Recent reviews by Shaft

After playing through two regions in the game I have experienced almost everything this game has to offer. There's no experience or levels. Gear and travel items are region locked. That means you lose them every time you cross the border in to a new region. Every new region you revert back to your original ability. I got bored of exploring new regions because the progression was always the same. Look for travel items like the boat, hang glider,harp, etc. Stumble on a good weapon, steam roll the dungeons and quests, acquire useless artifact, repeat.

Quests are all the same. NPC Dialogue is repetitive.

The end game artifacts that you work towards in every region give you permanent stat bonuses that are basically useless. +1 lamp radius, Increased diving speed, more hang gliding stamina. If you could get a car in the game artifacts would give you more blinker fluid.

Overall a fun game for roughly five hours. Not worth $20.

All around great game. Futuristic Dwarf fortress with better graphics and UI. 5/7

Overall a good game. Very in depth story with different story elements and random events. Lots of RNG elements that can be annoying at times but do not hinder gameplay. The RNG can crush you or give you insane streaks of luck. Feels like X-COM in that regard. Combat mechanics are solid. Training and building your Legionary is interesting and NG+ mechanics make each playthrough different.

I would give this game thumbs up If i didn't have to spend 1/3 of my total play time clicking "Roll again" at character creation just to get a character with attributes that has a chance of surviving more than 5 minutes. Even Dungeons and dragons lets you pick your starting stats with a penalty. ( You could theoretically roll a superior character, or pick his stats with a slight penalty to the amount of stats you get). Worse is you spent almost half an hour rolling for good stats just to get killed in the first part of the game only to start back rolling again.

I spend anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes hitting roll again just go get a decent character. Yeet that silly mechanic straight out of the game please.

Just let us pick the stats ourselves.

Decent premise. Building castles is fun. The main game mode, Invasion, is fun at first, but the games many flaws become apparent very quickly. TLDR: Good sandbox mode, poorly optimized, micro-freezes, bad AI, frustrating playing experience.

The AI for your units is bad. When you build something, every pawn will try to build the same block at the same time. when its done they all stop for a moment, aim at the next block, and repeat. When you have limited time between waves its frustrating to watch your units waste so much time doing nothing. Pawns will carry what they have when called to arms all the way to a weapon rack to equip armor and weapons. 50% of the time they will stand there un-able to figure out how to drop the rocks they are carrying and pick up their equipment.

Stockpiles tend to become massive over time as you try to collect all the rescources you need to build walls, armor, weapons, etc. You eventually run out of room on the ground as you dont have time to build a 3D structure fast enough between waves to accomodate the absurd amount of resources you accumulate. You can delete stock piles, however, your pawns will manually destroy them which takes up more of your valuable time. Also too many stockpiles kills your FPS.

Ah yes, the FPS. After a certain amount of time passes the game experiences micro-freezes. If you have too many stockpiles, if theres to many enemies on screen, generally just playing the game, it will lag. This is a current issue acknowledged by the devs. They're working on it, but this games been in development for 5 years now so I wouldn't expect it to be fixed any time soon. Every few seconds the game will stop for a half second, all the way up to a few seconds, non-stop. Its bearable for a while, but eventually it turns a 2 minute battle into a 30 minute slide-show.

Wave 60 is the final stage. I never make it past wave 30 because the lag is too much.

I'll admit the premise for this game is fun. Anything that is inspired by dwarf fortress always has my vote. Sadly, this game has been in development since 2013 and progress has been slow. Since I bought this game they have added very few promised features, and the game is not anywhere near being completed.

TLDR: Typical early acess/kickstarter failure. They've made all the money they will ever make from gullible suckers like myself. Wait till this game is 100% actually finished before buying or wait untill its on sale for $5.

This game showed promise. It really could have been a fantastic game, yet the problems with the final product force me to not recommend it.


Why?
A game match cannot be completed reasonably. Towards the end game there are huge framerate issues/lag that literally bring all ship movement to a near halt . Lots of good gameplay aspects, unfortunately the game is unfinished. Quests are incomplete, ship models are not implemented for some races(The wolf race), and the developer has no intention of finishing/fixing it. What boggles my mind is the developers decision to make a sequel. How could anyone reasonably expect the sequel to be any more of a complete product than this ?


I cannot reccomend this game as it was personally dissapointing for me, the developer is incompetent/Shady ,and this is not a finished product.

Don't waste your money.

An unfinished, unpolished gem. This could be a really good game, though even after the full release, the game is riddled with bugs and is generally not an enjoyable experience. Many other reviews cover that. This game is a perfect example of the downfalls of early access.

One of the developers said this on the forums in response to their supposed shady development:

Vitali Kirpu [developer]: "We are not shady, we have alot of funds to fund pixel piracy development for the next 1-2 years or so.

My point is that it doesnt matter for us if the game is early access or full release, updates will keep coming untill nobody ever plays the game."

Take that however you want.. To me it say's "keep buying our unfinished game, and in 1-2 years you may have the privilege of a finished product"

it's an interesting glimpse of the truth of early acsess on steam. For the few good games that have thrived from early access, we as a community are left with hundreds of games just like pixel piracy.

Disappointing.

*Update*
I'll be fully updating my review once the game is finally completed. A quick glance at the community hub revealed the game to still be riddled with bugs. If the final product is good, i'll recommend it. Untill then, I am reserving any positive judgement.