Recent reviews by Joking_Phantom

It's got a lot of potential. It really does make you feel like the AI custodian of a ship, doing what it takes to go from broken wreck to sustainable colony ship.

It's performant, and has a lot of content implemented such as items, music, sound effects, UI, mechanics, etc., so there's quite a lot of meat on the bones from a game dev perspective.

I would like to see more focused development to flesh out some weak parts of the game.

For example, worker behavior/efficiency (they can haul many parts at once, but don't "efficiently" haul when trying to build multiple things). The threats and challenges to your ship don't seem to be very interesting, so there's not much time pressure. As is, this game feels a bit too sandboxy, with not enough incentive or purpose to encourage players to play to their limits and make tradeoff decisions. The base UI doesn't present much information, you have to toggle between several different views and graphs to get a feel for various ship metrics such as electricity, oxygen, temperature, research, etc. A HUD that presents top level info for the ship would be much appreciated.

I hope this game makes it across the finish line.

The game is great. Art style, soundtrack, gameplay, story, are all top notch. The campaign is quite long and exhaustive, though probably speed runnable for those interested in making their space journey short and sweet.

Most negative reviewers are struggling with the difficulty, but the game is not that hard. In fact, when you consider that the game gives you an enormous amount of resources and research to collect, it's obvious that the designers are going too easy on you - space should be harder to survive in.

I eagerly await a hard difficulty mode for those who want a challenge in a space ship city building simulator, and an easy mode for people who just want to explore the story without having to make hard decisions in a game about... hard decisions. Or do I? It seems like the difficulty of managing a moving space city in a hostile environment is a central part of the theme, so compromising that part of the story with an easy mode is probably counter intuitive.

A really fun fleet combat game. Mechanics are heavily simplified from other games like Gratuitous Space Battle, where you only need to make a decision from a small set of random choices for ship+weapon, permanent upgrade, or temporary boost.

A little too easy to amass an overwhelming advantage though. Lasers are plentiful and scale up really hard (though even the anti-fighter variants are prone to poor accuracy against fast fighters). Beams have perfect accuracy against fast moving fighters, and share the same upgrade with repair beams. Bullets are like lasers, but bypass shields. Fighters/mini-fleets are much better than large ships since they carry multiple copies of the same weapon. Large ships are only good for front line tanking, while the fighters do all the damage/stun/healing/point defense. Concentrate your upgrades into fighter health, laser/beam/bullet damage, large ship health/shields, and eventually you will be invincible in the later half of the levels.

The presentation and UI is clean and crisp, and watching the battle unfold with no lag, a perfect frame rate, and decent sound is a pleasure. Can't even see any bugs, if there are any.

It really reminds of the golden days of flash games on the web, when things were a little more Wild West when it came to internet content.

Great game. A few bugs and balance issues on launch, but they are pretty minor. Some have already been patched in the first few days to make things easier for players.

It doesn't hold your hand at all, which may shock some players. It only gives you a few hints on how to proceed through the game, so you have to either have good experience with other logistical games, or you have to experiment and learn what strategies are best to terraform Mars. Its entirely possible to stall on logistical bottlenecks or run out of resources, if you don't plan or build efficiently.

Similar games are Harvest: Massive Encounter and the Creeper World series, in terms of mechanics.

The harder difficulty, Per Aspera, was beatable even on the launch version of the game. Some balance patches have made it slightly easier, and less likely to stall out due to losing. Expect to sink about 10-20 hours for a first playthrough, though it's entirely possible to beat the hard difficult in 5 hours or less.

It's quite immersive and detailed for a simulation game, with a beautiful 3D render of Mars complete with cool topography and a futuristic orbital view from which you can plan special projects to aid in the terraforming process. It really makes you feel like you are in command of a mission with humanity's best technology.

There is a great, 3 way branching story line complete with excellent voice acting and plenty of optional lore to be discovered. Unusual for a simulation game, but its quite a good story to experience, and blends in well with the terraforming process you are tasked to complete.

Love the interface - it's functional, clean, sticks to the ASCII terminal hacker aethetic without actually limiting functionality to 90's style terminals that we are stuck with at work. Entirely possible to play the game with just the mouse, but using keyboard hotkeys or just straight keyboard mode is very natural. It's sort like of a perfected version of gVIM - powerful hotkeys at your disposable married with the versitility of the mouse.

Never before have I been so satisfied at ASCII explosions and EM waves put together out of tile graphics. In this respect, Cogmind is top of its class. Graphical developers everywhere should take cues from how Cogmind renders game events in a way that gives both visercal satisfaction at seeing your enemies torn to shreds, as well as concisely communicating information to the keen player.

The game itself is fun, and the concept of "put yourself back together with parts scavenged from dead enemies" is very well applied. In fact, the entire game is balanced around part availibility from finding them in random rooms and killing your enemies, which is something quick players will adapt to easily. Your first win might be out of sheer luck after at least several failed runs where you learn more and more, but experienced players can win reliably (although going for high scores does take some luck and playing the same seed multiple times for optimal moves).

Multiple branches already in the game, with more on the way. Experienced players will be able to plan out what branches they want to take, determining a large part of their build and victory method.

Plenty of lore for the nerds to dig deep into. It will take many runs to discover the various events, dialogue options, and general gameplay options availible to the player.

Well worth the price, in fact I wouldn't mind paying double for all the polish and content that has clearly gone into the game. Satisfying games like this one are rarer than they ought to be.

Great combat and gameplay, without any of the overwhelming min max crap and abundantly useless items you encounter in other RPGs and games similar to Dark Souls.

For people who don't have time to waste on frills, this game is a perfect 3-8 hour playthrough on normal. Every enemy is someone to learn from. Strategies for dealing with enemies are naturally formed as they obey the same rules and use largely the same moves the player does.

Nightmare mode tests the skills you learned on normal, and gives the player additional lore that those engrossed in the story and setting will appreciate (the story is ignorable, but for those who enjoy it, the good ending is discoverable with sufficient gumption).

You can build physical and/or magic damage characters. For players who are less mechanically skilled, grinding up a build that can stomp the hardest of bosses will only take a few hours - but defeating the final boss with zero upgrades is a plausible, albiet difficult task.

All in all, the gameplay is compact and concise - the experience does not require tens or hundreds of hours to fully appreciate, which is a positive for players like me. The combat system manages to maintain simplicity throughout the game while simultaneously leaving multiple styles of combat open for the player - players can tackle a majority of the enemies through any mix of dodging, blocking, and dash stunning (bosses may require more than one, naturally). Magic damage can be used to supplement physical combat, or downright replace it with sufficient levels (no mechanical skill necessary to beat any boss and enemy if you just nuke it to death).

To those who find frustration or boredom out of a need to build up their character, this is likely your own fault. Beating the game in a timely manner does not require mechanical skill - the least mechanically inclined players can beat it in less than 10 hours by being careful with spending their experience at safe intervals - the only thing this game punishes is recklessness and thoughtless actions. If physical combat is too difficult, magic can make the game a breeze by removing much (but not all) of the need to read and anticipate your enemies actions.

tl;dr: get gud, or nut up - this game is fun.