Recent reviews by Cogneter

Okay, so this is an interesting one. Even though I will be listing many cons below, I still like the concept of the game and enjoyed it enough to recommend it.

It really reminds me of a simplified Stellaris with a storyline, which is an interesting concept. The gameplay is fine and the story is good enough. I didn't encounter any bugs, except one time the game froze on one of the faction's turns, but reloading a previous save fixed that.


Pros:
+ I really liked the concept of a 4X game with a story. Now I wish Stellaris did something like that (more than they do with origins).

+ The dialogues were sufficiently mature and without typos. I was really expecting less, so was pleasantly surprised.

+ The tactical battles were interesting, forcing me to adapt my strategy almost every time.

+ Major bonus points for making espionage actually useful, compared to Stellaris. Your agents can damage enemy fleets, hurt relations, and overall they feel useful and sufficiently powerful.


Cons:
- I have a very hard time believing European Union as an organization is going to exist for another 250 years, but okay.

- Managing planet buildings is currently very painful. I couldn't find any way to see where I have buildable planets without buildings, so, when I had to look for a planet to build extra mines, I had to literally click through all the buildable systems and check if they had any free space. Additional frustration comes from the fact that you unlock technologies that make more planets buildable, so then I had to click through all the same systems again to find them.

- Managing fleets also becomes painful after you get 20+ of them. Like with planets, you have to click through all of them to remember where they are on the map and make their turns. For comparison, in Stellaris the fleets were bigger and I rarely had more than 10 of them, and could also order their movement across the whole galaxy, instead of managing it every turn. I think it would be better if it was at least possible to group 3 fleets into a single unit. And also allow docking them in systems with allied ships (really annoying when I can't move 3 fleets through a system because there are allied fleets stationed there).

- Surveying derelicts felt very pointless. I was expecting some unique and powerful rewards, but instead surveying them grants a very mediocre amount of rare earth and science. I could generate the same amount of resources and science in literally 1 turn without doing anything, while derelict surveys last multiple turns and may fail (although I never managed to fail mine).

- Even after completing the game, I still don't fully understand how energy generation works. From what I could gather, it allows you to only use the energy generated on the last turn, without being able to store or trade the excess. They don't have capacitors in the year 2260?

- "Local happiness". I see it's a recently added mechanic, and I couldn't find a meaningful way to interact with it, i.e. increase happiness on a specific local planet or a system. As such, when a rebellion was brewing on of one my system, I didn't have any way to stop it other than issuing an edict increasing global happiness. If edicts were on a cooldown - tough luck.

- Speaking of rebellions. Rebellious systems joining a random faction is plain ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's especially "fun" when your colony rebels and joins your ally, and you have no way to conquer it back (you can NEVER attack your allies, the game doesn't let you) and have to trade like 10 other systems for it (colonies are very useful and important for the story).

- I also didn't like the limit of tier 3 (T3) buildings on the colonies. You have 1 T3 mandatory story building, and there are 3 T3 buildings necessary to construct different T3 ships, so already you can't have a colony that can construct all types of T3 ships (unless you capture more than 6 colonies, which is very difficult). I would really prefer if a colony could build T3 buildings without a limit, or at least increase the maximum T3 buildings to 5-6.

- I couldn't find any way to increase the max amount of governors, except through rare events. In the beginning, I thought admirals would always be useful and opted to increase their max through the events, but then suddenly I had ~50 max admirals and two buildings that can increase this number further, while I had 18 max governors with 40+ habitable planets.

- Lastly, I had a rather amusing experience with the "nemesis system", which makes all other factions go to war with you if your reputation drops low enough. After they've done that, I could just click through them and offer them the cessation of hostilities, which they always immediately accept. But, what's even more funny, they are ready to pay me minerals and rare earth to stop the war that they have initiated. :D In the mid-game, as a Nemesis, I used that to get a couple extra Ks of minerals per turn, just ending wars that would start again on the next turn. Although, at some point, the factions stopped engaging in diplomacy with me, so I guess there was some limit to it.


