Is it really so bad?

[Butcher]

Top negative reviews mention that graphic is bad, that optimisation is bad and that game crashes. Ignoring those 3, how is the game itself?

[Saica-Fox]

Originally posted by XXtwistedXX:

Originally posted by ZeroGravity:

The game is really slow to start, this is the main cons against it.
Don't expect to have fun or to play what you see in the trailer before 10 hours of game.

See this is the issue I had.

I keep hearing that the game really gets going much later. But I got 2 hours to decide. If a game can't sell me by then I'm refunding it.
This game did not need some convoluted campaign taking away from optimization and development of what they primarily marketed it to be- a RTS TD.

I actually ran into no crashes. Game ran at near 50-60fps the entire time. Granted the graphics are miserable. The character animations are so bad I wonder why they bothered. The dialogue cringe at best.
This came off as a cheap mobile game.

The formula could've been so easy;
Fight off the horde.
Oh no were losing!
Retreat!
OK were still alive but broken. Time to secure this new area and rebuild.
Then progress from there occasionally fighting off waves of enemies.
Explore to unlock tech or take on different missions.

Instead I spent the first 45min walking around, VERY slowly, and trying to make sense of what the game wanted me to do.

I waited awhile for this game too. It's just boring. I was sold on a tower defense with RTS and SOME fps elements. Instead got a free to play mobile game for 40 bucks (cuz I'm dumb and got the vanguard)

the game is easy and basic till about the 5 or 6th mission than it picks up, its got alot going on and wants u to learn it slowly so ur not confused. many game systems

[Awa]

Hello, game born yesterday and I have already 20 hours. "Tutorial" before you can play with players took me like 12 hours to open that option (but im still learning and playing solo). Most of time is it FPS looting and bring material into your outpost, it take some time before you manage get few turrets and feel stronger. When you are not in mission, you are in underground huge base where you unlocking more options like craft, build, mercenary, research and more. Game offer more game mods but I still playing "campain mission". Im big fan of Tower defense games and this is something really original and new. Grind and after day got two or three turrets make me more happy than finished one or two other games.

[Alaskan Moose]

meh, my computer is like 8 years old and ive not run into any real bugs or crashes. cant speak for anyone else tho.

[Alaskan Moose]

also, if you happen to be an absolute loot goblin like me the exploration is not boring like others say. its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ paradise.

[Poop Lord, Lord of Poop]

The game feels like it was just barely put together in time for release. Devs seem keen on repairing it, but it was definitely rushed out the door. A lot of weird jankiness and the voice acting is either AI or very poorly directed (two different characters said "Tourettes" instead of "turrets"). The gameplay itself is fun if you can ignore the freaky skinwalkers speaking broken English at you and the overall jankiness.

[Zidaken]

If you like tower defense games and shooters, you will like this game. At first I did not like the game and though it was less than I had expected, but I continued to play and the game gets much better as you progress. The game crawls slowly at the beginning but adds new systems and tech as you play on. The base building aspect and FPS aspect as an addition to tower defense type gaming is my favorite part. Being able to customize your defensive strategy and then configure the cannons for range and target acquisition adds a lot to the game from a strategic perspective. I am already at the point where I can pretty much let my Outpost do most of the heavy lifting and just sit back and watch and that is only working with the starter cannons and the 30mm.

My one gripe... is losing the gear when one of your units that is not the main character dies. So be careful if you are using a unit that is not the main character, you will lose everything if it dies.

Some advice, do not let all of your cannons fire on every type of enemy or you will constantly be reloading cannons.

[StellarSkys]

Originally posted by Your Friend:

The game feels like it was just barely put together in time for release. Devs seem keen on repairing it, but it was definitely rushed out the door. A lot of weird jankiness and the voice acting is either AI or very poorly directed (two different characters said "Tourettes" instead of "turrets"). The gameplay itself is fun if you can ignore the freaky skinwalkers speaking broken English at you and the overall jankiness.

so fun fact, saying it like tourettes is a actual accent thing. its not very common but it is real. i forget where it comes from though since it is so rare. but yeah no thats real.

the voice acting being ai could explain a lot though. like, any of mgt's lines.

