Recent reviews by ProxCentB

Very clean and polished game, unlike other recent releases. The story line, quests, and freedom of movement is astounding. The game has been done very well and benefited greatly from taking their time to make a product. More companies should take note from this game, as well as Hades, and focus on getting a completed product out in a time that isn't rushed.

Casual city builder. Well, village builder in this case. You manage resources, make sure people don't starve and grow the settlement. Fend off raiders, and trade with outposts. Overall a lot of fun and easy time sink.

The fun:
The combat, while rather simplistic, is enjoyable. Parry mechanic is an absolute favorite and it's hilarious watching it stun a greydwarf throwing rocks. The weapons are somewhat varied, and you have a choice between tower and regular shields. (Note: Towers cannot parry, but block a hell of a lot more)
The exploration and randomly generated scenery is very beautiful. The black forest is scary when you first find it, the swamp feels like a low-budget horror flick, the mountains are steep and treacherous, and the plains are beautiful but infested with creatures of hell.
The crafting is quite varied and you can create some absolutely beautiful sets (there are some amazing submissions).
Overall: great sandbox survival game.

The Meh:
Combat while enjoyable kind of punishes you for protracted fights. Blocking enemies doesn't do much to tire them out or allow for counter attacks -- graydwarves, goblins and surtlings just run around like idiots after they attack, Trolls and Lox are too big to care, and undead will thankfully try to circle. Because of this limit parry and archery becomes the better option. For this reason I do wish block would get a patch buff in both XP progression and maybe slowing down the opponent's animation after attack to allow for counter-play.
The weapons, while varied, quickly devolve into Sword and Board being the go-to for everything, Knives are great for sneak attacks, but spears, clubs, and polearms are all either too slow, or have bad attack animations. Axes are fine but unless you're using an axe not for tree cutting they do not have a special attack. Also: if you're cutting trees expect durability to be dropping faster so it's a bad weapon to be caught out in the open with.
Item durability: A feature of all survival crafter games. I get the need for bases but weapons just get annoying. Having to manage your weapon and armor durability during exploration is just tedious at best. This game does a great job at mitigating it from being an absolute headache to being a minor annoyance with portals, higher durability than most games (with the exception of the first pick axe! Damn that is PAINFUL to use!), and free repairs. Thank you for recognizing the headache and minimizing it.
Ocean Biome: They're working on it. It looks pretty, sailing is fun, but outside of going from point 1 to point 2, and fighting the occasional serpent it's really meh. 3 boats, no way to customize them or make them cool. Also: there needs to be a docking mechanic (tie the boat to something)

The bad:
Farming: This is the only game I know of that will punish you if you do not understand the crop spacing mechanic. It makes for some really wonky spacing, tedious planting, but really inventive farms. It'd also be nice to be able to plant berries and mushrooms since they are required foraging for even late game.
Fishing: There are guides on how to cheese fishing so you can catch massive amounts of fish with no effort. The issue is: fish spawning is far too limited and stamina drain will cost you your fish and bait.
Skill drain on death. For completionists this is HORRIBLE. I will often just re-up my stats if I die because block takes far too long to raise, archery is a nightmare at lower levels, and non-combat skills are painful at low levels. An option to toggle this off would be lovely.

Tried this game out with a friend. Nothing about it was really fun, or done well enough that it piqued my attention. It tries to be Souls-like with the combat mechanics, but only has dodge and block. Neither dodge roll nor block allow you to capitalize on guarding against your opponent, and the stamina and block bars only serve to frustrate you into wanting to mash M1 until one of you fall.

Another issue is that it's an open world with a sprawling world but the map they offer you is absolute trash. One of the first quests you get requires that you go into a cave NE of town, but it's not marked and will remain unmarked even after you discover it. You kind of have to go by the markers of "Bandit Camp" or some of the other few markers.

It added a rather annoying mechanic where your heath and stamina bar would be temporarily damaged until you occupied some requirement to restore it. For heath we found bandages (which were in limited supply) and for stamina you had to flat-out sleep. I did like the risk of ambush mechanic, but it seemed to have been shoe-horned in to only unnecessarily slow down the game. (At least in D&D ambushes meant more XP)

This game, for unknown reasons, decided to force in item durability. Item durability is an absolute trash mechanic and needs to be removed from most all games. There's a reason why Bethesda finally deleted it from their games -- it's because it didn't add anything to the game itself. It creates this artificial limitation at best and breaks immersion at worst. If you want to see a game where it does make sense look at Escape from Tarkov where you could get the drop on a high-loot player, get blessed with end-game gear at the start of the game, but then it will eventually break because you cannot maintain it. Normally, I'd hate mechanics that punish bad luck that hard, but I guess they do offer good loot often enough to high-level players that it's not so bad.

The final nail in the coffin for me: Death got me "captured by bandits" when I grabbed my stuff the quest item I needed to turn in was missing. A QUEST ITEM. I'd say it was a waste of money, but I got a refund.

TL;DR:
Cons:
Game has a combat system that isn't rewarding.
An item durability system that doesn't add to the game.
A map that is quite terrible
Will delete, or hide, quest items.

