Recent reviews by Grimm Spector

I've been playing this game for a very long time, and it's come a long way. There's been a lot of growing pains, and there's always a new bug, or worse a new unexpected (for me) foible of the mechanics that will rear it's head when you may not expect it. But overall, it's great. It's a great game, with great devs, who're very passionate about what they've been creating here.

If you like building things, and a sci-fi theme, you can have a lot of fun in this game. You really have to think over how you're going to solve problems, and how to spend your resources wisely.

It's like a combination of Ark and top down slashers with nice Vampire elements, think there's some missed space for improvements and depth to the system, and some need for QOL, but overall quite enjoyable. Gets pretty grindy in later levels though. PvE focus is good and refreshing.

Boring, clunk bad combat (has no one learned melee in first person sucks). It has nothing interesting about it. The combat feels like a sloppy attempt to be Doom, but locking on to enemies to finish is sloppy. The environments are beyond arbitrary in layout. I get it, it's hell, but it's not interesting, and doesn't draw you in.

The horror elements are thrown around for shock but fall flat. The climbing system is trash, it always tells you where to go, which is necessary since it's not necessarily obvious due to poor level design but then you're just "press x to go forward" which is just awful.

The abilities are meh, the gear system looks lackluster like it's going to attempt to be a Diablo inspired thing but it's not a looter so ... that's not interesting.

I would go on but ... it's just not interesting enough for me to waste any more time. Oh also the softcore porn aspects of it are also suuuuuuuuuper boring. Lots of attempted fan service that just ... falls flat. But I'm sure it'll work for some folks.

Been playing this game since it first arose, it was good back then, and it's always been getting better. There's plenty of deep gameplay and interesting mechanics. It's an intense and often ruthless survival simulation. And the modding community is lovely and just makes the game better without having to wholesale change things like some games. I'd recommend it to anyone, and suggest you start with the easiest settings. It's worth the time investment.

Updated review!

The game now:
-It ain't perfect, but a lot of attention and love has clearly been poured into this by the developers, and they seem to be still working on developing the game.
-The devs are responsive, they area a small studio but take the time to reach out to individuals like me who's experience wasn't what they hoped for.
-The controls are still a bit not to my preference, but they're not as frustrating as before.
-The performance has markedly improved, I think a lot of that is the engine updates they've mentioned
-Animals are still a problem in games like these, it's just a personal nitpick
-I still find the rate decrease a bit high, but again personal preference.

There's still room for more optimization, but the improvements are quite significant. I'd recommend the game, and think most people who are into this genre will likely have a good time.

This game used to have:
-Terrible performance, even in single player
-Clunky controls
-Spawn rate of animals is incredibly low for limited goods they give you, seems to just pad out boring gameplay loops to take more time
-Sick of the every animal is aggressive when you attack it trope
-Food/water decreases very quickly compared to availability via hunting

Looks like it could be interesting with a lot of changes, balancing and polishing, not to mention the serious need for optimization. But I cannot in good conscience recommend it in this state, even as early access.

Overall a great game, not super into the PvP of these sorts of games, but it provides both good PvE content and stuff for the hardcore PvP types too. It's come a very long way since it's beginnings and there's a fair bit to do in it. The new maps are neat, and they seem to keep trying to push forward with their tech and ideas.

Better with mods, but overall a good solid game in the series. Many improvements over tthe originals. Controls are still a bit poor, modelling is a bit rough, and frame rate drops and staggers are pretty high during large battles. Looking forward to what the team can do with future titles.

Highly recommend this game to any big strategy fans, people who enjoy siege battles may find the gameplay a bit shallow compared to what they'd expect. Some light modding can give much more battlefield flexibility, but it's certainly no TW game as far as troop command. Some of the full conversion mods make it a whole new game too!

Over hyped pile of steaming ♥♥♥♥...

Game has zero actual content. Everything is "busy work" with no actual goal. Super repetitive trash. Grind for things you need to build things you don't really need because nothing is a challenge. Oh except those space raiders, none of your weapons can scratch them unless you have super powerful upgrades, which you can't get because you can't build anything, because if they attack you, you simply cannot flee and have to fight, so you lose all your ♥♥♥♥.

Inventory system is pure trash, grinding ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Crafting system is also pointless waste of time ♥♥♥♥. Why make me craft a chain of items to make a warp cell? There is literally no benefit. When you put mechanics into a game they should benefit the game in some way, i.e. make gameplay interesting, challenging, etc.

The words ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, come on, a RNG to decode pointless text we don't really need or care about? And everytime I talk to an alien before I can do anything I have to wait for the damn words and menu to fade in and print, even though I can't read them. What a waste of time.

Then there's that lovely letterbox when you achieve completely meangingless things, that gets in the way of being able to do anything, whether it's combat or anything else, disabling some of my controls arbitrarily.

Ship combat and ground combat, you have to recharge your weapons by standing still while you open your inventory and keep getting shot. That's a real great ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ combat mechanic. There should be an auto fill that you can setup to use a particular material, like the billions of worthless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ plutonium you have to cram into everything just to be able to get around!

If you want to waste your time flying from planet to planet, seeing the exact same ♥♥♥♥, with no actual value or interesting at all, with a pathetically tiny set of art assets, enjoy the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game!

Excellent game overall so far. Unsure why the poor reviews!

Strong strategy elements, though the localization could use some work. Tutorial is somewhat spare and there's no real indication of what various numbers mean.

For those that like to experiment this isn't a deal breaker, and none of the odd choices of phrasing make a significant impact on the gameplay or story overall.

I'd definitely recommend this game to anyone who really enjoys strategy games! Artwork is pretty good. Tech tree and concepts are interesting. The only con is that a lot of tech is poorly described and you have to try it in action to get an idea how it works. This is OK for some, and leaves some replay value!

Lovely concept.

You can't bypass the tutorial, and the tutorial has a bug that prevents you from completing it. Waste of my time...