Tempest051

Draconic Evolution is certainly a cool mod. It has OP gear for the late game, an OP reactor to generate near infinite energy, and various OP tools. And that's just the issue. I hate overpowered mods. It is nearly impossible to balance DE against other mods because it blows them so far out of the water, they end up in the stratosphere. The DE armour is also so overpowered that most other mods can't even get though its energy shield. It basically makes the player immortal, something I'm principally against.
The only thing balanced in this mod is the fact that the reactor will obliterate the biome it resides in if misused (not even an exaggeration, the explosion will wipe everything off the face of the earth). It is aesthetically pleasing but the novelty wares off in practice. Call me salty; I actively avoid any modpack which includes it.

MTS is definitely the greatest vehicle mod for Minecraft, and almost scratches the itch that MCHeli left behind. Its mechanics are modeled after real world vehicles, and it has the most realistic flight physics of any aircraft mod in MC. It has mechanics like flaps, trim, airspeed (stalling is possible), individual engine thrust (flat spins sort of possible), etc. My only gripe with the mod is that all of these features make for terrible performance. You need a relatively lightweight modpack environment for the heavy math calculations to function properly, otherwise any tps lag (especially during worldgen) will cause you to lose control of the plane as it over-corrects and inevitably crashes. Boats also tend to have buggy controls, and so only one addon pack even has them. It does force you to optimize the hell out of your pack to use it though, so I suppose that's good?
There aren't many addons which add functional military vehicles, and those that do tend to be buggy (gun projectiles hitting the vehicle's bounding box, not working at all, etc). So it's mainly civilian stuff for player transport.
MTS is otherwise an awesome mod.

I believe this was one of the first ports of NTM to 1.12, so it deserves a special mention when talking about the various ports. NTM is definitely my favorite nuclear mod, and easily the best nuclear technology and general "weapons of mass destruction" mod for MC. It quickly fell behind the official 1.7 version, however, and the various bugs were never fixed before it was eventually abandoned. While good in its time, it is now superseded by NTM Extended Edition (Alcater's port).

PREFACE: This is specifically for the 1.12 version of the mod! Later versions completely rewrote the mod and it might as well be considered an entirely different mod in newer versions.

So, on 1.12 this mod is something you shouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. While some of the biomes look nice, the compatibility of the mod is terrible. And compared to other biome mods available on this version, it doesn't really add anything substantial besides biomes with very dramatic terrain heights (which are a pain to traverse). The worst offense of the 1.12 version, though, is that it's MCreator. Compatibility with other worldgen mods is terrible, and as with all MCreator mods, it's buggy as all hell. 0/10 wouldn't recommend if not using the rewrite.

This is honestly the best dragon mod currently available for MC (Wyrmroost is a close second, but it doesn't really add proper dragon bosses in the way you'd expect from an epic fantasy). The models are great, and the combat is interesting (dragons have multiple attack movesets). Past mods have attempted and failed to add proper dragons to the game. But I&F? It's honestly scary meeting one when you're low level. I&F isn't the most stable mod, especially on older versions, but it's not bad enough to be game breaking. Just a little laggy.
Just remember to reduce dragon detection range or significantly reduce dragon den spawn rates, because those mother effers will tunnel to the surface and cross heaven and hell to chase your but down and roast it alive.

This mod is like the holy grail of patches for 1.12 devs. The amount of tweaks and bugfixes are insane. My only gripe is that most of them are enabled by default, and some can break other mods or cause weird bugs, so the initial setup time of going through and disabling stuff is a little tedious. But that's a minor issue. The dev is also pretty responsive to small feature requests, and has added several that I and other devs have asked for that helped to create some pretty critical game mechanics in their respective modpacks.

[My reviews are based on a mixture of subjective preference and objective game design criteria]

Design ratings:

-Originality: 0/10
-Aesthetics: 7/10
-Thematic Consistency: 5/10
-Custom Content: 0/10
-Grind: Low

Found this pack during a search for ocean themed modpacks. From the page description, I was expecting an ocean world with subnautica themed content. The pack even has the MTS subnautica vehicles addon, so I was optimistic. Turns out, the pack is a generic kitchen sink with no custom content whatsoever, and the only subnautica or even ocean related thing is that MTS addon. To top it off, the dev openly violates Copyright by using a resourcepack which rips subnautica's music and audio files, as well as even stating on their pack page that the images used in the project aren't his (with the usual "ask me to remove it" fine print). "Disappointed" would be an understatement.

[My reviews are based on a mixture of subjective preference and objective game design criteria]

Design ratings:
-Originality: 6/10
-Aesthetics: N/A
-Thematic Consistency: 8/10
-Custom Content: 5/10
-Grind: Low

I tried this out while on my search for an ocean based modpack. The hint of a story intrigued me. There is no story, however, beyond a couple questbook notes. I also didn't find any structures in the ocean, though I admittedly didn't look very far.
I played for a couple hours but ultimately decided to drop the pack. I checked better questing in edit mode, and the questbook is essentially a collection of "craft this" quests. There are also very few recipe edits (a single script with half a dozen lines that integrate some magic mod items into the tech recipes).
The setting is somewhat interesting, with the entire world being under water, and the player starting in a custom structure. But the pack doesn't really seem to go anywhere with further custom content beyond that. It might be fun for players looking for a light pack who are new to custom starts and unfamiliar with the mods used, but I otherwise can't recommend it.

I'm only two hours in and I'm already loving it. This modpack ships with a map of sorts, with custom builds integrated into the terrain and villages. A story narrative drives the progression, and it's full of hilariously dry humor I had to fight a ship captain named Johnny Depth xD.
One thing I really love is that there are mod tutorials build into many of the structures you find, which gives players an interactive way of learning the mod's mechanics. I never gave much thought to pneumaticraft, but after seeing some of the builds and content in action, I'm very intrigued.
The aesthetic of the builds is also really neat, and many of the structures have portions that are gated until you gain access to stuff later on. Kind of reminds me of games like Subnautica in that regard.
Anyway, highly recommend. I love story driven packs with NPC, and this is one modpack that uses CNPC very well.

If you've ever heard of the Ambience mod, Music Triggers is Ambience after it chews 5 gum. It allows creating a full soundtrack for your modpack through a host of custom rules you can build in the config files, and it is the most advanced music player ever made for MC (no music is included, this is a dev tool for playing sound files based on conditions you add to the folder). The recent updates also sort of bundled the functionality of travelers titles into the mod, which is neat. And the rules you can specify can be ridiculously specific. Like only playing a given song while under water, at night, inside a cave, in biome X. If you ever wanted to add a dynamic soundtrack to your pack like triple A games have, this is the mod to do it.