Recent reviews by Bob Vanus

I've stuck through the past updates, but this most recent one is perhaps the hardest to swallow.

FJ took a a dump over the entire building mechanic by making every single part - Even the most basic chassis blocks - RNG loot. Want to build a plane now? Pray you get wings in crates. And then go through 50 or so crates, and still be missing half the wings you need. And get a few worthless mask pieces while doing so - And I do mean worthless. Their recycle rate is .025% compared to other parts that recycle at 20 to 40%.

New players are going to get shafted the most off of this update since mid and higher level players are going to be grinding low levels for protocrates using ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gnat-seeker bots that are all but impossiable to hit using low end weapons - And most higher end weapons, minus the seeker itself of course, as well - and are armed with a weapon that the user doesn't even have to AIM to get kills with.

Of course, this is dependent upon you getting matched with bots that are near your own rankings. This game is a bit netorious for bad match making, and this update just made that even worse.

FJ made progress with the ML and FSC updates, but they crapped all over that progress with the microtransaction inspired loot-crates change.

https://steamdb.info/app/413150/graphs/

Given just how many copies this game has already sold, I think Marvelous and Natsume and sitting in a corner, crying over what is a MASSIVE missed opportunity for them. (Natsume especially since they kept putting off Seeds of Memories PC release, though given how much it was 'optimized' for the mobile market, I doubt it would have did as well as SV is.)

...Now if only someone could make a Medarot/Medabots clone for PC...

(Disclaimer - Game was originally won via Steamgifts from before the game went F2P)

-Poor account security. Passwords aren't encrypted in the games servers, and a recovery request gets them sent back to you in plain text. By far, this is the weakest form of account security that a multiplayer-mmo could have. (Update - SS of what you get when you put in a recovery request. No confirmation required, not even a simple security question. Just them pulling user info from what is, from the devs own admission a unencrypted user database and sending it right out - http://i.imgur.com/C9U2Rdq.png )

-Smatterings of untranslated text. The account recovery screen for one has been left in Russian, while most other account pages have been translated.

-Race selection. One of the race descriptions completely overshot the description screen. so you're unable to read a segment of it.

-Ship selection. The ship selection screen has a section where you can see your ship, yet quite a few ships clip through the screen. That said, the ships themselves are beautifully designed, as are the character cards. That said, the ship descriptions are spotty, having been translated to English but not properly localized. (Case in point, housing durability? What? Oh, HULL durability.)

-Micro-transactions. This game has em, despite the games kickstarter and official reviews saying that the game wouldn't have em.

-Extremely, EXTREMELY, variable pricing. The game launched at $5, a month ago with a small discount to 4.49. The games price was then jacked up to $10 on the 18th - Two weeks after launching. The game was then dropped down to $5 two days later on the 20th. And THEN (Yes, it continues...) the games price was set to $1 (Note - The game DIDN'T get a discount set, the games base price itself was lowered) on the 28th. (See last point for another bit about 'variable pricing'

And now we come to this month. The games price was jacked up to $15 on the 2nd. (Price history available here - https://steamdb.info/app/368750/)

Also, see my disclaimer? About getting this at Steamgifts? Yeah. The dev has been putting up quite a few copies - my guess, in hopes of getting positive reviews and to try and get more players - of this game their in recent weeks. (Just today he'd put up 129 copies)

Speaking of players, the game had lost quite a few of them which is what lead to the giveaway flood. The game topped out at 3600 owners on the 2nd, and by the 8th the owner count fell down to 2460 (Losing almost 1200 owners). Oddly enough, that tanking happened right after the games base price rose from $1 to $15, so I guess many people thought something looked very off about that drastic a price jump. (Owner stats available here - https://steamdb.info/app/368750/graphs/)

-Incoming bundle flood. The Dev stated that 25k keys were given out to various bundlers and game websites. One month after release, and everyone and their grandmother will be bundling it.

UPD - Flood is mostly over, for what good it did. Stillborn from the start, the game topped out at 19 players in the past week. The dev was a bit quick to make such a big deal about the game hitting just under 1k players after their little bundle flood, since he'd confused card idlers with actual players.

