Recent reviews by Lucent

Miserably difficult. Exploration and experimentation are constantly punished. Logs of new discoveries that provide zero information. Frustratingly difficult to assess positives and negatives of new equipment. Combining spells provide no feedback for why things don't behave as expected. Basically a game you must play with the wiki open. I am not masochistic enough to enjoy this. Regretful purchase.

Played only on multiplayer. Most of it as not the host. From this experience this game is a miserably bug ridden disaster. Doors don't open, quests often don't progress forcing restarts constantly. Key items can't be upgraded.

Aside from that, this game is an utter failure of world building, absolutely stupid quests and story. In nearly every respect this game is far worse than the first game. You could get black out drunk on a drinking game based on Aiden getting punched in the face to end a cut scene and start a fight.

I finally finished the game and I spent the vast majority of it frustrated with my experience. The positive reviews of this game don't match my experience in the slightest. I wonder what game they were playing.

An interesting premise that I may have tried somewhere else before in a similar style game I can't recall off the top of my head. Its a bare bones of a cult simulator. Light story elements, and light game play elements.

To start with, you're always at a severe disadvantage, by which i mean in almost every case you'll be losing points at every turn. so knowledge is incredibly key in how to play out the rounds to minimize the loss and survive to later rounds, but to get that knowledge fast enough requires gambling, which leads me to the biggest flaw. The randomness just sucks all the fun out of this.

Even if you survive the early ignorance rounds, you're stuck with how badly did you roll the random events for each season right from the start, then you're stuck with how badly did the traits get distributed, and then you're stuck with how fast did the negative afflictions spread crippling you even more on your limited choices. The answer is almost universally as poorly as possible and thus, the challenge feels cheap. There's very little to do to recover from bad early rounds. In fact if someone were to play this a lot I imagine it would quickly fall into the trap some games have of:

"Okay, if these several conditions aren't met by round 3, just reset because this is a lost cause."

I don't enjoy games that fall into that trap, I think its evidence of poor design.

After 4 rounds I barely improved, even after looking up some more information on the game to help me out. Maybe I gave up too soon, but I don't feel there's enough game here to bother myself rolling the dice over and over counting on luck rather than strategy to get me through to a later part.

Shallow mechanics all around. There was potentially an interesting game here, frequently ruined by randomly generated tactical maps that are boring, walking around simulations or frustrating grinds.

The map that finally broke my spirit started me in this tiny portion of the map where the majority of my heroes were body blocked from moving, and attempting to advance activated 6 enemies with ranged abilities or far to much hp for the one or two heroes i could use to damage through.

The strategy layer is devoid of any meaningful choices. There seem to be so many negative traits for heroes compared to positive ones I often feel like these heroic bloodlines were inbred disasters long before I got put in charge.

I've got hundreds of hours into tactical games and I'm always looking for new ones to scratch my xcom itch. There is a tactical game here, but its not a great one.

I wanted to balance out the crazy amount of positive reviews with something a little more balanced, albeit frustrated. This game is at best, okay. There are some really decent game play pieces here that just largely go under utilized, or so poorly balanced even though fun, feel like a total waste of time.

There is a huge amount of repetition right from the start, typical of these space merc games admittedly, but this is worse than most simply because of the lack of any variety. There's only so many times you can read the same quest text about someone's wife recently dying so they can't pay you more before it starts to feel ridiculous. I have no idea if this is some inside joke or just a genuinely bad random mission generator text. The reason I mention in joke possibilities is because the game is full of them of which I have absolutely no knowledge of.

So, all of the random missions are basically the same, and they don't in the slightest pay for the annoyance of doing them. Destroying debris outside of space stations is supposed to award 250 credits but usually awards just shy of 1k. Also you can get decent paying missions to complete just to clear junk. But it makes it clear pretty fast that whats happening is that junk is stacked up oddly, so you shoot 1 junk, get credits and quest credit for 3-4. You want the best ship in the game, get the fastest cheapest ship and go blow up junk for 2 hours, congratulations, you broke the game.

