Recent reviews by AliceTheGorgon

The light is going out.

Yes, there's a couple of new weapon types and some reworks. Some DLC with alternate avatars and posable mannequins. Yes, the light hasn't gone out completely yet. But its fading is unmistakable now. Dying the slow death of decay and sickness.


Crystals have been a distant memory for quite a while. Now, so too fuel and ammo. Both just magically summoned from specific types of generic material storage. A feat that was already accomplishable on vehicles with the fuel and ammo processors for those who wanted it, but now mandated from on-high, with no alternatives. One resource to rule them all. The message to those who enjoyed the old systems written plainly and irrefutably in the new mechanics. "♥♥♥♥ you if you enjoy mildly complex logistics. You'll do things like the zombies want to, or not at all."


Insult to injury, now we randomly have "commodities" as a new "resource", mostly for bribing the other factions. Factions who all are bizarrely keen on including the player in their weird weekly random diplomacy battles for some reason. Gone is the ability for the factions to simply not have an opinion on the tiny random no-name with a tiny "base". Gone is the ability for the factions to naturally begin to aggro as you grow and expand. Don't want to engage in the suspiciously artificial diplomacy meetings? Congrats, literally every faction will gang up on you and attack, because the random child of a meager pirate family doesn't want to engage in weird LARPy council meetings and battles with decadent aristocrats.


The character upgrades are gone too, now. Were they overpowered? Sure, but it's a single-player game, and they were fun. Doesn't matter though, brutally murdered all the same.


But, the light going out is visible in other ways as well. There's new cover art, with the obligatory suspiciously diverse cast. But, not satisfied with merely providing a face for the different factions, the robot avatar that has been with the game so long is now magically depicted as some kind of Asian woman, for literally no reason whatsoever. Rambot was merely a robot avatar for the player, staying out of the way and making no statement in any direction. Now though, it has received the same treatment that so many other things have. Dumbing down of systems that worked fine, turning a beloved thing into a "minority" to appease the diseased appetites of degenerated ex-humans, etc., etc., etc.


The light is going out. That is undeniable. There may yet be some fun to have here, stashed away in forgotten nooks somewhere. Scavenging for the last bits of fun left in a dying world.


Requiescat in pace, From the Depths; you will be missed. Though not by the vultures picking at your flesh.

Intro shows a really cool ominous character, and then in the fashion of so many other games, it refuses to let you side with the actually interesting characters and tries to force you to play as the incredibly boring "hero" type group. ♥♥♥♥ that. Either you let me side with the actually cool faction, or I won't play the game. Many other games have tried this, and I'm not playing any of them either. Why waste so much potential designing cool factions and characters and then *actively* refuse to let players side with them? You *know* players will want to do it. They've *always* wanted to. Stop wasting awesome factions and characters by forcing players to play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring ones instead.


The game also has a max password limit of only 20 characters, and doesn't seem to allow copy/pasting your password in either. Meaning if you use a password manager, you're totally ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Way too many games are *actively* encouraging ♥♥♥♥♥♥ security with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. All it needs to do is allow longer passwords, and let you paste a password. But apparently that's magically too difficult for some reason.


And, to top it off, it only manages to start up successfully once in a blue moon via Proton.


I could begrudgingly live with the last two, but I *will not* play any game that slaps players in the face by refusing to let them play as the cool faction. So many games do this, and it's absolutely disgusting every time.

Not polished or tested well at all.

First weird jank I noticed almost immediately was that attacking was extremely inconsistent. Turns out that's because the sword always attacks towards your mouse. Fair enough. Except the shield only defends towards where your movement keys were facing, and ignores the mouse entirely.

Neato. Two totally separate aiming methods for literally no reason at all. Great start.


Pushable blocks can be set to only be pushed from one direction, except with no visual distinction between those and the ones that can be pushed in any direction. Which way can this block be pushed? Who knows! You also have to hold the use key in order to push things, for some inexplicable reason.


Then, when I tried a player-made dungeon, I almost immediately got soft-locked because a particular terrain object reappeared while I was standing in that spot. This doesn't look like it was intended by the dungeon maker, so the only conclusion I can come to is that the game wasn't actually tested. Joy. Another half-finished game.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428846249


While it's nice that there's some folks trying to make Mario/Zelda-Maker style games, it would really be nice if they were actually well made instead of being janky and un-tested.

