Recent reviews by Buttons BMC

"Its rednecks in space with power-tools ripping ships apart for salvage"

Its a "Working in Space" simulator. The ships that are in the game are complex enough to be fun to tear apart and salvage, and the puzzles of how they have to be disassembled is just enough to keep you wanting more.

After you max out the tool/suit upgrades and make it to the end of the game, if you enjoy the game you will likely find yourself coming back and tearing ships apart just for the pure zen value of doing so brings.

I found myself coming back over and over just to tear ships apart after maxing out the pre 1.0 game just because it was so chill and calming.

The sountrack is great and suits the "rednecks in space" vibe that this game has going for it.
Great base to build upon, add more ships to (if the devs see to it) and overall just a great chill experience.

Even if the devs dont add more ships, what is on over is more than enough to be fun, engaging and keep you coming back if for nothing else then to get that darn debt counter down to 0 (which is entirely possible).

Sure there are little issues here and there (like how to decompress ships later on in the game without blowing out panels) but they can be worked around or seen as the quirk of a small dev that they are (I actually love them because it adds tension and keeps you on your toes).

The devs appear to care and have seen this through from early access to 1.0 and I have to say seeing it from where it started to where it got to at 1.0 (now released) it has been a journey and it has been great.

Great visuals, great sound, great music, and overall a great idea and very well executed.
Would recommend and I will likely dump another couple of hundred hours into it.

All but ruined a darn close to perfect game with what feels like (and likely is) a smattering of fan made mods and zero thought to balancing or fun.
The new content is very meh and in some instances downright bad.
The new graphical overhaul some of the old enemies and animations look good on their own but do not really fit the aesthetic of the art direction of the game and look very like what this expansion actually is, a collection of mods.
The new music in some instances is out of place with the levels and in other cases is again meh.
The lighting is much better than it use to be, but who plays Isaac for its lighting?
The new floors are all but pointless bullet hell grinds that are there only for the achievements and otherwise do not fit in the game as a whole (especially their layouts or how you get to them).

All of this aside, what really makes this "DLC" (see again really just a mod) not worth it and in a big way ruin what was an amazingly almost perfect game, is the balancing it brings....

It tries to make what were generally regarded as garbage items, well, less garbage. The problem with this idea is that, like a Card/deck builder game (see hearthstone or magic or slay the spire), what makes the amazing items amazing and what brings balance to the game and the item pool as a whole is the garbage items that you are either forced to use or have to skip entirely. So by trying to make these garbage items less garbage, they have essentially broken the "meta" of what Isaac use to have. And this is to say nothing of the fact that they royally screwed up the spawn rate of the better items so enjoy seeing the same 20 to 40 either garbage or meh items over and over again and hitting that "R" button to reset runs because that is what you will be doing...

On top of this, they then took the amazing items that are actually fun to use and combo together, and nerfed a high number of them. So now you have slightly less garbage items, and then you have slightly less (and in some cases straight up terrible now) amazing items. Does that sound fun to you? So now most of the items are just in that really bad "meh" category of "whatever" items. It also appears (and this may be just my interpretation) that a lot of the NEW items this expansion brings are either outright broken or dont fit even slightly and go against the general gameplay loop of the entire game). So it appears that the old items are now relegated to this "meh" pool and look at the new shiny.

So you have the "meh" graphics, the "meh" music and the "meh" new floors, then you have the stupid item balancing, well hold onto your hats, because they also completely broke the Boss health scaling. Yes thats right folks, for only 15.99 you too can have a 10 minute fight with Delirium (on NORMAL difficulty) because the boss health scaling is now so far out of whack that by the time you jump into the void its bonkers just how long it takes to kill this boss, and this is with enough items and combos to outright break a run in the old version of this game. It is more than annoying just how badly they messed this up. Even the first 2 floor bosses are far FAR to tanky for what they should be given the items you likely have by then. All this for only 15.99.

And dont even get me started on the new bosses themselves... Do you enjoy frustrating charging bosses? Do you enjoy bullet hell dodging in a small room with so much flighting around on the screen that you visually lose track of Isaac? Then buy this DLC now! Because that is what almost all the new bosses are. They either are fast rushers that you likely wont have the speed to even have a chance of dodging or they are bullet hell annoyances that you will be lucky to get a few tears on between attack cycles because you will be spending so much time dodging projectiles. Its almost like this is just a cobbled together mod that wasnt made by professional level designers and thus was not balanced even slightly for actual fun gameplay that they then charged money for... HMMMMM

And lastly the additional rooms they have made for the RNG floor layouts can range from "why was this even included" to "so they put 10 enemies in this tiny room with no room to dodge anything and expect me to escape without taking damage?" to "oh these moving spikes and spike rock layouts are SUPER fun taking forced damage on"... Yeah its that bad. Again, no thought to balance for fun or challenging gameplay, just throwing things at the wall...

Hardmode is now so hard as to be frustrating and not challenging (and this is coming from someone who has a vast number of items unlocked and was playing (at that point) exclusively on hardmode. All enemies move faster, projectiles fly much faster and there are larger number of enemy spawns and the number and variety of elites that spawn is nuts. Its not fun, its not challenging, its just frustrating. Enemies and bosses that I would normally either stomp or have fun trying to beat are now just not fun or take so long to kill that I give up.

In sumarry, is this DLC worth 15.99? NO, it is not. I respect what they were going for here, but with the amount of problems it has and with the amount of "this is just not fun" it brings to this game, I would say avoid until they either re-balance the systems (boss health scaling, item balancing, item spawn rates, etc.) or straight up fix these problems. It is really sad that this is how this DLC turned out. With all the hype surrounding it and the amount of time they are saying they worked on this (I am calling a BIG BS on that) you would think this would be better, but as of right now, it just isnt. I would refund if I could but I have gone over the limit of time because I wanted to give this mod *cough* I mean DLC a fair shake. It just isnt here folks. stick with the other DLC's and enjoy the game for what it was. Sad times, sad times.

its good

Due to Bethesda's continued march towards EA levels of greed, I cannot in any right mind recommend this game. A once thriving ecosystem of community supported mods that kept this game alive well past its expected shelf life, has now been fractured into Micropayment DLC mods reminicent of mobile games. Where once you could expect mods that extened the game well past what even the original developers could have dreamed of, all for the free, now those mods are going behind paywalls where they can nickle and dime you. The price split between the mod developers, Valve and Bethesda are all well documented, and I emplor you to go seek them out and read them, but to say the least they are egregious. I fully expect that Bethesda will do the same thing they have done with Skryim to further games they own (I.E. Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas) as well as new games down the line. Because of the paid mods situation and the clear indication on the new direction of Bethesda's business practices, I cannot and will no recomend this game nor any other Bethesda game. It was fun while it lasted, but that day has passed. Giving this a STRONG thumbs down.