Recente recensies door Blue A10

Completed the PS2 version right around when Golden came out. I never had a Vita but always wanted one just for this game, since it retcons the original and adds so much. After years I wake up, not having seen the PC Gamer announcement and being completely unaware of the rumors, to the best surprise Steam store release banner ever.

Summarizing the original and what I've played of this one so far:
It's just a damn good time. These games starting from 3 might be my favorite video game series. Other people have written enough about 4 and 4 Golden, and I wouldn't be able to write a very clear or objective review of the games, so what follows will concern the port aspect.

Technical bits:
Port is pretty good for a game like this, which is usually "it technically works". I'm running it at 1440p, 200% rendering resolution, v-synced at 144fps anywhere but loading screens. That alone is good enough for me. However, it's not without some manageable issues. The game gradually slows down over time, presumably to due with it having a 32-bit executable. The slowdown is resolved or reset by restarting the game once it starts occuring. Patching the executable with the Large Address Aware flag may give you more time before the slowdown and I've heard it assists with crashes.

For Linux, it's kind of messy since MF is involved, but I have been playing it with the latest included Proton through Steam (5.0-9 I think?) and "protontricks 1113000 wmp9 quartz devenum" which I found on a reddit post. Be very cautious of the Denuvo activation limit if messing with Proton/your prefix. If it has to grab five new tokens within 24h, you will be unable to launch the game until said 24h have passed and the activation count is reset back to 0. This is per Steam account I believe, so any other users who have been shared your library will have a seperate 5 activations to use independent of the game's owner.

Surprisingly most of the in-engine UI and animations in the game (both UI/2D and 3D) all benefit from the arbitrary resolution AND arbitrary framerate. So while the game was originally 30fps I think, here at 144fps I'm clearly getting smooth animations of the crystal clear menu transitions and character models. This is in contrast to what I would typically expect for a lot of ports where the animations were stored or otherwise played back as 30fps animations regardless of the rendering frame rate, like you might see in some situations on Halo: Reach PC for example. The result is an incredibly delightful way to experience and fully appreciate the PS2-era assets of the game. Along with the few things that do not scale with framerate or resolution, I also have a sneaking suspicion that a select few animations are actually sped up by higher-than-30fps situations, my main suspect being the turnaround of NPCs on the streets when you talk to them from behind. At 144fps, their body turns to you instantly and their head kind of lags behind slightly as it swivels to you. I haven't tested lower framerates, and I don't actually remember if it was like this on the PS2 version of 4 that I played, so it might be normal for the game, but it kind of sticks out at first even next to the rest of the game's age on display.

Great big wall of text alert, because this ridiculous insane game needs it.

This game. This ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monster of a game. This is by far the hardest game for me to describe to anyone. It's seriously difficult. You can call it a space shooter sim sandbox 4X RTS economics game and you wouldn't be wrong, but that still barely explains anything about this game. I'm not sure if I can fully explain this game in one review, so I won't try to. It's probably best you jump into it and explore things for yourself. It'll be overwhelming and you'll have no idea what to do, and that's alright. I can at least attempt to write out, why I specifically love this game so much.

I guess to start off, I'll try to generalize my feelings into a focused idea. The best I can come up with, is a single word, and that's "immersion." This game, is immersive. Partially in the sense, that you're immersed in an ocean of ♥♥♥♥ to do, but also, because almost of how thorough this game gets into simulating things, it feels "real" or "alive." I'll try to explain a bit more. If you want to skip any one part of this review, it'd probably be this next section.

I'll start by painting a bit of a picture of a game with some time put into it. You've established a headquarters in an abandoned sector. You have your own trading empire consisting of more than 40 trade ships, roaming around the galaxy finding deals, buying low and selling high. You've used the resulting profits to create a chain of factories. These factories have their own trade ships, of which a few will go out and gather resources such as Ore and Energy Cells, which the factories need to create products such as weapons and missiles. Not only are your factories' ships buying these resources from other NPC factories (or perhaps your own), but they're also selling off your products to other factories, or to trading posts for NPCs to purchase. You've set a threshold on these products, so that a portion of them are stored at your headquarters instead of being sold off.

This stock at the HQ is for your military fleet, consisting of a handful of capital ships (think something like the Imperial Destroyer big flying Dorito ships from Star Wars), with escorts each of smaller ships, like frigates (miniature capitals that are faster but less armed and armored) and corvettes (something like the Millenium Falcon. They're middle-of-the-road in size, speed, and power. Jack of all trades). Each of *those* categories are escorted by fighter ships, the small fast ships made for dogfighting and attack runs, usually with other fighters or if en masse, they can also bug larger ships very effectively. In addition, some capitals act as aircraft carriers, and you can dock tens of fighters and sometimes corvettes to these ships, for mass transportation or protection using the larger ships jump drive, which the smaller ships can't mount or carry much fuel for. Much like a real aircraft carrier.

So you've got a fleet of traders roaming the universe making money by finding good deals, you've got a chain of factories buying goods from other NPC traders or factories and turning them into more useful products, which are both sold back into the stream of goods, and stored at your home base for use on your own ships. These ships being your military presence, with which you can protect your own assets from marauding pirates, unruly competitors, rampaging AI-gone-bad, or you can be the aggressor and destroy some nearby competition, at the expense of your relationships with the local law enforcement.

