Recent reviews by swiftdraw

TL:DR It's an interesting and good looking game to be sure, but I'm not entirely certain on how to go about things.

After just about an hour, I have concluded that City Builder is inaccurate and this is more of a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.) The city building part really is more expanding districts to gain population and connecting to resource nodes than fiddling about with on goings of the city. You don't even have to worry about food and services for your city, just gaining the resources you need to expanded it to house more workers to gather more resources. The problem I've run into is figuring out how resources from those nodes are routed. In my current city format, I was originally producing 12 wood and 5 stone. After upgrading the bridges to stone and nothing else, I was suddenly producing 7 wood and 7 stone. More fiddling revealed the direction I connected various bridges effected how many resources I was producing, but I am still not entirely sure why. Press Tab to show the flow of resources didn't see to help as I couldn't see any changes in flow from what it had been before the bridge upgrades. Also, I haven't worked out how to acquire more extractors, though I assume base on current gameplay I find disabled ones to deconstruct and relocate at some point.

Outposts I find at see are also a bit of a mystery as well. As far as I can tell, you deconstruct them, carry them via your airship back to your city, plop them down, connect them and things happen. The refugee settlements are rather straight forward, you gain population. The others like the Surveyors and the diplomacy guilds... It's more difficult telling. Surveyors allow you to spot things farther out, but by how much I can't tell. I guess I spotted one refugee camp further out than normal, but it's hard for me to say honestly. Diplomats I truly have no idea what they do. Trading thus far has been difficult. I found one minor faction to trade with, they told me to bring in more workers to initiate trade, so I put the wood and worker transport captain on it, then I get told to connect the trade harbor to them to gather wood. Except I can't seem to do that and I don't appear to be gaining any wood or further diplomatic actions with this faction.

Combat has happened, but I missed it. Some birds flew around, I saw lasers, and by the time I figured out where it was happening and got the airship and camera oriented towards it, it was over. We won. Yaaay. No idea what happened and I had absolutely no input in that event. Maybe later as I stumble across other factions I'll figure it out. Oh, and I have a sloop on my longest trade route that will shoot at things I guess. The trade route was labeled "Risky" before is now "Safe and Protected." Now if I could get that trade route to produce something with that minor faction, that'd be great.

So now that my gripe fest is over, what so good about it? It sounds like I don't like the thing, so why give it a recommend? Well for one, the aesthetic pushes all my buttons.Stone towers and ramshackle buildings clinging on for dear life on jagged rock outcroppings jutting out of the sea. A mass of humanity clinging onto civilization in this hostile environment. The storms, the monstrous creatures, and the sea and air ships bobbing about. Oh yes please. Also, I feel that there is a game in here that interests me, but I've yet to unlock how to go about playing it in full. I keep getting flashbacks to the early '00's real time 4X games like Rise of Nations and Empire Earth. Now those games had more in-depth game mechanics to them, to be sure, but this game keeps bumping against the same base concepts and basic mechanics as them. I have a primary settlement, I expand it and my ability to bring resources to feed it's expansion. The game suggests that I set up other settlements to bring in more resources, though I have yet to figure this part out. I encounter other factions in which I engage with in either diplomacy or warfare, depending which benefits me most at the time. The biggest thing I am missing is constructing units to enforce and protect my expansion, but you do gain units in the form of recruitable captains to defend you trade routes that feed your expansion. It's causing an itch I haven't felt in some time, and I want to explore the game more to see if it can satiate it.

And I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't say that the game has seem solid in the performance department and is free of engine jank and weirdness. Sure the mechanics and controls can be a bit... Inscrutable? Obscure? But the base from which they are built are solid. To do that and make such a, in my opinion, good looking game by one person is laudable.

So yeah, the game has issues that you might have to work around and fiddle with to get the most out of the game. But there is something there and the game is good (and cheap) enough that I am willing to find out exactly what that is. So good on the solo dev for making a solid, if a bit fiddly game.

Has some bad bugs, like connection and terrain collision issues, but it's still really fun. Haven't had this much since the first couple years of DRG.

EDIT: Whoops, now requires a Sony login which I have no interest in. Much like prior games that tried to shoehorn in a third party service, I gotta say no.

Edit 2: Sony backed off their oopsy. For now.

Same crap game as Vermintide with even more crap microtransactions and grind than Vermintide 2. Peered pressured into getting it on sale, regret spending the $25. Oh, and Tencent is a producer of it, so even more reason to leave this one alone.

