Recent reviews by Red Aria

I loved Homeworld 1

I loved homeworld 2

I loved deserts of kharak

I was one of the first backers for Homeworld 3 on Fig when it was announced

I felt like a kid during a birthday party when i finally got to play this game.

So please keep all the above in mind when i tell you, this is not a homeworld game. This is someone raising homeworld's corpse from the grave, dressing it up, and slapping a "3" sticker on it. The story is nuts (in a bad way), the banter and advisor commentary is nuts (in a bad way), the cutscenes are nuts (in a bad way - notice the pattern?), ingame controls are nuts...

I thought maybe it was just me wearing rose-tinted glasses. So i went back and replayed Homeworld: Remastered. And then i replayed Deserts of Kharak. And i loved it, again. So no, its not rose tinted glasses - its just this game isnt Homeworld.

Dont.

A problem with many city builders is that the fun only comes during the early stages, when everything is new, and you're solving problems of "what is X and how do I Y", but later it all just boils down to "making numbers go higher". You might need more A, so you construct more B, which needs more C and so on. It becomes less of a puzzle, and more of a step by step, where you just keep making stuff to make the bar go up.

Against the Storm does an absolutely fantastic job of solving that. It blends roguelike elements ("every run is different") with the city builder. Every map you will have different layout, different resources, different villagers, different events, differerent requirements, different buildings unlocked, etc etc. And with the well-made gradual difficulty increase, you will find yourself challenged without it devolving into a slog of "do x or you die" that you often find in other city builders.

All in all, i wish there were more games that gave me as much fun as this one. Absolutely recommend.

This is not Baldur's Gate 3. Its not as polished, not as deep, not as well made. But that is both a blessing and a curse. I know many people who are put off by the sheer scale of BG3, by just how much there is to do. This is a much more manageable game - its still relatively long, and has a good amount of content, but its more manageable as a"game" that you will actually finish.

Overall the atmosphere was great, they nailed the "unfairness" and "there's no good guys" approach of 40k. Combat was allright, although even on higher difficulties it felt like there were many ways to get absolutely broken builds. I was able to beat last boss in just 3 turns, without minmaxing or knowingly exploiting, just because i somehow managed to make some of my teammates do absolutely ludicrous amount of damage.

My main concern would be lack of polish. This may come in form of bugs (like parts of your UI dissapearing until you reload your save), somewhat poorly implemented third quarter of the game (the "C" place, to those who know), and a bit weird interaction at times where the game seemingly forgets what actions you took previously (Like getting a dialogue from an NPC who you previously killed). All of these are relatively minor, and can be ignored, and overall it was a game i enjoyed.

Performance wise i had no issues, it ran smooth and i didnt experience any crashes. Graphics were fine from above, but a bit blurry/low res when zoomed in too close. Would have liked higher resolution in party view, for example.

Overall - id recommend playing this if you enjoy 40k universe.

I was excited for Cyberpunk when it was announced, but when it released i was busy with something else - and by the time i got free, all the "game is bad" reviews started pouring in, and i just put it on my backlog. And there it stayed, for years and years.

I had some spare time now, and figured this was as good a time as any to give it a whirl. And i am so very glad i did. I cant talk about how the game as at launch - i didnt play it, maybe it was horrible, maybe it was allright. I dont know. All i can say is that now, when io played it, it was fantastic, and i loved every minute of it.

Gameplay - engaging, fun, allowing for a variety of approaches. You wanna find a stealthy way to get in? Go ahead, there's hidden paths and coded doors. You wanna play bladerunner, hack a camera, and remotely fry the brains of enemies undetected? Go for it, choom. Are you feeling simple and just want to smash some heads? Grab a chainsaw and go through the front door. The world's your oyster, and it works incredibly well.

