Recent reviews by Greep

Hodor

I'm going to give this a vote of confidence since the developer is actively working hard to address launch concerns. Summary:

Pros:

-There is more and possibly much more depth to combat than FTL

-Not an FTL "clone": it's very similar in the basic idea and visuals, but that's it. Ship customization feels more like masters of orion than FTL for instance.

-Lots of customization and complexity to ships

-Large scale battles, not hundreds of wheenie insignificant ones

Cons:

-Currently not very enjoyable due to some lack of polish: You'll be spending a lot of time doing time consuming activities you won't enjoy. The meat of the game is the events, battles, and shops, and the game currently has a bunch of useless features that keep you out of these.

-Not as combat focused as an FTL player is probably expecting. Not nearly enough IMO. Events are cute but get old fast no matter how many are added, and weren't really what made FTL fun anyways.

-Seems to have just generally launched into EA a bit too early. Particularly noticeable with things like battles almost completely lacking visual and audio feedback marking important events, leading to a confusing mess.

-Too difficult right out the gate: FTL generally ensured you wouldn't flop until having fought at least a few dozen fights. In this game you probably will fail several times possibly even before your third fight.

-While ships are highly customizeable, it's mostly in "mathy stuff" (+shields vs +hull e.g.), not cool features, which gets old pretty quick once you know what to optimize.


Anyways, most of the cons are actually pretty serious right now, so I'd hold off on a purchase if you're looking for something fun to play for the next two or three weekends and it'd honestly be a negative release view if most of these things aren't changed. But the fact that these are being addressed seriously means it's good enough for a tentative positive vote right now for Early access.

This isn't a terrible game, so consider it a mixed review, but after 30 hours in and not wanting to play anymore and not very excited about it, I can't rate this positively for a rogue-like game. I will note, though, that if you generially like the idea of "rogue-likes" but are mostly turned off by lack of feedback/graphics/music, this is a good game to get into the genre.

Quick review:
Pros:
-Varied builds
-Lots of loot
-Very good music
-Good graphics
-Standard hard rogue difficulty curve
-Cute mechanics like monster horde rooms

Cons:
-Very repetitive, imagine a single player only diablo
-Catastrophically bad inventory management
-Grindy as heck, even on the no grind game option (lol)
-Not very well balanced
-Surprisngly simple for a rogue game

Details:

Possibly the worst part of the game is the inventory management. This sounds like a weird gripe, and I've played lots of games with terrible inventory management and just dealt with it, but this is definitely the worst inventory management in a game I've ever seen. Basically you've got somewhere on the order of 1000 different item types in the game, and all can be used to craft stuff, but you can only hold onto 60ish items at a time. Sure you have a dimensional stash that you can visit any time, but with that many item types, you'll be visiting it every 3 minutes.

Even choosing a no-crafting skills build, which seems to be the only option, its still surprisingly annoying to deal with given you need food and booze of which there's like 100 types. So then it comes down to choosing builds that don't craft and use vampirism (no food), and don't use throwing or crossbows, just to play the game without going insane.

Next up is the repetitiveness. Most roguelikes have unique enemies with interesting abilities, enviromental hazards, and their own brew of general randomness to spice things up. This game is mostly just stacking on various resistances and bonuses and dealing with your enemy's resistances and bonuses. You look at the forums, and most build discussion is even just about choosing builds that let you stack certain stats. This kind of munchkinery is super fun for about 15 hours or so, but it gets old really quick. When you combine this with the fact that a floor takes about an hour (half an hour on "no grind" lol) and there's fifteen floors, and you're mostly just spamming the left mouse button, I think a lot of people will just get bored. Even with the builds that implement some form of strategy, it's going to be the exact same strategy for any situation.

There's some major balance concerns as well, although since it's single player, you can just opt out of using the overpowered crap or choose random builds.

Almost no enjoyment whatsoever / 0 dollars = infinite enjoyment per dollar spent.

Says it's inspired by cave story. Would be true if cave story ended after your first fight with balrog.

Edit: I did go back and play this game about two years later, and a lot of these issues actually were fixed (snowballing eliminated, ship balance fixed). So I am going to bump this to positive, since it was kind of a mixed review before and it looks like the developer is responding well to criticism :) That being said, it still is mostly a sandbox game despite these fixes, the strategy layer just is not that deep and only a few ship types are worthwhile, but it's a lot better in that regard in any case.


Old review:

I think the game is going to be great eventually, but at the moment it's really rough around the edges and just doesn't have a lot going for it in single player.

Pros:
-Coolness factor (I mean, army of airships man)
-Sounds like it'd be really fun multiplayer if you're into that
-Varied ship design
-You can probably have a bit of fun in single player if you intentionally gimp yourself, like do a single city survival or something

Cons:
-AI is pretty terrible at designing fleets

-The single player mode is like civilization but:
*Has no limiting factors to curb snowballing, it's actually accelerated since damaged vehicles usually last several fights
*the largest map is very small, I defeated the largest on highest difficulty in like an hour
*defenses are worthless maintenance suckers, you're better off building a rifle tank and running around pillaging to get quick cash

-There isn't a lot of strategy once you build fleet and actually fight, you generally know ahead of time what you're going to do. It's not like you'll run into an enemy fleet that actually make you think, it's mostly just fling your guys at the enemy and hope for the best.

-Pretty poor balance: spamming rifles will tear things apart, marines will give you free ships.

I'll change this review to positive when more work is done on the single player side, but for now I would say it's only worth it if you're getting this for PvP.

Hey, so I've played a lot of turn based strategies (all of the advance wars, battle for wesnoth, and many many more), and this one is fantastic. Most of what makes it great is the incredible diversity of gameplay and the dynamic battles. I don't think "opening theory" even has an application to this game. However, it is a very niche game, so I will focus on it's idiosyncracies that may or may not turn people off.

1) Heavy PvP focus. While there is going to be a limited sort of MMO style "PvE" from what I gather called "Realms", there is nothing of this sort yet, and I'm pretty sure pvp will still be the focus. Single player is just a pvp vs a bot that will entertain you for all of 3 hours.

2)Heavy luck element. Playing against the median player, the win rate spread for chess is about 2% to 99.5% depending on the player. For advance wars maybe 10-90%, for battle for wesnoth 15-85%. For this game it's a whooping 25-75% win rate against randoms. Saying there is a heavy luck element in an understatement. This is going to change some, but not much. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly enough skill for a ladder be stable and make sense and have "best players". But you will lose to newbies. Regularly.

3)Imbalance. This is not bad so much but things get tossed up like every few weeks as more and more stuff gets added to the game. So the game wont feel very balanced for a long time. Such is early access ;) Current example: Undead can only be killed with attack spells, equipment or other undead. Sometimes you have none of these.

4) The game is built around a deck of spell cards but you currently have no influence on the deck, and will only be able to influence maybe 5-20% of the deck in the future. This is actually a good thing for the game, as it makes the game more about your full knowledge of all the cards, but it might turn some people off.