Recent reviews by FriedrichPsitalon

So I'm of two minds on this game.

On one hand, it has a hell of a lot of untapped potential. On the other, it was four bucks. Let's go all nice and traditional pro/con on this:

Pro:
- The use of the "auto chess" genre squad-building system here is genuinely clever and a fresh take.
- The multi-squad-member-and-all-different nature of the game puts a lovely spin on the Vampire Survivor genre, as well.
- Although not every corporation's bots are equal (Shockwave, in particular, is just not effective enough), there are *definitely* a great variety of playstyles available here.
- You can get pleasingly, absurdly OP by the end of the game using a gun-based strategy or a "synthwave" (polite term for "magic") based strategy.

Con:
- With my ten hours, I'm at 100% achievements. Now at four bucks, that may not be a sin, but it's worth mentioning.
- Now that I'm at 100% achievement, there's literally no reason to fire up the game except to redo things. There's absolutely no endgame to speak of.
- The dreaded "Extinction Event" boss was literally a half-second blip. I barely even got a look at the guy.
- Mixing gun and synthwave in the same squad is pretty unwise. Not a huge deal, but yeah.
- Mostly my cons here are just "Eh. It's not bad, but it could've been a lot better."

And that's the bottom line here. This is a *GREAT* game for four bucks. Best four bucks I spent since - wait, I can't mention that in public, my lawyer warned me.

... but this could definitely have been a 15-20 dollar game and been explored much, much deeper than it was. This is the coolest take on the VS genre I've seen yet.

It just leaves you going, "...but... but there was so much more potential here."

At four bucks, that's fine. But watch these guys. If they put together a 20 dollar game, look out.

So first, let’s get this out of the way:

A spiritual successor to SMP, this ain’t. All the people claiming that this is anything like Sid Meier’s Pirates are losing their minds. The similarities between the two titles:

Both occur in the same geographical region and time
Both involves ships with men who have questionable hygiene and eyewear
Both involve keeping your crew happy

…aaaaaand that’s it. Absolutely no other similarities. SMP is - in its most recent version - a near-arcade game. Tortuga is a pirate management sim. This is both its bane and its curse.

I want to like this game - but the number of issues and bugs for a year-old title that (as near as I can tell) is not an EA/still-heavily-worked-on is just not acceptable. More ominously, there are a few balance decisions that I just can’t see past and justify. But let’s start with the high points:

The Good:

- You can indeed sail around and yo ho, or you can sail around and merchant, or you can sail around and, as your crew might put it, “lick the boots of the powdered wig” types.
- You can actually engage in combat WITH EVERY SHIP THAT HAS A CAPTAIN. If you ever dreamed of swarming a galleon with a half-dozen sloops, well, you can do that! (Sort of. See below in Cons, alas.)
- The “split your loot often to keep your crew happy, but they don’t quit on you, they just want to know what you’ll do next” mechanic is genuinely a lot of fun and inspired. You brag about your future plans and the crew loves that - but of course, you better back up all that talk.
- The turn-based combat does NOT need to be onerous and slow - there’s all kinds of options to speed up play, skip animations, etc - they were nice to think of this one.
- There’s actually fast travel, and you can capture pirate hideouts and make them your own, and do things with them. (Except… see below in cons again.)
- Fairly high degree of ship customization. Sniping boat, close range boat, boarding boat, etc.
- Very high degree of captain customization. Skills to sort every play style and intention.
- While the turn-based movement system does make “out turn, out-shoot” in the SMP style much trickier to do, there are definitely means to make “small ship outmanuever big ship” combat still work. Mostly.

…but unfortunately, the cons list here is… very problematic.

The Bad:

