Recent reviews by Vanguard

uGH.

Were to start?

Hover units fighting for ground control across planets - Real time strategy that´s really looking nicely. It´s fun to watch them duke it out. There´s even a rock paper scissors element done right and the units are interesting enough.

HOWEVER.

Campaign: I played the campaign on hard and finished with the last mission on normal. While normal is a regular snoozefest requiring you to pummel through static defenses, hard can be challenging to the point of infuriation, as it requires knowledge of the enemy attack patters to come up with the perfect defenses, and you better not screw up.

The campaign´s UI is infuriating, wrestling camera control away from you, right in the middle of giving orders to your 200 workers and boy, will you need those workers as they die left right and center due to enemy bombers and land incursions. Even when covering them in smarty defenses or a hoard of frigates, enemy targeting priorities will alaways kill your workers, so all your queued jobs go to hell. So when you select an idle workers, instead of staying on the target area it zooms to the worker - the idea being? Do they want you to priotize work on things based on proximitiy? It´s useless as you need to get ♥♥♥♥ done anyway half across the map.

Best strategy i´ve come across so far is to treat your workers as fire-and-forget drones to simply queue and spam up defenses as needed. You will usually drag lines of air defense turrets across your base time and time again and again. Same goes for repairing your resource facilities, because enemy bombers target priorities... well see above for the worker dilemma.

Overall it´s too repetitious and lacks options in your approach to the game - orbital options feel too weak and the quana is best spent on upgrading your units to plough through the enemy defenses.

Overall it´s probably not a bad game, it just feels unengaging and I can´t recommend it. Pick it up in a sales, maybe, but a better alternative if you like these kind of games would be Supreme commander and it´s fan driven lobby mod, "Forged Alliance Forever".

Picked it up at the humble monthly bundle. Was surprised and looked good.

Sadly, apart from the "destroy it all", there isn´t much going for this game. If you are looking for a "shut down your brain and depress both mouse buttons at the same time", then this game is for you.

The campaign story is unengaging and just a bad excuse for throwing another wave of enemies at you. Every map can be played with one of a small number of preconfigured pilots and their vehicles.

There is no upgrade path ( like more ammo or damage for the weapons you like, no upgrades to character or mech ) and the money you earn you can spend on stuff that there is no way of using. The UI is confusing and doesn´t explain what the bought stuff can be used for - because all that can be bought in the store is already readily available for use in the campaign.

Overall, not a terrible game - just unengaging. It feels like it´s missing the refining touches.

Really well done. You can see the ending coming by a mile off but it´s terrifying nonetheless, and one puzzle in particular is not that easy to figure out. Overall I enjoyed this VERY much and I´d recommend this game to any fan of games with horror elements.

I was amazed in what a short time the game made me care about the protagonist - it is amazingly scripted.

Simply Horrible. I don´t know why I picked it up, and I wish I didn´t but I did, so now I´m here to tell you that you shouldn´t.

Duke nukem? Whatever...

I was not able to spend as much time with PF: Emergence as I hoped I could, but I managed to play the game in a review state a week before release. Already then it was extremely well playable and polished. Knuckle Cracker, the developer, made sure to push out a version which was very well reviewed and most bigger developers could learn something from this, im my oppinion.

The game itself is a strategic resource management game, in which you control a space faring coorporation in it´s struggle to uncover it´s own culture´s galactic history.

pros:
Fun time killer, easy to learn and hard to master
Variety of technologies and ships that you can employ that alter the way you play the level
Fun dialogue and engaging characters ( even though I find the story a bit too scifi-babbly, it´s scripted well enough )
The Music! The Soundtrack is far above what I expected from a small game like that. It´s fantastic and very well alone worth the price of the game
An active and friendly community
Editors that allow you to easily create new maps and / or ships.
A powerful scripting language that allows you to create new units/effects/whatever you can imagine
theoretically an unlimited amount of procedurally generated maps, however, the community created maps are better by far in general.

cons
Art. Some of it looks rather simplistic, especially land. Ships and land look "blocky"
Some campaign maps can be rather easy and I´d liked to have it harder. However, if you look for a challenge the community created content is usually the hard stuff and this is just a minor negative point.

Overall, it´s a very reasonably priced game, well worth buying if you like strategic games with a good learning curve, that can be incredibly complex. Especially community created maps can be real brain teasers. Also, if you like competing for the fastest map times, you can do exactly that and see your name emblazoned in the high scores ;).

Supreme Commander -> SC: Forged Alliance -> Supreme Commander 2.
Stronghold -> Stronghold: Crusaders -> Stronghold 2.

Same story all over again. Take a time proven concept for a great game and mangle it beyond recognition in an underwhelming effort of squelching the last few bucks out of a great franchise.

Seriously? A maximum of troops and buildings in multiplayer games? Still limited to 24 peasants in the recruitment pool? Way less options to customize your stronghold? Worse ballistics than Stronghold Crusaders which at least captured the feel of a volley of arrows where this game just... just... no.

PLayed HUNDREDS of hours with the original games. This is already getting on my nerves after half a dozen.

STAY AWAY FROM IT IF YOU LIKED CRUSADERS AND KEEP THE MEMORIES OF A GREAT GAME IN YOUR MIND. Or even better: Pick up the Original Crusaders. It´s better than this POS.

Simple, yet complex. Easy to learn, hard to master. If you don´t mind a bit of repetitive gameplay, this game will take you on a fantastic voyage in deep space.

Bleargh

The sequel to Supreme Commander, this is essentially Supreme Commander with new units, a completely new faction and features like "Building blueprints", where you can store your most favoured building combinations in a single blueprint to speed up construction of your base.

This RTS Game is a MUST have. If you played it through, look for "Forged Alliance forever", a community mod, to find THOUSANDS of players online.