Recent reviews by Shade

I hate to say it but I cannot recammend this game, even though I'd love to as a fan of base builders. The game is just too tedious. It takes forever to gather resources, making base building slow and cumbersome; all the while you're being attacked by stronger and stronger waves. Some mission goals for resources are insanely high as well. Upgrading townhall from level 1-2 takes 150 wood. From 2-3 takes 600, in addition to stone, iron and money.

The timing on cutscenes is also really bad, to the point were I just started skipping all of them, even though there is come good comedy. Imagine you're having a conversation with someone but they only speak one sentence every 4-5 seconds but maintain eye contact with you the whole time.

The game's pacing needs serious work and now that it's 1.0 I doubt it will improve.

If you're a huge fan or wave games or base builders *maybe* give it a try, if it's on sale. If you're on the fence, don't waste your money. Good concept, poor execution.

A fantastic city builder with a lot of challenges and such an amazing atmosphere.

If you enjoy x-com than maybe you'll enjoy the game. Even if you don't you'll likely love it early on but many of its problems become apparent very quickly.

Pros:
Fun strategy game
Ability to stake out missions to learn enemy strength
Ability to position off-map support such as snipers, spotters etc
Cool team member abilities
Fun base building and ability to relocate your base
Agent heat management
Ability to capture, interrogate and recruit enemy agents. Coolest part is turning them into a sleeper agent and triggering them during a mission to give you an extra unit and take away from the enemy.

Cons:
Missions become repetitive very quickly
All missions are stealth missions or else
Once you're spotted, every enemy on the map becomes aware of you
Reinforcement timer (this is why I stopped playing)
Once an enemy base or agent is discovered your heat begins to rise, as if you finding them means that they found you.

So let's talk about the reinforcement timer. Once one of your team members is spotted a reinforcement timer will begin ticking down. Once it hits 0 a number of things can happen. Either new enemies will spawn somewhere on the map and begin hunting you down or CAS in the form of either missiles or an attack helicopter will be summoned. If your mission is to wipe out all the enemies on the map, each consecutive wave of reinforcements will add to that number. This means that you can potentially end a mission having to kill 20+ enemies when it started with only needing to kill 5.

Oh and if a civilian spots you than the reinforcement timer is triggered and all enemies are aware of you.

This timer wouldn't be so bad if it was a one and done, or even happened twice; but no, the timer will never stop. Once it is triggered reinforcements will arrive in endless waves. Where a covert enemy safe house is sourcing waves of troopers? Who knows; but they'll keep coming forever.

Because of this timer there is no such thing as starting a mission guns blazing which means that any gear which you cannot hide or might give away your position such as heavier guns or body armor is all but pointless in the game.

This means that ALL missions are stealth missions. And all stealth missions happen the same way. It makes the game become very dull and repetitive very quickly.

For these reasons, I would not recamend the game.

This game has a wonderful setting and story and for a big RPG fan like myself that is normally enough for a fantastic experience.

Unfortunately combat, even on the easiest setting, is like pulling teeth. Using the environment to your advantage is supposed to be an awesome mechanic but late game everything is cursed which hurts you but never your enemies. You can dispell it at great cost but it doesn't matter because the next time an enemy bleeds everything is cursed again. You constantly lose control of your party members to effects and when the AI controls your party it always does the dumbest possible thing.

To make things worse the AI moves at a snails pace in combat meaning their turns take too long. When facing a large number of enemies I often just alt tab and look at imgur for three to four minutes and even then sometimes the AI still hasn't finished there turn.

If you love stories than you might like this but if you are anything like me, the combat and power crawl ruins any fun you might have.

So much was promised, none of it was delivered.

I started playing this game back in 2012 when it was available on the Google Chrome App store. Since then the game has almost completely changed and so much content has been added. This game is truly a labor of love for Klei Enterainment.

I love this game. It is very challenging, and has an incredibly rich and original story!