Recent reviews by Ghost in the Maplenepvision

Now that the Carriers are out, this game can finally replace the niche I hope that was existed in Homeworld and Star Wars: Empire at War series. Customizable strike crafts, and now I can live my dream in a fully simulation-based epic space battle.

There are two distinct features that separate this game apart from other space strategy titles.
1. Electronic Warfare.
2. Highly detailed and customizable ships from head to toe.
The latter is much more easier to understand than the former, you design your ship in fleet editor. From the mounting weapons, missiles, point-defense systems down to each individual compartments, modules inside the ships, not to mention the missile and strike craft designer. You want a battleship that retrofit into a heavy carrier that comes with 450mm cannons and 20mm CIWS with long-range cruise missile that shoots flare and decoys? You can do that, you want a cargo freighter that can shoot cargo container torpedos and have several launch states? You can do that too in this game. The possibility is vast and near endless.

The ships in this game don't have your typical health point system either, instead as long as there still crews alive or the reactor don't go boom before they can do anything, your ship can still come back and do the shooting, providing info and whatnot.
In fact you can't tell a ship is dead or not on the map unless you tag them yourself, your radar can't tell a different.
How do you tell them if they are dead or not you might ask? Either they are shooting shuttles out or they go nuclear boom (shooting the lifepods is a war crime by the way.)

Now comes the electronic warfare part, information is key in this game, without them you are basically blind and good as dead.
Each ship comes with their own radars (i.e sensors) to detect enemy ships, comms to receive info from the ally ships, you need both of them to survive and both of them can be destroyed. Besides that you also have illuminators, think of them like a really giant flashlight that points at your target and make it easier for your Radar to see and pierce through enemy jammers, some of the missiles also require illuminators to be as a guiding point. And the jammers, there are two types of jammers, one is to jam your comms and the other is to jam your radars, and both of them exist to make your ship sensors go haywire. Now combine all of these and integrate to in-game weapon system and physics which is why this game have a deep learning curve, and I think that is one of the reason why people were upset when the conquest mode is canceled.

Currently there are two factions both with 7 different ship classes for a total 14 unique ships and 4 strike crafts each, and now you might think for a space rts game it might seem not a lot, but when you taking the customization into consideration,
Most of your time in this game will be in the Fleet Editor, and most of your victories will also be reflected upon it.

This game in the current state is not without issues, aircraft path finding and collision could do more work, the deep learning curve (the latest update comes with new tutorials now), heavily focus on the pvp environment and lacks of singleplayer content besides skirmish, not so user-friendly user interface, lacks of graphics design that help you understand/memorize what does a thing do in the game, etc.

But what truly shines in this game for me is the Fleet Editor which is a timesink for me, spending countless hours designing my own fleets and spend only 1/3 of the time to play just against AIs and watching your fruits finally bearing in the final moments is something I can't experience in other space rts games...
Two years ago I pledged 20$ on dev's patreon just because I like space ship and watch them battle in space then call it a day.
Two years after I find myself can't stop spending time to actually learn how the game works, actually wanting to try PVP for the first time in this game.
I can finally sense the fruits start bearing with the carrier update and I can't help but excited for what the future this game holds.

The latest update also included the fully rewritten computer AI to play with, and as someone who played the game 2 years ago, I can see there are huge improvement and they can keep you up for quite some time if you are like me don't enjoy PVP in the most games, and the dev also mentioned in the latest devblog that the next major update will be a fully singleplayer campaign so that's something to look forward to.

Finally, the music track in this game, specially the "fighting phase" one, is really really good.
NEBULOUS: Fleet Command OST, Vol. 1

A pretty neat horror game about simple gardening and goofing around.
This is like Outer Wilds without Astrophobia, unless you have Gnomophobia.

A juicy fever dream...

Probably the best Story Pack Stellaris ever got since Distant Stars, actually added a lot of favors in early to mid game and feature-wise it feels completed such as you can actually trade and steal the specimens from other empires. It even got customizable bio-ships (sort of, I still want a complete new shipset for my hive playthrough) and integrate plenty of past dlc contents.

The fleet manager UI could use a bit of touch-up since there are now extra ship templates and the way the dlc introduce these templates into the game often confuses what ships am I exactly building.

Besides Cosmic Storms which feels more like a nuisance than an actual mechanic, Stellaris Season 8 in general got a pretty good value in terms of polish and content, I like what they are doing now by comparing to the past.
Hope Paradox keep up the good works in Season 9.

A pretty solid visual novel telling a bittersweet story during times of chaos, for a visual novel this game is not really that long, took me about 6 hours to read through the whole thing, but for that price-tag it is well worth it.
Story-wise it is well-constructed with memorable characters, I especially love that it handle the internal conflicts between the main characters quite well considering the game is not really that long, and combining the music, when it delivers, it delivered. The story itself is nothing new mind you, but as long as it is telling a good story with some proper ends I don't really mind.
A good old redemption story is still a good story though I gonna warn that this story features some dark tone stuff like cannibalism, murder and human trafficking and such, not too gruesome and actually a bit "tamed" in my opinion but there's plenty in it, I just love some depressing stories.

Since I am a native Chinese speaker the voice acting is pretty damn good that even comes with some dialects, but if you are not familiar with Chinese dub in a visual novel game, there's Japanese dub coming this October 2024 so you can look forward to that.
As for the English translation, it is a bit... wonky sometimes but it is at least better than the Japanese translation from what I have heard, this game expects you have at least some basic understanding of history of China, especially with Three Kingdoms. They don't explain any proper nouns like some any other ordinary Japanese titles, not that it matters much since the core story isn't exactly about the Chinese history anyway, but figured some people would want to know.

