Recent reviews by Vas

I don't think my review would be much different from the other reviews available.

All I can say is that, as I play, I feel very meh. Its a low quality game with some interesting aspects to it. Some things could be improved but they won't. It sorta feels like one of those early access games with temporary assets. Its got a lot of meh to it. I tried my best to give it a chance, it just wasn't pulling its weight.

If the devs were around and still likely to begin updating it, it could actually get above that meh mark and start being nicer. There's a lot of little things that bother me about it, and a big portion is illogical nonsense things.

Short version:

There's so much misandry in this game, I can't enjoy the story.

The skill tree isn't all that great. Lots of things I don't really need or want, attack combos that must be memorized to use. Weak valor systems.

Its hard to actually play the way you want, with lots of new elements that make no sense or are just useless.

The story in the game changed quite a bit and though I've not yet finished the game (almost), it falls very flat and is very predictable due to the woke nature of the game.

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I've tried real hard to enjoy this game. However a lot of it is frankly terribly written garbage with extremely predictable outcomes. In multiple occasion you come across someone complaining about men, and in many instances you meet a a new character that you know its gonna become a primary. Its female, and strong, and intelligent, while the male they hang around with is gonna suddenly become evil or corrupt or is just selfish in some way. The game suffers a LOT of woke features. I never had a problem with the first game's writing style. This game takes it to an all new extreme where the writing constantly puts down men. Its a combination of feminism and misandrism.

In relation to woke, I don't actually encounter any lesbian/gay couples or trans individuals, you'd think the game devs would have written those two factors in for extra bonus points, you know? They totally could have, after all. Especially for the uh, advanced group of people you meet later being totally capable of the transgender stuff. I'm being vague deliberately to not spoil anything. Not that I'm mad about this or anything, it was just surprising that the game focuses solely on raising women up while also bashing men down. I guess it makes sense based on the writing time of the game. It was most likely written around late 2010s or early 2020. Years before its release date. Where as the first game was written well before the rise of new age woke garbage. So it makes a lot of sense why this game's so heavy with it.

However, I can handle a game having strong female characters. I can't handle being constantly slapped down for being a man. I'm so sick of the game treating men like ♥♥♥♥. There was a single story in the game I experienced so far involving Las Vegas that I actually liked, with three male characters who were actually well written and I loved that story. That mission was quite honestly refreshing and made me feel good again. I thought maybe not all of the game is misandrist and maybe it was just a cluster of it at the beginning, but nope. That was the one and only mission that really portrayed men being good people.

As for the non-woke parts;
I really disliked how they changed the saviors of humanity to be more evil. They even ruined Elisabet to a degree by having her help "the bad white man" design a virus to destroy databases and whatnot so that Gaia couldn't be stolen. Why would someone who wants to help save humanity, restrict giving people moving to a new world, something that could make that new world a second Eden? This really annoyed me how she just became a bad person right then and there. On top of the fact that other characters were increased in their evil ways too. It was a lot of ugh.

In relation to combat;
I really don't like this skill tree. You even find things unrelated to the skills in other trees. Like I can find spear related stuff in the ranged tree and ranged stuff in the melee tree. Lots of skill combination attacks in the melee tree that you'll have to commit to memory to use which is something I simply can't do. Many of the skill upgrades I unlocked were totally worthless to me, didn't do squat to help me. I ended up just not caring what I unlocked anymore towards the end because there was nothing that'd benefit me anymore past like, level 30 so I began just unlocking random stuff for no reason just because.

Enemies don't seem like they were in the first game, where you could target strategic points. Instead it was more bullet shields, where you just throw as many arrows as you can at it till it dies, hopefully hitting the right spots. Some enemies moving so fast that targeting a weak point was impossible. The snake for example. Even in slow motion. In this case the only time you could do actual damage was to be undetected and wait for silly AI to go "Hmm, I got hit in the eye with an arrow, must have been the wind."

I found the experience of this game to be relatively meh, compared to Zero Dawn. It felt less story rich, less content, kind of empty and void of feeling. Maybe they focused too much on building up their new characters to actually add side content you could discover in places. I loved scanning things in Zero Dawn to discover notebooks, letters, etc, finding voice logs and such. Even the old world visual spots which this game doesn't seem to have. You don't get as much of that this game.

I did like the mountain climbing thing they did. No longer using only solid painted ledges to climb. At the start of the game I thought it was every mountain and wall. You could see various grab points so you could climb any surface. However later in the game I was disappointed to find they barely did it any past the mountain you pass through. That was unique. I understand that it was probably time consuming drawing those grab points all over the place though so thats not a factor on my decision on rating the game. I did like it, just wish they did it on all mountains.

