Recent reviews by Isengard

I'll be happy in the future when I get what I want.

This is a phenomenal game that you absolutely should not purchase from the disgusting vampires who currently own the IP. Instead pirate it from your local big torrent site, where I'll be spite-seeding it forever due to how much I love it. Up yours, ZA/UM

this is the "sorry for pirating your game while i was unemployed, i really like it" fee

I feel a complex sort of way about this game, which I've been playing since around day one of EA. Ultimately I'm leaving it a positive review, because I still got at least twenty or thirty hours of good entertainment out of the price of entry. Sandbox mode is a great toy, and I wish it had been the focus.

The basic game system is exceptionally cool. Everything about the core gameplay loop feels great-- you can tell they put a lot of time into the gameplay systems, and anyone who's been following this since early access knows how much they've put into ironing out the systems to make sure everything is satisfying.

The main issue, as noted in a lot of other negative reviews, is that the recent development history of the game doesn't really have much to do with the core gameplay loop. Very few new "core" features have been added over the game's development cycle. No new ships, systems, locations, tools, or anything else unless you count the habitation module (itself mostly just a cumbersome replacement for what should just be a mission select menu). By and large, in terms of what I can play in sandbox mode it's basically the same game as it was in EA.

Instead, it seems like the only additions to the game since EA have involved the campaign story mode. I'm sure you can read more colorful descriptions of campaign mode in other reviews-- but even with total political agreement, I still found it to be pretty annoying and clunky from a "show don't tell" standpoint. We get it! Company bad! Capitalism evil! All of this was communicated through incidental storytelling that was already there in early access: Earth sucks, you're under insane crushing debt, the company exploits you every single day for basic necessities and saddles you with insurmountable debt as they work you to death in high orbit. You're peppered with cold corporate messages on your terminal every morning detailing precisely how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ you are. We didn't need extended voice-acted cutscenes where the Boss personally comes and does an evil villain schtick at you while your plucky co-workers vow to Keep On Fighting. It feels contrived and annoying. It's like watching Blade Runner but in every scene Deckard turns towards the camera to make the poggers face at the audience and go "Isn't this messed up dude?!"

It feels like at some point the people responsible for programming new systems and designing new ships all left or something. The focus in this game should have been about becoming a better space mechanic, with the people's champion plotline a distant second. I want to struggle to save crippled ships as they fall out of orbit! I want to patch-weld crap onto pirate space stations! I want to repair a comm satellite as it flies around the planet at a thousand miles an hour! Instead I play the hell out of the same five or six types of drydocked ship that have been there since the beginning, and eventually get bored.

Again, I'm giving this a good review because at the end of it all I still feel like I got a lot of good gameplay time for the money. But damn, it really feels like a wasted opportunity.

thanks for forcing me to wrestle your awful spyware for this game i bought ten years ago. should have just pirated it