CalaMariGold

Vampires Strike Back is an inventive and unique experience in Minecraft. It offers a fun roguelike gameplay loop that you don't see in many other modpacks. It's clear this is a high-effort modpack with incredible aesthetics. I will say it feels like it hasn't reached it's full potential, and it's quite hard at first if you're not good at Minecraft combat or don't utilize all the new mechanics, not sure how beginner-friendly this pack is.

Excited to see where to this goes, but in it's current state it's absolutely worth a try. It's not a long pack so why not!

This pack plays really well and smoothly, it's clear a huge amount of effort and creativity was put into this! I had a lot of fun playing through the early game and a tad of mid-game. Performance was really solid, the art direction and aesthetics are inspiring, and the story was fun! The whole aspect of the world machine is really cool and reminds me of Satisfactory. Personally it didn't hold me for long enough to get to end-game, but that's more about me than the pack for the most part. Overall definitely give this pack a try.

The way Quark Oddities implements a backpack is really unique, and I vastly prefer it compared to other backpack mods for adventure packs. The other backpack mods are either OP, offer too many unneeded features, or unintuitive.

This backpack simply expands your inventory in a clean and visually polished way. That's it! Simple!

I also really like the totem of holding, and prefer to use it compared to other grave mods. It's implemented well, but doesn't offer enough config options, which is why Quark: RotN Edition was made, a fork a Quark that I actually use and recommend if you're looking for more configuration with Quark/Quark Oddities.

Mowzie's Mobs is a classic at this point, offering really unique and highly polished mobs with actual unique mechanics. I do believe the potential for this mod isn't reached, the Wroughtnaut for example is quite boring and could use more interesting mechanics, it's not super fun to just be waiting for it to attack.

I will say, this mod is used A LOT, to the point where I'm almost sick of seeing it, especially on older versions. It's in basically every RPG modpack. I think there are a lot of newer boss/hostile mob mods that are more worth trying out, even on 1.12.

Genuinely one of the best horror mods out there, mostly because this mod doesn't just try to be a horror mod, it's simply a side-effect of the aesthetics and concept. The main draw of Dimensional Doors is that it allows you to have your own small pocket dimension to put whatever you want in it, but that's not why I enjoy it. The maze dimensions, the portals, the rifts, and the coolest of all: the limbo dimension .

Honestly this is one of those mods you need to go in blind. There's so much potential for modpack developers with this, and I feel it's not reached it's full potential. My main gripe is it doesn't offer as many configuration options as I'd hope, with the ability to make your own maze dimensions, change what happens, more limbo configuration, etc. I believe a whole modpack could be based around Dimensional Doors if there were only more content, or at least offer robust configurability.

Someone really needs to make a unique reality-bending story-based modpack featuring this mod!

DeceasedCraft is a really well made pack and deserves a lot of the praise it gets. The gameplay loop is fun (looting/exploring, base building, some tech progression), it offers different types of gameplay for different people, and is overall well built out.

I'd definitely recommend playing on a server with friends, but maybe not a community server. I'm not sure I would've enjoyed this pack much at all without friends.

Personally I didn't end up playing it too much as it didn't hold my interest, but that's more to do with me than the modpack's quality. Give it a try for sure.

I've put off making this review for awhile because I felt like I haven't put enough hours into the pack or gotten very far, but I feel like early game and first impressions are really important. I'll update this review whenever I get to the rest of the pack.

Coming from someone that has really struggled to enjoy tech mods and automation in modpacks, this pack felt different. I've always wanted to enjoy tech, I find it really cool! But for one reason or another I couldn't get very far in any tech pack or mod without getting frustrated at a lack of explanations or boredom.

This pack explains EVERYTHING but still let's you figure out puzzles on your own. The puzzle being how to most efficiently complete this automation task. At least in the early game, the quests give you all the information you could need, with a few exceptions. It's really easy to get into the groove and just keep going. Most other packs have some sort of roadblock or tedium, this pack doesn't have that so far.

Thats another thing, basically all tedium is GONE. No mobs, no day-night cycle, no annoying terrain, just focus on the fun! This might put off some people but I implore you to give it a try! Because of its heavy focus, it has a lot more effort put into the fun part of the gameplay loop. While there is a main progression (thankfully!), this pack lets you explore with a few different tech mods at the start, letting you tackle what you feel is most important.

Performance is very great, given it's a basically superflat world with no mobs. With some modern 1.12 performance mod changes and Cleanroom, you could probably get this pack to run on a 20 year old laptop. I can't say anything about late game performance however.

