Recent reviews by TwoD

The ultimate interactive crossover between Starship Troopers and Terminator.

Excellent game in itself, if you can tolerate Sony's BS. The devs are doing their best to listen to the community, and correcting any mistakes, but the whole situation with Sony requiring a PSN account is just insanity.
Since I've already invested in this, and all "micro"-transactions are optional for progress, I will continue playing, but will most likely stay away from anything else Sony is behind.

It was a really good game. Sure, quirks exist but it has one of the best visuals of the series, good maps and mechanics. But now it's completly abandoned by the developers and almost every game has at least one blatant cheater teleporting around, making impossible shots through mountains or km away. The reporting system was always awful and relies on using the scoreboard to open the cheater's origin profile, manually selecting a report reason, a secondary reason, and in plain text spelling out what they did and in which game. It's like they hide this on purpose to help cheaters not get reported to not have to deal with it. Not a single profile reported by many players has ever been removed and comes back week after week.

The inspirations for this game are both obvious and subtle, influencing how it looks, feels and plays, or rather how you think you should be playing it.

It swings from a low pace base builder with an enormously detailed simulation behind every little thing you see and can interact with to a frantic struggle for survival as the dangers of Maia strike the unprepared mercilessly. Prepare to be unprepared and learn by failing.

If you prefer to learn from the mistakes of others - or perhaps boast about your most successful survival or expansion tips and strategies, visit the official wiki[wiki.maiagame.com] and help it grow.

Much like the games it draws inspiration from you do not control your colonists directly but act more as an overseer and planner for what they should do. You decide where rooms go, what goes into them, and where to get resources from - in the form of placing digging orders. Colonists make their own priorities based on their current needs and leave feedback in form of personal emails and expressing their most immediate needs through body language. Colonists arrive to Maia in pods which can be called down from orbit at certain intervals. Then they need to get into your base quite quickly as the atmosphere is toxic and you don't can't be outside without a suite - unlike the native flora and fauna which aren't always so happy to see new arrivals.

There's a story driven campaing with missions letting you learn about colonist needs and how to satisfy them, told through radio conversations with the orbital command and related managment functions. They've put you in charge of setting up several bases to accomplish tasks like establishing research facilities to learn more about the planet and technologies needed to survive there.

The overall style is very sci-fi-from-the-80's, despite being set in the distant future, people have realized colonising harsh environments require tried and trustworthy tech, with some robotics and AI applied here and there to help out where it's too dangerous (or inconvenient) to have humans spend their precious time, sweat and blood. AI isn't trusted with weaponry though, a few stationary turrets and handguns do just fine and won't uninionize on you to start making their own demands.

The humor, both explicit in voiceover/text and implicit in visual style, is very British, but suits the style very well and I've become quite fond of it after spending many hours trying to expand bases in a timely fashion - yes, pacing yourself is key, even during panics. Overwhealming your colonists with tasks is most likely going to be your first mistake, and thus also your last in that scenario. Maia - as in both the planet and the game - forgives some mistakes, but only up to a certain point.

I have not played many other games which are quite like this. Dwarf Fortress is probably the closest one in terms of finding out what to do, when to do it, why you should do it, and how to understand what's actually going on. The amount of input and feedback can be both overwhealming (you'll be dismissing a lot of emails) and frustratingly sparse (try following your colonists and robots around to see what they're actually doing and pay attention to your storage levels!)

I've been with this game since the Kickstarter and I think Simon - the single developer now working full time on Maia - has delivered very well and met all my expectations. There have been delays of course, but taking on a game like this is a massive task and easy to underestimate. Simon has done - and keeps doing - a fantastic job of engaging with the community and acting (sometimes within minutes!) on the feedback provided. He's got a clear vision and communicates it well.

It's a fantastic game for the audience it's aimed at and my only hope for it is to keep going in the same direction. Special thanks to Simon for staying strong and keeping Linux gamers in mind.

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