So, there is a story which is nice, but its just random jobs, often of obnoxious fedexing things back and forth. A couple times random mini games are introduced and never seen again, which seems a shame because at least that was variety for 20 seconds. My favorite part of the story was when I'd gotten myself a nice big beefy ship and the story quest forced me into one of three chosen ones of only modest quality, forcing me to go fly somewhere else, to repurchase the ship i had just bought at a loss. The story doesn't advance nearly fast enough to keep up with the simple progression of doing a few debris clearing sweeps. The pay ends up feeling insulting, the tasks boring, and then sometimes just massively annoyingly inconvenient for no reason except, if I was feeling really generous, humor.

Combat is, okay. There are a lot of upgrades to your ship, except all the guns are basically the same, missiles are expensive and you can't upgrade the durability of your ship at all. The first ship you get has the same shields as the last ship you'll get. So fighting more than 2 or 3 ship is basically gonna be a big risk of getting wrecked. The one beam weapon in the game felt so unbelievably strong next to any other gun in the game I basically never changed it. The range doesn't matter because enemies have the inexplicable ability to teleport right next to you anytime they seem to want.

Salvaging is fun at first, but falls off so hard in its time to reward ratio that its kind of a waste. Mining on the other hand is painful at first, then becomes by far the easiest way to make cash, aside from the broken debris clearing anyway.

Now that's all the stuff that's okay. The bad stuff largely concern the navigation mechanics. An absolutely indecipherable radar system, and multiple awkward key presses for system and "galaxy" maps are very frustrating. Fuel is a huge pain, that becomes just a non issue as soon as you get a fuel scoop. You can barely upgrade your fuel efficiency so it exists merely as a gate keeping time sink. The nebula exists as an obstacle only as a means of extreme inconvenience. It holds no navigational, strategic or anything of value, it is a stupid time sink for no reason. If exploring it provided any sense of value or reward, I wouldn't mind.

Trying to track loose floating cargo is impossible.

Dropping way points, called buoys, is a one and done. So find a wormhole, yay, fast travel. Except you can't mark it in anyway except with a buoy you can only carry one of at a time, and that you can't rename as far as I could tell. So if you want to mark both ends, you'll need to dock, fly back to the unmarked wormhole and drop another buoy with some generic system name. Also, buoys are basically invisible on the system map.

Get it on a steep sale, give it a try. I finished it, grudgingly, but this is also my favorite genre, I can't get enough space merc sims. And I do feel guilty ripping up someone's labor of love, it just doesn't excuse some poor choices that unforgivably damage what was almost a really good indy game.

This game has so many overwhelmingly great reviews. On paper this game should be exactly the kind of thing I enjoy. And I've tried to play it multiple times, and at no point do I ever seem to have fun. Playing solo, playing with a friend, it just doesn't seem to matter. I pretty much hate this game. Admittedly this review is entirely on the vanilla version. I'm gonna see if mods help it play better for my tastes, but in the end when I already dislike a game this much I'm not sure I have any interest in making that a priority.

The default keybindings are incredibly obnoxious. You can change them, theoretically, if you feel like spending a great deal of time trying to remap them.

Build all the things, but run incredibly slowly around the map which requires you to build sprawl and sprawl and sprawl. If there's a way to increase the density of your building so it doesn't seem so tediously huge, I didn't get that far. By the way you can run across somethings, and you cannot run across others. Build compact and find yourself running even farther around.

Realism for thee but not for me. So things need power, except for the things that don't need power. It sometimes makes sense, and often times doesn't make sense, but that's cool, after all quality of life obviously stops short of actual fun.

I hope you enjoy trying to figure out the warning sounds. A small icon appears and tells you things got destroyed. Run over to the spot, and find it buried in bug corpses. Can you actually see what was broken? Can you figure out in the tiny barely differentiated buildings what tiny piece caused your factory to grind to a halt? Can you find your backpack when it gets buried under corpses? Nope.

Blueprints! Download other people's hard work. Don't bother planning at all, just find something that works and copy and paste the buildings in the right spot. This simultaneously makes the game playable and completely pointless. Whats the fun of copy and pasting over someone else's design? Whats the point of trying to lay out a factory that is so annoyingly irritating to do by hand?

Uggh. Feels like a terrible waste of money.