Recent reviews by Bellatrix

This is the rare, challenging kind of citybuilder where it's not made to make you lose, and you can achieve a stable state, yet you'll probably lose on your first few attempts. Kind of like Dwarf Fortress.

But what I find really fun is that you don't necessarily death-spiral in this game. You can go through multiple disastrous situations and emerge unscathed.
My first stable town in this game in its first year faced constant revolts, famine, a lack of money to pay anyone, and invasions on the verged of overrunning the place. Usually multiple of those things at once. But it still managed to pull through after nearly a year of hardship!

I think the reason you can damage-control so well in this game is the very mechanic that makes the game feel so challenging: Your player-character.
Perfectly managing everything is impossible without the omniscient view other strategy games give you. But avoiding collapse is easier when you've got a do-it-all princess to control, who can run around putting out fires (both metaphorically and literally).

The fact that you're controlling a mining vehicle stops feeling like an important part of the game after an hour or two, since the incremental aspects of the game take front-stage and it becomes all about making numbers go up.
Early-game, you have to actually be tactical about how you mine if you want to be efficient.
But after that, the optimal approach is to either immediately punch through to the core of the planet to prestige, or come back later with more upgrades if the planet puts up more than an ounce of resistance.

The biggest thing holding this game back is that the difficulty is inversely proportional to how well you're doing.
Get hit less, and the game gives you more health, better guns, and more ammo.
So, the game is either boringly easy or impossibly difficult. It can never ride that line of feeling like a fair challenge.

Programming is simply not effective in this game about programming. Don't be mistaken, this is an idle game first and foremost.

I wrote a virus that could quickly spread across the entire computer network and deploy much more efficient code to hack computers, but there's only like 30 computers in the network, it would have been 10x faster to just hack the computers manually.
And even with the entire computer network infected, you get barely any processing power. Most of what you can get comes from purchasable servers.
Really, there's no interesting programming problems to tackle, no reward for clever programming, and constantly making the player wait for numbers to go up.

This game has potential, but it's constantly thwarting itself with terrible game design choices, and as updates have stopped that'll never be fixed.

Logic parts are necessary for building anything interesting. But they'll make a drone vastly bulkier and more expensive, because all parts cost the same to deploy and for some reason a single logic gate is twice as big as most parts.
Even just optimising a drone's steering to use pivoting thruster blocks required 6 logic gates, which added a huge amount of bulk to what would be a neat, sleek design.

You can't build anything cool when you start the campaign, because you're given the bare minimum.
Also, for some reason the campaign rushes you along unnecessarily, it's pretty much the same exploration rules as FTL but very badly misapplied.

The gameplay loop is so boring that I wanted to stop after just a couple of missions that were only a few minutes long (almost all of my time played is in the editor), the missions you're given are very boring and also you're encouraged to spend ages mining since it's a roguelite, and one thing that's always true about roguelites is that if you don't get as many resources as possible early on you're gonna have compounding issues later on.

Comparable to Portal 1 in terms of difficulty, length, and novelty.
So, it's a memorable experience, although it is a fairly steep price to pay for a game with low replayability.

Crashes so often that it'd be fair to call this game "barely playable".

If you're someone whose main problem with Portal 2 and Portal Stories: Mel was the lack of actual puzzles in favour of just roaming around using a portal gun, then this should make up for the puzzling you missed out on, as it's simply a pack of 25 exceptionally interesting and high quality test chambers.

A good RPG, but a downgrade from the 2002 original.
Worse graphics, missing features, and abilities and items are all watered down so you barely notice the difference they make.
Also vastly more difficult. Which is one reason you might choose to play this instead of the 2002 game, for the challenge.
And last but not least, the way level factors into combat difficulty feels awful, because it creates a huge dexterity difference. If you're slightly underlevelled for an area, enemies take first action and wreck you immediately and you struggle to land hits on them. If you're slightly overlevelled for an area, it's the same but the other way around.
If you want a fun time, play the 2002 game. If you want a hard time, play this game.

I've given this a positive review because it's a good RPG, I'm not going to give it a negative review because a better version of this RPG exists. But my point is, a better version of this RPG exists, play that instead. It's not on Steam though.

Also, when I say the graphics are worse, I mean two things:
-The game contains fewer character/enemy sprites. There's many cases in this game where several enemies will share the same sprite, perhaps with a difference in tint.
-The sprites are worse. Everything looks blobbier and duller in this game, compared to the crisp and bold graphics of the 2002 game.
-The sprites are uninspired. Original demon? Looked like a hunk of black muscle with red crab claws and a horned, pointed head. New demon? Vague humanoid figure.
-The sprites have boring poses and attack animations. Sure, the original sprites only had a single frame of animation for their attacks, but it was a good frame.

Honk honk honk honk, honk honk honk.
Honk honk honk honk honk honk; honk honk, honk honk honk honk
Honk honk honk, honk/honk.