Graphics and performance - fantastic, though they do require a strong rig. Maybe in a few years time we will have nvidia 9900 that can run it at full ultra RTX with no issues, but i had to go with performance DLSS to have stable 60+ framerate at 4k ultra. It still looked wonderful though, especially the bright city at night. I experienced no performance issues, and in my entire 100+ hour playthrough the game only crashed once.

Story - i came in expecting a barebones story. I thought the beauty of this game would be in just the sandbox approach of "go do whatever". I was wrong. The story was incredible, and i absolutely loved it. Not only that, but the DLC (Phantom Liberty) also did an absolutely incredible job with bothj its story and its innovative approach to the missions. And if you feel like doing other stuff, the side missions, gigs, races, all of that stuff is also great. Its not just a "Go kill generic enemy in generic cave to get some gold" kind of quests, but rather every "gig" has its own small story, its own npcs, its own locations. And the city truly feels alive. You have crowds, traffic, random shops. You have houses, stores, stations. That giant megablock of flats you passed on your way somewhere? You can probably go inside and look around, and maybe there's gonna be a mission there later. The city feels great. And just like with the game itself, you have many approaches towards solving the quests - the game doesnt handhold you. You can just do a quest and go somewhere else, or you can dig into it deeper, maybe find some new info, and even completely change the outcomes (and consequences) of these quests. The "endings" are varied, and dont just offer a "recolored" version of same cutscene, but totally different missions, different locations, different results.

Overall - absolutely recommend this. 100 hours i do not regret spending on a game.

A mostly fun sequel to an amazing game, that is unfortunately PLAGUED by performance issues.

Even on extremely beefy PCs, framerate is stuttering all over the place, game crashes are aplenty, some CPU series (13900k) simply refuse to launch the game as of last patch ("out of video memory"? Really?), game eats ram like biscuits (resulting in massive memory leaks after just an hour or two of playing), etc.

Overall this is what you get when you refuse to optimise. I loved Remnant, and i wanted to love Remnant 2, but even on 4090/13900k it runs like hot garbage.

This game tries to do multiple things, but fails.

The basic gameplay is similar to Vampire Survivors, except your attack slows you down. Which would be fine, but there are hordes of monsters and almost always you want to auto attack. Except when elites come, and then autoattacking slows you down to the point where dodging without using your active dodges becomes almost impossible. Except you cant stop autoattacking because the hordes of monsters are still there with you.

Bosses, instead of being fun challenges, are slogs of "either pray you dodge on correct frame so you can keep attacking, or stop attacking and run around and maybe throw an attack every few seconds". Neither of which is something that i want from a vampire-survivors-like game.

That, coupled with lack of meaningful between-sessions upgrades (the equipment system is bloody useless), and the fact that there's literally zero reason to play any character other than the ranged sorceress, made me lose interest in this.

Despite this game being listed as "full release", it plays and feels like early access.

Its a city builder with complex traffic and resource flow, yet lacks basic tools to control them. A good example is storage - you can construct a "warehouse" to store your resources, but this warehouse doesnt distribute said resources back into your network. So you can use stored resources to build stuff, but if something requires that resource for production, you cant use it - you have to create it all over. Its the easiest thing to fix, and its so dumb that its designed this way.

Traffic control is a nightmare. I have plenty of experience with games like Cities Skylines etc, so its not an issue of "you just need to learn how to control traffic". No, its an issue of "The transport AI is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dumb, it will create traffic jams even if you give it absolutely perfect roads". And if you decide to micromanage, prepare to have to manually click every single crossroad because there's no way to save or carry over your signal settings.

And dont even get me started on upgrading roads or rails. It seems the game flips the coin which direction the road will be when upgraded - meaning if you have a two-sided road that you replace with one sided, it will often interweave back and forth on the same road, resulting in entire road being unusable and you having to dig it up and redo from scratch.

Oh and the "deletion" tool, to remove unwanted buildings? Not only does it not have any confirmation box, it also is "see through". What do i mean by see through? It means that if you try to delete a road, and there's a house behind the road, it will delete the road AND the house. And, once again, it wont ask you for any confirmation. It will just delete it.

