Recent reviews by Hell_MINTH

I initially gave this game a bad review, citing balancing issues, but I just hadn't figured out the mechanics. I gave it another go and I'm glad I did. This game is a DOTA/MOBA-like game, with a few (good) twists.

If you, like me, loved the idea of DOTA but hated working lanes, clicking on exactly the right mook at exactly the right time, alt-clicking on your own mooks to deny your enemy XP, and 1000-hour sweats who play this for a living, then this game is for you. It is perfectly playable solo, but it will be frustrating until you figure out the mechanics. While there are some exploit-y ways to win, you don't have to rely on them. There are quite a few different viable playstyles.

If you want to get an army capable of pushing the boss, go for it. If you want to invest in your Scyron making them an unstoppable killing machine, go for it. Explore, clear camps, kill bosses, get stronger, take on the final boss, and win. Even the weaker characters are viable once you click with the mechanics. Over time, rogue-lite mechanics allow you to get permanent upgrades if you're struggling. The higher difficulties are pretty well balanced once you unlock most everything.

Highly recommend using/getting-used-to the MOBA control scheme. M/K is a must with this one.

At this point, Stalker Gamma is the leader. Return to Vostok is Stalker in style and substance, but removes the mutants, anomalies, emissions, and builds on a new world. The focus is on scavenging and tactical combat, but it is early and rough at the moment.

The primary reasons right NOW to play this are:
1. You want a Stalker-Gamma experience, but don't like mutants/anomalies/emissions, you prefer the human-to-human tactical component.
2. To provide feedback to a game in active development.
3. You love Stalker, and need some new maps!

These are conditional to faith in the developer to polish and develop at a good pace, as the game is clearly unfinished.

I have that faith personally, primary reason: The developer has demonstrated their skill and work ethic by converting this from Unity to Godot in a short timeframe (with both versions relatively polished), and has done things with Godot that are, frankly, bleeding edge and impressive.

To be clear, this game is an early-access investment, you are buying an investment here. My money is on this game's success.

I'm revising my review to positive, leaving my original review below, as the bugs still apply. Maybe call this one a mixed review, leaning positive.

Despite the jank and the bugs, the game is really compelling, and playing through a few more hours, I found myself unable to put it down. Like Majesty, it is really just a chill, non-clickyfest strategy game with great music, ambiance, and an art style that I really dig. Sometimes you lose a save to a bug, but restore, eat a half-hour's progress, and move on.. I guess in that regard, it really is a retro design. It has really great gameplay. There was a day-two patch today addressing some of the issues, so yeah on that front.

Original review below:
Be warned, this game is rife with bugs which should have been caught before release with cursory playtesting. Given the magnitude and count of the bugs here, I highly doubt this was play-tested before release.

For a game that features AI-controlled heroes, the AI breaks constantly.

A non-exhaustive list of issues I've encountered in ~3 hours:
1. Heroes partied at an Inn constantly break. By break, I mean they get stuck in some sort of endless logic loop and freeze completely.
2. Basic mission triggers won't complete because AI simply won't complete tasks.
3. Objectives/bounties that you set sometimes will never get completed by AI, even if you place an obscene amount of gold on the bounty.
4. Scenario complete window has a "Continue" button, if, when pressed, makes the "scenario complete" menu close with no way to complete the mission (forcing restart/lost hours of progress).
5. Game features many "escort" type scenarios, which are a crap-shoot, as often the units you need to escort either get zerg-deleted almost instantly or deleted due to number (3) above because nobody will take a defend bounty no matter how much gold you put on it.
6. Buildings don't always finish building or upgrading, the build just stops midway. Reloading the game sometimes fixes this, sometimes you have to delete the building and rebuild it (taking a resource loss).
7. Reloading the game sometimes breaks game state, rendering mission objectives invisible to AI.
8. The game features a fog-of-war, but any creature (which will be most of them) within fog of war is visible to the player AND cannot be bountied, the UI won't allow it. For a majesty-like game, this is a major break to the bounty system, which as I recall would allow you to place a bounty on any known creature. Honestly, fog of war for explored areas shouldn't even exist.

I'm not normally this harsh, but this game released in a 1.0 state at a 1.0 price, not an early access state.

