Recent reviews by danrome007

I played the demo for this game more than I play most other games. The developers (congrats!) have created an addictive, HIGHLY re-playable, and engaging game. From the mechanics to the artwork, everything flows nicely together.

I look forward to expansions, sequels, and ANYTHING like this!

I used to love this game and I played it on the iPad for 100's of hours prior to Steam. I can't recommend it because it feels like the developers are making it more difficult and reducing the frequency of getting good cards in random draws. I have paid money into this game and the older versions were fun to play, although the AI was a bit weak. they made up for that by giving the AI more action points, but since updating the difficulty have left the points the same, thus making it nearly impossible, even if you have a great collection of cards. so sad, because it could be a great game, but it just feels like someone decided to make it a money grab instead of focusing on balance and game play. No matter how many good cards you have (and you would have to spend a lot of $$ to get them), you are always fighting uphill and the AI always seems to know exactly where to hurt you. I have spent a lot of time and $$ on this game, and I am walking away for the above-stated reasons. If I could go back in time and play the first, or even the second, version I would do it, but as it stands I am building up too much resentment as the company goes for more and more money form its player base.

This game has a lot of promise. Unfortunately, they allow VERY experienced players to enter the tutorial game and that makes it very hard/un-fun for new players to learn. In my case, one player pretended he/she had never played before (he played over 87 games, it turns out). This player sent me messages pretending he didn't know how to play while his troops killed my units. I tired to help him all the meanwhile, until I caught on - which was too late. This bad experience in my 1st game turned me off to the whole thing; that was almost 50 hours of my time wasted and I felt cheated.

I find the difficulty way too high on the easiest level (i.e., there is no real casual play). It also feels like I can only take one path forward (campaign or survival) and when I make any change from that path, I have to delete buildings and build what I HAVE to build to proceed.

Finally, the challenges all seem to be aimed at a certain population level - the result is a "city" so sprawling you can't defend it. You could tear down your older buildings (like replacing tents with huts), but you can't really afford the time or resources for that.

I am looking forward to the community producing more Workshop content - that usually makes things better (maybe a cheat that removes the timer, or can reduce the required victory population, something that speeds up time, etc.).

I'll check back in 6-12 months to see if it has improved.

P.S. the Survival mode save file disappears, so as soon as you save and quit, it's over.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW
About 30 hours played so far.

I've only played a bit, but so far it's off to a good start.

I play solo + casual (I travel a lot) and it is pretty good for that style of play, although I hit a hard stop with the first boss fight (too much running around trying to flip switches - a stark contrast from the regular game flow).

I like:
- The idea of the game (reminds me of an old Atari-ST game called SunDog)
- The scope of the game
- Game details (I found a mini-game pretty quickly)

Would like to see:
-Less jumping around during fights (mainly Boss fights); suddenly feels like Mario Borthers, not a strategy game
-Some more focus on Solo/Casual play (my preferred); maybe some companions to help in fights
-More quickslots
-Less materials or larger storage
-Ability to break things down into smaller things (e.g. Pistol->Iron Bar + Gunpowder)
-An in-game tutorial; took a while to figure out HOW to eat food; difference in races?, etc.

Biggest frustrations:
-I live in the future, but I still can't see in the dark; torches are my friend and I'm not even a Dwarf
-Dropping my (usually legendary) weapon mid-fight because that function is default-assigned to a key right next to the movement keys
-Can't pass the first boss solo (I hate platform games, love strategy/survival)
-No ability to zoom/un-zoom without accessing options screen
-NO MAP (a mini-map would at least be useful)

I could not get past the video options screen (running Windows 8) because the button to accept my changes (I assume) was offscreen.

When I launched the game in its standard mode, I received an error and it crashed.

Too bad.