Recent reviews by Morbo513

Nah. Runs terribly, awful controls on index and has close enough to zero manual interactions as you can get in a VR game. Feels even more janky than regular Fo4.

Easily the best tenner I've spent on a game. It's a real-time-tactics game with pause, that almost feels like a puzzle game. You're trying to conquer the map or complete specific objectives, whilst holding off a continuously encroaching and evolving alien horde. Different scenarios can reward the use of multiple different strategies, whilst those same strategies applied elsewhere will just get you wiped out - at the same time, your execution and timing counts for a lot. Your attention's never split too many different ways, you'll probably use at most 2 different groups of troops at the same time.

I never completed the main campaign because I found the dynamic one a lot more appealing - it gives you a limited selection from all the possible units, buildings and abilities, and enables you to unlock others through crates and conquering hives, and likewise the aliens will mutate throughout, presenting different challenges and forcing you to use different tools to try and overcome them. Of course you can always just restart to re-roll the tech tree until you get the things you want.

Visuals and sound effects are good, I'm not a huge fan of the overall aesthetic but it's very easy to read what's going on. Units are responsive, pathfinding is good.

You can spend around 10-40 minutes in a given mission or dynamic campaign battle, depending on difficulty and other factors.

Helicopter flight-model is functional but rudimentary, with some weird quirks like losing almost all attitude control when you have collective at minimum, making certain maneuvers practically impossible. Your tailrotor goes from functioning normally to doing next to nothing once you cross an arbitrary threshold of speed, it's incredibly jarring when you're accelerating or decelerating while yawing.

Generally, it lacks a sense of weight or aerodynamics - eg you don't pick up speed very much from gravity, which feels almost non-existent. There's not much of a sense that your wings or rotors are generating lift to counteract it either. In helicopters, you can point your nose straight down at the ground and throttle up, and you'll travel straight forwards without losing altitude - and it just happens to be the fastest way to fly, so you end up looking straight up a lot.

The issues with the flight-model are even more pronounced with the AH-1 and Mi-28. The controls just start to lock up if you go below ~50% collective. It seems worse at high speeds - but even <70km/h, you can't pitch forwards when at low collective, and roll and yaw impulses are tiny. Presumably gonna be a similar story for the other 2 helicopters.

You can still have overall arcadey and accessible flight mechanics whilst still lending it a sense of realism and authenticity.

Desperately needs a recenter button. (Ed: Per developer response below, it already existed - press & hold left analog - just wasn't communicated in-game IIRC)

In the starter helicopter (an MD500) the controls feel too low, I have to hunch down when seated to be able to reach them and keep my hands where they need to be.

The missions spam a fair few MD500s at you, and they will rip your own helicopter to shreds in short order. They're easier to deal with once you get upgrades or into one of the other helicopters.

All that said, if you enjoy battlefield (up to ~BF4)-style helicopter (or plane) semi-arcade flight mechanics enough to play a single-player focused game about it, you'll probably still enjoy it. I don't think I'll refund this, just hope it gets worked on some more.

Bounced right off it. Weapons and world interactions are extremely simplistic and undetailed. Index controls aren't intuitive coming from any VR shooter that does them well. In multiplayer it's just rocket spam pretty much - no drop or anything, the rocket just goes where it's pointed and kills stuff. Find a roof-top, spam them and it's gg. Vehicles aren't viable because the lock-on missiles don't seem to be possible to evade or counteract.

Love the concept and aesthetic. Has a lot of potential, but right now it's missing the mark on some of the basics.

Pacing is very slow - which I like on paper, but this is boring slow. Harvesters can take 10 minutes to go harvest then drop off, so you can spend several minutes at a time resource-locked.



It'd benefit from a proper, intuitive formation system. Ground Control and World In Conflict did it well enough - right click and drag in a direction to set orientation, further out to increase spacing. That and the ability to keep a selection of units with different speeds together would be nice.

Better autonomous unit behaviour as well - hovertanks, jeeps, gunships etc should try and evade on their own, with a mode toggle to have them hold position. Otherwise, unless you're micromanaging the ♥♥♥♥ out of them, or they're parked in one big deathball of firepower, they're just gonna let the enemies walk up on them.

Dropships can't currently load and unload troops, and there are seemingly no other transports(? maybe you can get in as passenger in jeeps and such as well, but I think that whole system is borked). As far as I could tell, Infantry are only getting anywhere by walking, and it's slooow - making them only really useful for defence and ambush.