Conclusion:
* This game has a great foundation and needs just a little more UI/UX work and gameplay balancing to become really good. For now it is, at times, rather tedious to play, but, if you enjoy space operas and/or Stellaris - I would still recommend it.

If you enjoyed Starcom: Nexus, then Starcom: Unknown Space is pretty much more of the same - in a good way.

It has all the same basic concepts, but a completely new storyline and some gameplay improvements here and there. One of the additions I enjoyed were 6 lieutenant crewmembers (who can't be killed) with different personalities based on their different areas of expertise. These crewmembers are regularly communicating with the captain (you) and with each other (often humorously), which makes the trips around the Unknown Space less lonely compared to Nexus, where it was just you and your first officer. I also welcome the removal of the rather unclear crew morale system from the first game.

One thing that I'm unsure about are the randomized anomaly explorations - some planets can generate a random anomaly, which has a random chance of success, which can be increased by increasing your crew levels. if you get a bad roll, you won't get a reward and will be locked out of exploring that anomaly again, forever. And you can't even load an earlier save to reroll, because the planet would just generate another random anomaly. I think this system would be better if you were always allowed to later reroll unsuccessful rolls.

Other than that, it's a solid game and is apparently also a prequel to Nexus. If you liked Nexus, I recommend playing Unknown Space as well.

A fun game, very similar in concept to Starscape and Star Control 2.

You end up in an unfamiliar universe with just your ship (which you can gradually upgrade) and your space station (which performs the upgrades). Explore, trade and gather resources to upgrade your ship, discover weird alien species, unravel mysteries of the long extinct powerful alien empires.

If you're into all that - you're going to have a fun time.

A perfect game to scratch that XCOM turn-based tactics itch. If you've played turn-based tactics games before - the gameplay will be comfortably familiar, but with enough twists to make it feel fresh. If you haven't - give it a try, it's a lot of fun.

The sequel has a much better pacing than the first game, with plenty of story cutscenes and without dragging on for too long. The story itself is also interesting, and I liked the tactical missions.

On the bad side, it sometimes feels as there's too much micromanagement. In particular, I found it very inconvenient to manage equipment of the officets. The "auto-assign" feature helps, however it assigns equipment at random, which may not be desirable. Would be nice to save loadouts for specific officers.

Another thing that grinded my gears was during tactical missions - your enemies react to their arrested comrades lying on the ground, however you are unable to move them in any way (except one specific mission where you are allowed to carry the arrested gang boss). Because of this, you are sometimes forced to wait until your enemies walk into a dark corner, where they can't be found, before you can arrest them.

Still, I enjoyed the sequel more than the first game, and I can definitely recommend it.

While this game has a solid foundation, I found it pretty rough around the edges, for the reasons I shall explain below.

1) You are forced to play as a corrupt cop. If you don't do corruption, you get forcibly killed, without any way to protect yourself.
2) Some tasks regarding your officers are really missing the necessary UI elements to complete. For example, you are told to have 3 asian cops, but you aren't told which ones are asian - you are supposed to guess by their photos. I thought I had 3 asian cops, but then turned out I hadn't. Then you are told to fire all old cops, but you can't filter them by age, so you basically have to click through the "Fire" option on everyone and see if they're old or not.
3) The investigation mechanic, while interesting on the surface, feels like it lacks player control. New frames are always presented after midnight, no matter how many detectives you assign. And, in some cases, it's really hard to tell if you've already got all the necessary frames, so there's a lot of trial and error involved. I also found it hard to track which detectives are in which shifts and on which cases, because, unlike officers, detectives don't have a prominent UI and need multiple clicks to view them during the day.
4) One of the things I hated most in the first part of the game are some "immediate" assigments, both from mafia and from city hall. While most assignments have a timer, allowing you to wait some seconds for cops to return to the station, these "immediate" assignments demand that you assign 2-3 cops to them right now, and if you don't have 2-3 cops ready at your station at this random point at time, then you miss the assignment (even if the necessary cops would've reached the station in 1-2 seconds).
5) Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back and made me write a negative review, was a weird thing that happened to me on 10th of August, when Jack gets forcibly killed at the morning. The previous day I was completing all mafia assignments, and didn't do anything against them, so I don't really see any reasons for them to kill me. What's worse, my save file on the 9th of August got erased, and now I have to replay the whole week starting from the 5th of August.
6) I should also mention the music. While the idea of manually selecting and inserting a vinyl disc every time you want in-game music to play may seem original and good on paper, it takes a lot of unnecessary time and gets very old very fast.