So, you know all those places where hitboxes didn't match the terrain, water not being where it looked like, pre-placed objects that are nearly impossible to interact with, things flagrantly clipping through other things for no reason, and so on, which were all present in the early access version?

Yeah, apparently most of that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is *still* broken. They apparently literally couldn't be bothered to have anybody so much as make sure you could interact with dev-placed interactables, or make sure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ water is actual water, or that hitboxes were even slightly correct for the terrain.

After *many years* of development and lots of hype and money, the entire thing still constantly reminds you it's a buggy-ass game the moment you so much as rub up against a perfectly normal rock.

♥♥♥♥ this unfinished garbage. Many other factory games are more pleasant to play, and have much more polish, with drastically smaller teams. They even became a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game publisher, and couldn't be bothered to make sure the most basic features of their own game work right.

There's some good bones here, but the game needs a lot more polish.

There's lots of totally inexplicable decisions that individually aren't *that* bad, but which add up and continually degrade the experience. There *are* a good few very nice features that stand out quite a bit (and I'll point out a few near the end), but that mostly just makes the the problems even stranger. The dev clearly has *some* good instincts, but still left *many* things in an absolutely terrible state, for no discernible reason.

(For clarity, the game *is* still being updated at the time of writing, but it claims to be a fully launched, non-early-access, game. In fact, the "launch" was almost two entire years ago, and was preceded by four years of early access. And yet these issues are here, in plain view.)

There's probably lots more issues than what I've seen, but here's a bunch that I've noticed so far:


To launch drones, you have to *manually* target an enemy, and then *manually* press the "launch drone" button. When that enemy dies, you need to *manually* target another enemy, and then *manually* press the "launch drone" button again to make the drones go attack the next enemy. Ad infinitum.

The same goes for repair drones and healing, except it's even worse when healing fleet members. You have to hover over the fleet ship for multiple seconds to target them (because the "target ally/neutral" button doesn't target fleet members, for some reason) then manually press the "don't heal me, but go heal them" button. For each, and, every, one.

There's a high-tier mod you can build into your ships to get drones to auto-target, but that doesn't change the fact that the basic mechanics of drone usage are *inexcusably awful*. Requiring you to use up one of the limited mod slots on a ship to make a core gameplay feature stop sucking is *not* a solution.


Factions can invade other stars, and destroy stations of factions they don't like. The player can even see on the map if a system is under attack and go intervene. Pretty cool.

Except, stations never get rebuilt. Ever. The stations, by design, simply stay dead forever. The defenders don't try and rebuild, attackers don't take over the cleared territory, nothing. Each game is thus effectively guaranteed to turn into a complete ghost town over time.


Stations don't restock their items for sale. Ever. Some of the basic items have infinite stock, but anything actually interesting doesn't.

This might be okay with how large the galaxy can be, except that one of the items they don't have infinite of is scrap metal. This is a giant pain, because scrap is needed for near about every single thing you can craft. But the only other ways to get more of it are as an RNG drop from scavenging debris fields, or as an RNG product from your ore smelter.

But even worse, since upgrades are so easy to craft other than the scrap requirement, having a reliable way to get scrap would probably require redoing a lot of recipes so the player can't trivially overpower everything.


While I didn't play with the fleet system much, the AI seems basically useless, and couldn't manage to even shoot more than once in a blue moon. Often the enemy was even sitting still, but the AI rarely stayed sane long enough to fire at all. Which is weird, since hostiles will often just park and then fire constantly, but the friendly AI just doesn't seem to do that. Even a ship flying away in a straight line gives them trouble.

The turret gunners are also semi-broken. With beam weapons, the gunners would routinely sit there firing the beam at one exact point slightly off to the side of the target, doing nothing useful whatsoever (most noticeable with PD beams shooting at missiles). They track the target with pinpoint precision, perfectly following it regardless of its maneuvers or your maneuvers, except they're actually playing "I'm not touching you" with the laser. They seem to pick an inaccurate aim point (likely based on accuracy), but then never seem change it, and thus *actively avoid* hitting small targets.

The turret gunners also don't auto-mine asteroids. You have to do the whole, manual target, order to fire, repeat, *ad nauseam*.


