Constructive criticism before I ask for a refund

[CTMWood]

I bought this game on the assumption it was complete and fully playable. It is not complete (as the game itself admits on the splash screen) and major game-breaking pieces are missing, which I shall detail below. It's a shame because there is the basis for a fantastic game here, but all I get out of it at the moment is frustration.

Game-breaking problems:

1. The campaign mode can't tell when you've won, so it just keeps cycling through day after day after day when you control all systems, the AI has no money and some brains left.

2. Defending a region in the campaign is trivial. Space a couple of guys across the map and when the enemy brain tries to land, control the nearest guy and simply kill it. It involves no skill or effort and make every territory you own invincible.

3. The player versus player mode is broken, in as much as you can place your troops anywhere. Including directly next to the enemy brain.... Add in other stupid things like being able to place as much gold anywhere you like (it's in 'Terrain'), then you need some self enforced 'rules' to make it playable.

4. Actors, including the brain, spontaneously die. I havn't been able to figure out what's causing it, but on numerous occasions, without cause, an actor bursts into meaty chunks for no reason (no, not mines)

5. No fullscreen mode. Really?! I don't have an odd machine or anything, it just spazzed the hell out until it gave up and forced me into a window mode.

6. I then tried the games suggestion of playing on my TV instead. The writing doesn't scale. I've got a 40" TV and was sat less than a foot away from it so I could the read bloody text...

7. You can get into a stalemate and the game can't detect it, so you're stuck forever. If both you and your enemy have no money left, no way of getting money and all your mobile actors have died, there's nothing left to do but sit and look at the screen for all eternity. If it happens in campaign mode, it's a bigger pain.

8. You only ever attack with a brain and an AA gun. Even if you've invested 10k into the attack, you land with one brain and and AA gun.. It's the reverse problem of point 2. There is effectively no way of taking a heavily defended region as you die before you even land.

9. The game page states 'Multiplayer'. Perhaps it's Steams fault for not specifying, but 'split-screen' is not what most people would consider to be multiplayer...

I'll finish on a positive though. There is a the basis of an absoloutely brilliant game here. If I manage to get my money back, I'll certainly buy this again if it's completed. I'd just rather have that money back now so I can play something else that actually works in the mean time..

[Fizban Frobozz]

You might want to add on to this thread:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/209670/discussions/0/882962066670591376/

[GroeneAppel]

Besides points 5 and 6 I completely agree with you.

5+6: Try playing with the resolution settings a bit more, Yes while silly, the game will work in fullscreen with readable text in the lowest resolution. Yes this needs to be improved.

To add to the resolution problem, on many resolutions the planet is not entirely visible. Meaning that you cannot select certain areas on the north/south side of the planet.

This game has amazing potential, it's lots of fun already. but it really needs serveral bugfix patches and netcode to reach its potential. From last year however I have seen quite some improvements so hopefully the game can reach a finished state in the near future.

[NIL0S]

Feyd, you echo the thoughts of many here exactly.

[BlackAlpha]

To fix the resolution/fullscreen problem, I had to:

- Switch in options to 1680.

- Restart the game.

- Set it to fullscreen (it now works).

- Set it to 1920.

- Restart the game.

- Fixed.

PS: My native resolution is 1920.

Took me a while to figure this out and it drove me insane...

[NIL0S]

Please report back if you get an answer from Steam about the refund.

[Qwibble]

Definitely some legitimate issues there.

I would mention in regard to point 8 you can take control of your drop ship and keep it flying high enough to prevent it being attacked while calling other troops to land ahead of you.

AI improvement is a must though because point 2 makes the single player far too easy once you've mastered the technique I mention above.

[Dikk Justice]

GroeneAppel lähetti viestin:

To add to the resolution problem, on many resolutions the planet is not entirely visible. Meaning that you cannot select certain areas on the north/south side of the planet.

Im having the same issue. I can see that the AI is going for north and south locations on the planet, but I have no way of seeing/scrolling and clicking on the locations. Awesome for the AI, sucks for me.

