Recent reviews by Varegi

It wasn't good when it released, but now it's damn near perfect for what itch it scratches. Wouldn't have touched it if it wasn't recommended to me long after trying it out the first time.

Gameplay-wise it's essentially a Korean XCOM with actual characters with personalities, that's better than even a heavily modded and borderline unstable XCOM 1 or 2.

A lot of systems in the game seem like there were plans to expand on them.
Or maybe they were just built efficiently to be modular and that's why they give the impression of a work in progress.

I'd hoped for more depth in the pet system, but that's just me.

Another banger.

It's good. Gonna play again once the launch week(s) issues are over.

Some people learned nothing about the obvious pattern of game release launch issues in the past 20 years and are review bombing the game for it. It's hilarious to watch the community hub. Just that circus is worth the game price.

Recommended due to the fact the game seems to be a very good replacement for the disappointment from Blizzard or that other free game with overtly hardcore sweaty optimization and most of the fun sucked out. When it works and isn't stuck loading that is.

Though I do hold them responsible for being another group that "didn't expect the influx of people" on launch, which is insanely dumb at this point. How do you not expect your game to be flooded on release with the amount of attention it was garnering? Maybe blinded by their own environment and that was out of focus for whatever reason? Doesn't really matter though.

I don't like the D4-esque marketplace choice of having high cost microtransactions, but they don't seem to be a major issue for game design for now. We'll see if the game is just a vessel to sell you overpriced skins or if it's actually going to be improved on.

Loved it, despite the jank.

CA can go kick rocks

Decent roguelike.

This is it. This right here. This is the prime example of how to make a proper videogame.

*It just works.*

During over 40 hours of gameplay and having cleared the singleplayer campaign twice in that time going on my third, I've had 0 crashes and the frames have dipped below 60fps less than 5 times in extremely intense conditions and I believe those cases can be optimized out. I never had a loading screen last longer than ~8 seconds I believe.


Quick sideline about microstuttering and GPUs and OS:

I play on Windows 10 with a decently "modern" AM4 Ryzen CPU + Nvidia GPU build currently. I wont post specs unless asked to, but having played FromSoft games on Windows with an AMD card and changing to Nvidia just rather recently, I can comfortably claim that if you have an AMD card and you experience microstuttering in AC6 or Elden Ring... it's most likely the GPU/drivers or another issue and not the game itself.
Seems to me AMD is unstable but powerful while Nvidia has usually less oomph per unit of currency, but is considerably more stable and has better drivers(?) (although proprietary, which is not nice for Linux users). If you dont get the microstutters or dont see it, good for you.
Apparently though you can maybe make that stutter go away on AMD cards by switching over to Arch Linux btw.

Back to the wall of text review:


It works perfectly on a controller, but unlike the older souls games, it also performs superbly on keyboard & mouse. You may use whichever you like without worry if it's optimized or not. It just works.
I don't like the fact you can't rebind pure manual aiming to not be "hold button", but that is a minor nitpick.

The gameplay is really smooth and the weapons all feel different enough to justify their existences. Due to the massive amount of weapon choices of course some will never see use, but that's ok. You can make challenge builds or role-play builds out of the "less good" weapons and parts.
There's also a convenient feature for playing a video of how the weapons work in the assembly menu instead of having to go and test them yourself just to see how it works.

Unfortunately the game does not have true sniper rifles and any sort of extremely long range combat, but I believe they would probably break the game balance too much. I don't know the true reason, but I assume it was a balancing issue. It may also be that I have yet to unlock one but that seems highly unlikely at this point.

The base mission structures are nice and varied. There's enough similarity where you can immerse yourself and feel like a mercenary AC pilot doing the work that they do and enough variety to not get bored of the same stuff all the time during campaign.

Bossfights are a mixed bag of easy~ gimmicks, tough as nails intense combat and strategic resource management depending on your build. I loved all of them, even the super easy and annoyingly difficult ones that made me seethe when I lost tens of times in a row because I just couldnt play properly.

