Recent reviews by ping_freud

It just has that special something, I can't wait to see more. Big maps are really exhausting to keep track of, and the build options could be less click heavy (give me all on one screen!) but I love it. Production values and music etc. are top notch. Any fans of the Heroes of Might and Magic series will be IN HEAVEN.

Amazing how solid this game is, and how painful the class choices are as they are all so tempting. Screw procedural level generation, this is hand-crafted.

A stunner in both technology and gameplay; hard to believe they worked on this for so long and didn't manage to lose the thread. Arcade mode is just the perfect capper to a polished and solid single-player experience, something that so many other AAA games have abandoned or throw in as a half-hearted effort.

I hate that "No" thumbs-down attached to this review - it just should not be. This should have been an amazing game, one that put the juice back into a very played-out genre. Yet after months of playing through the buggy pre-release versions, I don't see a polished, finished game here; just one dumped out the door. The frame rates are bad, the controls still awkward; working with orbital platforms and enemies is just painful, and yet that is the CORE of the multi-planet concept.

The lack of true "races" and the fact that everone has the same generic units make it just a game about optimizing build times, nothing more. I just put a flag in the enemy base and crank out units until the lights go out; I don't even bother with strategy or base-building or anything like that; just make a ton of units and wear them down. This should NOT work as a strategy, but the units are so incredibly fragile that if you make large mass armies and walk them over to the enemy, they get decimated in just a few seconds - it is actually better to trickle them in and keep them scattered apart. Auto-generated terrain means no using the map to your advantage, leaving each planet feeling totally generic.

The true endgame, crashing a planet into another one, is never worth getting to... It is the literal depiction of an anticlimax.

Nifty pixel graphics, smooth and swift Gauntlet gameplay, fun enemies... and dull, dull level design, really the downfall of the game. Almost no save points to be found, and shops and ways to enhance your character are very, very far apart. If you can get three other players, the game is suddenly fun, but as a solo game it is very dull, and unfortunately the servers are almost always empty.