Recent reviews by BronzeYohn

Back and forth on quality. I'm giving a tentative positive review here, because although I find them unreliable, it's good right now. Still, a later balance patch could easily break everything again.

Balance is good right now, netcode is mostly fixed - but random disconnects still *do* happen on occasion, and it's a huge feel-bad moment. Bots are still much harder than bugs, but fun in their own way. I don't know if I'd buy it for full price right now, but I have it, and it's worth playing.

The new DSS they added is a mess though; not anywhere near worth they hype.


Old review below:
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Every patch is broken, making the game borderline unplayable for a while. Every balance is terrible; they feel the need to nerf 'meta' builds as if this is a PVP game where strong guns make opponents salty; instead, it just winds up that every build takes too long to effectively kill enemies. Instead, they should buff weaker gear.

Netcode is TERRIBLE, causing far too many games to be ended with you getting kicked to lobby with no rewards - and when a game takes 40-50 minutes to play, this is an awful feeling, making it feel like you wasted your time (you did). Spawns are far too random; some matches will be too easy, others challenging and fun, but many will result in a swarm of superheavy enemies coming at you all at once (which you can't effectively kill, because, again, the good gear has been nerfed into the ground).

And sometimes, those super heavy enemies are all but silent, ensuring that they hit you from behind in half a second with no warning. Or, if you're fighting bots instead of bugs, they have pinpoint accurate lasers and rocket barrages, that can see and kill you from a mile away through heavy fog that obscures your own vision.

Some might say 'play on a lower difficulty'. But the change is so steep that low difficulties are too easy to be fun, featuring only a much more limited set of enemies. And besides that - unlockables require so many resources that if you play on low difficulties, the game becomes unbearably grindy (10-15 of a resource that you need 200 of, in a match that takes 45 minutes to an hour - and that's if RNG doesn't screw you and you get nothing after wasting your time). And speaking of which - the demand for resources are completely unbalanced. Common samples and 'credits' will constantly hit the cap (which is far too low), while you're still grinding away for rare samples (super samples, the rarest, highest tier ones, are required in sufficiently low numbers that it's the rares that are the bottleneck). And those samples are hard to spot on the battlefield, with a frustratingly low range at which they pop up on your HUD, that you often run right past them. Stupid.

It's a shame, because there's a really unique, compelling, *fun* game, under all the stupid, anti-fun choices the team refuses to stop making, and their broken engine that induces frustration on top of everything else. But at the end of the day, it's just not worth it right now.

Oh, and by the way - half the time when you quit the game, the process doesn't terminate properly and you have to kill it with TaskManager. The little, annoying things add up.

Chill, fun, addictive mechanics. Cute characters, nice soundtrack, fun story - a surprisingly pleasant mix of lighthearted, dark, and interesting soft sci-fi concepts. A bit easy for a roguelike deckbuilder, but still enjoyable, and there are ways to ramp up the difficulty.

Fly through a pastel-tinted space, barrel-rolling between the bullets to that chill synthwave soundtrack. It's all turn-based, but you'll still get into the flow.

Give it a try!

Great, fun game. Unique, melancholy atmosphere. Quality eldritch story.

Boring, repetitive gameplay. Overly difficult levels depending on trial and error and near frame-perfect timing. Do not buy.

What a game. A simulation-4x like no other.

Great game. Entertaining, and emotional. Great atmosphere, too.

Technologically, though, something's underoptimized. My laptop could handle it, but there's no way a game like this should push its temps up to 90 C. I think the devs may have put a bit too much graphical power into that beautiful ring.

It's not even out yet, but this game is great! It really captures the fantasy of being a free-roaming ace starfighter pilot, flying through frontier systems on your own. Killing pirates, uncovering ancient secrets, and pursuing your own goals. The controls feel butter smooth and intuitive, and the ships look great too.

Phenomenal. Mechanically, atmospherically, and narratively a sublime experience, and worth every minute I spent on it.

I'm still not buying a PS5 to play the sequel, though.

I only play the singleplayer, but nonetheless, what a game! A+ story, A+ experience. I can spend literal hours just hunting, then, when I want action, I go after a rival gang, or pick up a story mission. Very, very zen when you want it to be, and action packed when you don't. Climb a mountain; ride through a forest, enjoy the lost American west.

Extremely fun, more of the same from the last game, but with some even more epic vistas.

I previously gave this game a thumbs down because it was causing my computer to crash. I now have reason to believe that that was due to my computer, not the game, so consider this a sincere mea culpa.