While there are many baffling problems, there are some legitimately very nice things in the game that show some good instincts and good attention to detail.

Pretty much every weapon and system you equip on your ship can be manually bound to a key. Not even through the settings menu, but in the ship building screen itself you can manually assign nearly any key to any combination of systems and weapons. It's quite flexible and very nice to see.


The ship customizability is *very* high. You can change which weapons go in which hardpoints, which turrets are controlled by which crew member, and you can even adjust each individual weapon's fire delay so you can set them up for alternating fire, broadside style, or even bursts.

The game is also quite free with what it will let you install on your ship, allowing tons of playstyle customization.

The loot not only comes in different rarities with better stats, it also has Mk2/Mk3 gear (and maybe higher, I've only seen Mk3 so far), which have better base stats, and can get even higher when upgraded in rarity. The loot potential is quite high. Lots of variety and fun stuff to find/craft.


You can assemble a gun to behave exactly as you like, by combining different weapon bases and mods (including missiles and mines and beams and such!). The resulting gun has a material cost based on what components you added to the gun. The gun has heat, and needs energy or ammo as the non-custom guns do, scaled by the different components as well. Many of the components can also be stacked, if your ship can handle the heat/energy/size.

This system was quite cool when I poked around with it. I absolutely love the freedom it gives you to tailor your ship to your preferred playstyle. It is a very rarely seen level of weapon customization, and I quite liked it.



As mentioned at the beginning, there are some legitimately very nice things about the game, but there are also many aggravating and unpleasant things that are completely baffling.

If you like loot grinding games, and want to play one that's space themed, you'll likely have a reasonable time. But if you're primarily looking for a good space game, I'd recommend holding off on this one for now and checking back in a few years to see how it's doing then.

The game has a lot of potential, and has achieved *some* of that potential, but also has lots of very jagged edges.

Looks quite nice, and has some decent fun in it, but absolutely needs a good deal more time in the oven.


The most egregious thing I've seen so far, is that some scenarios are either nearly impossible, or they don't actually give you *any* of the info/training you need to beat them. I'm still early in the single-player, and multiple missions so far are totally wiping me every single time with absolutely nothing I can do about it. The game is either failing horribly at balance and scenario design, or failing horribly at teaching the player what needs to be done.

Another example is that different units will prioritize attacking walls while others prioritize attacking buildings. This makes it feel like what you attack with is supposed to be strategically thought out, but you can't control what cards you draw or when, and can't control where your attacking units spawn, and can't give them any directions at all, and so there doesn't seem to be any *actual* way to use any strategy at all with attacking units, other than trying to place your spells for maximum effect.

Card draw and destruction is also weird. Many cards will give you other cards upon certain conditions, (e.g. upon build, upon first survival, etc.) and this happens *every time* you use the card. So eventually your deck will be absolutely bloated, and you will *need* one of the cards that lets you destroy cards just to prune your deck down to what you actually care about. This is somewhat interesting in concept, but not all factions seem to have easy access to card destruction, and so far I've seen no mention of needing to consider this in the lackluster tutorials at all. A decent player could figure out they need to do that, sure, but it's yet another thing that is simply not communicated at all, and which feels like unintentional emergent behavior that wasn't foreseen or addressed.


On the whole, there's a lot of potential, and I do hope the devs are able to smooth out the rough edges, since there's a good game in here somewhere. But as-is it's very under-baked. The game looks *very* nice, but the gameplay is nowhere near as polished as the art.

The controls effectively don't work. The lock-on will miss shots more than hit if the target is moving, and will often just not lock on, or lose the lock, for some reason. The light and grappling hook both start from *behind* the sub as far as I can tell, meaning you'll occasionally hook onto something behind yourself instead of in front, dying through no fault of your own. The hookshot is also painfully slow to go out and back in, so missing is incredibly painful.

This is exacerbated by many of the hazards having rather tight timing, meaning you can't sit still and make certain the hook will behave, because the stupid currents will push you all the way back out (or the eyes will insta-nuke you). So instead you often just have to desperately spam, and miss most of the time because there's no way to tell if the hook will actually grab or not because it's fairly short.

The visuals are okay. Nothing fancy, but they work fine.