All the above said, if these issues get fixed, there may be something special here. The art, and ESPECIALLY the music is fantastic! Really well done!

The apex of multi-threaded, well designed AI combined with a mechanically unique asymmetric guerilla-war RTS. You will not find an experience like AI War 2 anywhere else. Don't worry about having Starcraft-tournament level clicks-per-minute, this RTS focuses more on strategy and tactics and is pausable (having your fleets in the right places at the right times, doing the right things).

A word of warning, it takes quite a bit of time to get competent. AI War is brutally hard, and it will punish you hard for small mistakes. The reward of this game requires a substantial time investment, and during that time, expect to get your ass kicked. However, if you want a more chill experience, difficulty is highly customize-able, from "if you win this it is a bug" difficulty to "don't hurt me please"/sandbox difficulty.

I cannot stress enough how impressive the multi-threaded AI is in this game, it feels like a human opponent. It probes weaknesses, it withdraws from losing battles and uses those forces to create death-balls to kill you later, it hides strike forces from your recon, it ambushes you when you attack a "weak point", it attacks your weak points, etc. Every enemy fleet runs on a different thread in a different CPU core, making absolutely massive battles more performant than would seem possible, although it will choke a bit if the battles get big enough. You can see some lag in response as overloaded threads call back to the main UI at times when you have 20,000 or more ships engaged (on my system).

Another impressive aspect is the sheer amount of customization available to you in starting games, from starmap generation, to each AI fleet's behavior, to starting forces, there are hundreds of dials to tweak.

This is a must-buy title for anybody who has the time to invest and who loves strategy.

-Dozens upon dozens of bugs, many of them render the game completely unplayable. The latest (as of today), newly created cities now have an issue where all shopkeepers now require a "password" to do business. This was a mechanic that is supposed to apply only to black markets, except with the bug, it applies to every store, restaurant, etc AND there is no option to provide one, rendering money and commerce useless (your save is gone).

-If you want to REALLY see how buggy, go into the game discussions general forum and search "Briefcase". I got forty-eight pages of users asking how Briefcases work, why they aren't working, why they can't "place" them to complete investigations, why they can't take them off of people carrying them, etc... This is just one unresolved issue of many.

-Evidence critical to investigations does not generate, wasting many hours of your time.

-Yes, I know this one is a bit nitpicky (but immersion suffers): A "1979" world that has touch-tone phones, computer-controlled camera systems and employee records, and GUI log-in screens created by (I presume) someone that can't even imagine the world without computers. There are in-world explanations for the alternative universe, but it struck me as a thinly-veiled attempt to excuse not understanding what "1979" was like technologically. If it had been set in the '90's and the tech in the game would actually be quite close to reality.

-Political pandering/controversial/injected politics (tired of this sort of thing from ALL sides personally). Might be a dealbreaker for some. Their art, their vision I suppose.

It's a shame really, they were really shooting for the stars with a procedurally generated investigation game, and DID do a lot of impressive things, but I think what was attempted was beyond the developer's capability (they bit off more than they could chew). Before running into absolutely game-breaking issues, I had a lot of fun, despite the frustration.

A great, unique, rogue-lite capital ship space shooter that plays like Starpoint Gemini with a Diablo-esque loot system (a great mix). One dev, GREAT game design, less great (but fine) UI and controls.

Has a very addictive loot and progression system, thoughtful combat, and a few bugs here and there.

My main complaint at this point is that on runs, loot works in a very odd way, and one specific oddity annoys me quite a bit. All the systems you pick up (sensors, armor, engines, etc) change the stats of all of the systems. It is very odd to find "Armor" that gives you -10 to your armor and +5 to your sensors. I wish loot would specifically (mostly) alter the stat that it is typed after. In this game each system type sometimes gives you a special power-up, which has a different pool per system type.

It is really unique and has a lot of indie charm, this one came out of nowhere and I'm having a great time!

An atmospheric, immersive, cinematic, mechanically sound game with excellent solo and multiplayer support. A great game at the cost of a beer at the ballpark.

