Recent reviews by adam

I'm definitely what I'd consider a rabid fan of Fallout and the Fallout lore/universe, I own Fallout 3, NV and 4, all GOTY/Full editions with all the DLC's, but I put off buying Fallout 76, given the awful news pre launch about it being online only not to mention the many disturbing ♥♥♥♥ ups post launch, the bugs and everything else.
I was pleasantly surprised that I could give it a go, for free, for a few days, so I tried the game for the first time last night
They say first impressions are everything and well....they were bad.
Game loaded ok, tried to login and it crashed to the desktop, reloaded, same again, third time was a charm and the game started fine
I went through the leaving the vault process, but even that was buggy, the quest markers where you pick up items would stick around for minutes at a time, despite having picked up the items you were supposed to.
Already losing interest at this point.
Managed to get outside the vault, spoke to a robot and was advised to speak to two ladies down the steps ,so I got down the steps, the lady NPC calls to me because I'm from the vault and CRASH again.
So, reload, log back in, wait 30 seconds just to login, approach the NPC girl again and this time I just couldn't interact with her, I kept pressing E to engage in conversation and nothing.
I quit and uninstalled it.

Abandoned by the developer, Steam won't refund despite 0.3 hours played.

Wasn't sure if I'd like an RPG heavy game like this, but to my surprise, it's a lot of fun
Love the comical dialogue, the sillyness, but also everything else
It has it's tedious issues, but I find it a lot of fun.

I bought Stardrive 1 shortly after it came out and despite all the bugs and issues, enjoyed it
I was hoping Stardrive 2 would be a much better version than Stardrive 1 with improvements, in some respects, it is better, but in a lot of ways, it's no where near as good as Stardrive 1.
Unlike SD1, there's no governors, so you have to manage each colony individually, when you have a lot of planets, that's a LOT of clicking to queue items up and move workers around.
You can't build troops, like you could in SD1 (I guess there's no such thing as recruitment in this universe), you have to wait for troops to "spawn" and unlike SD1, you can only spawn 2 mechs (which are the equivalent of Tanks in SD1) PER planet.
Another annoyance is when you colonise a planet, you confirm colonization, which takes you to the planet view, but then other popups, like battles or other events, popup right after, so you can't start building on the colony until you've dealt with the other items first.
The ship customization seems a fair bit more limited, although graphically the UI is better and there's options for overload/extend arc etc, the ships seem? smaller, even the titan classes, which would often take 10 minutes or more in customizing SD1 because they were so big, take a lot less time in SD2, because everything seems to be scaled back.
The battles are....ok, graphics and detail are great, but they can sometimes take an age to finish, with no option to speed them up (which wouldn't be advisable right now, due to massive FPS issues)
Speaking of FPS issues, I have a powerful machine, but I had 25ish ships and the enemy had about 25, the frame rate was in the single figures, often dropping to 1FPS while the rockets were being fired by my ships, it's awful, such a let down.
In SD1 you could customize starbases/ship yards, not so in SD2, so they end up being destroyed quite easily by medium sized fleets.
The ground battles are the worst part of the game for me, I did try using Auto resolve, but often found my troops which had superior technology and regen, lost to the weaker forces on most auto resolves
Doing ground battles manually is incredibly tedious, having to click for each shot of a weapon and it just takes an age to finish a ground battle sometimes, especially if both sides have high hit points.
The ground battles feel unfinished and rather alpha/beta in quality.

A lot of what made SD1 great (albeit, buggy) have been removed or stripped down in SD2, I Can't understand the rationale behind that, surely it's best to work on what was great about the previous game and include and improve apon it for the sequel?

Ah well, such a shame.

Update - 02/04/2016

I decided to change my review to a positive one.
The main reasons are a new/renewed interest and bug fixing rampage by Zero, which has been ongoing for a couple of months now
The game has also been improved quite a bit with the addition of a basic governor system, although it isn't perfect, it takes away a lot of the tedium of queueing up tons of buildings.

Update 04/04/2020

Four years on and like his other games he's released (Stardrive1 and the table top one), it's been abandoned in a buggy state.
The game simply has too many issues to recommend, the new DLC is forced upon you and it adds more game breaking bugs than fixes.