- Captains are kind of rare and hard to come by. You won’t be fielding six sloops anytime early.
- As soon as you’re in good with a nation, there’s not much reason to customize your own hideouts. Store extra ships? Why bother? Sell them for cash. Store extra loot? See above. Free repairs? Max-rank relations gives you that. They’re fast travel points and little more.
- Boarding is the correct answer. Ships sell for vastly more than their cargo. (Rare indeed is a fully loaded ship.) You can also customize your captain to make boarding much, much easier.
- …except when boarding isn’t the correct answer. Did you board that tiny brig with your pirate galleon and two supporting frigs? Did you pick the 90% dice roll option and thus this should be a slam dunk? Screw you. Even though winning a boarding action takes 2-3 rounds, usually, one bad dice roll and that brig just took over your galleon and cut the ropes to your two supporting frigs. You’re down 200 crew and you don’t know why.
- Related to the step above, the autosave system is horrible. Way, way too infrequent and no way to change that. You’ll be manually saving a lot - and no, there’s no quicksave option. Feels very 1998-2003ish.
- Keeping your crew happy becomes increasingly difficult unless you very deliberately make sure to NOT specialize in your tactics. Generalists are okay, but if you specialize in certain kinds of piracy, your crew will eventually expect you to sink every other ship in the game, capture every town west of the Prime Meridian, and divide a million ducats among the crew every fifteen days. This may be a deliberate design decision by the devs, but it’s one that is *frequently* the subject of player complaint. So far I've avoided this problem, but I've very, very deliberately planned with it in mind.
- There are a few balance choices that are way, way out of whack: particularly the “ignore armor” one. It’s entirely possible for a well-chosen cannon ship to one-shot any other ship in the game. I’ve yet to have the AI do it to me, but I should fear a Queen Anne, not snicker at it. You also need never fear having insufficient crew - with a certain captain in your team, your crews will always be at max. No need to waste money buying grog in the taverns, lads.
- All combat other than ship-v-ship is done via RNG/RPG selection menus. It’s very sterile and not terribly engaging. "Gee, which of the three exciting options will I choose THIS time?" (Except there's always a correct one.)
- This is a big one: ENEMY SCALING IS MUCH, MUCH TOO PROMPT. Did you just manage to take over a Pirate Galleon with your three brigs for the first time? Congrats, you! Now you can be a terror of the seas and… wait, no. Now everyone else has pirate galleons or the equivalent, too. The only way you will ever “punch down” in this game is if you deliberately take a quest with easier enemies. You will never roll up on a hapless innocent lone trader and shout “Muahahahah!” in the manner of SMP.


The Ugly:

- Town raiding is handled in a very similar way to ship boarding: sterile and unexciting. You will never get your blood pumping this way.
- There’s very rarely a reason NOT to pick the highest-probability option; it’s pretty much always the right answer. In theory, the higher-risk your choice, the lower your guaranteed losses (90% gives 4 guaranteed deaths, 60% for three guaranteed deaths, 45% for 2) but the difference in crew loss when you have a ship of 200 is laughable - and if your 45% roll goes poorly, you’re going to lose an awful lot more. So you always pick the 90% choice.
- In a few places, the dialogue options are unclear - most notably the fate of enemy crew captains. You have them walk the plank and your first mate complains. You stuff them in your brig and the first mate complains that you are letting them go. (Which seems to be true, because I’ve never found a way to hire them, torture them, ransom them, or even dress them up in frilly pink outfits.)
- Did I mention the first mate? Because he never shuts up with the same tiring dialogue lines from the tutorial. Plan on turning the voice volume down VERY early.
- There’s very little of the feeling of intrigue and long-term planning from SMP. Power scales too early, too hard, and getting max rank with a nation is a near-trivial task.

Final Verdict:

This isn’t a bad pirate management sim - but it’s a pirate management sim, not a piracy arcade swashbuckling title.

It’s also not a very good one - at least not in its current state in Feb 2024.

Wait for it to go on sale; this might be a 10 or 15 dollar title, but it’s not worth 22. Sorry fellas.

The specter of SMP remains unbeaten… even if this game avoids the dumbarse prancing square dancing. :P

----Re-review June 5, 2024------
So I originally reviewed this game Nov 2, 2023, and gave it a thumbs-down at the time. The dev asked me to re-review, and so I slapped another thirty hours into the game and delved into their end game. I’m including the original review at the bottom here for growth/posterity purposes.


So I still wish Steam had a more nuanced thumb option, but this one has juuuuuust barely managed to push itself over the thumb up/down margin line for me. Having said that:

You boys still have considerable work to do before I’d enthusiastically recommend this. It’s a very tentative thumb-up now. Let’s go down the numbers:

The Good:
- Vampire Survivors playstyle, but better: there’s more to do, more to chase, more going on. This is notably improved since last time.
- The playstyle variety is definitely very real: AoE builds, elemental builds, pure physical builds, projectile-spam builds. Note the asterisk here and on a few others.
- Very wide variety of difficulties, maps - but maaaaybe not as much map variety as you’d like by the endgame.
- Lots of methods of advancement is still the case. These guys DO still have a lot of things for you to do, even out of game. We’ve got an asterisk here, too.
- The ability to customize your characters is really quite significant; much more so than I’ve run into in any other VS-type game. I didn’t appreciate this enough last time. The mutation-shuffling minigame is particularly subtle.
- I don’t remember the market from last time, and it’s a good addition - but I’m going to slap an asterisk on this, too.
- Framerate issues seem to have stopped altogether. I deliberately ran a really, really visually messy build one game just to see, and my computer never winced. Now I’m on a new machine these days, but I’d like to think - as bad as it was before - that they fixed this. Certainly looks like it.