This is not a bad game, but I feel it has much room for UX improvement, which probably won't happen 6 years after release.

I like the premise of the game and I believe it could be fun, however the results of the choices you make don't seem to make any sense.

First of all, not publishing most games increases morality. I can see how some choices, like lootboxes or paid mods, can tie into "morality", but why is declining to publish a game usually considered "a good thing" morality-wise?

Second of all, declining to publish some games increases the "developers" resource. So when a developer comes to you and asks to publish his game, and you decline his request, that raises his desposition towards you? Like with morality, I couldn't discern any logic why some of the choices raise that resource.

Lastly, most of the time I lose because my "developer" resource gets too high. Again, because sometimes I want to lower it by declining a game, but it gets higher anyway.

The cards start repeating rather fast, so you could potentially try to remember them and their effects, but that's rather tedious.

My suggestion would be to add a mechanic, which I believe Reigns had, that displays which resources are going to be affected by your choice and how (display whether they go up or down), but only if you made that choice before. That'll help streamline the gameplay a little after the choices start repeating, so players who invested more time into the game will have an easier time managing the resources without having to manually remember (or write down) the results of their previous choices. Which, I'll repeat again, don't always make logical sense.

Also, the minigames are kinda "meh". And I was never able to get past the 2nd pipe in the "flappy bird" clone.

I'm a big fan of sci-fi and cyberpunk games, so this one was right up my alley. I also like RPG elements, which this game has plenty of.

Instead of a free first person view it has a grid, which gives this game a retro feel, but in a good way. Kinda reminded me about the first Might and Magic and Lands of Lore games.

The game is still a bit rough around the edges - it has a few bugs and problems, but it's only been a week since the release. The robot companion has too few voice lines which it repeats too often, and the game itself can get repetitive if you play it for too long. I will unlikely go for a second playthrough, but I find the first one enjoyable so far (playing on Hard difficulty).

It's also worth noting that the game developers are very active on the forum (I got a response from them within an hour on a Saturday), which shows how much they care about their game and community.

So, all in all, I definitely recommend giving this game a try.

I want to preface this by saying that, in real life, I get to build PCs very rarely. I think my last major update was around 6 years ago, and a couple years ago I've upgraded my graphics card. Other than that, my PC is still running the newest games, so I don't really have any reason to upgrade.

It's a shame, because I really enjoy building PCs. It's a very mesmerizing ritual of picking the right parts, putting them together, and then that magical moment when you press the "On" button and it all actually works. :)

This game, if not completely, still manages to capture the majority of that ritual. For that, I can recommend it to anyone who, like me, enjoys building PCs, but doesn't get to do it nearly often enough in real life.

That said, this game still has its flaws, and I cincerely hope they are fixed by the time it's out of early access. This game has great potential, so I hope it doesn't go wasted.

My gripes are as follows:

• The progression in the career mode is painfully slow. After 8 straight hours of playing, I only got to the 8th level, and my understanding is that there are around 15 levels. Normally, I wouldn't mind playing a game for that long, but my second gripe is...
  
