Recent reviews by BobTheBox

I think the game is worth the price.

Currently, I only have 1 issue with the game, and unfortunately, it's quite a big one.
It's pretty repetitive.
That sounds a little worse than it is. The problem isn't that the game has no replay value. No, starting a new campaign is fun and the many different factions and heroes make sure there is a lot of variety. The main problem is actually that campaigns get more and more repetitive as they go on. I've never actually managed to complete a campaign, not because it's too hard, but because I loose interest since I'm doing the same thing over and over again.

That said, the game hasn't been out for that long, it might get fixed and even if it doesn't, there is a lot of content here already.

This game is AMAZING.

I can tell a lot of work went into this. It's absurd how many different mechanics this game has.
At one point, you're throwing nails at walls, at another you're walking on walls and in the next you're shooting syrup everywhere.

Every chapter has it's own mechanics and the 2 characters rarely share the same one. And let me tell you, there are A LOT of chapters. You're constantly introduced to whole new mechanics and have to use them to solve the puzzlies. Those puzzles can't just be beaten by 1 of your powers. It takes the 2 of you to beat them.

The game is pretty, there are a lot of well designed puzzles and mechanics. The dialogue is entertaining and the game just feels very polished overall.

It took me a little while to try out this game, because, quite frankly, I don't trust EA, but the game didn't seem to have suffered from their influence.

This game is pretty much textbook definition of "don't judge a book by it's cover".
The graphics might make the game look years out of date, but the gameplay loop is very solid.

Short version: I like the gameplay quite a bit and I think it's well designed, however the game struggles even on low settings, it's poorly optimised and regularly crashes for me because I run out of video memory.

Long version: I think they really managed to pull this game off quite well. Combining camera checking and roaming could easily be badly implemented, but, at least to me, it really works well in this game. Whenever I am trying to sneak past an area I check the camera's, run to a hiding spot and check the cameras again until I find an opening to get to a new hiding spot.
Unfortunately, this game is quite poorly optimised. I have almost constant stuttering on low graphic settings and the game has crashed on multiple occasions. It only started crashing after I got a good chunk into the game, so my guess is that the later parts are less optimised by a significant margin.
I recommend holding off on this game for a little while, until they improve the performance. Since you can't save at any time, but instead this game works more with checkpoints, the crashes I experience always set me back quite a bit.

This is one of the most enjoyable games out there, if you manage to hit the following requirements:
-You have at least 2 other friends that are interested in the game
-You and the friends you play with voice act the characters
-You and your friends can take some sexual humour (and many other kinds of humour)

This game can also be enjoyable if you:
-Play alone
-Like connecting with virtual characters
-Enjoy playing casual games

This game is probably not for you if you:
-Cringe easily
-Hate anime
-Absolutely despise reading

This game has given me some of the best fun I've ever had, because I've found a group where everyone puts in the effort to try and voice act the characters and all laugh along with the joke the games throw our way.

On the flip side, some of my biggest disappointments also came from this game. The original friend group I wanted to play this game with didn't try to voice act and just cringed at the game in general.

So basically, if you want to play this game multiplayer, first make sure you have a like-minded group to play it with.
(Though, you can just play singleplayer and still have a good time)

I am amazed by how much sense the rules make in this game.
Sure, the games can easily get so chaotic that you can't keep track of everything that's going on. At first, nothing will make sense. But once you understand the basics of piece movement and how timelines work, games become surprisingly easy to follow along.
The Puzzle levels make for a great tutorial and are just a fun and challenging solo experience.

Some hints for when you first start the game:
-Read the Guide (found on main menu): It's quite short, but does a great job explaining everything you need to know about the game.
-Play the first 2 or 3 Tactics of each piece: Learning how the pieces move in 5D is half the battle and these Puzzlies are great at making sure you got the basics down.
-The past can't change: any time you move a piece to the past, it automatically creates a new timeline. As a result, checking a king in the past is a very powerful move. Since they can no longer move their past king, the only way to stop you is by taking out whatever piece is checking their king.
-Focus on the present: You're only forced to play on the boards that are in the present (highlighted by the thicc line that says "the present"). It's often best not to touch future boards unless it helps you out on a present board.
-Branch with care: The first instinct of new players is to keep branching the timeline. The problem with this is that once you've made a branch, any extra branches you create will be inactive until your opponent branches. An inactive timeline is one players aren't forced to play on, meaning the enemy can just totally ignore that board.

