Recent reviews by Dexee

The fact that all the reviews of recent are still marked as "off-topic" clearly shows Gaijin's stance and they're not willing to listen nor accept the fact that they'd kinda botched this whole thing. I know I aint got a high hour count on steam, but I had put on some time here and there for a long time. I miss an older snail that, while sometimes making stupid decisions, weren't anywhere this level of bad.

I still think that the whole RP system from the get go was a mistake just to pad out hours required.

After U237, this game has lost any and all interest in being a functional piece of software. I don't know what sort of drugs Starbreeze and OVERKILL were on thinking that breaking a game with a decade's worth of generally always working for a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ storefront and player base that doesn't even buy their games through a service that never seems to work at all, let alone correctly. Due to this, I have zero plans of ever buying anything else from Starbreeze/OVERKILL, and I do wish them the best in their efforts to stay afloat.

However, 236 and earlier, great game. Good fun, even with power creep and weird janky heists that sometimes has some funny moments because of the Diesel engine. Gonna miss it.

Take this as a warning: Amazon and Smilegate are issuing bans if you've been inactive. Said bans screw your steam profile to life. Removing this from my steam account and will never touch another thing from this combo again, despite the game itself being SOME fun.

Apparently rumor on the street is that Amazon is threatening to buy out Valve if they kick AGS off the platform for these REPEATED beahaviors.

p gud

edit: a month in now. p gud.

tl;dr: i got my fun out of it. outside of that fun, it ain't good and needs serious help across not just the game itself but also the development/community team too.

i won't bother covering the good. there's some here and there, and the promise is there. just like there was promise for Cyberpunk 2077.

the things that bug ya:

ui bugs: the ui has all sorts of issues scattered all over the place. the quest list on the main screen getting pushed down, the tracking for animals and nodes stops working after a few hours, bad design in needing to completely take your eyes off where you need to look for consumables, half-visible xp bar. the list goes on, but it gives you a point to start at. plus, AGS posted a job listing for a new UI/UX director after the game launched. it also came out that the ui's programmed in lua, so it became apparent on how to fix some of the bugs.... can't because of EAC but still.

server bugs: yes, they exist. either the server improperly reporting a node as active when it's not, lag causing enemies to not be hit while you get chewed up and spit out.

pvp "bugs": i guess now, after a forum post on new world forums confirming it, it really isn't a bug. but basically being able to turn in a small handful of quests to force a war just because someone held onto a territory for 5 days is a pretty bad way to implement pvp.

pve v pvp: yeah, there's a lot of back and forth and it sure does show that the game doesn't know what it wants to be. is it a pve game or pvp game? the game was originally going to be pvp, but after folk complained about it, we have what we have now. and a lot of the skill trees either are perfect for pvp but completely useless for pve content or vice versa. it sucks straight ass and isn't fun in that case.

yeah, honeymoon period aside, there's going to be more that will get found out about. it also doesn't help things when AGS employees were moderating the official subreddits for the game. such that reddit admins stepped in and kicked them clear out because of site rules. it also doesn't help when the company seems to be mismanaging what's going on/expected between here and many other places. they keep this up, it'll make CP2077 and even FFXIV's 1.0 launch look good.

Matt's the best with this. 10/10.

Great game to have in my hands after waiting so darn long. Loved the first AI War. Glad to see Chris go back to something that he knows worked very well and refine on the ideas further. Sure, at the time of this writing it is in Early Access, and such has 1/4th the total content of AI War Classic + all expansions, but currently has more than the base games' offering. Theres going to be some hiccups from time to time but that is the nature of the beast.

Looks like AI War. Feels like AI War. Has quite a few QOL changes over the first game, such as upgrading tech increases cap and doesnt leave you with 1000 of the same ship across 4-5 tiers.

Hopefully we'll be able to change the font on some of the UIs as some items FEELS like it is in Comic Sans but I jest.

Okay, time for me to actually write down some comments here on this amazing game.

First off, anything you know about AI and RTS/4X games you absolutely NEED to throw out the window. Period. Anything you know is invalid here in AI War. The AI for this game runs on entirely different rulesets and strategies that other games could only ever hope to emulate as those games aren't focused on the AI being cunning, ruthless, and most importantly, semi-procedural.

Secondly, take this view every time you walk into a game of AI War: YOU ALREADY LOST THE WAR. Humanity is on the brink of extinction after the two AIs had rebelled against their creators (your children and those after you as you've been in cold storage for god knows how long). There are colonies that are enslaved, other alien races that have been brought to their knees in the Milky Way galaxy, and the AI literally holds just about everything. You're brought out of cold storage to make one final stand against the AI.

Just about everything significant you do will cause AI Progress to rise. AI Progress is, simplified, how much the Core AI are paying attention to you and diverting resources to Planetary AI to fight you. So, the more you take back, the more the AI will pay attention to you. Which, depending on the games' setup is, can become exponentially painful fast.

None the less, with all of the expansions of the game alongside even just the base game (which the base game updates core gameplay as expansions and their gameplay altering side effects cause) is absolutely worth every dollar. I've bought extra copies of the collection packs just to have some things to give away and try to get friends sucked into campaigns that literally take days, in part because real life sucks and this game is about one of the only things that is consistantly excellent in just about every way. This Fall Sale is no different.

Who needs graphics when you have an AI that will rip your head off if you sneeze in the wrong direction?
Who needs a significant story when if you piss off the AI in such a way that they send a moon sized motherbase with insurmountable firepower that CAN and WILL annihiliate much of what you hold dear in a matter of minutes?

Always will love AI War.