The Bad:
- While it’s better, FZ still suffers from the “VS repetition grind” syndrome. It’s not at all uncommon that by the 20 minute mark, your build is done, and in some cases, you *literally just take your hands off the keys* and wait for the next supply radar drop. That’s better than nothing, but the impetus to look around for tiny one-drop chests is still pretty weak. This is better, but it could and should still be more.
- Balance is still bad. It’s not AS bad, and there’s definitely more to do, but c’mon guys: build into Amaterasu with some support on it, and you can cruise through 90% of the content. How has this not been corrected? Anyone who thinks endgame baseball bat or endgame SMG is balanced next to the utterly horrible endgame boomerang is out of their mind. You guys are doing better, but there’s still way too much “one right answer” with that evolved Kus build.
- Last time I stopped before getting to Legendary; this time I pushed through. The problem is that the rewards for legendary (both running it and the achievement) are pathetic: your buildings are maxed-out or close by the time you get there. 3000 chips? Great. I can build a toy house! The increased value of loot from Legendary vs. the difficulty is also dubious, since you don’t really need what legendary is offering anymore when you get there.
- The differences between the classes are… concerning. If you want to tell me the Saboteur and the Survivalist are equally powerful and balanced in their class abilities, you’re going to need to get me pretty drunk before I’ll agree.

The Ugly: Biggest positive improvements here, but still some room to grow.

- They’ve got a genuinely great early game now. They’ve got a pretty solid midgame, too. The endgame is still pretty awful: the recruitment house upgrades are largely pointless. (Why not allow us to hire higher level recruits at Rank 6+, fellas?) The HQ upgrades ONLY exist as a hoopjump-gate to block other buildings and offer no real benefits.
- Endgame Redux: So I’ve got all my buildings to ten. I’ve done the Legendary thing with one guy in one zone. What’s my motivation to keep playing here? Just collect achievements, one every thirty minutes, as I push the rest of my guys through? Nope. Nowhere near enough.

Final tally: This is now a decent game. It’s NOT a good game - yet. But I’ll give the folks at Midhard credit: I *do* think they’ve improved it a lot so far, and I think if they can continue the strength of their work into making a meaningful endgame (both in-combat, minutes 20-30, and out-of-combat, Invincible+ difficulty and some buildings Rank 5+) then yes, this will be a downright excellent game.

I’m switching my thumb from down to up; I’ll disagree with the trend of reviews lately in the other direction.

Keep it up, lads.



-------------Nov 2, 2023 review------------------
Games like this make me wish Steam had a more nuanced thumb option.

This will be a good game. It's not yet. Wait for it to be on sale in a few months and pick it up then.

The Good:

- Very "Vampire Survivors" play style.
- Unlike VS, strong variety in stats for each character suggest the possibility of radically different play styles.
- Widely varied difficulties and maps.
- Multiple methods of advancement; character-specific, base-specific, level-based and gear-based.

The Bad

- Right now, VS's biggest problem is FZ's biggest problem: ultimately, you're still just walking around a wide open area and letting the game do most everything else. It becomes grindy and repetitive fairly quickly. We don't have the number of options and tweaks we do in Brotato to make up for it.
- 30 minutes to complete a map; you can (and should) leave early in many cases, but your character will max out before 20 - you'll then spend ten minutes literally doing nothing but walking around in the least-engaging part of VS/FZ's content.
- The balance is VERY, VERY, VERY out of whack. One evolved weapon in particular is STUNNINGLY out of balance with the rest. The tier list would go "S+++, A, C, F" right now. It's problematic enough that when you discover it, anything else feels reallllly pale. Now that's forgivable; we're in early access - but holy cow is it bad.

The Ugly:
- The predominant, most-powerful strategies involve the use of lots of AoE; no surprise/shock there. Much bigger surprise/shock: in many cases, your computer will not be able to handle it. Framerate drops will have you taking damage from mobs you never even saw/thought were dead. This isn't a performance issue, either; computers running Starfield or Path of Exile shouldn't be staggering on FZ. Now again, this is an entirely forgivable optimization issue - but it's enough of an issue that one might question the Early Access decision at this point. At the very least, take a page from Soulstone Survivors and offer us a "turn down effects" slider - getting nailed by mobs you can't see just sucks.

Like I said though: this WILL be a good game. The only major issue that time won't solve and will need some cleverness about is the "How to avoid the VS grind" and the developer clearly has already been thinking about it - just not enough (yet.)