-Extremely overstating given reviews. From what the dev said about the PCGamer review, you'd THINK that they called this one of the 'best games in 2016'... But they didn't.

-Available for Free elsewhere. Yeah. Facebook and Android.

Honestly? Just wait for the bundles to be released. Or take advantage of one of the free EA versions.

And after 'consulting the fans', the game has went F2P. I don't see why the Devs are making such a big hoopla about going F2P when the game was advertised as a F2P game in the first place. I guess you could tack this on under the variable pricing as well.

...Speaking of the F2P update, this doesn't exactly bode well for the 'cash shop' that many of this games official reviews say the game doesn't have. Supposed to have been removed two updates ago, as STATED by the dev, all we've gotten since then was a mention that it'll be 'updated next patch' and that next patch has just come out with... no mention of it, at all.

How MP controls are handled were a immediete turn off for me - The game, for no legitimate reason, handles online MP controls like you're playing a co-op match.

The games gimmick is 'streamlined' controls, so while the lack of mouse controls in a match is understandable, I really dislike that it doesn't let you use the mouse for menu movement.

I'll just say one thing - Minimalistic controls worked back in the past, but there ARE reasons why we moved away from the basic '2 key only' control setups.

Ugh, where to start...

Well, I suppose I should start on just who would be intrested in this game - If you love mech games in general, then go ahead and get this. That specific genre is rather thin, and despite this games flaws it's still a bit ahead of a lot of the current offerings.

If you love the older FM games, and like mech games, don't get this. For people who haven't played any of the TBS FM games, they won't know how much this game craps on them. If you're a member of this group, I'd really recommend you'd buy Project Nimbus instead. If you're intrested in the multiplayer, then I'd recommend you look into Heavy Gear Assault (Not on Steam) or Hawken.

If you never played, or don't like the older FM games, and are fine with single player, then you could give this game a try. As it is, it's a well-done SP mech game.

As for the crashing issues, I never did come across any of them though I'll admit this was on a much older computer that was closer in spec to the games requirements. Haven't tried it on my current machine yet. (Edit - Haven't had crashing issues on this computer, i5-4590/GTX 960. I suppose the issue is random though, but I haven't experienced any)

Sod was a good game, though it did have some minor bugs, with worthwhile DLCs.

The makers though decided to give a middle finger to this games owners by deciding to package up future bugfixes and every other improvement into a 'special edition' of the game. Rather then push bugfixes for the game - as they should - and release the enhanced content - New weaponry, missions, graphics - as a DLC they decided to wrap everything up into a entirely new game.

Owners of this game were given the dildo end of the stick - You want bug fixes? Ok, just buy this game again!

I had hopes for this game, and bought the Deluxe version because I believed this game had potental.

And then the game got pushed out of Early Access, despite still being a bug ridden mess that could have really used another half year or so's worth of bugfixing.

The game had potental, but it turned out to be another Starbase DF9 - Aka, the game sold, tapped out the market, and the developers decided to cut and run instead of completing the game.

Edit - Some additional reading material on this games history

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2dhpvd/starforge_developer_misconduct_a_look_back_from/
http://imgur.com/a/i7OG5

Forgoing all my past issues with the game, I'm going to focus on one specific feature that is missing.

Ingame, deletable, saves.

The code for such is already in the game, with one being able to delete custom ship designs, but you can't delete your saves.

And depending on how much you play, the space taken up by the saves can get rather large. And given that you have to do through a, by default, hidden folder to reach the saves directory then not everyone is going to know how to manually delete them.

I've wiped my saves folder a few times. The first was after Pre-Warp mode was released. I wiped three gigs of save files. The next was after I decided to start using Tech Level Mod, and I wiped 2 gigs worth of save files. Eventually, I wiped those saves out as well clearing out roughly 3 gigs of space.

I wiped my save folder again recently, hadn't done it for a long time, and got rid of 6.3 gigs worth of saves. Counting all these saves, I had roughly 14.5 gigs worth.

That's practically the size of a completely new game. And if I didn't know how to reach the saves folder, I'd have never thought about cleaning the folder out because well... how large can something as simple as save files get?

Given how much space you can eventually rack up in saves, it's rather sad that Stardrive doesn't include a easier way to get rid of them.