Recent reviews by Fyrcat

I've loved the series, but the player limiting design of this new iteration just let me down.
It has a feeling of "just one more turn" for a little while, until you get into all the ways the game limits your gameplay and playstyle. The game does a horrible job of telling you everything that will be wasted when you move to a new age. Yet at the same time it feels like there are constant popups to tell you how things are supposed to work.

It tells you you'll keep "some" of your units at the beginning of a new age. Super frustrating for a militaristic approach as you're "starting over again". I don't know what the designers were thinking with this. If I wanted to start over I'd start a new game. Additionally, the settlement cap is just atrocious. Why would I ever want to play a militaristic and expansionist civilization when I'm capped at 5 towns? Was this just a crutch for bad AI or something?

Also, at the beginning of a new age all of your cities suddenly revert back to settlements? It tells you this 1 turn before the age turns... Right after you may have sunk 2-3000 gold upgrading towns to cities. It's really just a frustrating experience.

And don't get me started on the UI. Assigning resources to towns/cities is like they asked a coder to do it without consulting any UI/UX people.

I've experienced only 1 crash in 9 hours, so that's something.

I'm super bummed that I spent the money on this and I'll probably only play it this once (assuming I even finish this first game). There's just no way to know how frustrating it is in less than 2 hours. Shame on the product manager who redesigned what was a tried and true approach. Back to Civ VI.

This is more like a choose your own adventure episode of star trek that takes place shortly after the Next Generation movie era. While there are a handful of first person control elements, the majority of the "game" is choosing dialog options and living with the consequences. There are consequences for some choices, but not all. Overall it feels like Star Trek, but it is not a shoot-em-up ship or away team simulator. It took me about 12 hours complete the game.

Wait until they do some major patches. Performance is horrible at launch for a $70 AAA title on very decent hardware.
I requested a refund. I may revisit it again after they get their sh-- together. Definitely not worth $70 at this point.

The videos look fun and silly. And that's about it. Otherwise it's a little fun to configure and build your vehicle + trailer. But once you have something in working order, it just becomes a boring drive/slog to the next location with fuel. I got about 20 hrs out of this game. For $10, that's 2hrs/dollar spent which isn't too bad. Just don't expect anything more once you figure out the mechanics.

Motion Sickness - I want to like this game, but I can't play it for long without getting a headache. I've turned off motion blur, lowered FOV, but it doesn't help. The implementation of the camera with head bob/sway, taking it over for motions, and the way they have it whip around in cut scenes is just disorienting.
I got this to play multiplayer with a friend who loved DL1, but I'm not sure I can stick with it.

It's a basic survival game that is quite a bit of fun. Enemies aren't too bad to deal with, but you do need to be vigilant as you'll lose your inventory if playing on Normal mode or Hard.

I want to like this game. I bought it a week or two before the 1.0 update. The 1.0 update gameplay would be fine if it worked. Career mode missions just stop working when reloading saves. It's been an issue since the 1.0 launch. To the devs' credit, they've launched lots of fixes, including readding classic career. What good is that if players can't continue missions!? Ridiculous.

I'm on my 6th restart trying to make this work. I don't want to just play creative mode as so many longtime players have suggested. I need missions to keep me interested and progressing my builds to meet mission requirements. If it wasn't weeks ago since I bought thinking the devs would get this fixed, I'd probably refund. Seriously bad development prioritization for fixes.

Review Edit: I've played this for almost a week now. It's a great game! Challenging and just complicated enough. After I moved to the public beta channel and found the additional features there are great. There are also additional comms audio from wingmen that helps a bit, though still some polish is needed. In many ways comms almost sound too clear..

Enabling voice commands is super immersive. Requesting taxi and takeoff, landing, etc. all by voice is fantastic. Some polishing is needed but there's such potential here.

I had trouble with Mission 7 bogging down my FPS in my Oculus. Folks were super helpful in trying to help me smooth it out by bypassing Steam VR. There seemed to be a graphics tradeoff in doing so, but it was worth it.