Aesthetics I gave 3 stars because not much effort was put into it as far as I can tell. No high-effort presentation and aesthetic polish that many modern packs have these days, basic vanilla main menu with a logo and screenshots. Only 2 texture changes as far as I see in the files. The custom item textures are nice however. I would've really loved a more polished presentation and consistency in aesthetics, but it really doesn't matter all that much considering the vanilla aesthetics fit the pack mostly well, but a unique presentation and aesthetic is important these days!

If you've struggled with tech in the past, want to try something different or don't want any tedium/differing focus of other tech packs, please give Feed The Factory a try!

I saw this was one of the highest rated packs on the site, so thought I'd give it an honest try to see what it's all about. To preface, I am running this with an Intel i9-10900k, an RTX 3080, and 8gb of RAM assigned (which seems more than reasonable for a pack with 137 mods).

I was greeted with a very long load time, the default vanilla menu, and an even longer world load time (nearly 15 minutes total). As I spawn in I run around for a couple minutes and notice the TPS is abysmal, everything is a slideshow. Doing any action takes 2-4 seconds, with frequent FPS freezes. I really wanted to play more and see what it really had to offer, but I could not stand the performance.

Of the gameplay, I noticed nothing good. Chat spammed as soon as I spawned in, no quest line, no advancements, nothing directing me what to do. I noticed very few mobs as well. The structures were neat, but I could tell most of this was just mods thrown in with little configuration.

This pack was likely made for a couple of friends, and was not intended to grow beyond that. Further more, the logo of the pack is clearly AI generated, so that goes to show how much effort they care to put in.

It's fine to have a pack like this for friends, but I don't see any reason this pack should be anywhere close to the highest rated packs, along the greats like MeatballCraft and Divine Journey 2.

I don't have many hours in other tech mods so take this with a grain of salt, but every time I play a modpack with tech, I've found myself gravitating towards Mekanism. I really enjoy its aesthetics, intuitiveness, and the progression. It's super simple to get into, but also challenges you in plenty of ways. It all feels very seamless and polished with plenty of risk and reward. Making a fission and fusion reactors was super challenging for me but lots of fun!

Some context: I played this pack on a community server with 10-20 people, usually less than 10 online at any given time.

Coming from someone who hasn't played much of modern versions and tech, E9 serves as a pretty good introduction to its mods. I mainly used Mekanism throughout the whole pack, with a couple other mods throughout. It's beginner friendly with good quest descriptions, not the greatest but it told me what I needed to know to get started. Late-game Mekanism, the quests started to degrade and I was forced to use the wiki and multiple tutorial videos. Quests weren't in the best order either and the quest rewards in the beginning felt super OP. However, for a kitchen sink pack, this felt rather polished compared to others I've played in the past but definitely not perfect. I still enjoyed this much more than E6, that's for sure. I recommend picking a specific mod in this pack and going through it fully, especially if you're new.

I will say the exploration, caves, and mobs felt pretty barebones. The modlist is fairly tame compared to most kitchen sinks, but it seems like it's intentional. Personally I think this pack could've used a bit more to spice it up (especially the caving) but it wasn't a big deal to me as I was inside my base working on tech 95% of the time. I rarely even went to other dimensions as there wasn't much reason to, aside from plopping a digital miner in the Nether and going back home.

E9 has a lot of potential for a polished experienced with great inter-mod compatibility but drops the ball on a few aspects. A big pet peeve of mine was the fact that there were multiple versions of the same ingot. Osmium for example had the Mekanism version and the "enigmatica" version. It was really annoying when going through recipes and having to find recipes and uses for a specific ingot.

I'm very curious to see how E9: Expert compares to this, but as a beginner when it comes to tech, I still had a blast learning all the systems. It felt open-ended with enough direction to not have me completely lost. EMI is a blessing and blew my mind when I first saw what it offers. Plenty of QoL in the pack but could use more (cough, Carry On). E9 could use more building blocks as well, definitely sad at the lack of chisel (i like the cool tech blocks 😭). You really gotta get creative to make some nice looking factories.

As far as performance and stability, the first half was pretty much perfectly fine. I would've rated it 5 stars if the server crashes didn't start coming in half-way through. Issues and crashes started to become common as more players got ahold of complicated tech, but I don't entirely blame the pack for that. Any kitchen sink would struggle with the amount of players we had, so I only deducted 1 star.

All in all, if you want a somewhat-polished, easy, and fun kitchen sink pack to play with a bunch of friends where everyone can be satisfied, give E9 a try :)