I unlocked the whole tech-tree but didn't see anything along the lines of a repair bay or medical centre, and units don't heal/repair by being returned to their production facility. Some means of healing/repairing and preserving your units would be appreciated. Take Starcraft - passive healing for the swarmy alien types, active healing/repair for humans. Could be something like a medevac armoured car, dropship or medic infantry.

Alternatively or in addition, maybe wrecks/corpses could be recoverable for some kind of rebate, but that's all getting beyond the point.

I find it hard to take "giant enemy crab" seriously as the antagonist faction, but eh.

Direct control of units, as commander at least, feels at best redundant, and unenjoyable at worst. The human unit AI are much better at shooting fleeting, moving targets than the direct control's overall setup enables you to be. The night-vision doesn't help you much in combat, only navigation, cause everything blends into the terrain at night. Thermals, maybe as some kind of unlockable upgrade, would make things much more viable.

Harvesters will collide with one another (which is apparently top development priority amongst another thing or two) and this can destroy them.

One of my biggest gripes is the lack of order types for units. No patrol, no guard/escort in particular. No rally points for production structures. No "go harvest nearest resource node" or "go drop off resources" for harvesters.

The game doesn't communicate much important, useful information to the player - eg. which units in a selection are damaged, and which are healthy, or the numerical value of a unit's health. The UI can be a bit janky - if you're trying to eg. build buildings from your command centre, but click part of that UI that isn't one of the icons, it will de-select that structure. It doesn't tell you how long a given unit or structure takes to build. Buildable area projected by your command centre and outposts isn't marked in any way - you have to find an acceptable build location by dragging the building preview around the area til it turns blue. The map is hard to read, and you can't zoom all the way out like in SupCom which I feel would be helpful. When somewhat zoomed out, your unit cards will merge into groups making it difficult to split off individuals, you have to zoom in.

Can't comment on how the crabs play, people say they're even more jank.

I will say, the game is overall really impressive for a solo dev. It looks and sounds great, RTS/Action hybrids are one of my favourite genres and this is a fairly solid concept. Just needs its systems and bugs properly ironing out. I can't recommend it in its current state, but keep an eye on it if it interests you.

So far, feels very style-over-substance. The basic gamemodes don't offer a whole lot; the physical combat is fun, grabbing enemies' guns out their hands, sweeping or shooting them in the legs. It just feels like it's in service of nothing, with the current gamemodes consisting of sandbox and wave/horde-survival.

Weapon handling/mechanics are very basic - there's very little perceptible recoil, and this game commits the unforgivable sin of omitting the HK slap (or the ability to lock back MP5's bolt in the first place) and other functions that would make each firearm more distinct.

Enemies' gunshots are very quiet. It's often not apparent you're being shot at, from what direction and how far from sound alone.

I think what this game needs most is a narrative, and larger, more linear levels.

It's mid, and that's with mods. The "proceduarlly-generated" missions you spend 95% of your time playing, get old and repetitive very fast, and will still sometimes break because some hovercraft decided it wanted to see what hell looks like. The AI are incompetent, frequently failing to navigate terrain any more rugged than your grandma's front garden. The scripted missions (the vast majority of which are part of paid DLC) are slightly better, but are almost completely linear, tend to have extremely predictable beats and generic premises - which are at least a departure from the monotony of regular gameplay. Difficulty is the boring kind - higher difficulty missions literally just send assault mechs at you in droves, and it gets tedious. Building destruction is nice and satisfying, and the mech damage-models aren't bad either. Generally, presentation, graphics and sounds are decent - but once that wears off, well, it's just MW5 in all its lack of ambition. The mechlab is functional enough and gives you plenty of options - the aspect of customising your mechs' loadouts and seeing how they fare can be fun and engaging even in a bad game. MW5 is a mediocre one, and if you're a fan of any of the earlier games, you're gonna want to mod the ♥♥♥♥ out of it. Not holding my breath for MW5 Clans.

I like the concept, and it has potential. The major issue for me is that it doesn't play nice with index controllers. You need to start the game from within SteamVR or it'll ♥♥♥♥ the bed. Once you've figured that out, you need to adjust the controller offsets to get them roughly at the angle you're actually holding them - but they'll still be off by a bit. The hands seem to be offset above the controllers.