[Izatiis]

forgot the map/world in compaign is slightly too big, and you cant resize or rotate it, making some sites appear in inaccessible areas... and the aiming cursor needs to be fixed, can't tell where you're shooting half the time, then the cursor resets too after finding a target. walking is a problem half the time as you'll get stuck on a pixel somewhere, not to mention the physics acting on the actor (especially after crouch/prone). then there's the terrain issues as noted, where sometimes my additions appear and other times nothing does. that doesn't just go for terrain either actually... sometimes my built base will up and disappear after i (naively) think it's good to go.
the game has potential but fixes are needed. i'm not gonna ask for a refund, i'll just wait it out and hopefully some of these changes are made.

[Weird Chap]

I agree with you apart from the "I want a refund so I can buy the game when its more complete" Are you trying to prove some stupid point? Minecraft right up untill 1.8 was broken as ♥♥♥♥ in many areas and arguably was still pretty broken. For some stupid rason nobody cared for minecraft but with CC then you want a refund... so you can get the money back.... so you can pay again at a later date....

[Toroic]

Newe6000 lähetti viestin:

I agree with you apart from the "I want a refund so I can buy the game when its more complete" Are you trying to prove some stupid point? Minecraft right up untill 1.8 was broken as ♥♥♥♥ in many areas and arguably was still pretty broken. For some stupid rason nobody cared for minecraft but with CC then you want a refund... so you can get the money back.... so you can pay again at a later date....

Minecraft didn't take a decade and still be at the same point. Minecraft also had a fully functional creative mode that is vastly different from cortex command. Minecraft is not even similar to cortex command in any way.

Terraria would be a more similar comparison, despire being an action game and not an RTS. But this doesn't help your argument, as even though terraria is now an abandoned game, it's stable, has online multiplayer, lots of content, far fewer performance issues, and it took far, far less time.

Putting money in the hands of the developer is like putting money in the hands of the Duke Nukem Forever developers. Games that take that long to make are technologically behind, and usually hampered by lack of motivation and ability on the part of the developers.

Cortex Command is not such a complex game that it should've taken so long and be such low quality at this point. There is no acceptable excuse for it.

[Mad Mephit]

Minecraft was first released on a "preorder, get alpha access" basis. Up until v 1.0, it did not claim to be a complete game ready-to-play. And yet, for that time, it ran quite reliably - at least in singleplayer. For quite a while, there was a game people could sink hours into and maybe find a little sparse in content (though with mods, that was eased), but it didn't feel like core capabilities of the game were outright missing. (Even at "release," it had some awfully glaring gaps in its abilities, especially concerning multiplayer - but that's another issue.)

Terraria may have had problems, and the game certainly grew a lot over its not-very-long lifetime from launch to retirement, but was a quite functional game at the time of release. There was nothing really huge that felt missing, however much more got added after.

Here, though... I won't rehash all the points others have already touched on, but a few bear stressing: the graphics engine is horrible, its concept of display resolution is abysmal, the text is horrendous, and the UI is sorely lacking. (Escape = instant quit to menu, with no confirmation? Really?!) It's not just the length of development, either, because games from the turn of the century were far more readable, and the UI should never have made it to launch.

Store page makes no mention of it being incomplete; the game does as soon as you launch. False advertising much? In all, if I hadn't got this game in a bundle, I'd have been sorely disappointed - and not just in an "I don't like this game" sense; that I'd just swallow.

[Plays Terrible Games]

I think even the comparison of this and Duke Nukem Forever devs is going too far. DNF released as a finished, completely playable and reasonably decent game. Cortex Command is a bunch of assets and code that have been slapped together into a quasi-sandbox to make a use out of them. The "game" part is missing. It's not something even slightly resembling a product that can be sold for money. I hope everyone who bought this is successful in getting their money back.

[CTMWood]

Newe6000 lähetti viestin:

I agree with you apart from the "I want a refund so I can buy the game when its more complete" Are you trying to prove some stupid point? Minecraft right up untill 1.8 was broken as ♥♥♥♥ in many areas and arguably was still pretty broken. For some stupid rason nobody cared for minecraft but with CC then you want a refund... so you can get the money back.... so you can pay again at a later date....

To clarify, I am asking for my money back so that I can spend it on a different game, one that is actually playable.

If this game becomes playable in the future, I intend to buy it then. But in the mean time, I need that money so I can purchase a playable game. Understand?