Following only my first 2 tips is all you'll need though, since the game does a great job explaining everything to you in the guide and puzzles

Even though I personally really enjoyed the game and think it's a unique and interesting game, it has some big issues that could easily hamper the enjoyment you might have in this game.

In this game, you follow Aliya as she explores ruins scattered throughout the world, learning about how the world works now, what it was like in the past, as well as learning to read an ancient language.

I'll start with the cons first because I think they are way more important for your decision making than the pros.

-The first and most obvious problem this game has, is that it's visuals are anything but impressive. I personally don't care much about the visuals of games I play, but I often felt like the game expected me to be impressed by certain views even though they weren't detailed or vast enough to feel anywhere near impressive and this felt quite jarring.
-Sailing (the way through which you reach different places) felt uninteresting and the controls were quite janky, the game does allow you to skip those rides, but I never did because I wanted to read the dialogue (more on that later) and I didn't want to miss random abandoned ruins along the river.
-While sometimes during dialogue, you could choose between 3 replies, all fully written out so you know exactly what you're going to say. Most of the time, you just had to option to pick between 'Reply...?' and 'Reply...'. You have no idea what your character is going to say, all you know is that she'll ask a question with the former or make a statement with the latter.

~A more neutral warning I want to give is that it's a slow game. This game doesn't have anything that I'd consider action. You go to a place, explore, get some new knowledge and then explore a new place with your newfound knowledge.
~The game doesn't hold your hand when it comes to explaining how the world works. These are things you naturally pick up if you pay attention. However, if you try to rush through the game and only glance over the dialogue, you could come out feeling betrayed that the game didn't tell you something until after you made a mistake

+Uncovering the past is quite interesting. The game has a very big timeline, allowing you to easily keep track of all the events you uncovered along your journey.
+There was a lot of dialogue and most of it was just banter between the 2 main characters that helped you uncover a lot about the world. But this dialogue didn't have you locked in cutscenes, you could just walk around the location you're exploring at that moment while having a chat about whatever is currently relevant. It really amazed me that the game continued giving me new lines of dialogue between the characters, never repeating the same line twice (although every now and then, the message of the dialogue was old information already talked about and thus redundant)
+++The biggest plus definitely goes to uncovering the ancient language. I think it worked really well with the slow playstyle of this game. You wouldn't often get ancient scripts back-to-back, instead, there were often gaps of exploration and dialogue between them, allowing you to get some context about the location where you find the text, giving you new clues on what words might be relevant in this location. After some time, you'll start to recognise patterns in the text, turning your near-random guesses into quite educated guesses. It felt really good when I started uncovering the meaning of certain symbols.

If you can enjoy a slow, relaxing game, and taking your time to do some deduction, this will quite likely be a great game to pick up. If you're someone that requires constant action and mindless fun, you better look for a different game.

I have some very mixed feelings about this game and wasn't sure if I should recommend it or not, but in the end it's a fun game that's absolutely free, so there is no way I cannot recommend this.

The reason for my mixed feelings are the following:
The game is free and has great gameplay. The characters feel good to control and the general gameplay loop is engaging. It also has a variation of modes that feel quite unique from each other. As a result, you're less likely to not enjoy any of the modes.

However, even though the game nailed the gameplay, it is severely lacking in quality of life features. Here are some examples I can think of off the top of my head:
-No seperate option to pick a random character. If you want to take a random character, you need to wait out the full 35 seconds of character selection, forcing everyone else in your game to wait as well.
-No seperate option to individually adjust the volume of rogue voice lines and emote music.
-When you first load into a random game, there is no way to mute other players until you get control of your character. This means that if someone decides to blast their deepfried music through their microphone, threatening you to go deaf, you have to wait up to 35 seconds in the character select and an additional ~15 seconds before you finally get to turn that ♥♥♥♥ off.
-When trying to report someone, it cancels your writing every time you transition between rounds, making it very annoying to report someone in an ongoing game.
-The training area is lacking in friendly characters, it'd be nice to test which gadgets and abilities damage your teammates and which don't. Additionally it'd be nice to have downed teammate in the test area since there are 2 rogues that have a revive ability and there are 2 revive related perks.
-There is no text chat, forcing you to use either voice chat, ping or quip system.
-There are some basic communication options missing from the quip system. The quip system only contains 8 quips: "Hello", "Thank You", "Nice", "Good Shot", "You Rock", "Sorry", "I'm The Best" and "You're Welcome", literally 4/8 slots are dedicated to complementing others or yourself and the other ones are just very basic conversation tools. A quip like "drop bomb" or "medic" would provide much more utility.
-No option to rejoin a match. If you want to rejoin a match, you need to fully close the game, start it up again and hope the game decides to put you into the ongoing match. (This is a huge problem for me since the game tends to throw me out of a match once per day and if I don't join back, I have to suffer the deserter penalty)