Give it time. Then pick it up. For now though? Maybe not. There's Early Access, and then there's too-early-access. This is the latter, much as I want it to be the former.

So just finished a "quick" game of GalCiv 4. (Pay no heed to my playtime; Steam ignores hours spent in Offline Mode.)

I *want* to like this game. A lot. It has a lot of the bits I really like in 4x.

...but this game is a godawful mess. I barely know where to start.

1) The ranking charts are bizarre. I had a twenty-tech lead on my closest competitor, but was still in second place in research. I won the game on prestige - largely because I could build things no one could with my research edge - despite not being the leader in any way. The game ended when I upgraded a few planets with optional upgrades I'd found. THAT was the "prestige" that put me over the top? A space elevator on one of fourteen worlds made everyone else pack it in? Wut?
2) The influence system is totally out of whack. Influence-push systems are supposed to be gradual and grindy. I saw huge jumps - totally without explanation - frequently. Lots of territory changing hands; I had an ally go from "Warm" to "Enraged" because after one of those jumps, suddenly I had a crap ton of stuff deep in his territory.
3) The economics/build system is a mess. C'mon, guys - 4x learned a LONG time ago about the balance issues of "store up a bunch of units that are free production, without any real maintenance costs." I completed more than one or two wonders instantly simply by dumping ships on them. Seriously - we stopped this crap in the "2" range of Civ/Galciv/Whatever. Why's it back now? I'm not even going to get into some of the abuses the Culture system enables. Free Starbases? Instaflip starbases and planets? With no warning because of a culture perk?
3a) While I'm at it, let me mention another economics issue. Maybe it was the difficulty I was playing on - I just went with the "quick game" for game one - but uh... there are no costs involved with fleets. Let me clarify that: NO SHIP HAS ANY MAINTENANCE COST. There are max-fleet-stacks sizes, but that's a thin limitation at best.
4) The combat system is very underwhelming. I get not every game wants tactical combat, sure, fine - but this is just boring. Oooh, can I watch the ships swoop past each other? Exciting!
5) Ship Design is a total mess. You can spend ten hours making them look just right, but your options for what to put on them are infinitely less interesting - and thus the actual gameplay is sharply reduced.
6) The time scale on everything feels like a mess. Endure challenges for 100 turns, when you can make most things in the game happen in under 5!
7) The documentation is a complete fecal flinger. I'm not even talking about the ridiculous number of spelling errors - whatever. I'm talking about tooltips that say "This thing will happen" and it never does. I'm talking about random bonuses that you have no idea what they do, or what they mean - and there's no clear indicator. I saved some people! I get +1 persuasion! ....great. What the hell does that do? I have no idea, even after a full game. I mean, I know about persuasion in trades. But what does +1 do? And what's my total? Absolutely no useful info that I could find.
8) The AI is absolutely complete and utter balls-out garbage. Mind-blowingly bad trades. Complete rubbish combat tactics. Literally ignoring my fleet that's sieging its homeworld when it has an equivalent fleet right next door. The worst forms of trade manipulation. Completely ignoring my prestige-stacking run for a win. It's a disaster.
9) The UI is a mess on several levels. You can look at a planet summary OR a civ summary OR a fleet summary OR handy tips from your advisors, but never two at once. And you want to know about your trade routes, which are crucial for many game aspects? Screw you. Go two menus deep. You get a handy indicator that you can buy a new cultural trait... but not, y'know, for a culture you care about. So have fun clicking into those menus all the time to see if you can actually buy the traits you want. I can't imagine how hard it is to track units cruising around (because the AI doesn't particularly respect borders much) on a larger map with these tiny icons and the basically infinite unit limits.

I want to like this game. SO much. It has so many cool ideas. Customizable victory conditions midgame! Deeply specialize-able planets! A great exploration and reward system!

....but right now, this is a game only its mother could love. Stunning numbers of bugs. (Seriously, this is a AAA title. C'mon.) Horrendously poor AI. Huge lack of documentation. I'm genuinely stunned this was released like this.

This review as of 11/24/22 - Early Access 0.9.028e.

So Soulstone Survivors is the latest entry into the genre that Vampire Survivors created, filled with other titles like Army of One, Brotato, and so on. In some ways, it is a superior product to most of its contemporaries - in other ways, it has some development yet to come. A few of those ways will be critical to its success or failure overall.

Let’s break it down.

THE GOOD: The flexibility of the character development is top notch. The thinking-about-player-desires is very good.


