Recent reviews by noxa #YOLO #BODYSHOTS

A better Settlers than any of the Settlers released in the last decade.

It's a lathe! Seems to be implemented as well as the milling machine in the main game. No career mode yet, unfortunately, which for a noob not yet doing any free machining makes my purchase now more of an early access support-the-developer-and-hope-the-career-mode-is-added thing.

Kinda like a hardcore Zachtronics for milling with a similar game loop - you're given a blueprint, a block of stock, and a machine and asked to produce the part to a % similarity to advance the career. Getting the 99+% similarity can take some thought and calculation just as it would in real life. As someone who has watched quite a few youtube videos trying to pick up milling I found my first hour with this, a calculator, and a sheet of paper trying to puzzle out the math/approach from what I remembered seeing a way better teacher. Looking forward to the lathe DLC!

Only con is that the controls can be a little rough - lots of clicking due to lacking hotkeys and fiddly UI even on high-res/ultrawide displays where there'd otherwise be room to have everything visible. Would love to see a proper DRO with DRO features. Also would love a touch probe as edge finding with the endmills can be inaccurate enough to miss perfect scores (tip: keep the mill running at a high RPM while edge finding to get a better value).

Super cute! The chill vibe is nice and feels like a mashup of Fable + Black and White + Settlers in style and tone. Lots still to come in EA - what's there feels like slightly more than a demo but the placeholders they have look like they've got a good direction set. Bonus points for ultra widescreen support.

I played 100+hrs of classic 5 years ago and this has rekindled my love of the game. The tutorial is welcome as a refresher but I still recommend some of the good youtube tutorials for getting going (Kruggsmash has some good ones). The new graphics are great and it's awesome to see workshop support though I am playing vanilla for the first round (community tilesets for classic were great too but the consistency and coverage here is perfect). The music is solid both in composition and placement and though I'm sure after 40hrs I'll switch to other sources it's really helped pull me back into the world. If you like reading wikis to figure out mechanics of a system that is three levels deeper than most other games dare to go then strongly recommend.

I've never been able to get into a game like this - too many kings and ww1 tanks and such - but this feels like hard sci fi space opera meets the pandemic board game crossed with stellaris. LFMF: the game is well balanced with default settings and if you play with fewer factions it gets _harder_. Very surprising how few bugs there are - mostly just small UI glitches and the gameplay has been solid for my first 15hrs.

Such promise but such underdelivery :(
Pros are the humor in the campaign, the graphics, and the music; cons are almost every major game mechanic being perpetually broken or unsatisfying throughout development (including the latest version). I've checked back every ~yr throughout development and besides improved save jank it still feels just as broken as it did years ago. Maybe it'll eventually get finished but I probably won't be checking back again unless some major development happens. I generally don't talk negatively about small dev studios but I really don't think it's fair for anyone to be paying for this as it's priced and with the development trajectory. The positive is that there is at least some kind of development happening but I'd strongly suggest against paying into EA for that. If the devs fixed the game to work for what features they had it would probably be pretty close to being worth it for a 1.0 release - but there just doesn't seem to be interest in that.

Ship movement is floaty and unsatisfying - like playing drunken air hockey while being shot at with a paintball gun. On-foot navigation is slow and clunky with tons of backtracking required. Oh and EVA navigation just doesn't work (talk about disheartening to die without an EVA suit, grind to get one, then finally get a chance to use it and find out that it does nothing as you fly off into space mashing all the keys). Enemy ships are pretty dumb - sometimes just rolling over and giving up, sometimes not responding to fire, and sometimes getting stuck on top of each other. I can't comment on what happens when you talk to them - hitting 'h' to hail causes the screen to blur as if a modal dialog is up and the only way to exit it is to kill the game with alt-f4. The map is poor and lacking basic features like death markers and indicators of having searched/exhausted locations and is often misleading as to friend/foe. Trading is entirely broken: after 10+ hrs I only ever saw two trades that could make a profit - and those were for items that with their 8 item stack limit would have turned me a whopping 1000 credits (where even tier 1 basic research can cost 40k). Research system is also unsatisfying: finding/hacking blueprints is fun but needing to do hours of grinding to then pay to unlock the blueprints found/purchased/stolen ruins it. Ship design looks neat but getting to the point where anything but the predesigned ships makes sense from a cost and research unlock standpoint seems forever far away.

Play Heat Signature instead for an example of a game with fantastic ship and on-foot movement, and Cosmoteer for a clearer ship designer and better navigation and crew management systems.

I do hope the devs can hit their vision - and the game stands to be something fantastic if they do - but I'm not sure the current trajectory will get them there ;(

kurisu~~~~~~

combat is fun and all, but playing this game like a medieval truck simulator and just wandering around the map trading is very chill.

The game is pretty, controls well (for a turn-based game), and the inclusion of voice acting and great music is icing on the cake. Unfortunately it clearly wasn't playtested and just isn't fun. Unavoidable death after unavoidable death and large amounts of backtracking make it a chore :(