Recent reviews by gajop

Full disclosure: While I don't consider Zero-K to be something I've made, I have contributed to this project (in engine & lobby), so keep that in mind as you read my review.

This is an Open Source game that doesn't use the Open Source tag as an excuse for poor quality. The devs have put considerable effort into making sure players (especially new players) enjoy the game. The game was fun to play for years now, yet it wasn't released on Steam because it wasn't polished enough. Now it is. Enjoy.

The game still holds my interest, despite spending thousands of hours on it, most likely due to the many types of units and strategies, as well as continuous development devs put into it. It is rare to see games with so many units that are all somewhat mechanically different and balanced, without just being reskins of a single unit.

Now as I mentioned in the beginning, this is an Open Source game. It is not only free as in beer, which it really is - there is no sense of pay2win here, you can't even buy hats (at least not at the time of this writing) - it is also free as in speech. The source code is publicly available, you can download it, learn from it, modify it, even make new games from it.

Developers are players (not just as a marketing slogan, they are some of the best players - I regularly get crushed by one of them), they participate in the community and listen to user feedback. I am honestly sometimes surprised how calmly they will respond to very hostile (quite arguably toxic) comments, as if they were robots - which I guess is a good personality trait for a robot game dev(?).

So to summarize, if you like RTS games, Open Source games, and generally games with good mechanics, I strongly recommend you give Zero-K a try.