Recent reviews by Felix

I felt the need to write a review, since a lot of the prominent negative reviews seem to hit on the same sort of point: The difficulty curve.
Now, if you've ever played a game like Freelancer, you know what you'll be dealing with coming into this title. This is not a game in which you beeline for the story, nor does the game imply that you should, though you can. At several points the game encourages you subtly to take a break from the main story, grow your fleet, and then come back. If you chose to ignore that, then yes, it will be very difficult.
But it's not grindy. You're able to very quickly assemble a decent fleet using the starting shipyard, if you so wish, and using that shipyard is extremely cheap.

The shipbuilding is super interesting, the story is serviceable, and the combat is pretty good. 80% of the fight is dictated before the battle even starts, but don't underestimate that last 20%, if you play to the strengths of the ships you yourself design, you can punch well above your weight.

If you're yearning for a game that offers the freedom of something like Freelancer with the airship building mechanics of something like Conquer the Skies, and classic ship of the line combat? Honestly, this game is the sweet spot, and the devs are fantastic at listening to the community and improving the quality of life for the players.

I love this game. I do.
But Gaijin needs to get their ♥♥♥♥ together and actually start cooperating with the community properly.
There are games out there with a similar model that don't have to predate on their players to run a profit.

Silver Lion drains are not fun, are not helpful for game balance, and absolutely drive people away.
I don't mind the research grind, I don't mind the premium vehicles, hell, I can even live with some of the most fun vehicles being premium only. But the fact that someone can play a round, and end up with less SL than before they played that match? Unacceptable, simple up. And the fact that it's been like this for years, and that Gaijin are slowly but surely trying to make it worse? Nah, this frog won't boil.

This ♥♥♥♥ has been a problem for years, and their absolutely disrespectful behavior has finally come to bite them, this community is at it's boiling point. Do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ better, you've got an awesome base game which people only despise because of horrible monetization tactics.

I've played for about 3 hours and I've already seen all the content the game has to offer.
Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, it's a cute little sci-fi mount and blade experience, with a few bugs. But it's very playable, and pretty fun. I hope there's some kind of roadmap, I'd adore to see more content. What's here is good and cute, but between 4 mechs, 12 settlements, and maybe 20 something battle maps, it's a tight package at this time.

There's a good variety of weapons, especially for the mechs. Commander weapons seem to be the same as your soldiers, except amped up. They vary from absolutely worthless (The Stinger, firing 3 rockets that go nowhere near where you point them and do very little splash) to making you a one man army, even without the mech. (Incendiary grenade launcher stands out as an insanely strong weapon.)

I suggest keeping army size around the recommended 25, up to 50. Above that the game gets unstable. I played most of my game on 50, and it ran well. I tried 75 once, and it instantly crashed.

Once you get a mech, a couple good weapons for it, and some of the later call-ins, you're basically free winning every battle. The opponent gets no mechs, no abilities, and no commander. Just soldiers, and in sieges, relatively weak turrets.

It feels like a demo for a larger game, but... In a good way? It's fun, it has some cool concepts, but I wish it had more meat. But hey, if I find myself wanting more, then I can't really say anything but yeah, it was fun. Just know what you're getting into. When you finish the campaign it gives you an objective that sounds like it'll take you to another planet, to see more content, but once you actually activate it, it just ends the game.

With the full release right around the corner, now's as good a time as any to give a crack at recommending this game.
This is Ace Combat but for ships.
That's my recommendation. If you enjoy arcade vehicle action, this is an amazing buy. The ship creator is surprisingly detailed, and you can make some super interesting designs, anywhere from believable modern vessels from the WW2 era, to cold war and beyond, to some truly zany sci fi stuff. And it'll all be effective, you can make anything work with a little clever design.
The story campaign is enjoyable, but light-weight, though with characters I found myself wanting more of. The character writing is excellent, the story writing as a whole is workable. Nothing groundbreaking, but serviceable.
If anything I'm left wanting for more, not because the game is short, especially with more story missions coming with 1.0, but because the ship creator is so fun to toy around with, I find myself replaying the campaign several times just to try out new designs, and it would just be... Nice to have more missions! Here's hoping there'll be more content added via DLC or updates after release, but as a product already now, it's worth picking up and playing, and will give you a couple dozen hours of entertainment for sure.

Game is decidedly not ready for a full release.
In the last half a year they've been rushing out half done features in an attempt to label the game "Feature complete"
While some of the progress is impressive, and the support for the game is still extant, I worry for how long that will last.
The game is not in a playable state right now, it's a tech demo. The loading times are horrendous, you'll be stuck with a game that is either frozen, or feels that way.
When the campaign was just Europe, it was actually decently playable. But then they expanded the map, didn't bother to optimize, and we're now stuck with something akin to Warhammer Total War before the Potion of Speed update.

This is a gem in the rough. And that's important. Below the rough surface is something I truly believe could be, has been, might once more be, amazing. But I can't play the game right now, and I could in the past. And that's unacceptable.
If you're interested, wishlist it, follow the development progress, see what happens. But in it's current state, it's not even worth playing for 2 hours and getting a refund. You will not have fun.

This game is one of the best, if not straight up the best, airport building and management games out right now. And that's as is, in early access. It's getting weekly updates to fix bugs, and content updates pretty regularly too. This is obviously a passion project, and I can't wait to see it improve.
It's pretty buggy, but super playable. It's got tens of hours of content, and I'd say once this nears 1.0 release it'll have hundreds. Big thumbs up from me.

I'm really enjoying the game so far!

Fights are brutal and you die really quickly if you don't play them smart. Controls can be a bit finicky at first but I found that I got used to them after a while, playing mouse and keyboard even.

The developer is super responsive as well, there's a few bugs right now but I doubt they'll stick around for long.

Game's got a great feel to it so far, looking forward to seeing this thing progress through Early Access!

While I normally don't review games much, I'll take an exception to AC7 as it seems to be taking a pretty bad beating from review bombing.
The game is great, and while support for various input methods is being investigated and dealt with at the moment, I personally fly mouse and keyboard, because I'm a scrub like that, and it works very well. Menus could do with some mouse support, but as is, it's pretty easy to navigate all the same.
While I can't say much about the story at my current playtime of a couple of hours, the gameplay is fantastic, and this is a great arcady flight game. Probably the best out right now. I heartily recommend this if you play gamepad or mouse and keyboard, though if you do have a HOTAS you'd like to use I do suggest waiting for that situation to get resolved.

I just need to put my two cents on here!

I absolutely love this game.

No it does not need a pause button. FUN FACT: Doing a mission with an ENTIRELY ROOKIE CREW is not easy!
As the game progresses, you will unlock autotagging of fighters, manual navigation, the works, and it becomes a lot more managable, even easy. Autotagging especially is a godsent, and not difficult to get.

I think a lot of the negatives are people who haven't played for long. The game gets more managable as your crew gain experience, as it should. Still plenty hectic! Which is a good thing. Love it to bits.