Recent reviews by Weeping Fog Knot

+ The building mechanics seem to expanded in a couple of ways, calling in a team of engineers from outside of the map to build a line of tank traps feels nice and fast compared to earlier entries.

- Tanks scoot around like electric cars or something. Their movements don't feel tank-like at all.
--- UI is atrocious, both inside and outside matches. Nothing about it is intuitive. Spent a good chunk of my time trying to figure out how to actually do things. This is the main reason I refunded the game.

Get Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront instead.

The game's like a combination of Hades and Vampire survivor, but worse. The way it copied the god powers from Hades is particularly blatant.

The game is pretty fun to play, but overall it just doesn't feel finished. Some examples:
-Sometimes I can join my friend's game straight away. Sometimes I need to restart the game 5 times because the game keeps freezing or erroring out during the loading screen.
-The performance isn't great. Once it even effectively "stunned" me for 5 seconds when a bear was attacking my friend next to me, and I was stuck looking at the map which was lagging my game so hard that it refused to close.
-We stopped playing on one day on a crash and when we started on the next day, one of my friends had went from lvl 18 to lvl 7. Googling the issue, all sorts of save game failings look like they're very common for this game. Going from lvl50 to lvl1, losing all your gear, losing the entire map you've been playing on etc. We found a fix. Manually swapping around backups in the game's save folder. But that's less of a fix and more of an ugly patch up work. Gives off the ominous vibes that the game won't get proper fixes.
-The progress from tier 1 to 2 was fun, but tiers 3 and 4 felt boring. Upgrading from stone to iron showed a great leap in power, but everything after that feels oddly weak. Like only tiny upgrades or sidegrades.
-In the workshop, the progress is odd. You get the shotgun backpack before the mining and archery backpacks. Why? You can mine and craft a bow at the very beginning of the game, but shotguns are tier 3. Also the later weapons and envirosuits just seem clearly weaker than the mid ones.
-Weapon balance is broken. One of my friends used early game bone javelins and was easily soloing most enemies with giant damage output. Meanwhile I and a second friend used tier 3+ knives, throwing knives and crossbows and were struggling to kill things together. All the ranged combat other than the javelins seems to be only good for hunting and cheesing combat from on top of rocks. That makes the late game ranged weapons pretty unattractive, since I can easily hunt with a starting bow.

If all sorts of little issues like these could be tweaked or fixed, the game could be really great.

If there was a meh option, I'd have picked that.

Seems fun in the beginning, but gets kinda repetitive. In the latter parts of the campaign, missions last for a couple seconds and after every mission there are these news segments that can be sped through, but not skipped. So the game gets annoying fast.

Fun enough, but runs like trash. It's not noticeably better looking than the previous games, but somehow runs way worse. I'm not at recommended specs, but I am above the minimum ones.
If you have a beefier PC and liked the previous entries in the series, you'll probably like this game as well.

The starting missions are fine, but the later missions start to tank the fps like crazy the longer the mission goes for. Something to do with Unity not being able to handle the amount of units on the map maybe? At worst the lag got so bad that I had a several second delay on my inputs. I had to play around that "feature" and had to rush the couple last maps by spamming units and killing everything on the map as fast as I could. Any other method was unplayable. Don't get me wrong, "Zerg rushing" can be fun, but when it's the only option available to you due to the limitations of the game performance, it's not a fun time. I couldn't even get some of the level specific achievements, since they require you to play the maps for too long.

One of the better roguelites and thus I can warmly recommend it. Though it can get pretty bullet helly, so if you're not into that type of thing, you might wanna pass on this game.

Positives:
-No real performance issues. And that's nice nowadays, since I have a 1060 and find myself saying that less and less.
-Fast and fun combat. You can snipe around corners, weave through combat with melee, shoot explosives down from above(thanks to the verticality of most rooms) or stand your ground and mow down enemies with heavy weapons fire.
-Continuing from that previous point, there's a decent amount of weapon variety too, from hard hitting sniper rifles to dual wielded uzis and summonable weapons like turrets.
-Collecting and comboing perks and items together is my favorite feature in roguelites and I can say that they managed to nail that in this game. For example things like +critical chance become way more interesting when you get a perk that makes your critical hits ricochet to nearby enemies.
-Music is both great and varied. There's a calmer version of the area songs playing in the rest areas and, once you leave those to fight, the music picks up with great hyping effect. I think every area and boss has their own songs and I often found myself bopping my head to the beat.
-Looking for secrets felt fun. And no more on that since they are secrets~
-Levels are visually pleasing and feel somewhat different from each other. Also level design wise, in games like these, it's easy to place the player in a bunch of boring hallways, but the devs managed to improve on that a bit. They are still hallways, but with cover and verticality. Plus mobility increasing mechanics like grind rails and boost pads.