[Zidaken]

Originally posted by Butcher:

Top negative reviews mention that graphic is bad, that optimisation is bad and that game crashes. Ignoring those 3, how is the game itself?

Most of the negative reviews never made it to the part where the game gets good.

[darkbeat]

Originally posted by Butcher:

Top negative reviews mention that graphic is bad, that optimisation is bad and that game crashes. Ignoring those 3, how is the game itself?

Had some poor performance when started it first time. No idea what caused it but when restarted it was fine. There is a lot of pretty deep systems that provide much needed quality of life that are not avaible in early stage of the game. Or game does poor job explaining it.

[Surreal]

1. Graphics - No issues for me, but running a RTX 4080, so unless its game side, I shouldnt have an issue. It doesnt stutter or have frame issues.
2. Iv got 32gb RAM and I havnt crashed from a mem leak or anything in a like 6hr? session.
3. I have crashed once while a friend was hosting with "Connection is lost", but closed and relaunched game and could reconnect easy enough and didnt lose any items or materials I had collected.

The game has a grind to it. There isnt any way around it. The gameplay loop is you pick a Tour (Mission), Difficulty of Mission (1/2/3/4 maybe more, im not very far), then the game gives you a map with Mission Stages to complete. At the end of each Stage you extract a crate of goodies which get sent to the Recovery Day stage. After you complete however many you can/want of these Stages until you run out or a dead end on the map you can keep getting more and more goodie crates. After all that you go to the Recovery Day last Mission Stage then the RTS aspect comes in, at least later on with controlling Artillery and other things. Now this is the wave style Tower Defense/ RTS part of the game which gets progressively more difficult and has a spike between Mission Tour Maps.

The Easy Map "Borderlands Woodland" is fairly straight forward and not very hard. The Snow Ruins or w/e Normal Difficulty Map crushed my face in the first time I did it. Side note on that, I had bad RNG with Salvaging so only got like 5-6 maps and no freebie defensives before getting rolfstomped. SideSide Note, if your Outpost gets wrecked in a mission, you do not lose anything from it. It gets fully restored (at least mine did on my one loss so far) but if your Operative dies, unless its Fae (starter) you have to pay their medical bills beofre they are usable again and you lose all equipment on them. SSSNote, you can revive allies if they get killed instead of just downed, it takes awhile though.

The game can be a bit boring, tours can take hours, RNG can suck ass (Thank you RNGesus for the 47 MG Turret Barrels and 7 30mm /sarcasm) and the tours can become very boring as they are the same 4-8 stage maps per Mission area.

Is the game fun? Depends on you.
Is the game engaging? Depends on you.
Does the game have bugs? ♥♥♥♥ yes, what game doesnt now adays? If its playable day 1 for the majority its a success these days.
Is there a female model with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ top in a glass tube? Yes, but most character models are mid at best and shes the only one with a decent amount of work done to not look like an AI art program made her.
Are the devs patching and updating? Yes.

[Niopha]

Originally posted by XXtwistedXX:

Originally posted by ZeroGravity:

The game is really slow to start, this is the main cons against it.
Don't expect to have fun or to play what you see in the trailer before 10 hours of game.

See this is the issue I had.

I keep hearing that the game really gets going much later. But I got 2 hours to decide. If a game can't sell me by then I'm refunding it.
This game did not need some convoluted campaign taking away from optimization and development of what they primarily marketed it to be- a RTS TD.

I actually ran into no crashes. Game ran at near 50-60fps the entire time. Granted the graphics are miserable. The character animations are so bad I wonder why they bothered. The dialogue cringe at best.
This came off as a cheap mobile game.

The formula could've been so easy;
Fight off the horde.
Oh no were losing!
Retreat!
OK were still alive but broken. Time to secure this new area and rebuild.
Then progress from there occasionally fighting off waves of enemies.
Explore to unlock tech or take on different missions.

