
The Eel however is very underwhelming, and its scroll reward is honestly not worth it.

The unique rewards are interesting and not just exclusively useful in the mod's structures, and there's some new plantlife allowing for underwater lighting, which is amazing.

The Ice Maze replaces the Deep Frozen Ocean. I personally like that ocean so that being gone is a bummer, but this is great for the aesthetics of the mod's content itself, and for the 'questline' it basically guarantees you won't have to find another Ice Maze to complete it.

Like the title suggests, I was looking forward to playing this pack given that I like RPG packs and the Terraria theme was a great bonus. However, there are a number of glaring issues with this pack that I just can't overlook. For some background, I played the ranger class, which may have been the main issue.

There's a real lack of variety since essentially the only viable weapons are bows, and there aren't very many of them. You have to beat a few bosses to get multiple bosses to get a single gun.

The quest book is quite small as well, without any interesting rewards since they mostly tend to give money and/or xp. I'd really like there to be more to make progression clearer.

Also, the movement accessories aren't very balanced. The hermes boots and all its variants barely give any movement speed, while also requiring time to reach max speed, so they are outclassed by vertical movement accessories and the eye of cthulhu dash.

However, the other classes may well have a better experience, so probably play those instead if you're going to try it at all.