Recent reviews by Nexrem

This is possibly one of the best games I've ever played.

The premise is simple, go from point A to point B with a submarine on the moon Europa, while doing some objectives along the way, like killing some alien fish. Of course this is never that simple, you're almost completely blind in the vast caverns you traverse, relying completely on your terrible sonar and crew that would maintain your quickly deterriorating submarine.
Before you know it, you got hit by a Hammerhead, your hull is breached and filling the entire submarine with pressurized water, you're running out of oxygen, one of your friends got eaten, the engineer is struggling to keep the reactor and wiring to the guns alive so that you can get that one last shot at the enemy while plunging deep into the abyss and towards what lies within.

You're rarely left with a peaceful moment regardless of the role you play. Everyone is involved in repairs, first aid or combat and whatever other situation suddenly arises. With in-depth medical, engineering and combat mechanics replayability is virtually endless. Craft and wire up a whole complex logic circuit or even computer with the abundance of electrical components, sensors and actuators (autoturret anyone?). Become the traitor and secretly sabotage your crew by breeding alien creatures secretly on the ship, infecting someone with zombifying parasites, rewiring the submarine to explode or flood or masking yourself as another crewmate to gain trust. Mix and match medicines together to cure (or inflict) many ailments and save your crew from near death, or drug them up to the point of auditory and visual hallucinations and have them running around shooting ghosts or extinguishing nonexistent fires.

The game shines best in its' campaign mode in which you can slowly progress your characters' abilities, upgrade your submarine, or buy a new one altogether, while going from mission to mission, making friends and foes with various factions and desperately gathering enough money to buy much needed supplies to run and maintain your submarine. The difficulty slowly ramping up until you either get good, upgrade and adapt or get sunk beyond crush depth and eaten alive by the creatures at the bottom of the abyss.

There is a fantastic, albeit a bit clunky, submarine editor built-in where you can make your own dream machine or modify an existing one. The depth of the mechanics allowing for some insane and creative things to be done with this versatile tool. Pair this with STEAM WORKSHOP support where you can download other people's submarines and many many other mods, this game becomes a sandbox rivaling the likes of Garry's mod and Minecraft.

Especially recommended if you have thalassophobia, claustrophobia, megalophobia or just fear drowning.
Recommended with friends for maximum enjoyment!

Fantastic game to play with friends and family. It is a rich and complicated sandbox experience with workshop support and extensive modding. You can mod and script any game you've ever wanted and play it with your friends, or just download one from the hundreds of thousands already made online. I use it to play with my friends all over the globe and it's a fantastic time. The depth of tabletop mechanics is unparalleled.

Extremely promising and then ruined.

As most other reviews around here probably also tell the same. The game started off extremely promisingly. I was very excited about it and participated in the first and second beta tests of the game. At its short peak I played this game quite competitively against other equally as competitive teams. It was one of the first games which I felt was both fun enough to keep me playing and at which I was good enough to play at a high level competitively. Alas the Playwing (the developers) decided that that wasnt their vision of what their game was about...

In the first beta, the game was fast paced and had a near infinite skill ceiling. The game is at it's core about movement and positioning. The fireballs autotrack and the firebreath automatically locks on. The actual skill was in outmaneuvering your enemies and their attacks all while delivering blows of your own. An emphasis on dodging is necessary here as it's the most important mechanic of this game ultimately. Someone who is skilled would be able to use the environment to dodge attacks and lose his tail. If playing against someone who is also skilled then this results in very fun and skillful chases/dogfights where you could be spending literally minutes dodging around terrain and pulling sharp turns all in an attempt to get 1 or 2 fireballs on to the enemy. Getting hit by all 3 fireballs would result in you being one mistake away from death. Be it by hitting the terrain or having the enemy get close enough to burn you with their firebreath.

While the game had it's flaws, none of them were in the control mechanics...