-SS has an *outstanding* post-run character development system. Easily its strongest point, you can make meaningful choices that completely change how your next run plays out. Change your weapon (more weapons coming, apparently), change your runes (increased chance of X, higher damage on lower life, higher damage for damage-type-purity, etc), and obviously, pick one of the many character classes.
- SS has a quite good in-game character development system. Fans of the genre will be familiar with the base concept, but SS takes it a bit further - you can augment your abilities every level up, or CHANGE your abilities (or add new ones if you’re not at the cap yet) every few levels. The augments are a bit hit-or-miss; sometimes you have three great choices to grind your teeth choosing between, and other times you have one obvious choice.
- SS is pretty. Pretty enough that other games in the genre may be cringing a little.
- SS is smart enough to know that pretty isn’t always good. Path of Exile players take note: YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO TURN DOWN WEAPON EFFECTS TO AID IN VISIBILITY. What an amazing concept, eh? Mind-blowing. Maybe GGG should take note.
- The character classes are significantly different, and have notably different playstyles. We’re not talking one or two here - we’re talking 14 classes, and of those, maybe 6-7 of them have at least two genuinely strong, viable playstyles.
- The difficulty curve is quite long and the endless modes (there are two - a “steady as she goes” mode and a “rapidly harder” mode) offer a great deal of replayability. I’ve played the hell out of this game (70 hours) and there’s still room.
- A loooooooong progression line. There are still things to unlock after 70 hours. Don’t let Steam lie to you - there’s not 100 achievements. There’s 173. Each achievement functionally changes potential gameplay. Unlock a skill, a rune, a class - every time.

THE MEH: Balance issues, cost issues, variety issues.

- The classes are nowhere near evenly balanced at the moment. That’s to be expected in Early Access, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it. Some classes are vastly more powerful, playable, and flexible than others. Paladins, Necromancers, and Death Knights are quite potent. The Hound Master and the Legionnaire… less so.
- The Skill Tree is too simplistic and the costs are weird. “Five of this gem” for level 2 of a skill, then “one of that gem” for level 3. Kinda weird. You’ll also finish out the skill tree way, way before any other aspect of the game.
- By day two of playing (with the exception of one largely inconsequential late game mob) you’ll have seen every enemy the game can offer. There is a decent variety of monster types, sure, but functionally they all show up pretty early and are pretty much the same: “rush straight at you,” “rush up, fire cone,” or “stand off and lob.” Exception: the rival version of you I’ll discuss below.
- By forty hours of gameplay, all currencies are functionally worthless. I’m sure this will be corrected later - right now, some forms of currency don’t even show up out of game!

THE BAD: Yeah, we’ve got some bad here. In-game playing is pretty poor, gameplay is extremely repetitive, and the bosses are very unimaginative.

- Do you like to circle strafe? Too bad. That’s all you’re going to do. Ever. The later game consists of “kill random mobs for a bit, then three or five bosses spawn and group tightly together, and you circle strafe while pointing into the middle at the huge bullet sponge.”
- On very high levels, that’s your entire gameplay experience after 2-3 minutes, because you’ll kill so many smaller mobs incidentally while fighting the bullet boss sponge that you’ll trigger the next boss wave. You’ll actually get “boss backlog” and never stop seeing them. Fifteen, twenty, forty minutes of straight boss fighting. This is *REALLY* bad. It stops being fun after awhile, because all you’re doing is worrying about the bosses and nothing else. Which is too bad, because there's an interesting mob that only shows up late game. (Aside from the silly pointless reaper guy.)
- There are “rival” versions of your character - corrupted versions - and they can easily get lost in the mob swarm. They use your skills and are interesting fights. However, that’s actually very bad, because a) They have high powered abilities (like yours) and b) their telegraphs are just a bit quicker than every other mob in the game, including the bosses - they’ll catch you out a lot. But seeing them in the swarm? Yeah, g’luck. You'll die to the Corrupted Paladin more often than the bosses... but most times you won't even know he's there.

THE VERDICT
Overall, this is a decent game. I’m a little concerned because while The Good stuff is genuinely great and The Meh stuff is pretty easily fixable, “The Bad” list is… ominous.

SS would do well to take a page from Path of Exile’s boss fights, and substitute a bit more quality instead of quantity. When 90% of your screen is covered in red warning circles (and at times - lots of times - it will be) there’s really not much you can do except run away (which does nothing) or circle strage. Less mobs and more creative mobs would be a good idea - or at least something other than the same five bosses, over and over, in one small clump. Path of Exile does plenty of things wrong, but many of its bosses are unique, and they've got a lot of them.

Right now this is another “buy on sale, play it some and then come back when it patches” title. It’s got good bones - better than most, in fact - but… it has at least one pretty serious issue that needs a hard look before it can be the game that its makers clearly intend for it to be.

