Recent reviews by Waffle

Looks and plays very well.
Variation in weapons is pretty decent.
Have not run into any technical issues.

Situational readability can be challenging in some intense moments.

It's pretty good.
Allows you to throw around massive deathball armies like nothing else.
Better than SupCom2.

Pretty good puzzle platformer.

The subtly changing world each reset is probably the stand out feature. The changing worlds are also quite nicely done, the effects are pretty distinct and they get swapped out every few levels to keep it fresh.
The main difficulty comes from keeping track of 2 ever changing worlds and parkour that needs perfrectly timed world swaps at places.

Personally not a big fan of the ... world that supposedly does nothing. But that's probably just because I don't like effects that change controls.

Strong reccommend.

The controls are intuitive and responsive. Game feel is very good.
Art is clean and very cute.
No technical issues encountered so far.
Difficulty progression is good.
Has lore hidden away if you do the optional challeges.

There's a nice game here.. somewhere. It's just hard / tedious to get into. A bit too tedius really.

Important note: This review is written shortly before 4.0, so may warrant an update soon.

The UI can be unintuitive at times. (How long it took me to figure out how to merge fleets is just embarrassing)

Information about what some start actually does and what influences it can be hard ot come by. (What feeds into colony stability? any deficit? crime? defence armies? assult armies?. How to i get a good overview of all my trade routes, not just 1 station related stuff? Pirate spawns, what can you do to prevent them that actually works? stations? do I need one in every system for it to work? or in trade-protection range? does any random ship work for deterrence? will they just spawn randomly?)

Managing land armies is a pain in the ass. It all boils down to comparing numbers anyway, but it takes so much fiddly busiwork that adds little.

Wargoals and peace are ... poorly done frankly. You can steamroll some city state controll all of their territory. but still be forced to settle for white peace (reset territory to pre war state and gain nothing) because you didn't invade 1 planet. If a stray colony revolts and breaks off they are immortal for 10 years. Maybe an experienced player would be used to playing aorund this, but for a new player it's just a "WTF wasted like 30 minutes for nothing, and now have to wait out a timer before i can try again?"

Tried a federation game. Basically pointless, it takes away most of what little control you still had and gives little in return. (or maybe its worthwhile, but the game just fails to communicate the worth of this at all?)

The natural affinity is to play wide and capture as much land as possible. This is inherently neither good nor bad. But they want to make tall playstyles also viable, and much of what has been done to facilitate this just makes the game annoying. All sorts of arbitrary restrictions and debuffs for being successful.

Achievements only work on ironman mode aka NO SAVING. Oh but even on fastest speed games take many hours, I'm sure this wont be a problem.

There is a lot of notification spam. Every little thing is a popup you have to stop and deal with. Many pause the game for you. Items such as "random empires you have never heard about did something" are as important as a scientist doing an expendition or a research finishing. There are thousands of popups each game. By the half way mark i can barely even be bothered to read the lore snippets, I just want to play the game but have to read a book in stead.

Management of pops and planets is neat in principle, but gets very tedious very quickly. Some of this looks to change in 4.0 so i will not elaborate further.

With the price, mind the long list of DLC where most new stuff seems to have migrated to, it's just a bit too hard to recommend right now.

Weak recommend.

Its neat, but not as good as the original. Still probably worth it at the sorts of discounts it's been getting.

Theres a really big probolem: You have to pay resources upfront for everything. This does not sound bad on the face of it, but what this really means is that you issue a build order and it can sit in some hidden queue for 30 minutes/ unknown indeterminate time. Not quite how that queue works, but getting stuff you need done ASAP prioritised is a royal pain.
In Supreme commander 1 overdrawing on resources would slow down production, but you could still estimate when stuff got done and re-prioritize when neccessary.

Because its hard to estimate when anything gets done unless you float resources the default solution to everything is... turtle up, build deathball.. attack move, then force attack enemy commander. In the campaign, works 100% of the time.

Another problem is unit control. Pathfinding is not the best, Also units can wait around for reasons such as .. 1 unit is stlightly out of formation so eveybody must say perfectly still. Really messes with use of waypoints as your army randomly stops for long periods of time to reform a a different angle.

There is a unit cap. It looks like buildings also count, not just stuff that moves.
In large part the allure of Supreme Commander is the massive unit groups you can order around on a massive arena. Now feels like everything has been scaled back to a "sensible" scale. fewer units, less extreme experimental units.
Because there are fewer units you notice more how sluggish the unit control can be.

Nice traditional tower defence, aged better than some others.

When there are differences in elevation it is sometimes not clear which tiles a tower can hit. For a tower defence this is a major problem.

It's very good.

It's very nice.

The story fights are a decent challenge (for a noob like me, even on normal) and have decent variety.
Cute and pretty. No bugs so far, Story mainly an excuse to set up fights, but comes with cute lore bits,

Playable on kb + m, but much better with a controller. (This is also a fancy way of saying i'm annoyed by the default KB keymap and could not come up with something better. Keybinds are configurable.)
Mostly played with an XBox controller. Worked pretty much perfectly, but still shows PS button icons.

Its good.

The presentation is fun and cheerful.
The combat mechanics are good.
The artwork is very nice, both the pixel art and the high resolution assets.

Almost everything is top tier.
Except the keyboard controls are slightly annoying.
And I've seen like one minor bug (enemy attach somehow stopped mid sequence that one time).