Now after the second beta released Playwing decided to randomly completely destoy the fantastic movement system they had. Due to complaints from controller users "not being on an equal playing field" they did the exact opposite of a solution and decided to switch mouse control to controller stick emulation instead. What this meant was that any and all responsiveness and fluidity was completely gone from mouse controlls. Now if you were to use this system you would instantly notice the most agregious problem with this. Instead of having the mouse control the emulated analog stick in absolute terms, it did so relatively. Essentially to keep moving right, you had to keep continuously moving your mouse right, and even worse, the sensitivity at its highest setting barely moved the dragon at all. This flipped the original issue completely on its head without solving anything. With controller players now being at a significant advantage of turn battles due to just being able to hold the analog stick in a direction and do nothing else, where as a mouse player would have to repeatedly move again and again. Tests performed by the community highlighted the greatly diminished turn radius that mouse players had as opposed to those playing on controller. Alas however the core movement mechanics were unchanged..... until....

Before I continue with a description of the release and it's downfall let me briefly talk about the balancing in the game. Mainly in that there was none as there was no need for any. Confused?
The game had 3 classes and all of the classes shared the exact same parameters. They moved at the same speed, dealt the same damage and had the same health. What set them apart (aside from visuals) was their gadget, and that gadget wasnt as important. It was a trick. Something that can save you in a bad moment or get you that one kill you've been chasing for a while, but nothing that would necessarily turn the tide of the game (not without a ton of other skills and teamwork anyways). The classes were balanced because there wasnt anything fundamentally different between them except the player's skill. This added versatility of everyone being able to play any class and still be equally as useful.

At the release of the game Playwing decided that they knew better. First of all they decided to make the classes "unique" by strapping arbitrary health and damage numbers to them, and obviously without testing... They also decided that the classes need even more gimmicks and strapped on the rage comeback mechanic, which I'll get to in a second. But to get to the biggest elephant in the room, they touched movement again.
Playwing decided that drifting, a core mechanic of the game's versatile movement system and fundamental to the actual combat, needed to become tedious and limited. Where as before a player could begin a drift and then boost during it to perform a tight turn, or boost into a drift to rapidly change directions (at the cost of a boost) the new movement system completely punishes this by simply canceling boosts during a drift. Additionally the automatic wall collision avoidance (there to make most maneuvers possible without cancelling instantly when you scrape a wall) was cranked up to stupid high numbers resulting in the dragons simply recoiling when close to a wall, even if not in any collision path with one, making close to terrain flybys extremely inconsisten and not worth the risk.
On the combat side, things went from bad to worse. They removed the 3rd fireball charge, leaving players with only two hits of damage (4 hits fatal). This significantly increases the time to kill which prolongs dogfights way too long, given the short amount of time you already have per round. On top of that they added health pickups, with a relatively short respawn time too, which just made most dogfights that lasted more than a dozen seconds not worth pursuing as you might end up chasing the same person for the whole game without achieving anything.
Fire breath lock-on cone was expanded way too much, resulting in enemies being able to attack you from stupid angles, like being right next to you and leaving you almost no way to avoid. This led to the current game meta basically being just firebreath as the two fireballs you're left with simply dont have any real impact or guarantee.
And now to finally get back to that comeback mechanic. Upon accumulating a certain amount of damage you build up rage. Once you build up your rage you can trigger your rage ability. In my opinion such mechanics are terrible and easily abused but lets look at them one by one and make our own conclusion. Marauder's ability allows him to enable his infinite fireballs on to everyone for a few seconds. Windguard's abillity allows her to supercharge someone for a few seconds, like marauder but with double the damage. And Phantom's ability allows him to become invulnerable and deal double damage for like a minute.... Now I'm no game design expert but surely giving someone godmode where as everyone else gets a damage boost (or in the case of Marauder literally dealing less damage) seems like it isnt thought out too well. Regardless of what I think, the game's meta says it all. Where a lot of people would intentionally die and take lots of damage to trigger said Phantom godmode and then take 4-5 unavoidable kills before repeating.

Other problems include:

No way to reconnect to an ongoing game.
"Exclusive" preorder/supporter content being resold again.
Majority of cosmetics are just recolors which cost the same price as a skin that replaces the model and even some effects.
Extremely overpriced "packs" which cost $60+ and give you items that have already been sold for ingame currency.
Matchmaking system that pairs brand new players with literally the top 10 players on the leaderboard.

I really wish I could recommend this game. The artstyle is fantastic and the world really lacks more high quality dragon games. But I simply cannot. At the time of writing this, the original developers of the game had been largely let of from the studio and been replaced by a board of directors more concerned with driving profit margins than saving their dwindling playerbase. From 15k players on release to barely averaging 200 on weekends...

Tryhard simulator