Recent reviews by BigMistake

At first look it's a great game. You get a ship, you disassemble and strip it, complete contracts for money and use that together with salvaged materials to upgrade your tools. HOWEVER, there seems to be a complete lack of Quality Assurance. Multiple ships have had issues in the past where certain parts were bugged, meaning you couldn't completely finish the ship and complete contracts. Other issues are not being able to disassemble larger parts that need to be lifted/pulled away from the ship without destroying valuable equipment/materials inside.

All of this could be prevented if the developer(s) would just literally disassemble each ship, as is the normal gameplay loop, to find issues. But they're not doing that, and instead are just pumping out more DLC. I've got plenty of hours in this game and it's great to relax with, but these easily preventable issues are absolutely infuriating.

I've restarted from scratch and most problems are actually fixed. My bad!

Where to start?

- Buggy (refuses to moor at some quest givers, preventing you from turning anything in and progressing).
- Crashes a lot. Usually not a big problem, unless you were in the respawning screen and lost ALL of your inventory.
- Difficulty ramps up quickly. There's no indication of what areas are more dangerous, resulting in getting absolutely overwhelmed by overpowered enemies and losing your items without being able to get them back.
- Tedious. Travel is slow thanks to an energy system, quests nothing more than "go to x, talk to y".

It might get better with more hours into the game, but losing all my items more than once is enough to stop playing for a while.

What I thought was an interesting game during the open beta turned out to be a so-so game after release. But, good enough to enjoy for a bit. Even that is ruined by the haphazard, unpredictable and honestly stupid decisions AGS makes in their updates. Anything that is a convenience to players is seen as unbalanced and either nerfed or removed entirely, while bugs, exploits and dupes go unnoticed. If you're on the fence, wait a year until they either come around or are so desperate for new players that you can buy the game for a buck.

Great idea. Horrible execution. If you want a TL:DR, that's it. Before it's Early Access release, Onset sounded like a great idea: a customisable multiplayer sandbox set in an open world, built using Unreal. Basically Garry's Mod on steroids running on a powerful engine.

Even considering the fact it has only released into Early Access, the game and documentation are severely lacking, relying on the playing developers to create what's missing. And that can be quite hard when the wiki containing all documentation for developers is out of date or incomplete. Even though it is quite extensive when it comes to listing the functions, events, models and more, it's not always reliable. Even at launch a lot of the pages were simply placeholders, with nothing beyond the page name, or lacking crucial information like expected parameters for a function. Other pages that had this information were sometimes incorrect as their content was simply copy/pasted. In addition, it took the developer more than four months to release his version of a roadmap, in the form of a Trello board that doesn't do much to show which place the game is heading.

There are currently not enough players to ensure (non-developer) players will get their money's worth in gameplay. French RP servers are the most popular, with around 20-50 players in the evening (also, RP gamemodes make up most of the used gamemodes at the moment). For April, the highest peak of online players was 60, with an average of 18. You'd think with these kinds of numbers the developer would try and look for ways to make low-populated servers interesting to play in, but one solution (and my biggest annoyance) seems to be on the backburner: NPC's.

The current implementation of NPC's lacks pathfinding, which means you can definitely program them to move towards points, play animations and all sorts of other things, they will do so ignoring the laws of gravity and clipping through everything. And that's a shame because there's plenty of gamemodes to think of that don't require a lot of players to get started, if there are decent NPC's to fill the gap.

Lastly, the community around Onset (forums, Discord) is very hit and miss. While there's most certainly a large amount of people willing to help new players/developers, it's not uncommon to be lambasted for asking for help, or publicly ridiculed for (flawed/imperfect) code when releasing a project you worked on. Certainly for a game where developing (and attracting and keeping developers) is key, you'd think toxic elements would be removed or at least handled. One person was told his latest project was: "Really ♥♥♥♥ code man. Don't bother releasing your code next time BRUH". That's certainly not the way to help other developers get better.

I was hopeful Onset would be a good sandbox to develop for, but after six months I'm not holding my breath anymore. From everything I've seen the developer could make great strides by investing in additional help. Because for now, one man functioning as a developer/community manager/marketeer just isn't working.

If you're a zombie fan and like games that focus on story and consequences, get it!

If you liked the RTW but hated it's flaws, you're going to love the Reloaded version.

Great and fun poker game, pure and simle!