Recent reviews by carlica

I was really looking forward that this game would be finally available on Steam, but after playing a few hours, it's mostly disappointing or even outright frustrating. The visuals are nice and I like that there's a female protagonist for a change. However, that's basically where the positive ends. I had hoped for some dark and interesting story, but the story is somewhere between weird and boring. It certainly doesn't do a good job to make me want to continue playing and learning more. The main focus of the game seems to be on combat instead. The game keeps on throwing numerous enemy encounters at the player. Personally I find those encounters frustratingly difficult, but maybe it's different for a more skilled player. Combine that with an annoying auto-save system that gets you stuck in the same introduction dialogue to a boss encounter over and over in case you fail the fight, or places you somewhere else entirely in case you die to some random mob. With a game that has so much focus on combat and walking around (an overly complicated and confusing map), the ability to save manually whenever I want would be the very least to make it more playable for me.

Nice visuals and story. Recommended.

The game maybe a bit imbalanced,as you gear and skill up it gets significantly easier. Nevertheless it's a fun experience, with an interesting story and decent graphics.

This is really a nice game and quite addictive along with the "Rising Tide" expansion. I bought the whole collection, so I can't really say if the game is any good on its own. It's clearly a civgame, with all the good things and bad things that come with civgames, so maybe some of those bad reviews also result from people having different expectations. I personally like the idea of playing Civilization a bit differently on a different planet with different buildings and different technologies and factions. It's a nice, for a change, to research alien minds and build floating cities instead of reinventing the wheel once again (like any other civgame). Actually, I like that a LOT.

Positive:
+ the whole space colonization theme
+ different planets, environments
+ affinities and factions for variation
+ interesting new technology and research web
+ it's still a civgame
+ addictive "one-more turn" effect

Negative:
- it's still a civgame (e.g. with micro management, lengthy turns)
- the game kinda missed the opportunity to make alien lifeforms something more, e.g. by stuying them, more variety and such...
- more customization would have been nice

I've never played any of the previous "Tomb Raider" titles, but this one seemed interesting, so I bought it. I don't regret it at all.
To sum up my experience: it's like a movie that you can play through. Very interesting story that keeps you busy for hours ... visuals very well done, lot's of puzzles to solve. And it's intuitive even to newbies in that game genre like me. It's also ideal for those players who don't meet the hardware requirements to run the latest part of the franchise ("Rise of the
Tomb Raider"), as it's well optimized and runs decently even on medium-spec computers.

The only cons:

- The storyline is very linear. Sometimes I would wish there were different ways to get around certain situations. Would make it even more interesting in the long run.

- Automatic savepoints. I suspect, this is quite common for console players, but for me as a PC veteran I find it just plain annoying not to be able to save where and when I please during a single player campaign.

- Not much incentive for replays.