What I love about this game, is that you can do *AAAAALLLL* of that, and you can fly around in your own ship, and individually order around *AAAAALLLL* of those ships, or automate them to repeatable jobs and forget about them, and you can follow them across the universe as they do their job. Everything you do in this game, actually *happens*. Make a trader to buy and sell at profitable prices? You can literally watch him fly around, buying things from factories that actually have an overabundance of products, selling for cheap. Then he'll fly around, selling those things to other factories or trading posts, that are in need of those products, buying them at a high price. Your factories follow these rules too, and when they sell at a low price, more NPC traders will buy from them. When they buy at a high price, more NPC traders will sell to them. The NPCs are like this too. You can follow them, from their own home factory, straight to yours. You'll watch them dock, buy your ♥♥♥♥, undock, and fly back home to return it. And there are *hundreds* of other factories and *thousands* of other ships, all doing this everywhere all the time, whether you're nearby or not.

Those military ships you have? Order them to attack an entire sector. You can jump into this sector yourself, and watch each and every one of your 100+ individual ships fight, fly around, destroy enemies, or get destroyed themselves, all in real-time. They *actually go and do the ♥♥♥♥ you tell them to do*. This game rarely takes shortcuts. It does everything *thoroughly*, and you can watch *nearly all of it* in-person from your own cockpit, as well as in a different sector via the map, or you can even be in the ship that's doing it, running on autopilot or manual control.


If you managed to stick around and read all of this review so far, I really appreciate it. But do you see all this crap I just wrote? I had to cut myself short so I wouldn't write an entire novel. And I wasn't even trying to explain the game itself, just what I like about it. *That's* how damn hard it is to describe anything about it to someone. It's just so special and complex. It really deserves the "simulation" tag, because I'll be damned if I've ever played another game that captures this same feeling of "I have 1000 AI units under my control, and I can tell them all to do something different, and I can actually watch them do all these things as if I were doing it myself, along with the million other AI ships out of my control in the universe, and the universe will react to it." It's just.... so authentic.

Authentic, and immersive. A sandbox the size of the Milky Way, filled with more toys than you can begin to imagine, all seemingly with a will of their own, that react to your actions.

Go play this game. It's not perfect, but go play it anyway. Overcome the steep learning curve, the technical hurdles, the time sink, all of it. Go play this game, because it *deserves* to be played. It deserves your time, your attention, your effort, and your curiosity, because underneath whatever problems it may have, is something truly beautiful and wonderous. Go play this game, and then get Albion Prelude, and play it all over again. And then when you feel like you're ready for something else, start throwing mods on them. The king of mods for AP, Litcube's Universe, may as well be X3.5, and it's what I'm currently on. It fixes some of the flaws of the game and for me at least, is my new default/vanilla from which I add any further mods to.


Oh and if it seems like I'm talking about this game, more than what I've played (111.7 hours according to Steam atm), then that's just because for both TC and AP I moved to non-steam exe's available for download on the developer's website. My true hours are between 1.5x and double the amount shown on steam, for both Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude. Litcube's Universe alone would probably triple my AP hours were it counted.

I recently gave this game a negative review, the first one I've ever given, and my opinion may continue to flip between positive and negative. As of writing my negative review, I stepped away from the game for a bit and came back, determined to give it another chance to be sure of my review. I did this for a few reasons, the primary of which being because I've never given any game a negative review before.

Space Engineers needs even more work than what's already been put into it, but what's there is already very impressive and able to provide a fair number of hours of playtime for the price of the game. Just take my warning and my note about it needing yet more work still seriously, lest you end up angry at the game as I was: There are things in the game that have and continue to behave erratically. I had spent a number of hours and resources in a game with friends creating a rover for us to drive on the planet we were stuck on. We accelerated to high speeds on smooth terrain, with a properly tuned suspension, and the wheels suddenly exploded off the vehicle, sending it spinning into the air. There was seemingly no reason this should have happened, and when searching for the issue online, the most I'd seen from other players was "Yeah this has been an issue with wheels for years, just don't go so fast with them."

As long as you can accept issues like this as limitations in the game and find enjoyable ways to work around them, then you will be able to get a lot out of it. I now set very conservative speed limits on my rovers and leave high speeds to high-powered flying vehicles, tailoring the rovers to slow but heavy duty and/or low-power purposes due to the power efficiency that wheels provide.

At one point after repeating a level so many times I had reduced killing as quickly and efficiently as possible with the greatest variety between methods down to a science, I began to wonder if I had become too adept at seeing a level and instantly being able to visualize down to each second exactly how to kill everyone in it with a continuous, dare I say graceful, flow of death and violence without giving anyone a moment to strike back or say their prayers. Fortunately enough, those thoughts soon left me and I resumed gouging the eyes out of a morbidly obese sexual predator wearing a kevlar vest, and carried a beaten and bruised woman out to my car while stepping over the piles of dead bodies I had killed not even 30 seconds ago with kitchen knives, tire irons, and crowbars.