Recent reviews by Ananym

Update, finished the game now.
I was further through than I thought - chapter 1 is very frontloaded with content.
The later game is much easier than the early game if you end up exploring everything, and the faction story beats feel pretty rote - the NPCs explain exactly what you're going to do, and then you do it with no real surprises or twists. That said, the game still shines in its side content and exploration, and I had a great time overall.

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Haven't felt this immersed in a game for this long in forever. Tight worldbuilding, writing is characterful while staying to the point. Combat is fierce but not punishing, I've never felt stuck. The setting and the allegiance mechanism reminds me of the spiderweb rpgs, which can only be a good thing. I can't be more than a third of the way through the game and it's already well, well worth its full price.

A very solid meh. The game isn't a disaster, but it's definitely worse than its predecessor.
Expect an ambitious abstract story that fails to go anywhere satisfying. Expect quest design that you WILL need to look up.

The exploration aspect is a step up: the world is bigger and there are more environmental puzzles. However, the game can only ever reward you with equipment - equipment is not very compelling when nothing in the game presents any challenge. The standard shop-bought equipment will always do just fine.

Unlike dark arisen, ferrystones are limited and expensive. You primarily use oxcarts until the endgame instead, which only move between certain cities and are frequently interrupted by attacks. Much like the first game, expect to spend lots of time trekking across country by sprinting, waiting, and sprinting again - assailed by wolves and a dozen kinds of harpy that only exist to annoy you. Strict weight limits still have you spending plenty of time shuffling items between pawns with hundreds of keypresses. The design thinking here seems to be to use sheer inconvenience in place of any actual challenge, and that's never done it for me.

The gameplay you're looking for - fighting large-scale beasts - is still there, and it's still mostly entertaining even if it's never very threatening. Healing is still effectively instant and infinite, with the crafted healing items weighing nothing while you rarely have a reason to use them. If you manage to get yourself killed, you'll usually end up just minutes behind.

The progression didn't make a world of sense to me - you unlock everything in a given vocation within the first few hours of playing it, and from that point your gameplay never changes for the remainder of the game unless you deliberately swap to a different vocation just for novelty's sake. Other vocations let you unlock their passive perks for use on other classes, but... it simply doesn't matter whether you have the +10% strength perk from thief or not. You'll barely notice going to the bother.

The story is where I'd pinned my hopes, but the story throughout the first half is... nonsense. Various NPCs written as 'villains' that never really do anything that comes across as seriously bad or impactful. The talos from the trailer shows up for no particular reason and immediately dies in a few seconds. The dragon himself barely has a part in this story.

Despite the setup, I wasn't too impressed by the ending. It didn't really manage to convey the same sense of scale as DD1, even though supposedly the acts are much more significant.

This game would be much improved by:
good difficulty settings,
story expansion,
an equivalent to BBI to guarantee ready access to engaging combat
better progression pacing,
less intentional tedium.

It's difficult to give this a Not Recommended, because there is nothing fundamentally broken about this game. It's a visual novel where you spend most of your time flicking through a plant reference book, and it takes a few hours to complete.

It didn't really capture me. So much time is spent on the menial tasks that the actual narrative takes a back foot, and ends up very shallow. Everything is exactly as it appears - the story has no real twists besides the ones you pick. You are occasionally asked to make a choice, and most of them are the most banal kind of good vs evil. There are different endings, but the ending is so sudden that a slight variation in the described outcome doesn't feel impactful. You only talk to each character a couple of times, and it's not enough for them to have any kind of meaningful character progression or for you to develop any interest in most of them.

Are the 'game' parts compelling? There are a couple of map puzzles that are satisfying to solve, but few and far between. Most of the actual plant work is not interesting. The game will almost always tell you exactly which plant to pick for a customer. Identifying plants is mostly an exercise in clicking through the book until you find a matching description. Identifying a plant before the moment its needed ends up feeling like a waste of time, because you aren't guaranteed to have the description available until a customer asks for it.

Your experience may vary, but I didn't get anything substantial out of the puzzle elements nor the narrative elements. There is nothing strange about strange horticulture - it lives exactly up to its surface-level description and doesn't go an inch further. I spent the playthrough waiting for a payoff that never appeared, and having finished it once, I'm not likely to go back in.

On the surface, you'd expect this to just be "more subnautica", and while it is that, it's an altogether more shallow experience.

Subnautica was always a walking sim pretending to be otherwise, but BZ has stripped that pretence. None of the creatures represent any kind of threat, there are no labyrinthine wrecks or environments to navigate. Many of the environments feel very sparse - even subnautica's emptiest biomes had things to find and do, while most of BZ's environs just feel like scenery you can't interact with. The world overall is so small that there's never a good excuse to build multiple bases, either.

