Recent reviews by cannonInspector

Positive review scheduled to release in Fall 2023

Unbalanced X-com facelift with NPC cultists that have better coordination on a single target than the entire Tau Empire. Enjoy classic scenarios such as 7 cultists pinning down a single Marine and your choices being to move, causing lots of damage from overwatch+pinning or, not move, causing massive damage from AoEs and timebombs.

The only thing this game does right is writing an absolutely grating, intolerable and annoying NPC, so much so that you might consider utterly eschewing the 'research' aspect of the game based simply on the fact of how much of an insufferable ♥♥♥♥♥ she is.

You don't control marines, you control tissue paper maquetes that are nowhere near as durable as one might expect out of ceramite. The insufferable Inquisitor NPC tanks bullets more ably than any Space Marine off the battle barge.

And let's not forget NPC babysitting missions where the NPCs are uncontrollable, don't move and the enemy loves to use AoE attacks. Maybe the game's better if you play it on Easy but if you plan on playing a difficulty over the lowest offered, be prepared to save-scum A LOT.

Oh, also: If you lose the NPC defense mission in Ironman mode, it deletes your save.

Strange but wonderful conceptualization of "Okay, but what if Frostpunk was in space?"

Thrilling, sometimes nail-biting. Very fun. Very good. The only preorder I have not regretted.

*There was no pre-order.

Edit (11/4/23): I gave this game another shot and it has the same problems. 100 barbarians show up to raze your settlement with a population of 350. 50 people die. You build defenses. 100 barbarians show up to raze you settlement with a population of 300 and bulldoze through the defenses. 50 people die.

Enjoy building up your village and fending off raider attacks, until the game decides to send a raid that's roughly 1/3 the size of your total population, and your little rinky-dink town guard squad of 36 has no chance of fending off the 120+ raider swarm as they smash through your front gates or Kool-Aid man their way through any walls that look at them funny, then casually go about causing as much collateral damage as possible- Not killing your villagers, not even pillaging or looting. No, they'll simply go around touring the village and smashing any pretty houses in sight, then proceed to run around chasing your now-homeless citizens and disrupt your yearly planting until you're back at the title screen because everyone starved to death.

Assuming you don't end up at the title screen, enjoy rebuilding your entire city. By default, villagers will automatically upgrade their own homes, siphoning valuable resources from what might be important projects in order to rebuild their Advanced Hovel. Rebuilding said Advanced Hovel costs half as much as it did to upgrade it, with higher levels using more sophisticated materials, like clay bricks and gold.

I thought this game would be a better Banished. I had no problem with the concept of raiders, but when a challenge scales up from insignificant to insurmountable in a blink, something needs to be rebalanced. A number of guides on this game recommend digging dry moats with what I would essentially call a glitch, so that raiders get funneled into a killbox and don't use their wooden clubs to bonk down your walls. You can turn the raiders off, but disabling a feature of the game seems a bit misguided when someone could just fix it and improve the game as a whole.

For all that people ♥♥♥♥♥ about crops and food, I had no trouble with it whatsoever.

I just don't know why the raiders in this game are so diametrically opposed to the thought of residential housing. They raze that ♥♥♥♥ to the ground.

It's everybody's favorite factory game. It's moddable to hell and back, but the vanilla campaign should be a great place to start to understand how to do the whole thing. From spaghetti chefs to main bus builders, the game supports you and how lazy you want to be, even if you decide to do everything with literally just drones.

I guess it's okay.

What's the term? Mile wide inch deep. Per Aspera has no respect for your time, your money or your eardrums. Somehow this game is Surviving Mars with 1/10 of the content and 10x the scale but manages to jam in as much pseudo-philosophical dogcrap as it can with a built-in illusion of choice. The sound effects are also headache-inducing and playing on the higher difficulties isn't harder, it's more like herding cats and almost all of the game is sitting around and waiting because you have minimal control of your own logistic flow.

I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for this.

A very average zombie survival video game. Best played in multiplayer. Single player isn't a very fulfilling experience. Once you've gotten a good handle on the game, it stops being interesting. Once it stops being interesting, you'll download mods. Once you've gotten a good handle on the mods, it stops being interesting again.

Play with friends, ideally several who aren't intrinsically opposed to working against each other or roleplaying in some way. Roleplay can add a lot here. Be willing to die a lot. This game is utterly unforgiving and a little bit clunky, control-wise. It'll kill you because you decided to eat a nutrigrain bar in the wrong window.

There is no endgame. You simply play this until you get bored, like every other survival-crafter. For this one, you'll realize that all you're doing is zombie apocalypse chores; Gotta mow the zombie lawn. Gotta wash the zombie dishes. Run down to the servo to get a pack of durries. Gotta find 5.56 ammo so I can keep mowing the zombie lawn.

The way enemy AI works is eternally infuriating, because logging into multiplayer means the very profound chance there will be many many zombies on your freshly mowed lawn, meaning it will require mowing once again. Elsewhere, Zombies will, inevitably, gather up into pretty significant groups, then arrive at your dinner table like a racist uncle during Thanksgiving. At least in Zomboid you can move somewhere else to buy a little more time.

If Steam had an option for a 'neutral' review, I would be picking it. My overall impression for the game is 'It's okay.'

I do not recommend this game, nor do I recommend against it. I'm just tired of seeing Steam prompt me to write a review.

The dev is a whacko but the game is good.

While exceptionally fun and grandly anticipated by myself, the game slows to a grind at the later stages. Without a transition from one island to the other, progressing through the goalposts of the main storyline can feel exceptionally meaningless.

It's still a great game. I never got my golden missile statue, though.