Recent reviews by 73786e

Love the developer
Hate the publisher

Simple as

One day I'll break 300 seconds. One day...

I'm not giving this game a positive review until they include an undo for accidental clicks. I hate having to restart because of a double click.

Most fun I've had since Project Wingman.

The cops are the absolute worst part of this game, they will rubber band and hit you with cars that weigh triple your own.

Also the graphics are atrocious for a major studio game that came out in late 2019.

I got it for 95% off, and even then I thought about doing a refund.

** Update ** The game crashed, but there's still a process running. Can't kill it, as Windows says "access restricted". There's probably some nasty DRM that's caught up in this.

Wow, I didn't get a migraine!

I was able to get used to the visuals surprisingly quickly; but the scoring is much different than Devil's Daggers, which results in a more aggressive play style. The in game tutorial section helps explain the new mechanics, which I would recommend taking the time to do.

I bought into the alpha about two years ago, and substantially, the game has remained pretty much the same since then. Primarily, what's been added in the intermediary period has been a number of Naval Academy missions, more hulls and components, unique models for different countries, and most recently (within the past month or so) the campaign.

To get it out of the way, the campaign is the newest part which came out with Core Patch 1, I wouldn't even consider it something outside of a proof of concept to quiet the people on the forums who have been asking where it has been during the past year or so. I understand that the pandemic has effected development for many games with small teams, but they also had their studio bought out by a publisher. We'll see where this goes.

Where the game currently stands, there are just under 60 Naval Academy missions, ranging from teaching you core mechanics of the game through experimentation (no handholding, nothing is explicitly described in game), up to full scale fleet actions. This will primarily occupy your time and be the most challenging component of the game due to the weight, cost, and technology restrictions placed on you for each mission. You can have a ton of fun with this portion alone.

You also have Free Missions, where you have no cost limit for your builds, and you can have over 100 ships in action against each other (rip your computer if you do that though). Before you could only customize the lead ship of the fleet (i.e. the Battleship if that's the largest ship you've allocated for yourself), but now you have the option of making the design for each class of ship. This is where you go to make a Yamato with like 12 four barreled 12" guns scattered across the deck. Good times can be had here, but without the restrictions offered by the Naval Academy missions, there's not much challenge.

The biggest flaw that exists throughout the game is that the playing field is always an infinite plane of water. No landmasses or islands. Adding that alone, even as a slight chance when going into battle, would do a lot to break up the monotony of it.

The devs have been updating it pretty consistently, adding balance changes and updating calculations for more accurate behavior. If you like ships/naval history, and are a fan of the customization aspect of games like Koei's Naval Ops Warship Gunner (this game has none of the arcadeiness of that though), it offers an experience of customization in a 3D environment that you won't see anywhere else really. $35 isn't a bad buy, especially when it was $50 to get a stripped down version of the game in the state it was two years ago.

Edit: 500 hours already? It's still fun for what its is, even in the current state, as there's not a lot else like it.

A fun little environment to do some creative stuff!

NGS has become synonymous with terms predatory, exploitative, lazy, and cash grab. The game launched with about 75% of the content we saw in beta, with no major additions since then.

Here's what we've gotten:
Two seasonal events (the fall event is the exact same questing content as the summer).
A five minute long story side quest where you get a cosmetic bracelet.
An Urgent Quest which invokes one of the most loathed UQs from base PSO2, and takes place right outside the main hub so it's not even a new area.
FIFTEEN SCRATCH TICKETS WITH REAL MONEY (six of which were reissues of content from the base game) which cost about $2 per pull. They incentivize this by locking cosmetics or items you can't get otherwise behind pulling X amount of tickets. (This is coupled with a recent campaign where they gave out Sonic themed items that were modeled in PSO2 with spending up to 10,000AC, which is about $100 USD).

What we haven't gotten:
Personal Quarters
Alliance Quarters
A currency system similar to FUN, which you earned just by playing and community interaction. (You could obtain free cosmetics and certain items that would circumvent the pay structure, like three day shop or personal quarters passes.)
Titles (essentially in game achievements)

The framework existed for a lot of what's missing from the game, but we're still waiting for it. Instead, we're roaming the same four tiny exploration zones and three combat zones, doing the same quests over and over, with three urgent quests (one of which is a solo boss battle with not complex mechanics, the other is just a rare enemy model with more HP).

I'm letting my premium lapse as it's ending in about three days. I gave Sega the benefit of the doubt when NGS launched and re-upped for three months. My mistake. There's been no communication from them except "headline events", where at least half of the time on those is spent on advertising upcoming scratches.

Even before NGS, PSO2 was averaging about 6,000-8,000 players over a 24 hour period. This was their big push to get new players in the west. NGS saw nearly 60,000 players at launch, and when people saw how little content there was, most of the curious people left fairly quickly. People who stuck with the game because they are fans of the series have slowly been trailing off, most the people from my alliance have been bled off into FFXIV. NGS is dead. Presently, the 24 hour peak, on a weekend, is almost below 3,000.

You killed your own game in three months Sega. Good job. I hope milking your fans for microtransaction cosmetics without delivering any game play paid off in the end. (Probably not, SAMMY will likely liquidate your assets once everything you have ready to ship delivered by winter/spring.)