These problems are only a few in a sea of missing quality of life features. I don't have time to list more, but believe me, it's far from limited to the above. None of these missing features are dealbreakers on their own, but you'll most likely notice that they quickly add up once you actually play the game.

As of the writing of this comment, the DLC doesn't feel good enough for me to recommend it.
I don't think it's a bad DLC and it has a lot of potential for improvement. But at the moment, the ideologies are kinda lackluster. They mainly just affect your colonist's moods and opinions of each other. Different ideologies don't really have different mechanics, which I feel is really needed. The biggest effects from ideologies, as far as I can tell, is that they give you access to certain items. But I was kinda hoping for more, like special abilities for the colonists of a believe system under cetrain conditions. Beliefs just don't really change up gameplay in an interesting way.

I do have full faith that, with time, this DLC will become worth the price, but that time is not today.

Edit: While I still don't think the DLC is worth it as of yet, it is clear that the devs are hard at work improving the DLC, almost every day, a new update comes out with a bunch of healthy changes.

It's not the best 4X space game and there isn't a massive amount of depth.

That said, it being more simplistic makes it way easier to get into than, say stellaris.
Each race feels unique to play and the story is pretty interesting if you bother reading the flavour text on missions.

What I also like about this game is that you don't require a near infinite amount of DLC. If you have a friend who already owns all the good DLC, you don't even have to bother buying any yourself if you plan on just playing the game together.
If the person who hosts the lobby has DLCs enabled, you'll be able to join and enjoy the DLC without owning any of them.

If you're wondering which DLCs are worth buying, here is a quick overview:

---Definitely Worth it---

• Vaulters: Adds a new playable faction, "the Vaulters" with their own playstyle, also adds the ability to negotiate with pirates, which is a nice feature to have
  
• Supremacy: Another DLC that brings a new faction, "the Hissho" with a very unique playstyle (more so than the Vaulters). Additionally included in this DLC are Behemoths, giant powerful ships that cost a lot to create and keep up. Some people don't like these behemoths, but there is an option to turn them off

---Mostly worth it---

• Penumbra: Adds "the Umbral Choir" faction, a faction with an extremely unique playstyle (even more so than the Hissho). Additionally included in this DLC is the ability to hack. This is, as far as I'm aware, the main reason why the DLC has mixed reviews. Hacking can feel like a chore and pretty uninteresting. That said, if you care enough to learn it, it can be a fun and powerful tool to turn the game in your favor.
  
• Lost Symphony: Adds 7 songs to the soundtrack. All of these songs are good and are a nice addition to the soundtrack. Besides the songs, there is also 1 extra minor faction added with this DLC.
  
• Untold Tales: Adds 4 new minor factions and 21 new quests. A DLC that creates some more variety to playtroughs and makes the world feel a little more fleshed out,
  
• Harmonic Memories: Adds another 9 good songs to the soundtrack. Additionally adds 1 new hero.
  
• Celestal Worlds: Adds a big questline, 2 new unique planets, 6 new weapon modules and 8 new empire improvements, overall just extra, but good, fluff content.

---Uncertain---

• Dark Matter: Adds a 12 new small quests that are interesting for lore, but don't have any significance in gameplay. Last time I checked, the DLC introduced bugs that hamper gameplay, so unless you see somewhere that all those bugs are fixed, this DLC is one you probably should ignore for now.

---No. Just no---

• awakening: People seem to unanimously agree that you're just paying to make the game worse. If you want to know more as to why, you can just check the reviews. All you need to know tho is that you should not buy this DLC and if you already did, disable it.