Recent reviews by airbat

Eh.

This is difficult.

SotS I is my favourite game ever, only rivaled by KSP. The amount of potential in SotS II is just amazing and I've put over 600 hours into it, but there's just too many darn issues with it.

To start off with the good stuff - a lot of the ideas in the game are just perfect for a sequel. I absolutely love the attribute mechanic - best idea ever and perfectly in the spirit of random techs and traits. Armor is done nicely and so are critical hits. I think the expanded tech tree is very interesting and very fun to dig into. Progressing into new techs feels great even if you know all of them by heart already and the prototype system makes you feel the cost of bleeding edge. There's enough options in ships, sections and weapons to satisfy anyone. The factions all still have a completely different feel and the graphics are decent even in 2020.

I don't mind the admiral and fleet mechanics - it's very unintuitive at first, but you can get used to it. A lot of people think it difficult to get a hang of though or just find it plain annoying. It does slow down the game quite a bit - you need to establish more bases before venturing forth, ships need to resupply and so on. Everything takes more turns.

Solar systems are cool, battle riders are fun, system defense boats are a great idea... well, you get my drift.

At first things run rather well, but you quickly get hit with annoying bits. Balance is off in such a way that a few ships can face off against an opposing fleet and neither fleet will be able to actually destroy even a single ship in an engagement. One ship definitely can't destroy another ship within the battle time limit 1v1. This is very annoying. Boarding is way OP on the other hand as you start with boarding pods but no PD. Then there's the missing sounds or voiceovers for some races and commands. And the extremely monotonous music in the background - if any at all, depends on the race. Piracy goes way overboard at the beginning - pirates have fleets larger than some empires.

There's a lot of other minor issues regarding balance, but those are not even close to the main problem, which is that the game gets progressively slower as empires expand and the amount of data increases. And it's not just turn times that are getting slower - going into a menu is much slower in a large, late game than in early game. Basically, all your clicks and actions demand more and more time as you progress. At 500 turns in in a medium-large galaxy it takes multiple minutes for the turn to process (with no visible battles even - on a decent rig) and all you can do is sit and wait for the processing to finish. This just makes the experience more and more exhausting and boring as you near the late game - which is where a lot of the fun is, as the research rate skyrockets.

The game just actively wastes your time. And then there's the crashes. For me, there's 4 main points where I've got crashes or eternal freezes:
- When the first battle after a turn is supposed to start - usually loading takes seconds, but sometimes it just never starts
- When a battle finishes - sometimes the same happens - this is the most frustrating thing in the world - if you're in the 6th battle of 7 and you suddenly realize you'll have to repeat all of them.
- When you click diplomatic things with an independent - just avoid at all costs, crashes randomly, but often. Only accepting things civilian colonies propose works.
- When you click quit in the main menu. Exception : Pure virtual function call, cheers. Obviously not much of a bother.

And that's about it... I still absolutely love Kerberos and SotS. If I bump into a billion $ I'll totally get a SotS3 made.

That said, there's just way too many problems for me to recommend the game with a clear conscience.

The game's good and quite fun. As many others have pointed out, there's not quite the level of enjoyment of railroad tycoon, but good nevertheless - and with better visuals. Route planning is actually better. The city growing mechanic is awesome, track laying is easy and intuitive. A lot of things are actually very intuitive with this game.

Annoyances? Well, signals are brok... uh, I guess that would be unfair. Train pathing is broken. This results in trains waiting for no reason and not being able to choose a free platform on a multi-platform station even if there is one and signals are set up properly. They are also unable to choose a longer route over a shorter one. This is manageable for a smallish set of trains, as you can focus on one-way tracks and manually reroute every train to this or that platform, but good luck doing that with 100+ trains. Due to that, sometimes the game becomes a chore.

Most of the maps available in the game are actually paid DLC, which is kinda toxic.

Also, this might just be me, but the game "feels" somewhat simplified and geared towards people with not a lot of gaming experience. There's a lot of tutorials and so on (which you can fortunately turn off), limited depth, and your 'competitors' are rather annoying with their constant whining and pointing out things you know - which you can't specifically turn off.

And whoever figured that it's a good idea to have a dude talking at you randomly while you're trying to figure out your company name - should be hit over the head with a stick.

As you can see, I complain a lot - but the game is quite enjoyable - would recommend!

First time I played this I forgot to go to sleep.

The mood can be gloomy, almost everyone else is dead after all. Your decisions matter and they can be tough calls. There's a constant stream of problems coming your way whatever you do, keeping you on edge all the time (well, unless you play on easy or something). I thoroughly enjoy the immersion, the mood, t he constant threat hanging over your head and the visuals, which might not be 4k 3d eye candy, but are amazingly fit-for-purpose.

Also, such a nice departure from square-grid city building! This should be done more. And there's nothing quite like seeing the city you've built after you know that it can survive just about anything!

Oh, and one more thing - the updates. It's been quite some time since release and they just keep coming. Kudos for that, great job, devs!

This game is incredibly underappreciated. It's got a great story going - all the characters have depth, backgrounds, characters and backstories that make sense. The lead hero is an interesting blend of decency and darkness. And sexiness. yeah, that too. She's not there to save the world - quite the contrary.

There is enough story in the game for a proper movie - and you can experience the character's growth or descent first hand. The cutscenes have wonderful visuals, as does the game itself. I can't stress enough just how much high quality content there is in this game.

Besides the beautiful world, there's also quite a bit of interesting battle mechanics there - and it's different for every character. If you enjoy learning through your entire playthrough, well, you're looking at the right title.

