Recent reviews by m3fallen

While the game itself is fun, right now I still cannot recommend it due to the following reasons:
- Very old looking graphics...
- but still insanely bad performance
- Just one save slot, not per character but per game
- Microtransactions for a 70€, pure singleplayer game

Currently, I recommend to wait for a few patches that solve performance and a few of the other known issues, as well as a sale for around 20% cheaper.

Real brings the lore to life, combat also feels much better than in Owlcat's other games.

A very chill game in all aspects. Just sit down and relax

The TL;DR: If you already have Stellaris, wait for fixes and further patches. If you do not have Stellaris yet and are a great Star Trek fan, it it ok to get for 30 bucks.


My experience, mostly from Federation play:

The good:
- It is looks very nice, really gives you a big Star Trek feeling. That is a really, really big plus, they did that so well.
- Besides that, it is a Stellaris fork. Automation actually works. It is slow, but hey - you could have done it yourself.
- Pirates are an actual menace. They appear from somewhere and I need to scramble to stop them. And no, they did not spawn somewhere, they simply came from where I could not see them
- Many, many small lore events and characters you know and love

The bad:
- There are a few ship weapons that are just plain better in all situations. Why even offer the others?
- While we are at ships, the auto generated ship designs are plain awful. MUCH worse then in Stellaris. It does not even use all the slots.
- The Federation has so many bonuses to not only diplomacy, but also growth and colonization that it actually plays like a rush faction. If the others do not contain the Federation early on, it will blob and snowball
- Planets on the other hand are too balanced. Every planet I saw had roughly the same amount of energy, mining and agriculture bonuses, making every planet as good as the other for most things
- While the design is really really great, the music is forgettable. Maybe it is not loud enough, even on full blast, but it seems just to be a boring, nice tune in the background all the time
- A few textures went missing sometimes, like 1 leader and a few checkbox marks
- In popups, a few important words are bold. But you cannot get any info about them. It should have a CK3 like tooltip mechanic or at least some ingame lexicon to check on those bolded words.
- There are a few bonuses to be on friendly terms with minor factions, but you can also annex them which is not only plain better but gives additional bonuses. Why even add a bonus for being on friendly terms if you never want to keep that state?

The ugly:
Many functional issues where I wonder how that came through the QA check. Hell, how that came through dev at all:
- The Federation somehow has 2 human species that are exactly the same
- It has 4 founder species but for some reason humans are not marked as a founder species
- The other 3 founder species all come from Earth...
- and the humans have an unknown home planet. Yes, really
- And the actual home planets of these races did not have the home world bonus
- The federation is only a federation in name, no senate or special events are happening
- When a minor faction gets annexed, they vanish (as a faction) from the game. So in the galactic tension screen you will have unknown factions suddenly
- While we are at it, you only see that a galactic tension happens and to whom, but not due to whom. Would be kinda nice to know who the baddies actually are
- Messages/Notifications are baaaaad: We cannot make our own breaks for e.g. research finished, and messages for construction finished? Appears only once, and has in title and text the same message: "Construction finished". Uh.... where? And what?
- The mission/focus tree. So far I only checked out the Federation one, and outside of the question if you like it in general or not, it has big issues. Mostly the pacing/triggers. E.g. the very first mission takes a few years at least, but after that you can have 3 or 4 missions in a row that are already done. On the other hand, I had a mission I could not trigger - because...
- It has the old TotalWar mechanic that when you are strong, you cannot do diplomacy well. There is a diplomatic malus for being strong. So I could no longer finish my mission to have 3 commercial contracts at the same time...
- Some story events cannot be fulfilled - e.g. I figured out the supernova early, and was told to build some sort of ship I did not have and could not research. Great. I was also asked to do a mission against the Borg queen, but I could not reach the location with my military ships, so the timed mission failed. GREAT. And when I reached the place, my fleet cannot attack the Borg cube for some reason. EVEN GREATER
- You cannot play a minor faction or add your own custom faction to the ring

One of the buggiest expansions yet. Worse, there are simple things missing - placeholder images, monument effects switched, federations breaking without DLC, abuse of the favor system, etc.

Do not buy until all of it is fixed. Definitely not worth 20 bucks in it current state.

D3 done right.

Now some days after the release, I could not see any big bug. The biggest bug I saw was a missing texture of a tree.

Positively suprised. Novel combination of cards and ARPG.