Recent reviews by unc0nn3ct3d

Great

Got it's flaws
- Most of the game is one breadcrumb trail after another making it feel very linear
- Combat progression is very disappointing. Knowing that my weapons and abilities are essentially going to be exactly the same from level 15 onwards really diminishes any excitement that comes with leveling up.

But in terms of western MMORPG's this is one of the richest around. Combat is at least something beyond point and click with a bit of movement and aiming in there.

As a 40 something year old gamer this scratches all my itches and takes me back into feeling like a kid again. So fast, so frantic, so straight to the point, all the while being so badass.

Steam deck support for this is so bad it's beyond words. Beyond words how you could have controller support to the degree you guys do but somehow the steamdeck is impossible to work with.

That and the amount of enemies you face that lock you into a death spiral, where one hit stuns or immobilizes followed by subsequent hits that keep you locked down and damage you until you die. Who wakes up thinking any player wants to walk into a fight with 3/4 health and then just sit there after getting into one of these cycles helpless as they die.

Honestly, how hard is it to add in WASD movement instead of forcing PC players into the banal experience of point and click movement/combat?

Been playing this game since alpha, it's a great community that is actively participating in the direction of the game.

Is this game janky in some areas? Yes
Is there a more solid foundation for a survival experience than 99% of other releases out there? Yes
Does this game have the potential and the roadmap to go further and deeper in the areas of base building, player progression, crafting PVE and PVP than any other game I have seen? Yes

It's that last point combined with the first one that has be so excited for this game, even after so many hours played

It's fun, it's cute but honestly it's minimalist in areas it should have more complexity and more complex in areas where it should be simpler, leaving this game in a middle ground where the simplicity results in frustration due to the complexity(ie: troop deployment) becoming inefficient to manage, becoming the worst of both worlds.

Bottom line is if you want true minimalist experience in this vein go with Rogue Tower
If you want an experience that is complex and lives up to the full potential of the genre go with Going Medieval or Age of Darkness.

All that being said, this is a small developer with a cool idea that pulled off actually launching a game which is one of the hardest things anyone can do, so I still recommend everyone give this game a try and get some great fun out of it!

Unplayable in current state due to stutters and perf issues

First time in my life leaving an 'unplayable' review but this time it's the honest truth, not just a complaint about 'bad performance'. Running an RTX 3060 with a 5800x CPU, maxed out everything and every 1 second this game will stutter for 1-2 seconds.

Have updated video drivers, tried on windowed, fullscreen and fullscreen exclusive
Have tried on all quality settings.
Nothing abnormal in cpu/gpu usage, just terrible stuttering from the movement I land on the ground

**EDIT #1** - Downloaded patch to see if perf has improved. Launch game, go into prospecting mode, start match/game and my main monitor just blacks out. Totally inaccessible, can't alt-tab out on that monitor, open task manager and it opens on that main monitor, which is blacked out so I Can't see it. Only fix was to change display settings by right clicking on desktop on one of my other monitors and have the main monitor simply mirror my secondary monitor, move task manager to a visible place, force close, and then change display settings back to extend to my main monitor.

TL;DR - Things have gone from unplayably bad to even worse as the game now permanently blacks out a monitor

Very solid execution on an amazing concept.

Updated Review: I have 32 hours into the game and can say that the difficulty ramp and forgiveness of the game needs to be tweaked in a big way. Because of the nature of this type of game you can start digging yourself into a hole a looonnggggg time before you realize it and then when you realize it, chances are it's just too late. So it's not a matter of reloading a save and trying a certain part again, it's about throwing away 5-10-20 hours of work and starting from scratch. This is incredibly demotivating.

Looking at the design team I don't think any of them have experience with a meta this nuanced. The right move would have been to hire away a game designer from a studio who's made colony sims or similar games but alas that wasn't the play here and the result is a game that will deadend you after investing dozens of hours, literally putting to waste all of the work and content created after that point, which is substantial.

I just wish it didn't take so long to find out this fatal flaw

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Original Review: So far I'm loving this game. It takes me back to playing Planetbase, although this is a different beast for sure. It's just hard enough to make success very rewarding and also to make you want to save regularly with different save files so you can roll back.

The setting is fantastic, juggling between system tasks and sector tasks feels great. I'm 6 hours in and I haven't even left Sol, I can't wait to see what awaits me out there in the vast expanse