Recent reviews by Darren

I'm still early on right now but I love the direction of the new game. It's a real-time 4X game with a focus on survival and political strife set in a unique post-apocalyptic steampunk world. Um, yeah, I'm all about that!

A little rough around the edges, and a bit feature light at the moment, however what's there is a really fun and enjoyable foundation. It's also beautiful and runs very well. I reckon you can get around 20 hours of playtime in the game before you hit a sort of content wall and don't have much to do beyond just trying to build bigger and bigger. I recommend it if you're an fan of Banished, Ostriv or Farthest Frontier and want a more organic city-builder.
At time of review there's no dynamic AI opponent, no cavalry, not much "balance" and a lot of locked screens for work in progress features, but if the cadence of updates are good and this gets fleshed out quickly, it'd be an easy recommend to not just fans of colony-building but anyone with an interest in grounded, realistic or historical games.

Super fun game. Never played a auto-shooter type game before, but I picked this up for use with Steam Deck while travelling and can't put it down. My playtime is a bit off as I was playing it on flights / remotely so I'm probably closer to about 12 or 13 hours at the moment. Seems like there's still lots of content to get through and lots of progression to work towards still. The levels are quick, but get quite intense as you progress. I think it's really well balanced in terms of the mining, shooting, enemy variety, upgrades and weapons. Really enjoy it.

Better with friends

I don't think this is a bad game, but I just don't recommend it. As everyone is mentioning the performance is really poor. I have an RTX 3090, Ryzen 9 5950X and 32GB of Ram playing at 1440p and I get 25fps on a BLANK map.

Lowering to 1080p gets me near 60fps on a blank map, but it really shouldn't be the case that I have to do that. Then, there's a lot of graphical oddities in the game. Level of Detail seems broken, when zooming in things slowly "un-load" or become polygonal, and if I pull back a bit, then it loads in sharply. Animations are missing, shadows flicker, terrain looks wonky and children... children are cursed.

Performance and graphics aside here's what I've thought so far:

• Road Tools are really great. Not quite CS1 with mods level, but close.
  
• Deeper Mechanics (Power and Water even are interesting to manage now)
  
• Higher detail on buildings and cars (when they load correctly)
  
• Larger playable area
  
• Deep logistics economy with many trade goods
  
• Interesting progression tree (I say interesting because I don't know if its "better" or not, but interesting so far!
  
• Modular upgradeable buildings
  
• Better zoning with more variations in each category

• Massive building plots that take up too much space. They added modules, but I would've liked more granular modules, like place the cemetary building, and then add the burial plots in groups of 24 or whatever. Right now, you just have a GIANT cemetary the size of 3-4 blocks.
  
• seemingly bugged commerce? All my commerce said it needed more customers, but there was still high commerce demand, and citizen wealth was high and there was no demand for residential
  
• Terrain looks very ugly when terraformed and is really finicky, with houses expanding land and changing the zoning for their neighbours, deleting them.
  
• very little beauty/detailing options
  
• still not a full suite of traffic control. You can put a stop sign on all entrances to a junction, but not just one for instance.
  
• A lot of repetitive looking house plots, and they don't blend with the ground at all so stand out a lot.
  
• You're notified of disasters far outside of your playable area
  
• Radio ads cant be turned off, despite there being a button to do so

Fallout in Space. If you expected more, you'll probably be let down. For me, its exceeded my expectations in some areas, and fallen short in others. Overall I'm very much enjoying all the various layered systems, ship combat, gunplay and the exploration. Not far enough in to judge the story yet but voice acting is good and the world seems quite rich.

Disappointed you can't seamlessly fly between places, but you get over it pretty quick. With an nvme SSD loading screens take literally 1-2 seconds for me. Again, not ideal, but not a deal breaker.

For reference, I'm the weirdo that bounced off Skyrim after 8hrs, so my review is totally invalid to most Bethesda fans. I loved Oblivion and Fallout 3 and 100%'d them both.

Rough launch, still doesn't capture the BF3/BF4 feeling, destruction is largely missing still and squad teamwork isn't a priority. But, that said, I actually really enjoy the game in its current state. After the class rework the game feels much better to play now, and despite the mentioned issues I keep coming back for the scale of warfare and the numerous progression systems. I recommend it!

I'm not really a Warhammer fan, but have had exposure to it over a few games such as Total War and Battlefleet. This game got me really interested in 40K and the Adeptus Mechanicus have quickly become my favourite race/sub faction. A great tactics game, with cool customization and setting. A little rough around the edges as it is an indie game but generally I highly recommend!

Severely underrated game. Just a super fun mix of action and logistics with a huge array of content from weapons, enemy variety, biomes, buildings and now with extra DLC it has even more to offer such as burrowing underground. Love it!

Too similar to COH2. Feels more like an expansion with some QoL updates rather than it's own game. The single player portion is really simple and not very replayable. Sounds bad, but I kind of hope they just move on from COH3 and make a new, COH Modern Warfare game, just for a breath of fresh air in the series.