I didn't like the flight system. When you finally gain the ability to fly, it is the worst flight ever. It forces you to fly 5 feet above the ground and get stopped by every tree and big rock. Ascending takes forever, is really pathetic. Then when you go forward, you drop down to the ground again like a stone. This was the biggest letdown ever. I was so happy you could finally fly, and they nerfed it to oblivion.

Even worse, I hacked a raptor and found I could ride it, I was so happy cause I thought I'd gain its ranged attacks and such. But nope. it becomes a very slow mount that has the same standard melee or heavy melee attack. If you're gonna nerf the creature to be a mount, let the damn thing move faster.

All in all, I didn't want to rate this game down. It was a birthday gift (I bought with birthday money), and it makes me feel bad that I ended up wasting my gift money on something that makes me feel bad when I play any part of its story. I can play and ignore story parts, side missions, dialogs, but I loved the first game for its story and wanted to experience some more story again.

Frankly, I don't think I'll be buying a third version of this game. I lost the will to support PlayStation's stuff anymore, if this is how they're gonna treat people. I may still try to play the game, finish out the story. Add additional thoughts here later. I think for the moment I might need a break. I'll leave you with this clip though.

https://www.twitch.tv/vasvadum/clip/ScrumptiousStormyWoodcockArgieB8-rAdaeUV9rxasAo3h

I loved this game, way more than Forbidden West. This was well written, well thought out, and well made. I'm glad I played this, and would love to play it more too. I just wish the mods for it weren't all NSFW focused.

This review will be full of spoilers and such. Also please note that this is a game that can only be played once, as its story will never really change from what I can tell.

Enjoy this comprehensive review of me complaining about the game that gave me a headache and took 30 hours to complete only after I edited the save file to remove the unbearable doom spiral that the game is programmed with.

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Frankly, I've gotta say I disliked the overall premise behind the game, and a lot of the mechanics were awful. Some of it purely there just to torment you constantly which made the game unfun.

Being forced to listen to people cry about various stupid little things, like being stuck in a system for "too long" when it takes that long just to finish a system, and have those penalties applied made the game virtually impossible. I ended up editing the save file to remove those issues which unfortunately removed all negatives when I only wanted to remove the "you stayed too long" ones. But for that I blame the design and not my save editing.

Not being allowed to raise kids on the ship was silly. I mean, you already have it set so that people can be non-workers, why not have a child status that can't be trained for anything? Have a policy that allows parenthood and makes the people happy. They'll be a few years old by the time you reach your destination after all. Space is about taking things patiently, even if you designed your game to constantly hit you with penalties for not being fast enough.

The explanation behind the United Nations becoming a band of thugs that kill freely was stupid. Accidentally blowing up the moon also wouldn't end the planet, and I'm relatively sure people on Earth who could build such a ship could find a way to stop the chunks of the moon from hitting. Even if they couldn't, the UN wouldn't become an evil organization that wants to destroy everything related to the people who accidentally detonated the moon. Thats absolutely ridiculous.

Then there's the fact that the "ship hull is falling apart" constantly. Could you imagine if you had a car, and you put Nitro in it and went fast one day, then your bumper falls off, and if you don't put that bumper back on your door falls off, and someone tells you "Yea your car is permanently damaged, you have to keep putting these parts back on forever until the car's inevitable death!" ? Seriously. You fix something, it doesn't keep falling apart. Its not like the engine is vibrating violently tearing apart the ship when its shut down and inactive. You could have stated that the ENGINE is permanently damaged per jump and that each jump does a tremendous amount of damage to the hull requiring it to be repaired. But not a constant loss in hull. Just fix the ship again after each jump and every time you go through a damaging event. The plot hole there that pieces of your ship constantly fall off for no reason at all was just silly, just to add a constant doom mechanic to the game.

You have too many doom mechanics in the game as is. Pretty much everything is bad. You automatically know what events are going to be bad just by reading them. Then you go and share the same imagery with each event because in a game with only 5 systems and maybe 40 planets, you couldn't hire an artist to do unique renderings for each event situation?