The difficulty fluctuates and you never know if you're in for an easy mission or if there's going to be some surprises. I love that they have learned from Elden Ring's success and implemented many features similar to it here. Like having easy access to replay bosses if you lose and being able to change your build and try again.

If you ever get stuck, you can just go practice in the missions you unlocked already and collect money to buy more parts to try more varied builds or make a focused build to defeat whatever is blocking you.

Although I was sceptical about the fact it is mission-based, I think they made it really work in this title. The campaign is like a chain of missions that tells a story and you can replay any missions you have already done. There are also Arena modes against AI like in past titles and separate AC Test Area that you can use to test your builds against normal mobs, although I would like more variety there (I dont know if you can unlock more variety to mobs in AC Test) You can use the Arena to test your builds against AI enemies and see how well you perform. It is not a proper test for multiplayer, but it is the next best thing before going into pvp.

The voice acting is good and there is a lot of good flavor and lore to immerse yourself in.

The game has major replayability as new things unlock for at least 3 rounds (I'm on my third and there is new stuff) of the campaign as you can make choices that affect the immediate story direction. You dont have to worry about losing access to missions when clearing this game's campaign as every mission you clear is saved to the "Replay" menu and you can play them again whenever and even farm money in them if you need or want to. Trying to gain S-ranks in all missions in the replay-mode is a fun goal for a change of pace or if you don't want to progress in the campaign anymore. During the campaign you dont get scored so you dont have to think about it then, which is nice if you get anxious about it for whatever reason. There are also hidden mech parts in missions as well which is a nice challenge for players that like to find hidden stuff. I recommend not googling anything before clearing the campaign at least once, maybe 2-3 times so you can get surprised when you accidentally find cool stuff.

The customization is extremely good. You have color, luster, reflectivity control for surfaces and you can add some wearing as well. You can build your own emblem from a lot of parts, not just 5-10 but I believe you can use 100 parts from a list of well over that number to build emblems. And you can use them to create unique patterns and shapes on your mech if you like to spend time on that. Multiplayer will most definitely be rife with suggestive and improper emblems and I love it. I hope they don't start censoring the choices. Right now you can write and draw almost anything in your emblem/decals.

You can share your mech builds and emblems/decals with your friends via a simple system ingame. There's also loads of slots you can save your builds and emblems/decals in.

Multiplayer seems to work for the most part, but I'm 50% sure there are some issues with animations showing properly and some weapons functionality there. Turrets for example for sure do not work properly in multiplayer. Probably exploits similar to Elden Ring pvp exploits will be found by the communities some time in the future. But for now it seems OK.

TLDR:
This game is a unique gem and definitely worth playing through at least once. And if you get hooked there is new stuff waiting for you in the following rounds of campaign. The multiplayer works. Any criticisms I have for this game are very minor nitpicks.

5/5, 10/10, 100% recommend.

Definitely the true Game of The Year for 2023 (disregarding genre) for me, and I say this having played and liked both Baldur's Gate 3 and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a lot. But this game just has *that something* that makes it stand out and become the leader of this top 3 for me.

In my humble opinion. This way overused word applies here in it's true meaning:

Masterpiece.

Finished the base game with 2 other players in less than 20 hours without much rushing. Got it from -66% sale.

It's a good hack&slash ARPG game with mostly good boss fights. It also has resource gathering, building, "sailing" and "crafting" if you care.

The mostly good:

Bosses were mostly well designed with some odd ones with easy exploits.

Combat feels pretty good and the skills you can choose are pretty good. Though you can become nigh invulnerable at some point (I like that, but it can get boring).

The game doesn't waste your time with resource gathering. Gathering resources is nice and fast and doesn't get in the way of the flow of exploration or combat. However it does trivialize crafting and building somewhat as something you just have to get out of the way to progress.

The lore and theme. This perhaps most of all made me like the game beyond its faults.


The mostly bad:

The main menu is horrendous. Hands down some of the worst features I've seen.