Do you like making big ships? Do you like making big ships go BOOM? Then Cosmoteer is up your alley…

…as long as that’s all you like doing. And that’s okay. Maybe. For now.

The Good
Absurdly deep ship construction mechanisms. Right down to “which way does the door out of the barracks face” and “which way do you want people working this job to run.” Some copy-and-paste mechanisms and some mirror mechanisms help with the QOL on ship design.
While relatively simplistic visually, the explosions when you take up someone’s reactor core or the way a ship shears in half with a sufficient impactor is deeply satisfying. Watch chunks of ship spin off in different directions and the poor bastards who were in that chunk spin as well.
Significantly different offensive strategies exist. Stand-back-and-snipe (railguns), one-massive-beam-of-doom (ion beams), and lots of traditional cannons/lasers exist as well.
Significantly different defensive strategies exist. The difference between small shields and large shields is not zero, and the different between thick armor, layered armor, or swiss-cheese-style armor is also not zero.
You can make downright pretty ships. Paint it, color it, slap some skulls and bones on it, go to town. The game itself comes with a remarkably wide range of premade ships that you’ll face, which is pretty cool.

The MEH
The economic model in the game is… well. The game’s early access, and this clearly isn’t a focus yet. You CAN mine and you CAN build your own ship parts… but it’s generally not time/player-input-efficient to do so. Just keep blowing up ships and sending your salvaging ship along behind and you’ll overrun what stations can hold soon enough. Money is never really a problem after your salvager ship comes online. Yes, you CAN factory ship and mine ship… but unless that’s your kick… there’s zero real reason to do so.
So while there ARE lots of different strategies for combat… they are decidedly unequal. Rail-sniping, provided the ship is designed properly, is pretty much a right answer. Especially in PvE, rail sniping punches way, way above its weight. If your ship is slower than a rail sniper, you’ll die eventually. Ion beams are the vogue in PvE, but that’s more because they’re tremendously fun and easy to use than a balance issue. (Now mind you, for PvE, that’s fine, and that’s why this is a “meh” and not a “bad” - but there are real balance issues here.) Realistically, anything that isn’t ion or rail is probably way sub-par, although I suspect a rapid-orbiting deck gun vessel might do well.
Career mode’s solar systems are very, very predictable. This is an early-access issue, no doubt, but it’s pretty blatant for now.
Resource acquisition for building new ships in career mode in general is a little thin and hassle-filled.

The Bad
Career mode in general is very, very content thin. Fly to X location. Blow up ship. Fly to Y location. Blow up ship. Sometimes it’s three ships. Sometimes it’s a station (which is just an immobile ship.) Sometimes it’s blow-up-a-ship-before-another-ship-dies. When you’re done with a sector, move to another one where you do exactly the same thing with bigger ships. Now again *this is a temporary, early-access issue* but, again, for now, it’s a real issue. Unless you’re someone who doesn’t mind this kind of thing, you’ll run into repetitive content issues by sector three at the most.
The ship design system, for all its glory, still needs more QoL and love. We have blueprints, but we need to be able to design subsections that we can quickly cut and paste.
It can be very difficult to determine why your people are inefficient at times. You end up studying their movements on 8x speed too often.
Many combat features are poorly documented. The reddit is full of “always check the hamburger menu.” The tutorial, while not bad, is definitely not up to the task of the game’s mighty potential. In most games, it’d be a great tutorial - in this one, it’s a clydesdale trying to haul the Titanic.
I think I’ll surprise and offend some players with this, but: the weapons need more variety. Missiles are too much of a hassle to be used as a primary weapon system, and that leaves you with either projectiles or ion beams. Technically there’s ammunition weapons and projectile weapons, but functionally, lasers and cannons do the same thing and can be intercepted the same way. (The same way you intercept missiles, come to that.) Disruptors (emp lasers, basically) represent a possible route, but we only get one pathetic version of those. Only specialized rush-in ships use those at all.
Speaking of specialized ships, the fleet controls are non-existent/terrible/badly in need of improvement. Mining ships would be a lot more popular if there was a mining AI. Salvaging ships would see a lot more use if I didn’t have to manually fly them everywhere and order them to manually salvage. Using multiple ships in combat isn’t impossible, but I’d hate to try it in PvP, and it’s not easy or smooth to do in any case.

Verdict
Cosmoteer is a game that’s going places - but it definitely still needs time to go there. The core “build ship, make things go boom” is awesome. The balance and variety isn’t - but we’d expect that at this stage. The career mode is paltry - but we’d expect that, too. As long as the promised potential is fulfilled - more variety, more balance, more things to do, and hopefully some frickin’ automation - this game has potential to go quite big indeed. For now? Pick it up on sale, plan to spend a weekend getting familiar with it, and then plan to table it for a dozen patches or so.