Oh yea, and the constant accidents. Also the bad accidents. The very instant you become overworked in a sector, something explodes and fire rampages through the sector, and if you don't have a gigantic fire suppressor there, you lose half the sector. Where as if you plan ahead and have plenty of spare crew in each, you still get constant floods of random accidents that annoy the hell out of you with constant notifications of accidents. Seemingly every accident is the same requiring crew to spend the same amount of time in the infirmary. A broken finger, 10 cycles, your heart violently exploded and you needed a new one, 10 cycles. Oh lets not forget the power incidents. I have batteries to power the ship for 10 cycles in every sector, and just because something goes over my power limit slightly for less than 1/10th of a sector, all my people are angry and buildings have increased accidents? Wtf? Why? Does your stove explode just because the sun went down and your house switched over to batteries for the night? No.

Whats with limiting Research to only two? Why can't I queue up 10+ things? I hate constant micro managy stuff. Other little things like that, missing game mechanics, badly done mechanics, kinda ruin the game for me. Like the cargo pilots wasting huge amounts of time being very ineffective at their jobs. It was funny watching 6 cargo ships fly to the same asteroid on the other side of the map, each able to pick up 33 units.... And the asteroid only had 4 units in it. When the others could have just assumed that pilot would be successful and chosen new targets.. But nah, that'd require you know, planning ahead!

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Frankly, I hate to do this, I wanted to like the game. The music was unique and interesting. I liked the building inside a ship aspect like that and the general idea behind the gameplay. But the plot, and mechanics of it, ruined it majorly for me. Then I went to check out the discord community for the game and it appears dead as a doornail... So.... I know there won't ever be any improvements.

If this game was still in development, I would have given it a chance. Feels like it just popped out of Early Access, or should probably have stayed in Early Access a bit longer.

This review will remain until at least the bad mechanics are fixed. Even with a silly ridiculous plot that makes no sense. If the bad mechanics and bugs are resolved, then it is a neutral nearly positive game. The story did seem all over the place like you guys couldn't decide what you wanted it to really be about but whatever. You fix the bad parts that make the game unbearable to play, I'll re-try things again.

Not much to say this time, fun game especially with mods. Rather relaxing to play, even on mobile with various different activities you can do. I'd probably be more detailed if I wasn't so tired and if Steam wasn't forcing me to do a quick review. xD

I find this to be lots of meh. I can't really fully enjoy the game. Its hard to find people to play with for one, mods are needed to improve the experience and those mods are never updated. Things that should be base game just aren't. If you play on hard difficulty, it only adds more grind and makes the game impossible because you reach an infinite death loop as food is not the first thing you unlock so you end up dying on loop forever till food is unlocked and that is if you haven't set it to delete save file on death, and if you play that difficulty it truly is impossible unless you perhaps memorized the entire map and know exactly where to find your food with your perfect timing runs.

Frankly, food should be one of the first things you unlock the ability to grow.

Inventory Management shouldn't be a micro game of its own. You should be able to walk into your base, dump everything into a thing, and have it sorted and filtered to the nearby storage containers while also being able to access all inventories in range to build or craft with without needing to go to each container to pull specific items out.

A lot of the time when playing this, I feel like it was a rush job. Like the game is incomplete still. Various bugs and collision issues, silly things like being able to jump up and down beside a cliff wall to climb it straight up or certain areas where you can fall under the cliff and walk under the map to get around a cliff.

The meteor storms add no danger of any kind unless somehow you get directly hit by one which is incredibly hard to do. Building is a little bit of a pain but at least it lets you deconstruct for 100% return of materials. The options in creating a save to unlock certain things right off the bat are useless, because they still require their late game tier stuff.

This game may have a lot of stuff in it, but early game is just absolutely terrible and the order in which you unlock stuff is nonsense. Why would ladders be the first thing I unlock under Oxygen when I need food before I even need ladders?

Late game, the game can have lots of interesting content, but early game its absolutely boring as hell. You can easily exploit the oxygen mechanic too if you wanted, by plopping down a box somewhere and walking inside it for instant free oxygen. Frankly, there are several cheats in the game.

So would I recommend this? Maybe, if its on sale, and if you don't play any harder difficulties or at least if you modify the difficulty to allow you to keep your items. Imagine dying and losing critical one of a kind items that result in a permanent end to your game simply because they chose not to just drop it in a storage chest on your death spot. :|

The tutorial appears to be online only, so you'll need an internet connection to load them. I had a few tutorials load nothing but a standard "This game has tutorials" pages.

The big meh about this game though, is traffic. Everyone says it, the traffic is dumb as hell. If you try to use round trip, you'll find out before green science. If you wait, even after you get 6 lane roads, you'll find it again. Traffic in this game is very badly coded. It doesn't search for alternate routes, it just takes the shortest route which will lead to grid lock eventually, no matter what you do.

