Recent reviews by A Calm Dragon

Distant Worlds 2 is a bit of a mixed bag. With some elbow grease from the devs it has the ability to become a great game, but as of now it's hard to say. I'm enjoying it personally, but there are some issues I have noticed.

Pros : Customize the Galaxy how you like. Decide it's shape, size, difficulty, pirates, space monsters, independent colonies, number of other empires, starting tech level, storyline events, race specific events, use the ingame editor to recreate the Sol system and become the IMPERIUM OF MAN, amazing indepth personal control *or* automated control for things you don't feel like micromanaging. Also design the ships somewhat how you prefer.

Cons: Well, it's mostly UI issues I've been having. The game doesn't like saving my preferred UI text and box sizes, as well as the coloration. Sometimes it can be difficult to find what you need in all the different options for your empire, and I have a hard time selecting troops to choose if they should be garrisoned or ungarrisoned at a colony, as when you recruit a ton of troops, the icons start to occupy the same location and it doesn't help your leaders also occupy the same space in the colony screen.
Another thing: All my generals very rapidly end up with the drunk trait (happens from them sitting around in a colony doing nothing - Admirals do this too amongst others) and I'm constantly dismissing them.

Also my colonies keep rebelling the moment I colonize a planet because my empire had *some* of my spies get detected during missions (not captured) which lowered my Empire rating a bit much - which was made worse by starting out as a Military Dictatorship. Which meant I had to send in the troops, which lowered my rating even more. Right now things are stable with five divisions per colony of 30-100m but it's a bit frustrating. Even more when other dictatorships look at your rating when theirs are already terrible and go "I can't/won't talk to that guy."

Ships aren't as customizable as they used to be from the first Distant worlds as the hulls only allow for so many components as well as size. In the older DW it was just "how much can this hull hold?" So you can't really make a barebones frigate anymore covered in lasers, or a super battleship able to wipe out an entire fleet on it's own.

Fun thing: Discovered you can rename prisoners. Had an enemy spy get captured who had nothing but negative values for everything so I renamed him Dhip Schit and sent him back home. I wonder if I'll ever see him again...

Anyways. Yeah, the game still needs a fair bit of work, but with some TLC it definitely has the ability to be one of the greats like the original was. Now then, back to running INGSOC and kicking the little three-eyed rat people around...

This game could've been great. It could have been something worth playing, and buying, but all we received were broken promises and the taste of ash on our tongues.
Keen abandoned this game to focus entirely on Space Engineers and making paid DLC for it. Now they're coming back to this game? To what? Make more DLC for us to buy? Let me guess: We'll finally get clothes and armor but it'll all be DLC. Water? Probably DLC. NPCs? DLC.
Doubt they'll even make any of that or if they do, it'll be in a complete working state. If anything, they're just coming back to make DLC skins.
3/10 only because the physics are -ok-

P.S.: They're supposedly going to make a "Roman Engineers." Stay away from it.