A lot of players compare it to "Alien Isolation", but I haven't played that. I'm going to compare it to Monstrum: You're on a ship (in space rather than on the ocean), you have a giant monster chasing you, you have to complete your objectives (one of four: blow the ship, retrieve a black box, kill the creature, capture the creature). You play hide-and-seek until you have all the things you need, then you either bug out or take down the creature.

The creatures all play a bit differently, some are easier than others, but each has a fairly unique style. One is silent, another may be loud. One may use sound, the other rely more on sight, some use vents, others don't (as much).

It still has some work to do, there is one incomplete map at this point, and 5 of 7 creatures are in the game. There are plans to add an additional section to the existing map, and a second map, as well as complete the other two creatures. Despite being only one map, it is very well done, is well designed to the gameplay, looks REALLY good, and is h3lla replayable. Another missing feature is push-to-talk, right now it is flat open-mic, which is below modern bare-minimum. They DO have plans to implement this, it is a top development priority as I write this (according to DEV steam communications).

All in all, it is very well done and well optimized in UE5 even at this early stage (An optimized game in UE5 is a great litmus test ==> competent development team). The game feels VERY cinematic, with one of the best ship evacuation sequences in any game I've ever played. This sequence in particular reminded me of my experience in HALO 1 twenty-five years ago, which is the highest compliment I can give here.

This one is a winner and I recommend a buy without hesitation.

No mob variety, procedural dungeons made from 10-12 room shapes, a UI from 1995 that takes 3-4 clicks for basic functions that should require only a right-click or shift-click, no "ESC" from dialogue (have to wait for dialogue to finish, then click "leave" or "bye"), maybe 8-5 different mob types (the entire game) with the only change being that they level up with you, NPC's are lifeless and just text-boxes. Difficulty is left-click to win, everything on the map to find is marked with a big icon (ubisoft style), fast travel everywhere, no real complexity to the combat (damage type doesn't really matter, just click and kill), the same fetch quest over and over... it plays like a AAA slop game without the AAA graphics, really no innovation here. You've already played this game dozens of times before. Loot has variety, but there is absolutely no reason to care about building with it at all as the only real threats in the game are barrels exploding in your face and acolytes with guns (which are pretty rare). Absolutely no brain cells are required to play this game, but that may be the only positive, it IS a good game to turn your mind off and just mindlessly play, there are some bright points, as I'll get to next.

On the positive side, there is something satisfying when clearing out the dungeons, I think it is the sound design (which is good). Shooting things feels punchy and good, that part is also positive. I also liked the storyline, there is a bit of innovation in that regard... That's about it.

There are several better options to spend your 16-20 dollars on.

An unfinished, buggy mess. Inventory does not work right, saves are lost, games are hosted without any security whatsoever by default, crashing issues, bad balance, bad gunplay, AI is braindead, some monsters will block you into buildings, stealth is non-existent, saving is manual, emission mechanic is not much fun, art is terrible, the UI is inconsistent and buggy... I'm sure I missed a few things.

It does however offer the looting dopamine rush and base building which is rather satisfying, but not enough to justify even a tenner. Bunker diving, when it worked without instadeath bugs was also somewhat fun. Perhaps with a LOT more work, this will be ready for release. Until I double checked the store page, I thought this was early access (that's on me, I know).

I would not normally be this harsh with a single-dev indie product, but this was released as 1.0, not early access. Even for early access, this game appears to be in an alpha state, a junior high coding project, just going by bugs and balance alone. Of course, if updates and improvements come along, I'm always more than happy to change my review.

Can't really put my finger on why this is so popular... Play Stalker instead, or, if you need multiplayer badly, play Lethal Company. If you like meme-games, maybe you'd like this.

Fantastic sound and game design! There have been many comparisons to Brigador, and gameplay-wise, it is like a thinner flash-game version of that title. Main critique at this point is that there is just not that much here yet, and I expect to be able to commit war-crimes in mechy-stompy games (there is a distinct lack of war-crimes in this). Needs more missions, more mechs, more weapons, and of course, WAR CRIMES.

Support this dev, we need more mechy-stompy games! Definitely worth a tenner.

If you don't know what Brigador is, just do yourself a favor, throw this and that into your cart, hit "purchase" and call off work today.