Also, I've found the community and developer on their discord server are both super engaged and helpful.

In summary, buy this game if you like flight sims, combat flight, some systems complexity but don't want to spend forever learning systems like in DCS.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
So I bought this game yesterday. 6 hours later I still want to get back in and fly. It is a lot of fun and feels really right. It strikes a balance between complexity and accessibility. I have played a little DCS in VR and it didn't feel nearly as "right", ie. with VR interactions in the cockpit that are so natural.

It's still early access, so it's not polished. But the gameplay is great. At this point, the only things that bother me:
* updated comms audio from wingmen (the comms sound like the developer did it at his desk, not horrible, but not polished either).
* updated terrain graphics - these are so simple it's almost out of Windows 98 Flight Sim. The cockpit and interactions feel nice, but outside the cockpit is pretty simple. I know there are performance tradeoffs, so I don't know how far they can take this.
* mutiplayer - oh my yes. Coop missions, head to head team dogfights. Open world... So much potential here!

Definitely worth picking this up even now. And hop on the public beta test to get newer features sooner (at risk of more bugs)!

I really enjoyed this for a playthrough. It was engaging and immersive. Particularly fun with friends and felt "safer". But solo is a lot of fun as well.

I bought this game Early Access in 2016. It was interesting, but it needed a lot of work. Hence Early Access. I picked it back up recently to see how far it had come. Answer: Not far.

Pros:
- The ship to ship battles are really fun. Gives the feeling of sailing and fighting the tall ships.
- Crafting and player economy is interesting, if only they'd lock it down and quit changing it.
- When I first played in 2016, port battles were fantastically fun. I haven't been able to play any yet in 2018 due to the Cons...
- There are some very nice/mature players in the game.

Cons:
- This game is NOT for a casual gamer on the PVP server. It is only for hardcore players. In its current state, you MUST join a clan to survive and progress.
- You have to grind battles with NPC's to level up and get money to buy ships and materials. This is fun, until you are jumped by PVP players in supposedly safe waters and immediately outgunned and killed. Rinse and repeat. Spend a day grinding to get a ship and outfit it, only to lose it getting jumped when supposedly safe. This is NOT fun.
- Ships used to have a concept of Durability where each ship had up to 5 "lives". It wasn't as big of a deal to to lose one and encouraged PVP. Now it's permadeath. If you don't have a few hundred thousand gold to replace it, you start over again in a basic cutter. and again, and again... Devs should consider bringing this back OR bringing in some form of ship insurance.
- Early Access DLC - The only way to get out of the above cycle is to buy a DLC ship. (What Early Access game is already selling DLC when the core game isn't near being finished????) With this mechanic, you buy the DLC ship and get a new one every single day. The ships are very strong and basically you HAVE to pay for this to be at all competitive as a solo PVP player. What was that original game cost for??? Pay the devs more if you want to actually have fun in the game. No open world game should require DLC to be competitive. Ridiculous.
- I was appalled to find the UI just as horrendous as it was with a UI patch "coming soon".
- Don't let the high hours of anyone playing this game fool you, half of the hours are AFK sailing to far away ports just to get to a battle or make a trade run to try to make money. It's not actual gameplay.
- Port Battles - you can't participate in any of these unless you have a large ship and have major money to replace it. Lower level players can only participate with a Mortar brig. However, I couldn't play any this time around having lost everything to PVP gankers in supposedly safe waters.
- Declining playerbase. This game had thousands on when I played previously. Now 400 players is a lot and only during peak times. There used to be multiple PVP servers, today there's just one PVP server and one PVE server.
- Toxic players - while there are many mature players, there are just as many toxic people in the community. Guess that's par for the course these days.

I so want to enjoy this game, but in it's current state I just can't. It's just disappointing. Casual players can only progress on the PVE server, or through paying extra for the DLC ships. You've been warned.