Recent reviews by JunoNH

This game captured the feeling I had after I first installed mods on Skyrim. Walking around in fields, hunting deer. Hearing trees move in the breeze. Running from a storm into a fire lit hovel. Standing on top of a hill looking out over the forest in Summer was the moment I knew I was going to be putting a lot of time into this game.

There are so many positives to this game beyond the visuals, but that is what hooks you to begin with. The city builder elements are very enjoyable, with the settler mechanics well implemented. The wilderness survival and economy simulation aspects also do a good job of giving a lot of choice to your play style. There is even the progenitor of a combat system. You could dismiss the game as "low budget" - but you can see that every effort has been made to spend time and resources on areas that deliver something to the player.

That being said, the polish is missing in some areas. The NPCs can sometimes feel janky and robotic if you look at them too closely, and the seasons mechanic is hard coded in by forcing periodic reset/reload phases into the gameplay (you're forced to sleep for a new seasons to be applied). This can be immersion breaking, as you can only imagine what it would be like to witness the landscape slowly transform as the first snows fall, until the whole area is blanketed, or to see the rivers well up as the snow begins to melt. There is also a relationship/family feature, but it's a bit arbitrary and lacks an organic or engaging feeling within the setting.

In the age of the ubiquitous early access release, another important factor to consider when putting your cash into a gaming experience is support and ongoing development. So far I have been pleased with how the devs have listened to the fans wishes and have provided good status updates & roadmaps, with realistic timelines. While they have had other projects, they still consistently spend time improving this game and adding features.

I cannot say this game does anything perfectly, but it tries to do a lot - and much of it is done well.

Seems like a visually pretty game, with alot of the old MK9 features that are well loved, however the game is incredibly demanding on my machine and will frequently become choppy especially in the early phase of a bout (oddly this seems to subside after a minute or so). Very surprising as my machine is somewhat more powerful than a PS4; the main bottleneck seems to be the processing optimization on PC and appears to require at least a 4Ghz processor to play the busiest stages.

Until some CPU optimization is done or an option to reduce background animation is introduced I wont be suffering to play this game often.

Some really interesting concepts in this game - having the freedom to design the ships in your fleet gives creative (though not all together administrative) minds a good chance at crafting out a workable solution in this game.

Playing on the hardest difficulty setting the AI is extremely apt at expanding their empire quickly and assembling powerful fleets that race ahead in the tech tree's. I was able to counter act this by focusing on one specialization (torpedos) and creating vast amounts of small ships into disposable fleets that could assault effectively incurring huge but acceptable losses. By sacrificing the versatility and robustness of the vessels, and only supplying low fuel and ammo, you can ship fleets straight off the production line and into the fight, presenting multiple targets that simply cannot be reppelled even by the largest most powerful battleships.

If I had played a game were there are only a restricted number of ship designs I would have been crushed by the more advanced and efficient empires, however being able to design ships to meet my requirements and negate my disadvantages to a maximum gives great scope. Evolution by natural selection is allowed to take full reign here and genuine specializations can mature, instead of a game purely based on resource mining and quick tech tree progression.

Subsequently there are some draw backs to a game of this scale on a smaller budget - Most noticible of which is graphically there leaves alot to be desired. Secondly the huge amount of management that is required over a vast empire can be a bit restricted and becomes time consuming. Therefore this game will appeal to those who enjoy building up to huge scale battles that can be observed from a distace, and less to those who enjoy going straight into micromanging elite units or playing the hero themselves.

Fans of Homeworld, EVE, and Sins of a solar empire should take a look here. If you prefer your space games to be more like the X series, Freelancer, or Galaxy on fire - I would recommend waiting on Star Citizen to be fully released.