The single gripe I have with the game is that battles with very underpowered enemies can be a bit of a drag - to a somewhat lesser degree than in the FF series, but still. This does go away eventually - after you get the hoverboard.

Yes, there's a hoverboard. Cheers!

The game of waiting for animations to finish. Thought I'd get that out of the way...

A friend recommended this game to me. Bought it and am not disappointed. The game plays a bit like a cross between Civ and Fallen Enchantress.

The good:
There's a lot of things to like, starting with the tech tree, which allows you to make choices instead of forcing you to research everything to advance. This makes for a very nice feeling of customization. The stories, events and narration are nice and enjoyable. Unit design and hero equipment is pretty fun with a lot of different possibilities. There are few main faction units, but at least they are fairly unique. Each faction also has some unique mechanic, which makes things interesting (magic, pillars, holy resources etc.) . The existence of minor factions, their assimilation and own units is an absolutely awesome concept. I also like the luxury resource boost mechanic quite a lot.

The not so good:
- Well... not a lot of core units.
- Few factions, and of those available, some are just copy-paste factions with no differences gameplaywise.
- Battles near huge endgame cities create issues on the lines of which-army-can-reinforce-which-battle.
- Bugs with army positioning if you're attacking a large enemy city in a region that's not next to your lands : you can, for -example, get just 1 hex of your colour in the battle where your 8 unit army should spawn, effectively spawning 1 unit per turn.
- Squad damage does not scale with unit loss. If you have 1 marine remaining out of 5, the squad's damage is the same.
- Units tend to do dumb things if they can't execute their orders exactly.
- The game's a bit rough on the edges: can't select or give orders to multiple units, queuing orders is very limited, some actions not assignable to hotkeys etc.

And, most of all: you have to spend a lot of time just waiting for animations to finish. By the 5th playthrough you really want to speed things up a bit. There is an animation speed setting, but it is not as useful as it sounds. Even though it speeds up the animations themselves, it does nothing to the pauses between animations during battle etc., which remain needlesly long and you can't do anything about it. This makes a lot of battles tedious.

But, all that said : I do recommend the game. It's a very nice game for the price. Quite good, quite addictive.

Lots and lots of amazing events, great storytelling, an entire world of myths and wonder to discover. And many, many other nice things. A compelling resource and crafting system. Good music. Replayability and unlockable gods. Multiple paths to victory. World changing decisions. A hundred ways to screw you over.

Also, rats marrying demons!

If you liked the Witcher, fancy running a village in a similar, yet even darker world?

Well here's your chance.

I like the game. It does most of the things you'd expect, has likable characters, airships, magic and quite a lot of nice and touching moments. And funny ones too. The art is good and the soundtrack even more so! Would recommend to friends.

That said, the game's sorta oldschool. You don't get much in terms of "refinements" or "annoyance removers" such as, say, aniimation cancelling when picking up stuff with an animation (iron etc.) and there's no map or minimap.

Battles are so-so, but they can be buggy sometimes (enemies using attacks with no name or visual effect, for example). There is no 'sense', you just guess what sort of magic might be useful most of the time.

It's also somewhat short. While the story's enjoyable, it feels like there hasn't been enough time for detailed chara-devel and story-devel. Some tips are somewhat misleading (like apples - they don't change your class. They upgrade it etc. ).

But enough of that. Game's definitely worth getting if you want to play a short, nice, steampunk-ish RPG :)

Pretty good game overall. Somewhere in the middle between GalCiv (strategic, planet management), Sword of the Stars (combat depth with some physics) and MoO (ship design and management on MoO2 level). All in all, I'd say - It is very fun. Has a lot of small, nice events that add up to the general gameplay too. Tactical combat is interesting enough with ship design being amazingly fun.

That said, it has a little bit more bugs than you'd expect, and of a sort you'd not expect. Most notably:
- Fast fleets tend to overshoot their destinations - and then try to get back and overshoot again. This circus can for last a few turns if you're unlucky.
- You can't enter the purple wormhole right after researching it. Need to wait for a new one to spawn. And then to not overshoot it ;-)
- Very rarely, but sometimes you control the wrong ground force during ground combat.
- Very rarely, (happened to me only in corvette-only fights) forces refuse to engage and you do not seem to have control over any of the ships.
- Leaders appear so rarely that it's entirely possible to have a complete playthrough without ever encountering one
- A lot of the weapons are not really much of an improvement over their predecessors - effective dps seems similar.
- Auto resolving battles kills ships that would have not a single chance in hell of dying had the battle actually taken place.

I would also be happy with a bit more documentation on weapons while placing them in the shipyard. It's not trivial to remember at first which weapon is 'beam', which a 'particle beam' etc, and if installing, say, a particle capacitor makes sense for one.

The game's also a bit too easy. I have not lost a single game ever - even the new brutal modes seem to only give the AI more resources, but don't really make it any scarier. I think you can safely ignore any difficulty below 'hard' even on your first playthrough.

All that aside - I would recommend to friends. Which I am hereby doing. Cheers!

Definition of a garbage console port. There is a story behind it, but it does not change the fact that you should not buy it on a PC unless you know what you're doing. Controls are awful, the tutorial and hints are not even updated for pc users.

Now don't get me wrong - the game itself is pretty good if you play it on a console. Just don't waste your money on the pc version.

Not convinced? Let me leave you with this:
I have 10 friends who have this game on steam. One of them has managed to play > 50 hours. 8 out of 10 gave up after 2-3 hours. One was stubborn and got to 9.2 hours. I think you get the picture!

Cheers :-)

I've played EBP IV and all the previous parts on newgrounds - and had tons of fun! The game's truly epic and pretty punny, well worth the money.