• The gameplay is very repetitive. As much as I love building PCs, doing the same thing over and over for 8+ hours gets boring eventually. I would suggest adding some new elements to the gameplay, so it feels less repetitive. Maybe someone else opens a PC repair shop and you have to compete with them for clients, doing repairs faster and cheaper. Or add a monthly PC build competition, where you can benchmark your PC against others and win prizes (otherwise, I haven't found a reason to upgrade my in-game PC). Maybe grateful letters from your customers with bonuses when you upgrade their PC beyond their expectations.
  
• I think Auto-Screw Tool and Auto-Cable Tool should be made available sooner than levels 12 and 14 - maybe as soon as Quick-Screw Tool and Quick-Cable Tool. If each level takes a hour to reach, that's 12-14 hours of screwing and cable-ing. Making auto tools available sooner would make the mid-game less tedious. If you need another cash sink, you could just increase monthly rent and electricity payments.
  
• The tasks to get a certain benchmark score are ridiculous. I mean, do actual people in the actual world ask to upgrade their PCs to reach a certain benchmark score? And how do I guess which CPU/GPU will achieve the necessary score, other than the most expensive one? On the other hand, people asking to upgrade their GPU or CPU, without saying how much they want it upgraded, are silly too. They may pay 200+$ to get a very negligible perfomance improvement. I think there needs to be a middle ground that makes more sense. The most realistic upgrade task I've seen is upgrading the PC to run a certain game - that I can imagine.
  
• The default music in the game is kinda "meh". I had to turn it off and listen to my own music. Maybe add some other tracks?
  
• Add an option for faster movement around the workshop, like "press Shift to run".
  
• Lastly, I want to note that this game is perfect for VR. I hope you'll look into adapting ot for Oculus and Vive - it might be difficult technology-wise, but gameplay-wise you wouldn't have to change anything at all.

As far as 2D space sims go, I would vote Space Rangers to be the best of all time, even better than Star Control 2.

Space Rangers offer a great variety of gameplay: combat, trading, piracy, exploration, salvaging, upgrading ship and skills, text adventures, planetary battles, arcade minigame. There is always something to do, and all playstyles blend nicely together for a complete and satisfying game experience.

This game has a living and breathing world, where every NPC has a purpose. Traders carry goods from one planet to another, pirates try to convince them to offload those goods to them, diplomats and transports fly between planets doing diplomat-y and transport-y stuff (gameplay-wise, they are either used by pirates to extort money, or fight the said pirates). There are also rangers, like yourself, who can be pirates, or traders, or warriors, and who behave accordingly. Each of these NPCs is persistent, which means they don't just disappear forever when you leave their star system. In fact, you can use the in-game search functionality to track any NPC across the galaxy, by simply typing its name (you could even play it as a stalking simulator).

I want to mention that Space Rangers have a very flexible game difficulty setting. On the lower difficulties, your enemies don't control many star systems, so you can freely fly across the galaxy, trading and completing government missions. On the highest difficulty, the enemies control most star systems, and you are left with half a dozen (or less) systems that you can visit without getting annihilated by a swarm of enemies within a minute. This adds a kind of "fighting a losing war" desperation feeling, when you must fight for the very survival of your species, which I personally find enjoyable.

If you are not averse to the idea of turn-based space battles occuring on a 2D plane, you should definitely give Space Rangers a try. And even if you are averse to 2D space battles, Space Rangers HD offer the option to play text adventures, planetary battles and arcade fights separately from the main game, so you can buy it just for that. Speaking of additional content, this game also includes a MP3 soundtrack (no DLC necessary) with 33 awesome space-themed tracks - you can find them in the "Soundtrack" folder in the game's installation directory.

P.S. "Space Rangers HD" is actually an updated version of "Space Rangers 2". If you, like me, prefer to play games and watch movies starting from the first part, there is also "Space Rangers 1", which you can probably find somewhere on the Internet (it's not on Steam, sadly). It's a bit rougher around the edges than the second part, but it still possesses the same qualities that make it a great game.