Recent reviews by FallingWhale

I played this under the assumption that the worst of the bugs had been introduced to the base game and it wouldn't be too bad past that. (There's no way they could FPS tie all of the game logic a second time, right?)

I was deeply wrong.

There are hundreds of core issues in design here, but to give a sense of how busted this is out of the gate the base survivor added in this expansion: shoots through walls (but only sometimes), can't use abilities in the air (but only sometimes), has an that M2 throws the camera, has a very weak heal that requires stopping entirely to input a QTE; the only one in the entire game, said heal has a 15 second cooldown and needs to be done 6 times which fills 7 pips, that gives you a whopping 6% damage increase and a revive that won't trigger (or rather it will but the game over screen will finish before it does), her dash is just the egg item but with infinite scaling, so things are really bad.

Chef flat out does not work as intended. They got the basic attack functionality wrong so he can only throw one cleaver, his dash does damage before checking effects so it just doesn't combo on kill, and his fire stacks only seem to count as long as the enemy is still in the fire.

For reasons unclear to the human mind it appears that the damage/physics/logic/effect systems are now frame dependent. Because of this incoming damage is wildly inconsistent now.

Bravo Randy.

An okay logistics game hampered by poor automatic choices without manual overrides and a story that dares to ask: what if you needed an 80 IQ and a crippling personality disorder to get into the space program?

The game has good looking ships and I want to like it but it just isn't good.
There is basically no feedback to combat. In a game where there is a wide array of weapons with various ranges and projectile speeds there is no way to see ranges, target lead, enemy speeds, or even your speed.
The writing isn't very good and the translation is slapdash nonsense that just makes it confusing.
There are timers that run when paused in menus which means you just sit and wait with nothing happening.
Every other aspect of the game is literal dicerolls.

This game isn't about surviving the red planet. This is a game about constructing a luxury hotel in red Antarctica.

The game suffers from having extremely flat progression (the gameplay stays constant throughout and the only change is whether imported building parts are needed), badly balanced rewards (a reward for building a story meteor defense system is another meteor defense system), and whole mechanics can be made irrelevant by certain techs (shuttles make thinking about logistics pointless).

The game is painfully slow even when game speed is set to max. The game is very easy and gets easier when you start to understand how little is going on. This is to say you can and should pave Mars instead of caring about the landscape; the game has no answer to this and it's free to do. Despite having an in game difficulty multiplier its values border on random.

Mars is not treated as a unique threat. The dust that covers Mars is just used to visualize maintenance timers. It isn't the toxic microparticle nightmare that Mars really is. Water and oxygen can be freely extracted from Martian air. Radiation is never an issue, hence everyone living in surface domes. A rocket from earth seemingly takes less time that it would take to get to Antarctica by boat. A person can start complaining they are hungry and have a food rocket arrive before they starve. Mars is so little of a threat that your first colonists will complain there isn't a mall in the dome they live in. This will effect their comfort more than running out of food or water does.

It does not help that like all Paradox published games all improvements are locked behind expansions.

Overall the game is good, but unless you use a Mac, most content is behind paywalls and even that only seems to be by fortunate mistake.