Recent reviews by Toren

It's so cool so far. The art direction/style is insanely good, and the voice of the Cryptmaster is absolutely top notch. Hidden gem, this one. Tell your friends!

Robust DLC with a fair price. Wish that was the norm and not the exception, but good on the CTA devs. Haven't experienced some of the performance issues that some of the negative reviews mentioned, keeping my fingers crossed on that, but so far so good! New maps look great.

It's a bit rough around the edges right now, but the devs are putting in the effort to clean up a lot of the weird bugs, and the roadmap ahead looks to fix some of the UI and gameplay things that could use some looking at!

Rock and Stone, YEEEEEEAAAAHH

After having a shut-in weekend and wrapping up the first playthrough of the game, I'm giving Ixion a overall thumbs up. Gameplay was enjoyable, and the narrative is pretty interesting. I'm a sucker for space games so I'll award a few bonus points for looking beautiful. The intro and various small cutscenes are movie quality, especially on higher video settings.

I went into it expecting more of a city building game versus what I actually got. Not a bad thing, but I do wish the game had some kind of sandbox or chill mode where I could make things at my own pace and focus on a nicely laid out, optimized ship, but I do think that it may end up being too boring at that point with no real purpose to progress. Not to mention how it would handle things like asteroids etc. I remember my first glimpse of the ship and I immediately thought STARTOPIA! and maybe that colored my expectation a little bit. I tried to start making specialized sectors but by then I was at the ending and they give you no time to mess around then, so I was a little sad about that.

The game isn't overly hard imo, I think it is quite unforgiving in certain (planned or unplanned) moments, but I did beat it on my first playthrough with I think only one chapter restart because I got myself into a food deathloop by paying a little bit too little attention to the harvest cycles moving to farms. I did more deleting and reconfiguring and rebuilting than any other "city builder" I've ever played (unfortunately which is miserable due to how long it takes to remove some of the larger ones) and after a while I felt like it was more about managing what I had versus making forward progress.

I'll keep my specific story finale thoughts to myself, overall it was the I GUESS meme guy throwing his arms up. I think maybe one more chapter could have made things more interesting, I felt super rushed and less pressured. Not really sure how to describe it. It was like an "okay let's hurry and wrap this up" kind of feeling.

Frostpunk is an exceptionally hard bar to pass and it's certainly going to draw the comparison being in the same crisis-builder genre, and I don't think it reaches that bar. That doesn't, however, mean that I don't think it's worth the money. I am of course aware of the launch/hotfix issues but I think moving forward with those issues fixed that Ixion is a positive experience and should have a review score reflecting that.

Admittedly, the first couple hours I played made me feel like "oh dear a half-baked Squenix RPG" but sticking with it and just recently wrapping up the story, it ended up pleasantly surprising me. If Steam used a number scale I'd set it at around an 7-8 out of 10.

I do with the combat had a little bit more depth but overall it was passable. Farming enjoyment will vary depending on the person, I would say personally I used it the bare minimum for consumables/money and it served its purpose, but could see someone spending a lot of time with it.

Graphics and character stuff didn't bother me at all but I know people have been having a lot of heartache over it.

The story ended up being better than I expected, there are some minor complaints to be had but overall I think it turned out well. Side content is pretty bland and even tedious at moments, but such is the role of side content sometimes.

Game's biggest strength is in the party cast. They are all quite enjoyable and the character story quests(?) were probably some of the parts I looked forward to at the end of each in-game day. Break time chats reminded me of the Tales mechanic that is similar, which is a good thing.

I do think I got my moneys worth at full price but I'd give it an even higher recommendation if you see this pop up in a future steam sale.

I don't know why I like this game as much as I do. It's got a timer, you're missing half the available buildings and resources, you move to a new town when you complete your reputation grind leaving everything behind...It has all the building blocks of a city builder game I traditionally wouldn't like, but it's been incredible amounts of fun.

Trying to work around your city's issues with limited buildings and resources adds a whole entire new world of creativity into the city building genre. What a strange mashup of genres! It works shockingly well.

It feels a bit unfair to other early access games when you have something this polished in early access. I'm looking forward to the rest of the features yet to come!

EMBRACE THE CHAOS. Random effect mode is hilarious and a ton of fun with friends.

Single Player and trying to find public lobbies likely not that great, and imo Golf with Friends is better for "normal" minigolf type play. This game REALLY excels with the effects and mixing/matching them for CHAOS.

Golf Gang will go places with continued map development and people keeping things going in the workshop!

Game is awesome, story so far is engaging and well-done, mechanics and characters are fun and/or interesting...Often both! Be prepared to do copious amounts of reading. Even more if you are new to Pathfinder/the genre and need to read tooltips/tutorials. Not a bad thing, just be prepared if you're coming in fresh.

Graphics are good, I haven't encountered any bugs - or at least not noticed them if there were any - and the soundtrack is nicely done.

Going to be honest though...crusader mode or w/e kinda blows. I don't personally find it very engaging or interesting but I'm too stubborn to turn it off. I would have liked a war table type thing like in Dragon Age Inquisition versus what we got in Pathfinder. At the very least some difficulty tuning or options would be good, some of the fights are kind of insane and to get your armies up in power level it's a lot of waiting.

TLDR - Overall, fantastic and well put together game. Easily something you can play, set aside, and replay at a later date. Crusade mode ticks off a couple points for me, but I can easily concede that might be personal preference.

Did you like VC1? Yes? You'll enjoy VC4!
Did you not like VC1? Then you won't like VC4!

It's essentially the same playstyle, art direction, story theme, just updated and in a different chunk of the war. All in all, I think I liked the cast/story a bit better in VC1 - the VC4 story can be a bit eyeroll sometimes, but for the most part, I am having a lot of fun and highly recommend to anyone who likes SRPGs