Grind. If you don't like grinding things even in the slightest, you will have a bad time. If you don't like grinding you should focus on the objectives and then maybe you won't have such a bad time.

Sailing was not enjoyable in the slightest. The top-down view is not a good one for sailing. You have to use the minimap to navigate and even then you aren't guaranteed to avoid all rocks that you would see in a different camera angle or with a higher view. The ship also steers like a train on rails attached to a pole from the middle. There's no wind and you can do a 360-degree turn without moving .

Building is not really something you need to or want to do in the basic story mode.

Locking some unlockables shown in-game into some main menu functions was weird and annoying.
Crafting weapons and stuff while quite basic and fun in its own right, was somewhat ruined by some of the stuff being "gameplay unlockable", which meant you had to use a special resource in the main menu to unlock the craftable item in-game. What?
Also items that you would have thought were unlocked to be crafted by defeating a boss were simply similarly locked into the main menu store where you spend the special resource to unlock them. For example some weapons and armor you have to unlock in this way. Dumb.

Traps. We found them to be a thing after being done with the story. They are a nice flavor maybe. More useful in the defense mode probably.

Looting may get tedious having to press the same button all the time and sometimes stuff gets inside other stuff like buildings that get in the way of looting.


Finally:

Even with a seemingly heavier negative side, I overall recommend it on sale if you just want a nice <20 hr ARPG to finish. Maybe you will enjoy it more and start building stuff and take part in the other game modes. Who knows. Maybe it's worth full price if you enjoy these types of games a lot. The game is mostly good.

For an Early Access game this is a pretty good game, and I would have a lot of good to say about implementing existing ideas and QoL stuff.

But I'm going to give thumbs down for being an obvious Early Access game that is probably for some very amazing and good reason not in EA anymore.

The lack of polish is apparent.
Here are some examples from my multiplayer experiences so far:

-There are some specific things that desync (maybe they are broken in singleplayer too, I dont know), like dew droplets and construction. Sometimes constructed building parts like foundations, floors and walls after construction stay in "building mode" for some players. The fix is to reconnect to the game. Sometimes it breaks for the host too so you need to restart the server. Similarly dew droplets that are desynced stay so until server reset.

-There is at least one almost game-breaking bug that causes enemies called "Gnats" to disappear on contact with water and sometimes with ground and leave no loot, that was found quite some time ago (earliest mention I found was in April of 2021), of which the devs are apparently aware of according to reddit and steam, and it's still not fixed. What makes this bug almost game-breaking is that these enemies are an early-game enemy for resources to progress in your game further, and this bug makes it exceedingly hard to gain resources from them, given that they are usually located close to water as well.

-There is an Ant hive where the ants are all stacked at the entrance but there is basically 0 ants inside. What? Maybe if there is a lore reason I missed from one of those cassettes, this is a non-issue.

-Looting or the looting prompt is bugged. More often than not, it's a pain trying to pick up anything. Sometime things you break into pieces or stuff that drops require you to be in some "correct angle" or just keep tapping until the item is picked up. It's not very fluid looting when you're trying to pick up a piece of grass for 5 seconds.

-Construction needs a ton of polish. From desyncs to lack of variety in parts to better mix&match compatibility between parts.

-Information dumps. There are some NPC monologues (at least one), that last for quite many minutes unless skipped. It's good to have lore you can read and some immersive dialogue. A huge plus for voice-acting. But really does the thing have to tell us 2 light novels worth of information on first contact? It gets jarring especially in multiplayer when most players just stop caring after the first 3 sentences. And also most people really forget the information from the beginning of the monologue by the time it's ended so you achieved nothing.

It's still an Early Access game and should be treated as such.

It's worth it on a sale and with friends, but I'm starting to really dislike publishers/devs that just depend solely on the fact that their half-baked "non-EA but actually EA" games are good with friends. Even a burnt baguette is good entertainment with friends.

Not as disappointing as CubeWorld or Cyberpunk launch I guess, but still disappointing. Devs are either burnt out or are bored of their own game. Taking out the early access tag was premature.