Reseñas recientes de cswiger

I'd like to strongly recommend both this game, and the developers, Trese Brothers, who have been providing near continual updates and improvements to ST:F. The replayability and freedom to be a trader, or spy, or pirate, and have your crew and ship improve to facility your choices is remarkable. The development of faction ranks, contacts, and permits to make better trades or deal in black market goods comes naturally from exploration and the use of higher-ranked talents as you gain experience.

Note that the factions interact and stuff happens without your agency as well-- major plots have timelines and you can either work on them or pass if you want. Your actions could make a difference, but you can't please everybody and you sometimes have to pick a side. Even the first major plotline with the Faen court has lots of different paths and outcomes.

ST:F is using 2D graphics throughout which vary from serviceable to quite good; the character art is fantastic and being expanded and improved routinely, and the planet/landing zone regions are also pretty good. The 2D galactic map is OK, but not memorable. Space travel itself is either harmless or you're boned and about to lose; don't run out of fuel or else your crew will start deserting en masse from morale loss when you finally land.

In some ways, I think the FTL-inspired combat is the weakest aspect of the game-- especially the ship-to-ship combat, which ends up being repetitive since you're going to fire the same exact weapons every round, player effectively just selects a talent to use each round until one side wins. Ground combat is more varied and interesting since it is a 4-on-4 affair, and you have a variety of different weapons from melee guns in the front to snipers at the rear of the party.

On the plus side, you can often use talents to avoid combat or at least flee rather than duke it out, so engaging in combat is somewhat of a choice, or at least a fair consequence of failing to resolve missions using more subtle means.

Sparta Kick for the win!

If building a steampunk flying warship and then battling it out in glorious 2D pixel art seems like fun, look no further. Actually, your simulated steampunk land-vehicle and immobile fortress building needs are also covered.

Ever fight a hard mission, yet have all of your forces still look like they just came out of a car wash?

Not in this game. The losers end up crashing and burning, or sometimes the other way around. Even the winners tend to have holes punched thru their armor, weapons dismounted, and so forth. Seeing a fire start and then the enemy's ammo depot go up like a giant fireworks display is just brillant, perfectly handled.

Or, if it is your ship, your crew will bark out little comments like "Fire" and then "Fire! Fire! FIre!" as things progress. They'll remark on the "nice new window" when a cannon first starts punching holes thru your armor, but they grow more perturbed as your ship starts resembling a highway sign in hunting country.

Summary: 10/10 in terms of fun, about 8/10 otherwise since the campaign needs some work and balancing, and the UI in the ship designer can be a little wonky-- try deleting a module and you'll see what I mean.

Roger Zelazny would have enjoyed playing this.

Be sure to take the Watchman's mirror when you try to pass the Peacock door.

Imagine a deep space ship simulated system-by-system at about the level of Silent Hunter 3.
With you as the captain. And engineer. And gunner. And janitor.
Lots of hats, but you're the only crew, so you have to do them all.

Doing only one role at a time is easy, and given a little help from the manual, anything that breaks can be fixed.

However, a failure in one component can cause the breaker for the whole room to trip, taking out other systems in a failure cascade, for example. Likewise, more dangerous conditions like fires and radiation problems won't wait, and if you've got something hostile trying to bash in all of the windows of your tin can, well, you'd better prioritize and not waste the seconds.

The gameplay loop seems to be enjoyable but hard so far. Sounds are good, graphics are meh but servicable and you do get good visual feedback about changing conditions, smoke and sparks from ship damage and broken systems, etc.

Charge your hyperspace engine first, and then do high-power scanning next, so you can always jump back to your home starbase rather than fight it out with whatever your scanning disturbs, because you needed another 2 minutes before you can jump.

Go buy this. Yup, just as simple as that.

(If you aren't convinced, it has a demo available-- go play the demo and see for yourself.)

X-Com: this is where turn-based squad tactics games originated. TFTD and Apocalyse are worthy, as are the Firaxis remakes of XCOM, but the original game deserves the "test of time" award.

Crashland on a planet. Start building an economy from scratch.
Learn that the planet doesn't like you or your factories' pollution.

They start off small and mostly harmless. A pistol seems fine.
They become larger, armored, and not even vaguely harmless.

Fun. Put a classic SHMUP like Robotron 2084 into space; you face lots and lots of shooty streams.

OK. I've played through mission 5. No plot related spoilers ahead, but I like the game and the background story a lot so far.

First, the desert environment is beautiful-- dangerous, also, since the enemy AI seems to like to have swarms of a half-dozen units each patrolling around. Recon in force works better than sending out smaller groups to scout.

Rachel is in the game as a "Baserunner", which is an engineering unit, but hers can capture enemy units like salvage corvettes used to. The generic baserunners can also build turrets for ground and anti-air, as well as mines and sensors. Rachel can make sensors, but her mines can be manually triggered or used to demolish structures for salvage.

There's LAVs, which are light scouts; there's tanks (AAVs-- armored assault vehicles?), there's long-range sniper units called railguns, there's support cruisers which repair others and act as the delivery point for resource collectors. There are likely to be bigger attack-oriented cruiser types coming, but I'm just now getting some air units.

Combat is fun and reminds me a lot of Ground Control, which is a pretty good thing. I think I'd like a bit more variety of units, but I'm only a third of the way in. Micro matters a little-- not so much in big battles, since unit AI chooses reasonable targets by itself-- but if you have a railgun plinking away at you from max range, having your LAVs use their speed boost ability can end the threat more quickly.

The camera is great and you can zoom way in if you like; focusing on a unit works better than in Homeworld-- perhaps the ground helps give a more familiar perspective when comparing tiny LAVs to the huge carrier. For that matter, the zoom out to tactical map showing the landscape in 3D with your units having a glowing blue sensor in taken directly from HW also (including the sound effects). Seems to work pretty OK.