If you like Rimworld, you’ll find a lot to love about this game.
…but you’ll also find a lot missing. Stardeus WILL BE a great game - LOTS of replays, Rimworld numbers of replays in it - presuming development continues. As it is… the game is somewhat marginal.


THE GOOD
- The “gut through the bad times” aspect of Rimworld is there
- Lovers of “Bobiverse” books will feel strangely at home
- Extreme flexibility in handling problems and the direction you progress
- Very open-ended play; what to build the ship out of, how to structure it, where to fly it, where to place what facilities and what to prioritize - absolutely no guard rails here at all
- Like Rim, a surprisingly decent soundtrack. You might NOT turn off Game Music right away.
- Decent interface that comes at the challenges of the game type differently (better, possibly?) than Rim does.
- Did I mention the interface? The overlays for monitoring are top shelf; they put Rim to shame here.
- Really flexible time controls. Normal speed up through x4 is nice.

THE MEH
- The biggest aspect of Rim: “stories of the colonists” is not there at all. Your attachment to them is very weak, because their interaction with each other is very weak.
- The robots are equally as bland, interchangeable, and vanilla. Really, you just care about their skills and done.
- The colonist traits feel completely irrelevant.
- It’s a little hard to keep track of who’s wearing what - the pawns are hard to see at a scale where you can watch the ship - so you may occasionally panic about someone who looks like they just walked into space-exposed ship areas wearing a t-shirt.

THE BAD
- Look, I get this is space, space is empty, but for large portions of time, NOTHING HAPPENS. I literally accidentally left the game on slow speed, went to work, came home, AND MY SHIP WAS FINE. That’s really not good.
- The impact of dead humans is utterly negligible. I didn’t try it, but I think you could probably wake a bunch up, sell them to the slavers, and no one would care. Animals are similarly negligible.
- There are too few incident types. Maybe I just got lucky, but with 50 hours played, all I saw was dust, meteorites, fires, and space diahrrea. (The last one’s funny, I’ll grant you.) No combat - I lived in fear of it, but it never happened - and no other major incidence.
- There’s just not enough colonist-interact-impact. Yet.

Please note that I *DO* recommend the game. Note that everything in “Good” is a design decision, everything in “Meh” is fixable, and everything in “Bad” is simply because the game is so young… but right now… overall. Steam reviews need “meh.” I can’t *WAIT* to see where the game is in six months or a year.

But I should. And so should you.

Wishlist! Buy on sale! Do not play… yet.

So I wanted to wait until I had beaten max difficulty to post a review, but having done so:

First - for the cost, this game is *outstanding.* 2.99 for 29 hours - and I'll keep playing on yet - is genuinely impressive. Its competition - Vampire Survivors - should take note what this game is doing well. I'll start with that:

((((THE GOOD))))
- More active playstyle than VS. VS is basically just "wander around, don't get bumped." This requires aiming, a la Robotron back in the day, and it benefits from it.

- Multiple play styles which are genuinely unique from each other. (I'll come back to this later.)

- Genuinely creative weapon choices. With the possible exception of the Revolver, all of them are unique and interesting enough to be worthwhile, and I can give the Revolver a pass - it's a starter gun.

- While not wildly creative character choices, each is different enough from each other to be justifiable, and ...mostly... are all well-considered. (Again, come back to this later.)

- Twenty-and-ten minute options are well placed.

- Runes system gives you progression between rounds.

(((THE BAD))))

- The balance issues here are... pretty severe at the moment. Abby is head, shoulders, knees, toes, and the ground she stands on above all the others - I'm stunned the first balance pass didn't beat the crap out of her. Diamond, on the other hand, is completely without merit. She's the "I have lots of life" character. In this game, if you build right, you don't get hit - making that "lots of life" worthless.

- Did I mention the balance issues? There are some perks that are literally nothing but a dead weight at best, actively hampering at worst, for any playstyle. Glyphs are genuinely dangerous (they can hurt you!) and the summoner top-tier perk only LOOKS good until you do the math.

- The difficulty level jumps are, with all due respect to a hard-working dev, uninspired. "More life, more life, more life" and at the very end "Bosses attack more." This is - given how great everything else about the game is - REALLY underwhelming. Increased spawn rates? Extra projectiles? New mobs? New mob behaviors? Larger mobs? Larger hostile explosions? Anything? C'mon, brother - your game is awesome, but this part is bush league.

