This is the pinnacle of a truly incredible concept ruined by the artist's vision. One of the most in-depth, functional, and enjoyable customization systems outside of Battletech, hidden behind a complete lack of any actual, useable statistics. A genuinely unique and engaging campaign layer, buried under a mile of completely unnecessary features. Finally, a frankly lackluster, colorless, and boring tactical layer to round it all off, lacking any useful information whatsoever and tucked in a whole fifth of the screen underneath a labyrinthine and pointless UI.

This game feels like it's someone's baby. Some artiste had a goal in mind, set out to produce it, and succeeded in producing *exactly* what they wanted; unfortunately, what they wanted includes many absolutely unthinkable and silly decisions. I could have handled the savescumming. I could have handled the completely useless tutorial. I could have used steam guides to hold my hand through the first 20 hours. I did, in fact, do just that, and I got pretty far. Unfortunately, there's just too much wrong here to keep enjoying.

The perfect example of how bizarre the decisions made during development for this game is in the pilot selection screen. Sometimes you click on a pilot and you are simply not allowed to assign them, because they're busy eating, or sleeping, or partying. How do you make them NOT busy, you ask? Do you have to wait a day? No. Do you have to upgrade certain buildings? No. You wait three seconds. They randomly get locked out of the menu for three whole seconds, for no reason.

This is a complete nonissue; it doesn't actually hurt your game at all, once you figure out what the hell is going on. But it's the perfect example of what's wrong with this game. It perfectly encapsulates why there's effectively zero information given to you at any point, not from the tutorial, not from the UI, and not from any of the engineering screens. This game is someone else's vision. You were never meant to enjoy it.

Its hard. Nobody is going to explain how anything works. You're going to fail. A lot.


But its fun. The first time you put critical strikes mod on the first missile launcher you research and forget to set the minimum firing range, leading to a single blast killing all your mechs? Wonderful.