Is the story compelling, then? It definitely could have been. Most of the setpieces are there, but everything falls short. There's no sense of discovery, there are no twists or turns, there's no buildup to the finale, and the finale itself feels devoid of narrative significance.

The music might be the best part, although for the most part only passable compared to the base game.

As a DLC, this would have been underwhelming - as a standalone title, I'm actively disappointed.

Update: finished a few playthroughs now. It's fantastic and you should play it.

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Already excellent with a promising future.
Somewhere between heat signature, uplink, hotline miami - depending on what you invest in. There are lots of ways to tackle a situation and all of them feel great.

It's well worthwhile. Fun and approachable to play, engaging worldbuilding, plenty of that clever arkane flavour you don't find elsewhere. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but I paid release price and I don't regret it at all.
Only problem is you'll be looking for a Deathloop 2 afterwards, and it's not clear how likely that is.

I 100%'d the 'story' in about 90 minutes on the hardest regular difficulty - while there's a handful of bonus levels too, don't expect it to take long. Still, it's fun to play and an audiovisual delight, especially towards the end, so it's well worth the price.

Abandonware. Calling this "ultimate" when it's utterly threadbare compared to the original is an unfunny joke.

Game is superficially similar to AoW3, but the differences are more substantial than first glance suggests and the game is much better for it.

The sector system is more detailed and satisfying than 3's somewhat drab domain expansion, but is still easy to manage - it doesn't steal the show, but it offers much more exciting choices than "how many structures can I fit in this fort".

The diplomacy is more fleshed out, both between players and with NPC factions. Between the new 'influence' resource, covert operations, casus belli mechanics and trustworthiness, there's much more game in manipulating the map's diplomatic landscape to suit you than was present in 3.

The combat and unit depth are where the game especially shines. AoW3 was poor in this regard - even after updates improved racial diversity, the differences between races were comparitively minor and you broadly played similarly no matter what you were running. In planetfall, every race plays combat completely differently, with a host of different synergies, advantages and weaknesses - expanded further by secret tech and mod selection. I get the same kind of satisfaction exploring a certain playstyle in planetfall as I would e.g. playing a different faction in a card game, and that's something 3 never really offered me.

I'm having more fun with the campaign in planetfall. Three's campaigns were fairly linear, the stories weren't particularly grabby, and I generally had more fun playing random maps. Planetfall's campaign maps are still random, and let you customize your start, and still manage to tell interesting stories exploring each of the races. There's a fair bit of choice in how you play out each scenario with regards to how you treat the other factions, making each map much like a normal game, but the flavour response to how you act makes it that much more engaging.

Downsides?
Game's not winning any awards for its UI. It's servicable, and not much more. Often I'd appreciate having x info visible while making a decision, and there's no way to get to it easily. Often I'd like to be able to click an NPC faction's emblem to enter diplomacy, and it doesn't. Some tooltips are just missing from where you'd expect them. Triumph have shown they're willing to work on the UI in updates, however.

I would've preferred a little more asymmetry on the strategic layer. Every player scouts the same way, colonizes and annexes the same way, builds 95% the same buildings, has the same covert ops. All the incredible variation in the combat instantly evaporates once it ends. I really think there could be more done here.

The whole AoW format is still an awkward fit in multiplayer. They've certainly tried, with multiplayer allowing you to seamlessly switch between concurrent multiplayer and native PBEM. There are 'combat cards' that optionally limit players' use of manual combat. Nevertheless, if you're playing multiplayer and want to enjoy the manual combat - the game's entire reason to be - in a climactic siege against another player, everyone else is going to have to get up and leave for half an hour. Perhaps worse, this makes multiplayer a real struggle when players are playing the game or a given race for the first time. Unless they're allowed to manual combat some trivial AI battles (which will really slow everything down) they'll have no idea how to effectively control their army once the fights start to matter. If your friends aren't already solid 4X fans who'll be willing to invest hours into playing solo to learn the game, this is going to be a hard sell. Still, if you're playing with just a couple and willing to be patient, it can still be a good time.

Does the job, but little more.
If you enjoy the genre, there is fun to be found here. However, while a lot of obvious effort went into this game, it feels misplaced. The old Impressions Games citybuilders are still prettier, better written, simultaneously more complex and more elegant, and have 10x as much content. I regret falling for the hype and paying full price for this game. With improvements to UI and system balancing, this game might reach a 7/10, but more than that will take some major work.