Overall I am glad I found this game while looking through some Reddit posts that talking about it, it's a good read, looking forward to the sequel.

I hate taxes.

Epic Online Service.

*Edited: During mission 3 I got crashed to desktop for some reasons. Great. Now I don't even want to bother.

If you have ever played games like Hedon Bloodrite and enjoyed its world building with heavily focus on exploration gameplay then this game is for you! Because this game got tons of surprises!
You can clearly see the developers put their loves and souls onto building each levels and its details. For example almost every decorations are interactable, be it a painting, a computer, a pizza box, a kitchen sink, a toilet, etc. You can also find a lot of logs that were left behind by others and can almost find their death location later on when you put two and two together, it's the little things that count.
You'd think in a boomer-shooter-like game they serve no purposes and are a waste of resource, but this game is not a boomer shooter nor a immersive sim that emphasizes player choice, in fact the levels are pretty much linear. The game feels more like a good old FEAR or Half-Life game that emphasizes on the world building and I can safely say this game nailed it on that part.

I am currently playing with Captain Hardcore difficulty, which forbidden me to save as much as I want unless I have the resources to buy a save point, and I gonna say they aren't kidding when they said the AI got FEAR influence. The AI can take cover, flank you, suppress you with either firepower or grenades, fall back and reground with other teammates, etc and the most actions they do are voice acted which is just another cherry on the top.

Some people might complain about the game gives way too few of ammo to deal with the amount of enemies it gonna throw at you, although that might be true in some regards, but I find it perfectly balanced in the most levels I have played, the game really rewards you for exploration, such as it costs me 400 credits to save my game which is a lot, but you can find more than enough credits in this game if you just try to find them. So even on Hardcore difficulty, I don't find saving a too much of a problem.

But the game is not without some flaws tho, early levels such as the hospital and the sewers are a bit confusing to navigate and the objectives are often not too straight forward for you to understand where to go (the devs are already working on improving these levels), some enemy placements in some levels are just not fair because if you are like me who likes challenge and decided to play on the Hardcore mode first try, they can easily put you down in seconds and lost hours of progression. I'd recommend first timers don't try to play on harder difficulties unless you enjoy pain like me. Also don't try to play this game on iron sight mode as this mode is not default for a GOOD reason, while I do like it to some extent but with the amount of visual effects this game got (muzzle flash, smoke, debris, blood, etc), you do not want it to interfere with your shooting course it will by a lot!

If you have played any other GZDoom titles then you are well known enough that despite this being a source port of that old doom game can still do more than just making some boomer shooters, and Selaco clearly shows that.

Glad that I decided pick this game up instead of blinding reading some of these steam reviews, this is actually a pretty solid Strategy RPG game even if you are not a fan of Girls' Frontline.
The story at first seems a bit like your typical live die repeat but the character writing, story pacing are actually engaging enough for me to caring about what's the next and for 20$ price tag it got fully jp voiced, animated-ish cutscenes, lively details with the chibi characters I think it's well worth the price, with how much details they put into the game it's no wonder the game got delayed many times. If Girls' Frontline is actually as good as this one I might try the mobile game one day lol. Oh and this game actually got flashbacks of the previous events whenever you load up your saves which is a very nice feature.

As for the gameplay, you might notice a big difficulty spike after chapter 1 but the game also offered you plenty of options to deal with these obstacles besides your guns, you get flashbangs, turrets, barricades, trip mines, you name it, not to mention character progression trees, weapon customizations and most importantly. Stealth.

While I think not many of games in this SRPG genre utilize stealth mechanics as much (I mean of course you can name some big ones such as Baldur's Gate 3, XCOM 2, Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, etc) but none of them actually make you feel like you have to use stealth but in this game you kinda need to, and I don't mean that as a bad thing! Way too many of SRPG games throwing you a overwhelming foe yet you don't feel being overwhelmed, you often just rely on your powerful characters or items (not that this game don't get many) or cheesing the enemy AI to a point that it just feels unparalleled most of the time,
but in this game, items are limited, your characters are limited, there are ways to grind up these things but they can only get you so far and are also limited in a way.

I really like the fact that this game kinda force you to use its stealth mechanics as a way to moving forward as it fits its narratives, for those who dislikes stealth, unfair situation or hate retrying the same stage over and over again in video games it might irritate them as much but the game still offers you options such as quick save, autosave 1-2 turns earlier
anyhow, it's good to see a game trying something new for its genre. I mean I am such a save and load sucker in Baldur's Gate 3 so I don't really mind the missions that force me to do stealth.

Oh for a stealth-focus game, the enemy AI in this game is pretty decent, they actually take advantages of their surroundings and change focuses based on your moves rather than just beelining your last known location. But be warned, this game is not really easy if you just want to play it for the story. Sometimes a mixed bag isn't always a bad experience, I gave up on Utawarerumono series after its first entry of god awful and boring combat system yet finally fallen in love with the whole series after giving it a second chance many years later.

As for the dramas surrounding this game... who gives a ♥♥♥♥? :3 Video games are meant for play, games need to be ENTERTAINING in some way otherwise nothing else truly matters, and for the time I have spent on this game... I can safely say I am entertained.

The proper Darkest Dungeon 2.