Recent reviews by DaichiKurosawa

Completed a round and... felt compelled not to do another. "chess pieces" (if you can call it that) are hard to look at, controls are unnecessarily difficult (you only click a unit and then a tile, how hard can it be!), there are apparently different camera perspectives, which i did not notice, as there is no tutorial or anything pointing it out in-game.

Gameplay stops 10 minutes into the game due to a forgotten elevator-platform button... and not being able to jump down manually, except by somehow managing to glitch.

Very basic 2d scroll shooter without HP indication or checkpoints (you start at the beginning of the stage every time you die).

An avoidance game with oversized characters, oversized enemies and no goal (either explained or being there).

The game begins to be more than just a 3d Factorio, that's what it's initially been. The sight of your factory taking shape over time is just amazing. While i recommend the game at any price, getting it via Humble Bundle when on discount (and with monthly subscription) is the cheapest way.

In essence it is a fantastic game, time was just not very friendly to it.
Superceeded by Euro Truck Simulator 2, which makes gameplay even more fun than just doing deliveries for ingame cash. Get ETS 2 instead, unless you just want to have it in your collection (and see how horrible the current input methods are interpreted by this game :P ~ disclaimer: never tested with a steering wheel, so... that verdict might change in the future.

Could best be described as an indie gem for casual players... but it's made by a triple A game studio however (or shall we say ex-(the game studio part)).

Just a quick pros VS cons of the game:

Pro
+ Destructable environment.
+ Community is nice (from the few i have seen)
+ 6 modes to choose from (not really a pro, see con for that)
+ VERY custom player characters.
+ Trading Cards

Con
- Slow pacing due to slow movement speed.
- Snipers rule most maps (protip: use Rifle for sniping).
- Other maps are ruled by Shotguns.
- Rocket Launcher have a cast time (delay before firing), making them extremely useless.
- Multiplayer-only
- Multiplayer is practically dead, unless you can somehow bring a huge amount of people to the game to play any mode other than Deathmatch.
- Most time is spend running back to the action, as many spawn points are pretty far away from that, unless enemies push all the way to spawn area.

As conclursion i can't recommend this game, brought or for free doesn't matter in this case.

Graphic and controls from 20 years ago... you won't find any WASD movement here. You are practically greeted by "look at your keyboard and see those buttons? - You will need all of them, in the most unintuitive and painful way imagineable, have fun."

I could live with the graphics, if at least the controls would allow playing the game, but they don't, which makes this neither worth money nor produces it any fun.

A clear thumbs down.

Oh wait! There are of course trading cards, grab those if you got the game for free, else don't bother.

TL:DR:

Great game, endless fun, get it now.


Discounts:

The only ever discount is available via Humble Bundle Subscriber discount (Humble Bundle still pays devs the same, even with this discount). Otherwise the developers have a firm standpoint of never going down with the price, which is formidable in todays times.


General info:

You crashland on an alien planet with your ship and have to survive on your own (or with other players), different scenarios offer different types of play on top of this basic approach.
368 hours later... i have started playing with v0.14 and went over v0.15, v0.16 and v0.17, each brought some great change and feature with it.


Touching on some historical points:

Looking back at the start of the development and up to about v0.13 the visual style had a lot to desire, but that all has been fixed, even expanded on with HD graphics (saving a game in v0.15 and loading it up in v0.17 the difference in detail is quite extreme).

Gameplay stayed the same from v0.1, with the new inventions being introduced, making everything better and more interesting with each new version.

What release brings, who knows - something tells me, the devs have something up their sleeve, either for release or shortly after.

Communication by Devs via weekly "FFF" (Factorio Friday Facts) has caught my attention since before buying the game, as it is very informative how different development problems are solved in Factorio and this knowledge can be partly used in other Ventures.


Gameplay:

You build up a factory starting with your pickaxe to mine resources, slowly automating everything to the point where everything runs on it's own (well, almost). You play in endless & randomly created maps that expand as far as you want to go. Difficulty can be changed when starting a new world/map, while the normal difficulty makes for a good difficulty curve, still allowing you to build everything up in relative peace.

The endgame couldn't be any more interesting and i have certainly not seen any other game do a better job at it, the best update to this was probably the infinity research, allowing you to pursue certain research subjects endlessly. But the gameplay design itself already has the potential for infinite replay value.


Thumbs up or down?

Certainly a thumbs up and you should probably gift the game to everyone you know... on holidays or birthdays. I'm not lying when i say this is my most favorite game in the genre.