Recent reviews by CrouchingLlama

tl;dr: Unequivocally the best RTS game on the market. The central gameplay loop is unique enough between factions to remain interesting for outrageous amounts of time, while being approachable/arcadey enough that the average gamer can pick it up easily enough.

Graphically there are some hiccups such as lighting being too bright in snow, but overall this game is absolutely gorgeous.
Content-wise there is enough to keep even the pickiest player interested. With the addition of Immortal Empires as playable for all owners of this edition, you can experience content from all 3 games and see first hand how well they've done with balancing. Older factions may not be as polished nor have as many mechanics as newer ones, but the overall balance is so well done that most players will struggle to name more than 2 or 3 factions out of the 24 available factions that need a touch-up.
There are hundreds of mods available on the mod workshop, and even if you only explore the more polished ones you could easily double your playtime with what players have posted.
Multiplayer is fantastic. I don't personally recommend doing a campaign with more than 1 or 2 people just because waiting on 7+ battles every single turn in your 8-person coop is a bit boring, but if you did decide to do a massive multiplayer campaign like that the game handles it flawlessly. I can count on 1 hand the number of multiplayer errors I've experienced, and since the game autosaves every turn they aren't that big of an issue.

tl;dr: it's an early access survival crafting game on steam. Just go play Minecraft or Subnautica or something


This game is very pretty. It has an art style that works very well and most of the content gels with that style. The animations were clearly made with a ton of love, and the game makes sure you see them. That's about all I can say positively about the game.

Negatively, there is so much wrong with this game that I'm not even sure where to begin. Even the positive aspects have negatives: the game is very pretty, but the beautiful environments are impossible to enjoy with the nose-to-the-grindstone loot-gathering gameplay loop. The art style works well and is cohesive, but clashes horribly with the frantic nature of the looting and combat. The animations are very well made, but every single one is at least 2 seconds long and unskippable (you cannot run, jump, shoot, pick up loot, interact, etc while an animation is running).

The core idea of the game is drive a train through this not-space / not-ocean void environment and grab loot floating around you. You use the loot to craft better / longer train parts as well as to upgrade your weapons to fight off the jealous pirates who want to steal it from you. But even here, the design decisions clash horribly with this core idea; after the first engine upgrade it is physically impossible to see the entire 360 degree view around your train car unless you sit in front of the train as the steam engine blocks half of the screen if you sit on one side or the other. Unfortunately, that leaves the speed control console about a 5 second sprint away from your post. That means instead of cruising around and grabbing loot, you're constantly starting and stopping the train over and over like some kind of intergalactic bus driver so that you can make sure you hoover up the loot. There are stations they've added in the most recent patch that automate some of the loot gathering, but they need to be tended every ~5 loot collections or they stop functioning. Further, there are several types of hazards on the tracks such as mines, pirate ambushes, and even a space shark, so if you decide to ignore the loot and sit by your crafting stations you can look forward to enduring several long animations as you pull out your construction tool, remember that you need to use the completely separate repair hammer, close the construction tool, open the repair hammer, remember you need to be holding each of the associated repair materials, close the repair hammer, seek the associated repair materials in your chests that hold a single-digit number of items until the very end of the game, re-open the repair hammer, and then finally repair your floorboards and handrails that the pirates decided looked like good target practice. If that was an ordeal to read, imagine how fun it is to play.

And speaking of inventory frustration, holy hell this game got inventory management wrong. At this stage, Minecraft should be required reading for making a survival crafting game, so why do so many of these games fail to even copy it at a bare minimum? You can move items quickly from between your inventory and a chest you have selected, yes. But that's it. One at a time, no way to split a stack with a hotkey - you have to right-click, navigate the menu to split, then click an arrow until it goes to the quantity you want. Also, no way to match contents (i.e. no way to dump all metal scrap into the metal scrap chest). There is a pet mechanic that EVENTUALLY lets you craft items on workbenches directly from nearby chests, but I'm telling you from experience it will be 5-10 hours in before you have any, and at 22 hours played I still have several work stations I have to fill by hand.

This DLC took me about 3 hours to 100%. There's definitely some fun stuff in here, but a lot of it is repetitive and obnoxious. The time trials, for example, are a cool idea that was handled horribly - the first few are fun, but then every one after that is some variation of "swim quickly and then make one or more precise air jumps". Inevitably you'll miss slightly, run out of time, and have to do it over. It doesn't take long to get right, but that just means you're not having fun for less time.

It was pretty fun. Got drunk with my roommate and 100% it in 4 hours 6/10 with rice.