Recent reviews by jschoder

First of all: This is not a horrible game.

When terraforming through the different stages moss, larva and amphibian ponds appear without you introducing them. However neither of them counts towards the biomass, the or the animal count.

Also the story behind it doesn't allow any flexibility. You have three endings which you can choose (depending on certain criteria) and while it takes some effort to get to two of them the final decision doesn't change a lot of the rest of the game. You can't working without an antenna and even if you try you will still get messages.

A minor issue is that it is way too easy to fall beyond the walls when using the jetpack. In my second playthrough this has been less of an issue, but maybe I just was more careful.

To me this is a nice and relaxing game with calm music. ... Unless you are currently hunted by a larger cell.

I paid 4 Euros for it and even in its early stage this was it worth for me. I very likely will return to this game if I need a calm diversion or if they have an interesting update.

The game looks like it has some potential if the developer(s) invested a lot more time into it.

From the current looks of it I can't recommend it:
- You have to read the game description to learn that you have to craft a oxygen bottle and then drag&drop it onto the player. The game doesn't explain that at all.
- Mining is clunky and annoying as hell. At some points it took me seven or more trials to get the right angle to mine resources while the developer just could have linked that to "point to resource" => "click left mouse button". It's not rocket science (ironically)
- The game is currently a mess of styles. Most of the game is set in low poly elements while others have highly detailed structures. I wouldn't even have much of an issue if that mixture would be used in a consistent way. But having plants be presented in both just looks weird.

I bought it 90% discount for less than an euro. At this point this still is a little too much. I will revisit the game in a couple of month. If it gets better I might be able to recommend it by then. At the moment it looks like somebody worked on it for an extended weekend and then shipped it.

It is a slow game. Reaaaallly slow. For me it is a good way to calm down after a long day.

And every time the little guy returns to his sitting chair it puts a smile on my face. Time flies when he has fun.

This could be a fun game with a dark sense of humor. But the crafting systems makes it a repetitive grind instead of being actual fun.

You can automate a lot of the tasks as soon as you open the gate in the church cellar (I won't spoil how this works exactly) but there are still quite a lot of tasks you will have to do manually again and again and again ... And even those tasks can't really be skipped. For the easier ones you have to keep the F-key on your keyboard pressed till you are either done or have to refresh the energy of your character. For the more complex ones you have to select the different level of ingredients, click craft and press F till it is done. If you want to have multiple you have to repeat the selection every single time. This system needs a redesign badly including a way to fast forward.

Then there is alchemy where you have to figure out which two or three ingredients create the substance you will need for what you want to create. At some point I just started to keep the wiki open in the background to see which creates what. (To be fair: Once you created the right substance once the game provides a shortcut to create it again.) It would have been nice to place "manuals" at some places in the game which describe what you need for what.

Then there are the dark organs in the late game which requires a looooot of waiting around.

This game could be great with a couple of fixes in the system. As it is I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Let me start with: This is not a bad game. It just isn't for me.

Personally I like building games where you slowly expand and if you don't make any big mistakes the game you are playing won't crash and burn around you (e.g. Factorio). This is different. You have to work with deeply flawed and more realistic individuals and the game throws hurdles in your way all the time. You can set how bad those events are but they are a huge part of the game. If you like to see your "minions" and the game crash your plans for your colony this game is for you.

I loved this game. Then paradox took it over and changed so much stuff that it broke. Stuff that used to work perfectly before is now badly broken. I just had a couple of breakouts where low security prisoners just walked by about thirty security guards. The game became unplayable.

I am used to play the much much older Transport Tycoon Deluxe game and its open source clone. This game has quite a few improvements over the old game but I don't think it is worth the heavy price tag.

Especially frustrating are the campaign levels (havn't played the sandbox yet) where I constantly have to look up how to finish tasks because the instructions aren't clear at all. For example: In one campaign you are asked to transport "pomp" to a building site. When looking at the map you'll find the pomp factory. What it doesn't say anywhere is that you have to transport people somewhere over the map to generate pomp. Congratulations to the person who actually figured that one out.

If you like games building something extremely complex and stuff moving around this is the game for you. No tutorial required. Just a lot of try and error.

Don't get me wrong: This game has some awesome potential. But it suffers from some major design flaws:

- At some point there is no way to get rid of backlogs. The more rooms you build the higher your hospital will rank, which in turn will lead to more patients, which will add to the backlog.
- You need a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of general practice office and unlike different games there is no option to copy a room or create templates for rooms.

I will stop playing it for now and hope they are going to fix these issues in the future.