Recent reviews by Slytric

It's a great turn based resource management game with meta-progression. I don't want to use the term "rougelike" because you aren't going to be resetting all the time and the cycle times are a few hours per run, depending on how familiar with the game you are and how quickly you play.

The name of the game is efficiency and planning. Every action and turn counts. There's always something better you could be doing with that pip, if you've planned well enough. Everything takes time and you don't have a ton of it to respond to events. Preparation is key as you need to research, build, and train pips on structures before you need them for events. Random events and the changing of seasons will change your focus all the time and you need to find the right balance of collecting resources, generating defence against events, and RESEARCHING. Stay ahead of the curve or you will fall behind, quickly.

Those looking for a FAIR (usually) challenging experience, turn that difficulty up a notch and prepare to be pleasantly surprised. If you really don't like "losing" games you've invested a few hours into, you'll want to stick to lower difficulty settings.

Just update your graphics drivers.


Maybe I'm just old, but what happened to releasing games that actually run well? Why is this acceptable now?

I was really looking forward to the sequel to the amazing work known as Payday 2. What we got was not a sequel. It was a major regression in every aspect other than graphics (completely irrelevant) and a revamped and improved stealth system. It lacks in content (only 8 heists, and a handful of guns/gadgets) has a completely uninspired reworked and neutered skill tree/system and account progression is now tied to completing grindy ass challenges like doing X heist 50 times without an assault.

TL;DR Just buy Payday 2.

A rock solid logistics game in EA. It's not complete, and it's noticeable with the current late game feeling rather sparse.
The game relies on using finite resources and limited space to pressure the player into a death spiral if you aren't on the ball. Unlike many games in the genre you have to balance keeping your operations running with expanding and improving, because if you get too focused on one area you'll run out of a critical resource. But if you spend too much time keeping the status quo you'll run into the time crunch that comes from the finite resources. Storage and alerts are your friends, make use of them as they will give you a heads up about a death spiral incoming and give you time to react to avoid it.

Since scarcity is a main tenant of the game, I doubt you'd actually be able to survive indefinitely, but through farms and trading you might be able to manage it if that's your entire focus for most (if not all) of your play-through. This makes the game have a definitive end for most (if not all) players when you inevitably run out of resources. There are many ways to prolong your resources, and if you want to make use of the latest game techs you will need to use them.

All in all I'd recommend it for veterans and novices to the genre, but if you're a novice I'd recommend looking at a "getting started" guide to hit the ground running as the in-game tutorial/help is lacking and it can be tricky to start off when you're unfamiliar with the genre. I'd recommend NOT looking up guides and figuring out the systems yourself as this will allow you to enjoy ~100+ hours of gameplay before you "beat" it.

Server issues aside, this game is still an Early Access title. They've released this before it was done, without any basic polishing. My guess is they ran out of Early Access money and needed more, or they want to abandon the project so they are cashing out now.

- Targeting system is terrible, with many enemies not even being targetable, get used to shift clicking to attack and pressing control to move, because otherwise you will get burned when you fail to attack or fail to move when you expect to.
- Many main passive nodes are completely broken, some examples include the regen for standing still, (should double health regen after standing still for 10 seconds, but actually increases it by about 100 times to point where you regen more than your health pool every regen tick without a ton of investment in health regen (1 second by default)) many of the crit related nodes just don't work, and the Force Shield life leach node that I believe still randomly removes all of your Force Shield when leaching
- Many tooltips are wrong, an example that comes to mind is mod for the railgun skill that states it reduces non-crit damage, but it doesn't.
- Resource generation is inconsistent with some sources interrupting rage degen and others not, with no indication.
- Most tooltips aren't helpful and don't give information to make decisions with. For example many will be like "increases damage" but doesn't specify by how much, and then when you go to test the damage increase it's not even noticeable and you are left wondering if it's broken like a lot of other things in this game.

It has some novel ideas that could enrich the genre and normally I'd say give it six months to a year to iron out the bugs and it will be good, but with how long this title was in Early Access and this is the level of polish they released it with I wouldn't hold my breath. If it isn't abandoned it might be worth revisiting in 2-3 years.

The game is a brutally difficult platformer, but is a lot of fun with proceedurally generated levels and daily challenges to compare your skill with others.