Pros:
It looks pretty.

I've given this game a fair go. I've played a lot of round vs bots and a few with friends, but one issue keeps bothering me to no end: the excessive level of RNG that this game has. I'm not opposed to RNG, but there's no way to limit it in this game. Early game is always decided by who gets lucky and upgrades to 2 star, mid-game is controlled by who gets lucky can find stronger synergies with more 2 star heroes. And late game is, again, more luck.

I am editing my review because I ended up giving this game a second chance. I still find it absurd that docking isn't automated without the need to purchase a component. If Elon Musk and Google can make cars self-driving without sacrificing needed cargo space then a spaceship can do the same. You can see the original at the bottom.

The initial learning curve of this game is much higher than most games, docking aside, the combat is quite unforgiving in slower crafts, avoiding interdiction can seem like a nightmare until you realize not to use yaw and crafting your ship can as well as trading is a nightmare until you find out about eddb and coriolis. There is a lot thrown at the player and not a lot of information in the tutorials on how to do it all. Friends and youtube are extremely helpful if you want to climb the steep curve. (Especially planet-side landing.... Holy hell planet-side landing)

As of late: I have grown rather fond of playing this game and most of it is because of playing with friends. Combat, while fun, is infinitely more fun with friends. Grinding out engineers is much less painful with people around, and even trading with a fighter wing escort can be worth while when an unsuspecting pirate thinks your easy pray and 3 buddies tell him otherwise.

Overall the best part of this game has to be the DUNE BUGGIES! (Yeah, they're called SRVs, but screw that, they're dune buggies!) Nothing is more satisfying than launching yourself off a small crater lip, pulling a 720 barrel roll and sticking the landing. I've blown a lot of materials repairing and refueling that little bad boy and I have no regrets doing it. Surface scan missions are always ended with some “exploration,” though I do wish we could modify these little guys or even add in different types.


Original: "The docking in this game alone frustrated me to the point of demanding a refund. I get it wants to be "ultra realistic" but the controls, even after going through the tutorials, are really difficult and blowing you up for not being good at landing is really obnoxious. This game would be a lot better if it didn't put the timer on the docking, made docking easier or just automated the damn thing."

Thumbs up for the developers interacting with fans alone. They have a forum set up where they actually read and review fan ideas and suggestions as well as work to quickly resolve/explain glitches and bugs in the game (fish moving through ground).
If you like exploration, survival, large oceanic worlds and beautiful scenery then this game is for you.

The game is actually a good deal of fun. The powers are unique and interesting and each side has their advantages and drawbacks.
Some would argue that vampires are imba, but that's mostly because they are easier to play. They can climb, close distances quickly and are generally very powerful in melee. Their downside is that all of their attacks are melee and the only way to heal is to kill someone and execute them.
The humans, however, seem to be a bit more skill-shot heavy. They're armed with range weapons that deal a respectable amount of damage but also have muzzle (right word for crossbows?) rise. Their greatest strength, however is their ability to heal using sacks strewn around the battlefield. If the team hovers around a sack it gives them a lot more staying power than normal.
The reason I gave this a negative review is because the game is severely limiting unless you wish to purchase anything. And by limiting I mean this: all skills and weapons beyond your introductory set are available only with runestones and the only way to obtain runestones is through in game purchases with real money. This means people who wish to shell out hordes of cash instantly and forever have an unfair advantage over players who do not or cannot. And unless they change this, it means the game will only ever be played by the "whales" (industry term for people who fork over hordes of money in games).

With the most recent update to incluse the Reign of Giants expantsion not only can you, as before, die from frost bite but you can now die from being too warm. Your food and gear can also become waterlogged, reducing effictivness, and things will randomly start on fire in the summer. As if dying from, well, everything wasn't bad enough now they've added in additional ways to kill you and hinder your start.
With the previous difficulties the game was just frustrating enough to be enjoyable. You knew the road ahead was going to be tough but it was at least somewhat survivable. Before the RoG update it required a lot of planning, stockng of food and a bit of luck to survive the winter. The whole year lead up to surviving the winter so the next year could be easier. With this new update you're unable to plan for the winter because the summer is drastically worse and the heat issues begin to plague you even in the spring. If they could offer an update to actually remove RoG, without editing out the entire summer, rain, combustion, and shortening spring, I would be ok with this.
In its favor I will say that I do enjoy the new resources, monsters, buildable items and food. Expanding on the game was a good idea, but they just took an already difficult game and ramped the difficulty up to insanity.

They've really managed to capture the sheer expansive-ness of a universe, showcase the countless tech options available, and keep the game slow enough to allow people to actually read and comprehend what they are doing. The game keeps itself competitive enough to be engaging but not overly so that there's a near-impossible learning curve to become great at it.

I do wish, however, that the AI was more intelligent in this game, It appears that the higher difficulties just get a larger resource boost and a few cheats but not better tactics. In future installments of this game I do hope they put forth more effort into addressing this issue because playing with friends against the AI can be fun.