Instead I spent the first 45min walking around, VERY slowly, and trying to make sense of what the game wanted me to do.

I waited awhile for this game too. It's just boring. I was sold on a tower defense with RTS and SOME fps elements. Instead got a free to play mobile game for 40 bucks (cuz I'm dumb and got the vanguard)

I agree with this 100% and this is why I sadly refunded. It's a real shame too because this game has everything it needs to be good, I just don't want to play for 10+ hours just to find out if I'm going to start having fun...

[Valkerion™]

Originally posted by Butcher:

Top negative reviews mention that graphic is bad, that optimisation is bad and that game crashes. Ignoring those 3, how is the game itself?

I really am enjoying the game after getting over those same initial pains, granted;
The artifacting using FSR/XESS/TSR is unavoidable for me, I didn't see a change even on the highest settings. Using 980ti. So I just stuck to FSR balanced to have good fps. The artifacting is only really bad on the human models, for some reason. So once you're playing the actual game outside of the intro sequence you won't notice it nearly as much. Turning off motion blur isn't the cause of this strange graphical issue, but still worth doing as motion blur is just terrible.

For the crashes, I personally get them quite a bit, but hasn't stopped me from enjoying the game that much. Worst is when a crash happens near the end of a tour section, as you will reload back to the start (only single area). But with mod to cut the intro cinematic I can restart the game and load back to where I was in under ten seconds with SSD.

I haven't encountered any bugs like losing gear or such, but you can backup your save files occasionally just in case. There is also a save backup folder full of regular backups but not sure how to use them as they are totally different filenames than your save. Might just replace your "GameSaveData.sav" and work, might not. Manual backups work though.

Finally I see most of the remaining negativity aimed at the annoyance at the looting being too much of the gameplay. I personally enjoy the looting, but after beating an area at certain difficulty just once you get the ability to "quick loot" zones at the cost of more energy, which you can easily overcome through progression and enhancing your outpost, and start repeating runs very fast, mainly only playing the extraction day which is very fun. Though, this makes me wish the extraction had more than one map per area as well. Maybe later.

[Valkerion™]

Originally posted by Niopha:

See this is the issue I had.

I agree with this 100% and this is why I sadly refunded. It's a real shame too because this game has everything it needs to be good, I just don't want to play for 10+ hours just to find out if I'm going to start having fun...

I see a lot of people also saying this. How the game should have been simpler than it is, without the looting grind and just a barebones TD game. But that isn't what this game is about. You can go play literally any other TD game for that. They wanted to create a hybrid of several genres and honestly, every game I have ever seen do this becomes a very large project -- usually with great detail and charm -- but ultimately is never very popular. Multi-genre games like this rarely ever reach a large audience. But I don't think saying the game shouldn't exist is a solution. Look at Spacebourne 2. Its a very weird product for sure with very rough edges, but the people who the game is made for absolutely love it.

[Hart]

The grind is not a thing for me, I do n't ind it. But the game is really boring. Is it worth it? well no the trailers tell a different story, but there's really nothing going for the game sure you probably need like 100 hours to get into it but I am just battling to even enjoy the game with 7 hours in. It's not fun the challenge isn't even fun. Helldivers is difficult but is really fun, there's also great lore in it. On paper this is great but at this moment. I'd steer clear,

[Niopha]

Originally posted by Valkerion™:

But I don't think saying the game shouldn't exist is a solution. Look at Spacebourne 2. Its a very weird product for sure with very rough edges, but the people who the game is made for absolutely love it.

To be clear I never said the game shouldn't exist. I said it is a shame because this game has everything it needs to be good.
I also said I may rebuy it if they smooth out the rough edges.

I love all the elements of this game, I just think they are implemented poorly - that's a big difference to saying it shouldn't exist. Game mechanics need to be clearer, co-op needs to actually be co-op and not only progress for 1 player. The second missions generator ball mechanic thing is just not explained at all. And many other reasons. This isn't asking for the game to be simpler, I'd just like to actually understand how the game works which, in turn would help the game to be fun.