There's no voice overs, no ingame events, no story. The background music consists of a single tune that keeps looping and honestly drove me insane.

All in all, this would have been a promising game, if it was early in development. But for a full release? Absolutely not recommended. If you have an itch to scratch, go play Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Cities Skylines, Anno or literally anything else.

If i had to use one word to describe this game, it would be "Soulless".
Now, thats a bit unfair, so let me explain.

Visual design of the game - world design, graphics, animations, enemies etc - is fantastic. Its gorgeous, has a fitting style to it, and looks great. You have an interesting variety of weapons and special abilities aka bioshock, and i quite enjoyed the back-and-forth main character has with his glove sidekick.

The problem is the level and gameplay loop. Having spent almost 5 hours doing exact same thing with exact same weapons against exact same enemies over and over, and constantly having to "stop" the fun loop of killing stuff to solve silly and simple puzzles, fetch quests and going back and forth to collect things, press buttons then collect more things, it becomes annoying. The main character constantly breaks fourth wall to talk about how annoying all these fetch quests are - cool, so why are they in the game, in such amount?

"Oh, you need to go to the Cafe? Well door is locked and you need to collect 5 keys from areas around you. So you spend 2 hours collecting the keys, open the door, turns out the train to cafe is broken so now you have to collect 5 batteries from areas around you". You spend more time doing "fetch quests" than actual story.

But that's all still fine until you reach "open world" area. Thats when you realise that the game design is just annoying. Not hard, not challenging, not difficult - annoying is the word. You are surrounded by robots, who keep respawning, who keep summoning more reinforcements, and who keep repairing each other. Your best bet, in this "open world", is to play stealth and hide. It would be fine if it was just one segment, but entire open world section is designed to make you stealth around. In a first person shooter game. Who's bright idea was this?

In the end, i found myself losing interest, and once i reached the point where game told me to use its terrible map to find some "Optional testing sites" i realised i actually had no desire to continue, and stopped.

A shame because it had a very strong start. It just... fumbled and fell face first into dirt shortly afterward. It desperately tries to be Bioshock, Prey and Deus Ex, but succeeds at being neither.

First of all, if you enjoyed Homeworld series - you will love this one.

Everything about it - visual, audio design, etc - screams homeworld, and i mean that as a high praise.

If i had to describe this, id say Frostpunk meets Homeworld.

Story - very enjoyable. Gives plenty of things to think about without overshadowing the game.

Gameplay - easy at first, hard later on (as it should be). Enjoyable loop with kinks that are thrown into your well oiled machinery to constantly keep you on your toes without being annoying.

Graphics - fantastic. Love them.


Honestly the only, only thing i dislike about the game is "losing ships in bad space weather". I am ok with the mechanic, i just feel like it should be... adjusted a little.

All in all, very solid 8/10 game.

Pros: Its fun to slaughter nazis

Cons: everything else

1. Motion sickness. Holy motion sickness, batman. Im someone who can play most VR games with no issues, but by the time i was done with this game, i was almost ready to barf. If you have even the slightest inclination towards VR motion sickness, avoid this game.

2. Combat is extremely simple and very repetitive. Even basic concept such as "kill nazis" can become too boring when done this way.

3. Too much talking. Like, seriously, you will spend half the game (im not even exxagerating) doing the "story" stuff, which usually involves you sitting around doing nothing until prompted to press some button.

4. Did i mention motion sickness? Drone missions are the worst. Absolute worst.



Basically, if this was a good game, it would lose a lot of points for its motion sickness inducing gameplay, but its not even a good game. It has 4 levels, can be beaten in 1.5 hours, every level is almost identical to previous. Honestly it being so short is probably a bonus, i wouldnt have been able to manage playing it for any longer.

In short: avoid. Like, i wouldnt even recommend this if it was a free demo. Quite literally, would not recommend it even for free.