(((THE UGLY)))

- So the guy went with a very clear aesthetic and color scheme. I get that. Unfortunately, it DOES make the game hard to play until you get used to it - and even then you can have problems seeing what's going on. To be fair "Avoid all the red" works for most things - but there's a suicide-detonation mob that isn't red.

- Screen clutter can get severe to the point where you struggle to identify friend-from-foe. (Try a summoner-based Liliana/Batgun build and see what I mean. Good lord.) Accidental "bumps" into mobs you genuinely didn't even know were there get pretty common... and also lead you, inexorably, to Abby because she's the least likely to have that problem.

- Did I mention screen clutter? I can run ARK on Epic. I can run damn near any game on high settings without batting an eye. Playing certain builds, lategame, can see the game slow down so much that the ever-present timer in the upper right literally slows down. Two minutes left? Nah, more like four and change.

(((Closing Thoughts)))

Don't mistake my review for what it's not - this is an excellent game. It's also a very YOUNG game from - I'm guessing - a relative newcomer to the industry. He's got one other title, but it doesn't look like it caught on much. He's already working to improve this game and is freely admitting it's got a lot of room to grow.

Polished title? Heck no.
Bug free? Definitely not.
Incredibly fun, totally worth the value, and capable of eating as much time as you have available to throw at it?

Better believe it. Get you some 20 Minutes Till Dawn, and plan on losing a lot more than 20 minutes in your day.

As someone who played a whole heck of a lot of Civ, both SP and top-level competitive MP, I'd like to offer up on Humankind:
Humankind is a really good game. It's NOT a great game - yet - but it could be. It has some pretty significant balance issues that need resolving before that. (Some strategies are embarrassingly more potent than others, and some nations are absolutely a joke compared to others.)

...but that's to be expected from a "first generation" game. This isn't Civ 6 which is basically iterating on the same formula circa late Civ 3/Civ 4.

Humankind does some very bold things that Civ - inertia of time and tradition - would never have the guts to do. You change tribal identities every era. Humankind solves the SoD/bottleneck problem with a genuinely clever combat system that actually allows over time reinforcement. Humankind also solves the "why would I stop beating your face in?" problem rather nicely, and even solves Civ's perennial "endless sprawl" issue rather elegantly. "Go wide or go high" is a legitimate choice - and even more cleverly, you can reverse course later if you change your mind!

Having said that, Humankind is not (yet) in a position to say "We can/will unseat Civ for all time." Humankind still struggles with the "I already know I won the game and I still have to play it out" problem - much more so than Civ does. It has a fair number of bugs, a few of them genuinely gameplay disrupting. (Temporary, no doubt, but some genuinely rough.) Humankind's lack of diplomacy win is... curious. Their victory model will please some and infuriate others. (Looking at you, Apolyton SP gurus who steal deity-level wins at the last second.)

All in all, I'd encourage any/all 4x players to encourage this dev and buy this game. It might - or might not - be the game to unseat Civ. What it WILL do, most certainly, is light a fire under Firaxis's hindquarters to do more than just a lazy iteration for the next Civ. (I'd argue C5 and C6 are exactly this.)

Long story short: Humankind might or might not be a win for Firaxis's competition, but it's definitely a win for players. Give it a go!

Okay, so. X-Com Chimera is a small-squad/small-arena tactical turn-based shooter, in a world based on the X-Com storyline.
....and that's where its similarity to X-Com games ends.
- No squad members may ever die. Instafail if you do. (This is shockingly non-XCom.)
- Squad members have "enforced" personalities and storylines, removing the develop-over-time nature of your character RP from other X-Com games.
- The admin/base building side of things is dumbed down significantly and made into a one-or-two-choices selector.
- Combat itself is buggy; there's one critically useful ability that often simply does nothing, even though it indicates that it should work (debuff exists on character.) Enemy hit rates are sky-high even in ridiculous circumstances; far more so than the Xcom norm for the difficulty.
- Hit probabilities are puzzling even to X-Com veterans. The "explanation" display does not, in many cases, explain. Why is the unit seven tiles away half behind cover easier for my shotgunner to hit than the unit two tiles away with a clear line of sight?
- Real, significant tactical differences between starting firearms, at least, was zero, despite assault rifle/smg/shotgun/pistol assignments.
- The breach mechanic, while fun, is not really a wild display of tactical creativity. In many cases you have one choice, sometimes two. I'd only seen three choices once in six missions.

... and that really sums up the game. It's not XCom. It's "Telltale Games does XCom." It's "XCom on Theme Park Rails." It's "Generic Turn-Based Shooter in XCom World."

I'm more than a little disappointed. This is the first X-Com game that ever made me regret spending money since X-Com Enforcer nineteen years ago.