Recent reviews by Vonschiessa

This has been one of the greatest games to play with my friends, colleagues, and every other Freedom loving Helldiver I meet online.

The community that has been built together here is amazing. They are hilarious, united, and care about this being a great experience for everyone.
With all the debacle lately, glad to say that with my review, in my own little way, I'd doing my part FOR DEMOCRACY!

I would mark my recommendation as "Maybe?" if there was an option to do so. I have some mixed feelings about this game.
I bought this game as I had just finished replaying Star Control 2 and wanted to try the sequel and I was pretty hesitant when I found out that it wasn't done by the same original team. Needless to say, the 3$ price tag removed most of my big worries as I wouldn't be out much if it went south.

This game could probably be best described as "Ambitious". They were trying to do a lot of unique things at the time in a system that wasn't necessarily optimized to do those things. That being said I think they leaned a bit heavily on the players ability to figure things out themselves.

The good:
-Original Voice Acting
-Fun use of Practical effects for the aliens
-A brand new interface to explore and a truly massive feeling galaxy.
-Integrated help pages for each of the windows and options.

The bad:
-No real starting point aside from "Find the other races".
-A combat system that, while fun with the pseudo-3D space, felt a bit unwieldy at best.
-Completely deviates from the original story line, re-writing the closing details of the previous game in the first 15 seconds.

The Ugly:
-While the Spinning 2D star map creates a fun concept of 3D space with the galaxy, it honestly leads to more confusion than anything. That you could have stars that fell within your "there and back" range but were actually completely out of range because it was somewhere waaaay in the background could honestly get confusing.
More so than this was the fact that for players like me who tend to get a feel for memorizing where my important systems are, when the map begins spinning again then it's pretty much goodbye to whatever landmark systems I used before.

-It was incredibly sad to see so many of the alien races that we've come to know and love altered as much as they were. Specifically the Spathi were a prime example of this. The high-voiced and constantly terrified green crab aliens are now replaced with something resembling a naked mole-rat with one eye, relatively normal voice, and dialogue that sounds like it's trying to explain what being scared sounds like instead of just being scared. In all honesty I was waiting for it to start screaming "JAVA!" at any point.
If you want or expect any of the races to feel like their old selves, don't count on it.

-After a few narrative cut-scenes at the start the game simply opens into the universe viewer with literally NO explanation of what you are doing. The menu thumbnails are mostly non-descriptive, the galaxy is spinning, and there is no indication of how to play the game.
While the previous game did something similar, it at least had some lead in to show you a few basic goals. You began in our galaxy and would more likely than not visit earth. The star base captain there would give you a goal, "get some resources from a planet" so you would learn how the lander worked. You would then be attacked and learn combat. It was a bit clunky but it gave you the essentials.
This game just give you an interface and expects you to hopefully figure it out.

FLAT....OUT...FUN.

I am actually a friend of the man who does the voice acting for the suit, he pointed me to this game. Gotta say, this is one of the absolute best games I have played recently.
I know everyone is comparing it to subnautica and I will do some of the same. I played subnautica from the first release to the completed game. This game has an incredibly cleaner and more finished polish to it from the very start. There is no lag on any of the game, the tuturial is easy to follow, and I like the clear layout of goals and locations as you go.
The humor absolutely kills me, so much sarcasm but how many times I've found myself thinking the exact same things that they suddenly make jokes about.
I cannot wait for the next chapter to be released, if they follow this formula throughout the game then it will easily go down as one of the best games of 2018, and potentially of the survival genre as a whole.

Can't get enough of this game. I see some negative comments saying that it's hard and yes I will agree to a point. The bosses can be tricky at times, but they do follow patterns in their attacks. That being said, this is a BULLET HELL game. You are going to die at some point. But half the adventure is starting over with a new set of weapons each round. A few tips to those who want to buy this.
1. It's got an incredible amount of variety, lot of references to other games.
2. This is a bullet hell, if you aren't able to dodge a freakish amount of bullets or deal with it then consider a different game to start you off.
3. This is a roguelike, if you die, you lose all of your things for that round. It doesn't carry over. That being said, the variety of guns mentioned earlier gives it a lot of replay.
I'd recommend this game to anyone with some good hand eye coordination and a willingness to play differently most run throughs.
I've got 103 hours on record, all the characters and special endings, and most of the guns. I still find myself going back to this game as an easy and not-commital way to destress from a long day. Happy Gungeoning all!

Like many others, I really wanted to love this game. I just got a new laptop so I was pumped to play it and the graphics run great. It's just too much of a grind at the beginning. I don't have any problem with tracking down supplies and the like, if it takes time to get them that's fine. But at least please make them accessible. They're almost impossible to find without using the wiki or guide, and running for who knows how long to get there. The crafting isn't very satisfying and dying from lack of water (as even standing in a lake won't let you get any) as you desperately try to find said materials is just annoying.
Those are my main points. If you are going to make the world huge, fine, go for it. Big worlds are awesome. But don't make us traverse the massive world on foot to try and find the basic materials we need to start actually enjoying the game.
I'll keep an eye on it and hope that it gets better, but for now I don't plan to play this again.
Good Luck Devs!