The sound is a bit odd. The ambient noises don't seem to actually have anything to do with the creatures or objects that are actually nearby, and the sounds just kind of seem to do whatever.

For the level design. Most of the small areas are a bit too cramped, and are just unpleasant to navigate. Most of the obstacles don't seem to make any sense as to why they're there either. Nothing super major, but it's definitely a bit odd.


There is some potential here, and it's better than some other amateur first projects I've seen, but as-is it's incredibly rough and I can't really recommend it at all.

The dialogue makes me want to minecraft myself, but the gameplay was reasonably enjoyable.

If you enjoy the demo, you'll most likely enjoy the full game.

Playing the first game is absolutely miserable. Everything is clunky and frustrating for no reason. Many absolutely generic standard jumps will just randomly be stupidly tight. Hitboxes are absolutely ridiculous as well. You'll get killed by stuff you're not very close to, especially flames, which seem to have their entire hitbox spring into existence long before the flame visually gets anywhere near that high. I've even been killed by one turtle while bouncing on another one on the same platform. I was bouncing on top of one, but somehow I was still low enough for the turtle next to it to kill me. What the ♥♥♥♥ is this?

According to everything I can find online, the physics in the remake were changed to all match Crash 3, but the levels were very much *not* adjusted to account for that. It's the worst possible option. Either make the physics match the original games, or tweak the levels so they work well with the new physics. Don't just half-ass it and make things a giant pain.

One good example of the physics being wonky, is a part in Native Fortress that has a TNT crate, with a regular crate on top, and then a metal crate on that, and several regular crates stacked on top. Looking like this:

• Wooden
  
• Wooden
  
• Wooden
  
• Metal
  
• Wooden
  
• TNT
  
• Floor

If you ♥♥♥♥ around with it, you can *occasionally* break one of the crates above the metal crate with a spin, but not consistently. The physics *are* weird and inconsistent.

The collision box for the player was apparently even changed into the "modern" pill-shaped kind instead of a rectangle, which means that the edges of platforms are all effectively sloped and you'll slide off if you're near the edge instead of landing flat, making things even worse.

Supposedly games 2 and 3 are better (having been originally designed for physics which were more similar to 3), but I'm not about to give the game a pass just because the last 2/3rds of it supposedly work well. The *very first game* has *significant* problems that would be very easy for any experienced player to spot. And yet those obvious problems were either not noticed somehow, or were deliberately left in.


The art style feels very "generic HD remake" as well. Which isn't a huge deal on its own, but combined with game 1 being effectively broken, it really just makes the whole thing feel even worse. I'm not familiar enough with art stuff to point out specifics unfortunately, but anyone who's seen a good few remakes will likely recognize what I mean.


One minor nice addition is that after the first few levels of Crash 1, you can switch to playing most levels as Coco instead of Crash. Which is a neat addition.
Unfortunately though, there are still quite a few levels that are Crash-only for some reason. They seem to be ones that have vehicles and such, and I guess they didn't make animations for those for Coco for some reason, so those you don't get to pick who to play as.


On the whole, it might be worth it if you mostly plan to play 2&3. But I really can't recommend this game when game 1 has so many obvious issues.

The DLC is ridiculously brutal and tedious compared to the base game, for no apparent reason.

The combat is far too clunky for this kind of difficulty spike to be even remotely enjoyable. The combat was absolutely the weakest part of the base game, and it's not any better here. And even with your weapons as maxed as you can get without having access to any of the fancy resources from later areas, the bosses are just a giant pain and take ludicrous amounts of damage. And they've got a metric boatload of ♥♥♥♥ they throw at you that you cannot reasonably avoid all of. Plus, you're limited to some of the worst weapons and only the melee-range drone until after beating the enemy combat spider.

It's also pretty much random if you'll get the Heavy Exosuit which can break the ridiculously tough blocks at any reasonable speed before the extreme bullet sponge bosses you have to face. Meaning it can take forever to even clear out a mine through no fault of your own. And even if you get the Heavy Exosuit, it's so unbelievably slow that you have to awkwardly mine, take off the suit, fly forward, put on the suit, mine, repeat, over and over.

If you just want to support the dev, feel free to buy this, but I *really* cannot recommend this DLC on it's own merits at all.