Edit: Beta test version resolves all the above - chances are it won't be a factor for much longer

Beyond that, the control scheme is kinda awful, coming from H3VR. Some objects can only be grabbed by trigger, where it'd feel more intuitive to be able to grip as well. Wouldn't be so bad if you could rebind them, but I didn't come across any options to do so

The helicopter controls are equally unintuitive. Triggers for yaw doesn't give you fine enough control. The cyclic seems to have a deadzone and requires too much movement before you actually begin pitching/rolling. The collective is in an awkward position. You can move around within the cockpit, but there's no way to easily centre yourself to the chair.

That was enough to put me off before I even really touched the content and mechanics of the game, so I can't comment one way or another on those aspects. From over here it seems to have a fair bit going for it in that regard - I just hope the control issues get resolved so I can find out.

Some of the most deep and rewarding tactical space combat you'll come across. There's no easy way to summarise it - every choice you make matters, and there are a lot of those choices. The positioning and orientation (heading & roll) of your ships, when and how to engage what targets with what weapons and ammo types; whether to keep your radar and comms active, to go full-throttle or slow and steady.

Customisation is a huge aspect - every weapon mount, compartment and module on a ship's hull can be set by the player. This will determine your ship's capabilities - and the components you choose and how they're laid out does affect the survivability of the ship, and you have to balance firepower, mobility, detection, countermeasures and EWAR capabilities against power output, crew complement and ammunition stores, against the overall point cost of the fleet. A given hull is only a matter of limitations imposed on that, with certain weapons and internal components requiring larger or more specialised mounts and compartments only available on a few hulls. Beyond that, if it fits, it fits, enabling you to build whatever kind of ships and fleets you like - a swarm of lightly-armed and armoured, but stealthy and quick corvettes for point-capping and ambushes; one big battleship with guns for days; a missile boat with an EWAR-enabled scout, and anything in between or beyond. The game comes with a bunch of starter fleets for each of the 2 factions, which do a decent job of demonstrating their capabilities, and which kinds of compositions are most viable.

Ever considered working for Raytheon? There's a whole missile designer, letting you choose the missile body, its warhead type, the warhead's size vs the engine/fuel - the engine's balance between speed, maneuverability and range - what kind of tracking (and if you choose, validation) it uses - command, active or semi-active radar, anti-radiation, electro-optical - and more. These will all determine what kind of electronic countermeasures and point-defences it's more or less likely to penetrate, and the terminal effect on target if successful. You can choose between cold- and hot-launch, whether the missile will self-destruct or continue searching for targets on unsuccessful engagements, whether it employs any terminal maneuvers as it closes to the target - and whether it's an anti-missile missile. Cruise guidance allows you to manually path the missiles to use terrain to mask, or to engage the target from their most vulnerable aspect.

Along those same lines, electronic warfare is something you always need to consider. Generally speaking there are two kinds of jammers available - radar and comms. One helps prevent you being targeted, breaking locks from radar-guided missiles; the other helps isolate the target(s) from their team's communcations network. This can prevent long-range ships with inadequate detection from receiving information about your ships, and thus their ability to target them - and prevent command missiles from receiving commands from the firing ship. It can and often does mean the difference between getting reamed out by a missile salvo, or having them fly off harmlessly into the void.

One thing I kinda don't like is how the APM demanded from the player fluctuates so much - one minute you have basically nothing to do as your ships move into their initial positions, and the next, you need to make like a Korean Starcraft player while you dump flares, disable your radar and issue move-orders to evade an incoming salvo. Sometimes it also feels like you're fighting with the view and controls, but you get used to it.

Naturally, it's pretty overwhelming to start with and has quite the learning curve - but if you're at all interested, the tutorials do a good job of explaining the basic principles without taking too much of your time, and the community's also very welcoming and helpful.

You will get out-maneuvered, caught out and generally dumpstered on for your first 20 or so games. It can be pretty punishing, with one bad move exposing you to a stream of shells and missiles that takes you right out the game - but once everything starts to click and you do it to someone else for the first time, it starts to become very rewarding.

You can also play against the AI which are fairly competent - and though they might often be boneheaded in how they use more specialised fleets, they do provide a decent challenge and a low-stakes means to get familiar with the controls and mechanics, and to test new fleet compositions against one another.

There's a conquest mode in the works which will tie these tactical battles together into a meta-game - and it's to be single-player, co-op and PvP - which looks like it'll make the game a lot more compelling overall, contextualising the battles and adding even more consequential choices and decisions.

Easily the best space RTS since Homeworld 2. If the themes and mechanics are at all appealing to you, give it a try.

For a game that heavily features driving, the driving sure is boring. Feels similar to Farcry 3, I might've even liked it better in that game. Would've hoped for more depth and more of a challenge in that regard