Negatives:
-The way the enemy projectiles look made it so that it's hard to perceive how far they are, and I often didn't notice lone bullets before they hit me. This weirdly made it so that many times I took more damage in the easy first level than in the later levels where I was dodging entire projectile swarms at a time.
-Picking up data entries automatically opens them on top of your minimap. You can quickly close it, but that kind of thing just seems like a completely unnecessary feature in a fast paced action game like this.
-Slight balance issues. I had some trouble beating the game on hard, until I realized that stacking percentage damage perks and items makes everything melt to slag. Most of the items and perks feel useful, but some things like "Explosions have 20% chance to have a bigger radius or 15% to have a smaller radius" just feel genuinely useless compared to simple things like "Increases all damage by 10% against x".
Also spending power cells on buying weapons felt wasteful, since you'd have to either spend more power cells to upgrade it's level or swap out to a higher level one later. Saving those cells to buy permanent upgrades instead felt way more useful.

Mehs:
-The game's not terribly long. I had all of the basecamp upgrades purchased before 15 hours. And at 20 hours I'm at the point that the only "major" content left is to try and beat runs faster or with higher difficulties, which don't appeal to me. There are some "minor" things, like getting all the collectibles or using every gun long enough to unlock their data entries, but those kinds of things are fun only if there are "major" things to do them alongside with.
-Basecamp feels kinda lifeless and boring. I understand that the game shows in cutscenes that there's only you and Max traveling together, but oddly enough your base of operations with it's unoccupied booths is more empty than the rest areas inbetween combat zones filled with npc robots. It could pretty easily made more interesting. Like the music in the camp for example. It only plays near the van. Everywhere else is dead quiet. You could build towards making the camp more like the rest of the game's music with having more energetic music near the van hyping you to start a mission and calmer music further away. Or even simply having the music play everywhere.
-In levels there are these small jump puzzle rooms. A large majority of them are super easy and some can annoyingly damage you. Their rewards are mostly very minor too. And later on with some gadgets you can just skip the vast majority of the puzzles straight to the reward. Could have been way better than the "I don't really care for them too much, but I guess I'll go grab the tiny reward"-type of deal that they are.

Meh. First playthrough trying to learn the game was fun enough, but then I started noticing all the weird and annoying things. Some examples:
-The shipbuilding is somehow both simple and confusing at the same time. There are too many menus to do too little.
-Civilizations don't really differ from each other in gameplay. You research the same techs, build the same buildings, harvest the same resources and build ships that look only cosmetically different. The only noticeable differences are: the diplo trait deciding how much other civs hate you and your race deciding how you grow them.
-Nearly every event is about a space container floating in space.
-You can take over enemy planets with influence, but it looks like space stations are completely unaffected by it. Why are they allowed to keep mining resources within my borders when every planet nearby has already rebelled to me?
-Mining upgrades are locked behind a single resource, so if you don't have that one, you're stuck mining ALL the strategic resources for like 1/10 of the speed.
-Everything is really hard to see and differentiate on the map, like small pirate ships
-Said pirate ships don't seem to do anything
-Fleet offensive power is shown as an average of all the ships, but hp is all of it combined, making it really hard to evaluate how strong a fleet is. A 14 offensive fleet with 2 ships loses to a 5 offensive fleet with 9 ships. What is this weird math you're supposed to do? Is the real power of the fleet (attack * ship amount)? Then why not show that as the offensive power instead?
-AI seems a bit too dumb: repeatedly suiciding 3 fighter fleets into my full stacks and doing no damage & invasion fleets running into my planets and ignoring my full stack next to the planet which just keeps killing them. In my last game I got declared war upon by 5 other civs, 3 of them being my neighbors and I ended up fending them off effortlessly. I even attacked and took over one of the weak neighbors, which made me have to declare war on a 6th enemy civ to do so. If you get attacked in any game by 5 opponents of similar strength, you'd think that you'd be in deep trouble.

Started crashing constantly after playing for a while. Became completely unplayable for me.

A simple and fun game.

Don't do it...