Mixed reviews are correct. There is a competently done sandbox game here, but there is note much compelling about it. There are game mechanics, like changes in off road performance and driving/flying while dragging a load, that are cool in theory but the execution in game leaves a lot to be desired. And the further you get in the game, the more the lack of polish become apparent, up to and including mission breaking bugs by late game.

Look, if you're a fan of any of the previous Saints Row and hoping for more, you're probably not going to be happy. If you're looking for a action sandbox game to kill time with and this is on discount, it's an decent game with some flaws.

Edit: OK, I will admit to enjoying the Dustmoot story and DLC. Those were pretty good.

Visually it's great, sound design is pretty good too. Pity it's quite buggy, particularly on multiplayer coop

A fun real time tactics games. M biggest problem is once you're done with the campaign and the couple of scenarios, there isn't any real repeatability. No single or multiplayer skirmish, no bug campaign, nothing but repeating the missions you've played. That said, the campaign and a few of those scenarios were really fun, with good sound and animation.

A simple top down shooter, but has enough enemy variety, game modes and unlocks to make it well worth the price. If you want a simple time killer, get this game!

Best co-op game out imo. Fun mechanics, great atmosphere, and pretty good memes.

This is a case of 'so close, yet so far.' The core game itself is very solid and offers something that lands between Stellaris and Sins of a Solar Empire. It has the scale of Stellaris while being a 'real time' like Sins and possibly having greater depth than both. It rather appealing to me, but the devil in the detail is what holds it back.

Because of the scale and pace of the game, you HAVE to rely on the AI to run aspects of your empire. For the big picture stuff, like managing your budget, it does a good job. Where its lacking is in the auto-generated ship design, ship deployment, and the building advisor. The ships it spits out tend to be ok, though the combat ships tend to be all over the place with weapons, defense and inefficient with the general modules. With civilian ships it does ok, though it tends to under-prioritize range and fuel economy on them. This, along with poor fuel calculations, leads to seeing a lot of stranded civilian ships taking years getting to their destination. Fuel Tankers are suppose to help prevent this, but they run in the same problem and run out of fuel before reaching their target. This would be less of an issue were it not for the fact there are dozens of your empire's ships crisscrossing the map, making it difficult to identify stranded ships and you have to menu dive to find a nearby tanker with enough fuel to respond. While you can create your own ships, the game tends to overwrite them when it come times to upgrade and you have to retire all the old variants and delete the design before the AI decides to stop suggesting to build the auto-generated design.

The other major AI issue is the advisor it tends to have very poor grasp of resource management, particularly early on. My first three games saw my empire stall out early because I did not have one critical resource or another in my system. Not knowing that, I blindly followed the AI's suggestions on what to build, only to run out of polymer, silicon, or even fuel before I could even leave the system. Later it will continually suggest colonizing new planets even though you do not have the resources to fully develop them and will tank your economy from the prolonged development exspenses.

The other major issue is the UI and lack of documentation of some aspects of the game. For instance, resource tracking. You have to go between 3 menus and a couple of hover-over tooltips to determine what you need, what it does, if you have it, and where to get it. However, unless its fuel, you're rarely told exactly why you need it outside of a nebulous 'used for some weapons' or 'colony development.' This makes it hard, even after going through the 'Galacticpedia' in game, to determine what it is you absoluetly need and why when you're first starting. Same is had with much of the ship build screen, which buries info in mouse over tooltips that only activate on a specific area of an item or stat and doesn't explain whats need for certain mechanics like refueling or mining. For example, my initial assumption was Fuel Tankers transfer fuel from their fuel tanks to another ship's tanks and the ship's class description seems to support that. What you really need is cargo holds to store that fuel, a device to mine, and a device to transfer fuel. Also, it appearantly cannot use fuel in it's holds to fuel itself either, because I've lost count of how many times I've seen a fuel tanker limping along, out of fuel limping with 1200 or more units of fuel in its hold.

Distant Worlds 2 is a game with great scope and depth, but is held back by some design choices and a lack of clarity when it comes to informing the player. With a bit more polish it could be a great game, but as is, its a good game for the genre that requires overcoming a very steep initial learning curve.

I cannot put my finger on it, but this game just isn't as fun as the previous two. The army balance and play feels off, you're often times put in frustrating situations due to the world map layout, and UI is very often a case of 'so close, yet so far.' Part of it may also be I'm used to a couple of mods from the first two and those mods aren't out yet as far as I can tell. Quiet a few crashes too, but that's not unusual early on in a Total War game.

Wait for Mortal Empires, optimizations, and mods.