Recent reviews by TheImperialBronut

Relaxing city builder/exploration game with some resource management and some novel balance, speed and lift investment considerations. The world is great to look at and explore at first, but story is pretty light with some minor worldbuilding through ingame blurbs set around simple fetch, find and timer quests and a somewhat repetitive map. Great concept, fun to play, but I think there's a lot of unrealized potential in this currently somewhat overly simplified city builder.

The good:
- Excellent artstyle
- Enjoyable research tree with useful upgrades and variations
- Good building variety to balance resource burn and research time sink vs varying QoL boosts
- Sizable map to explore with a few interesting environments

The meh:
- Little reason to ever optimize/redesign cities
- Too many samey resource types
- Resource management comes down to: top up every bar at every opportunity
- Repetitive quests and map locations (towns/ruins)
- Light on story beyond pre-game voice over

The bad:
- Technically unoptimized
- Artstyle sometimes hinders UI legibility

Some more building interactions, more meaningful resource management decision-making and more unique locations and quests could lift this game up from quirky little ambient experience to a solid indie city building masterpiece. For now though, it still feels a little early-access.

Certainly recommended even in current state if you're looking for a chill city builder-lite experience of 6-8 hours.

Stellar soundtrack
Awesome characters
Moving stories
Unique every-day life dystopian setting
Just the right touch of minimalist gameplay

Damnit, I want more of this now... MOOORE

tl;dr: It leaves you feeling like you just played the underwhelming pilot episode of a spin-off series on the blockbuster that was Human Revolution.

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Damnit... my heart has just been broken...

[(partial) SPOILERS]

Just spent 20 hours playing the game, thrilled to be back in the Deus Ex universe, waiting to be awed by all the pretties and shinies that we've come to expect from this studio. Unfortunately, to my shocked surprise, the game simply ends with the most depressing slideshow of "micro-documentary storyline wrapups" since fallout 3 after defeating an apparently minor henchman in the first bossfight of the game (and what felt like at most 1/3 of the storyline).

They got the gameplay right, same as Human Revolution, just wonderfully smooth. And save for the forgivable minor buggyness here and there, it plays like a charm.

But everything that made the that game tower out above all others at the time for me:
- The sweeping globalised storyline unravelling before your eyes
- The incredibly rich locales, befitting this brand new reality
- Futurism and incredible tech pouring from ever nook and cranny of the world

... is utterly absent from Mankind Divided, making the environments positively dull.

All of the game is set in the same grey slum they label Prague (not the Prague I've visited, I'll tell you) with next to no unique, awe-inspiring, or interesting locations to be found. The sidequests are mostly running around in this drab place, and almost none of the amazing places you hear about (or even see in the distance) all over the freaking place are visited. (hint hint: DLC, expansions, sequel material coming up! Yay.....)

The main storyline starts off reasonably ok (a bit slow and running simulatorish) but only really gets going after hours and hours of introduction, and then just cuts off on a horribly jarring note as mentioned. A dozen storylines all over the place are just dropped or sloppily explained away in the horrifically cheap ending cinematic, leaving you with a complete sense of "What...? That's it...?".

Hence, it leaves you feeling like you just played the underwhelming pilot episode of a spin-off series on the blockbuster that was Human Revolution.

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I want to recommend it as the gameplay is still perfectly solid, as in the last game. But knowing that they are capable of so much more than this is what decides it. Living up to the hype is impossible and living up to Human Revolution is right next to that, I fully get that. But this was just so... so much less..

Just wait till the next sale I guess, give it a try, maybe the DLC will save it in some minor way.

Damnit...

This game was perfection for me, only F2P game I ever sank a bunch of money into. As readable in the many reviews however, the monetisation has ♥♥♥♥♥♥ it all up in the past few years. Most of the extremely fun progression systems since then are gone in favor of cheap skinner box methods. Very unfortunate...

Original review from 2015ish:
"Don't spend money on F2P games a lot, but this game made me cave!

Building your own craft and getting in blown up in a WoT style arena fight is just a hell of a lot of fun every time round. Progression in the 'free' part is pretty fair and quick enough to stay fun, with the possibility of buying your way ahead in the resources department while making the tech progress a little easier. All in all a very nice implementation of a F2P system thrown in with a very fun sort of game."

Starmade has been in development for a while, and it will be for a while longer. But updates are consistent, the core mechanics are solid, and the game already offers an ton of fun to those it caters to right now. But because it is still very much in development, a number of mechanics are still missing, meaning that for now it does cater to a more specific group. Namely the one that absolutely can't resist building creative things with a full suite of editing tools, blowing them up and strutting around in their creations in front of their fellow community members.

The comparison to Minecraft is easily draw of course, and one should rightfully compare the two. However, even in mimicing some elements, the game always implements them in its own unique way, making it a breath of fresh air for some veteran MC players like me. That said, the implementation is usually more complex and intricate than its counterpart, so be prepared for a learning curve, thankfully often rewarded with the awesome result of your contraptions.

For now, the worlds are pretty scarcely populated and static, meaning that if your desire is not to build and start exploring all sorts of wonderful places, you might be disappointed. A huge amount of content is planned, but it will take time, with the first of these updates hitting soon in the form of massively upgraded space stations.

Interfaces and tutorials are also quite barebones for the time being. Very useful and functional once you get a hang of them, but harder to learn and slapped together in places. If learning isn't your sort of thing, move on for now.

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In short, the game already features a great amount of mechanics that can provide you with a lot of fun if you like building, warping & blowing stuff up in your own creations, but for now, lacks content and might seem intimidating to players just starting out.

Good:
- Full suite of building tools
- Very optimised
- Very scalable
- Infinite universe
- Procedural damage & debris
- Innovative hexagonal planets

Bad:
- Improvised interface
- Lack of explorable content
- Steep learning curve
- Unbalanced economy

If you have any sort of creative or adventurous spark to you, definately try it and start creating or join a world without limits!

If not, maybe skip it and check back in another 6 months or so for the next batch of updates.