In real life, people prefer less occupied routes, so why can't traffic take alternate routes too? I designed my city specifically with tons of alternate routes only to find that, it was pointless. Every road must be a 4 lane road if you don't want grid lock anywhere and when you get to an advanced stage, you probably need to do 6 lane roads everywhere.

Honestly, Traffic is the primary focus of this game it seems and its absolutely horrible. Its at a point where I think I'm gonna quit now over it. Worse off, I got some mods to fix a few minor things, and my achievements became disabled. How nice of the devs to say "No you can't have this if you don't play our way!". In fact one of the mods I added made the game harder early game.

Frankly, I feel like the reviews here have been rigged. All the basic 1-5 word reviews that describe literally nothing about the game are likely bot posts. It figures that Humble would give this game out, Humble only gives out things that people tend to dislike or are very low effort products. I mean, this game has some potential in it but in its current state, I'm highly annoyed. I gave this game multiple chances so far since I got it, even after I rage quit from my first attempt at major grid lock. Even added mods to try and make it better. But eh. I'll see about just trying one more time later.

One more thing I'll add, I really don't like how the game handles building. Your buildings and roads can "flatten" terrain, in an "averaged" sort of way, and you remove them to get the terrain to pop right back. However there's no way to actually flatten an area for a good city type area. There needs to be some sort of land modification system. Bulldozing areas to become flatter, filling in flat zones with dirt gathered from other areas. That sort of thing. A mass road upgrade would be nice too, with automatic piping under all roads as an option.

I'll wait an update or two and maybe try again. If the devs are around and seeing this, please, for the love of god, make traffic smart. Allow it to use alternate routes to divide the traffic up. Also add truck upgrades so we can eventually upgrade how much each vehicle can carry in Hard mode.

Wow, this game blows. I bought it way back before it was available on Steam and now I finally tried to get into it, and its all paywalled garbage. Do one mission, find the next one is paywalled. Lots of things constantly drawing your attention around trying to make you do the standard free to play stuff that makes you think you gotta keep playing forever.

Missions suck too, enemies are easy and dumb. One shot most of them, even bosses. The annoying part of missions is the platform jumping, where if you make a mistake you die and have to wait or even start over a part of your mission because you dropped the key and the jump system is horrible. I failed to reach a platform like 20 times in a row, and couldn't jump high enough in several cases.

The UI is extremely overcomplicated, built to confuse the hell out of you and keep you wandering around in it for hours.

Cutscenes for some reason have a long black pause at the end of each which doesn't make sense.

The good thing about the game is that its rather beautiful in some areas. But other than beauty, everything else is pure garbage. Nothing to value in this game except random shooting of random enemies once in a while that are all super easy one shot kills.

P.S. Its sad that I bought this game before it was free, and I can't even play any of the content really.

Not much play beyond half an hour I feel like. Its very, lacking. I can't quite place my finger on it but it just feels, meh, to me. Get it on a great sale. You won't play it a whole lot.

Welp, like the other reviews say. This game is a low quality cash grab.

Tons of bugs in the game some of which make it unbearable to play like for example the sound cutting out, or after a long game being unable to click things anymore on the station, only the interface responds.

Bad design decisions, such as VAL's bad voices and the badly written lines its been given some of which literally sound like they came from google translate. Another bad decision was the events and such, like every inspection results in a shutdown, no passable inspections, plus some exploits in battle between sectors, event spam, no cooperation with AI players..

No updates in years, they abandoned the game as soon as they released it. No chance that anything here will ever be fixed. Seriously, don't even get this on discount like I did, it wasn't really worth it. I hated the gameplay, couldn't stand VAL, and realize that nothing will ever improve. I already went beyond the return policy play time because I wanted to be completely thorough and give the game a chance. It wasn't worth the 70% off I paid for it.

The only good thing was that I liked the music. This game did have potential, had they stuck with it a little longer and worked towards fixing the problems. Just fixing the problems would have made it worth it, but fixing the bad decisions could have made this game a real hit.

But, with their crappy launcher platform which I had to block with my hosts file as a method of displaying ads to people who launch the game and stuff, and as the company ditched it so fast, I will never get anything from Kalypso again. I've blacklisted the entire publisher now. The launcher is a very bad move that automatically earned the blacklist to begin with. Not bothering to fix anything, just proves further scummy-ness.