Recent reviews by ShenWeasel

The game play is fantastic, the game balance is in general well done. Sure some changes feel late or tone deaf, but the team is actively trying to keep the game fun for everyone and that is such an uncommon thing. I cannot express how fun the card game aspect of this game is, it's fantastic. But that is where it stops. Do NOT pick this game up. If you want to understand better, why please read on.

However, that's where the good things stop.

1. Card acquisition becomes a terrible progression pain point. You start off getting many cards quickly and then this quickly turns into a 'gacha-like' system where you end up with a unique collection until you get towards the end of Series 3. You won't get every card without massive monetary investment for a few months. On top of this there is a new card released into their top-line series each week. There are 72 Series 5 cards, 24 Series 4 and 100+ Series 3. The unique collection system doesn't work beyond getting series 3 and you'll obviously find that you will NOT be able to build a deck that you want to play because the cards you unlock are random so good luck building an optimized deck without spending a lot of money to increase the frequency at which you unlock cards.

2. Series drops - tying in with the above issues are the fact that we're not seeing reasonable drops of the cards release. We are getting three drops this year, the first was in January, the 2nd was in June and the third will be this month, previously drops were happening at a regular timeframe with cards releasing into Series 5, dropping to 4 after X amount of time and then to 3 after another amount of time. That went out the window this year and the development team have essentially said that all future drops will be intermittent and at their discretion. Essentially making it so that if they decide to do no further series drops they can point to the previous statement and say we're changing the deal.

3. Their attitude towards card acquisition and player sentiment has been "wait for more news" since last year, we're now at the end of 2024 and we've gotten the following statement: "we see your feedback, we know your anxiety, please wait for first quarter of 2025 for more news." This was the same exact statement given to us last year.

A company needs to make money, however, a company also needs to understand and actually react to issues with player sentiment towards their systems and attempt to make things better. Second Dinner is taking too long to address issues and is fumbling massively when it comes to addressing the players issues. Do not pick this game up currently.

I purchased this game prior to launch day. I hadn't bought into the hype then and definitely don't know. Had I known the game would be lacking significant features that were promised or advertised in trailers, I wouldn't have made the purchase.

I gave this game 8 hours. Between significant stuttering, frame drops, 'screen popping' because draw distances were poorly handled and the inability for the program to alt-tab properly, (of these, only the alt-tab problem was fixed) the game is still lacking the multiplayer that was promised. The grind is abysmal for a single player game. Trading, which had been mentioned is non-existent unless you count the weird 'market' system when gathering and selling materials to the NPC market.

Maybe I'll revisit this game in the future if they ever fix the problems or bring in the content that was promised. The game was not worth 60, maybe it would have been worth 20-30, but definitely not worth the AAA price when it doesn't deliver a quarter of what was expected. Definitely do not recommend.

Pros:
- Explore space.
- visit planets and star systems.
- travel to the center of the 'universe'.

Cons
- Poor performance.
- Visual 'pop-in'.
- Grind that rivals asian MMO's.
- visual stuttering.
- promised launch content not existent within the current game
- Poor performance on even great rigs.