Recent reviews by Anschau

I bought this game three days ago. Today, after a surprise update, I needed help and was told to go on the official discord to request that help. I went to the official Discord, which promptly BANNED me because in the last 5 years I never bothered to get an avatar for my Discord account. I am not sure if the development team itself has mental illness, or what the ****ing problem is, but there is a problem. This game is moderately fun, and the new update is interesting, but not enough to subsidize whatever this bulls**t is. I honestly cannot overstate how incredibly, unbelievably stupid, this is. Do not buy this game, something will eventually break and apparently they don't even want to hear you speak.

It's definitely complete enough for a buy, very polished. I am hoping the simulation gets a bit of a rework for unit sales on consoles and games, especially consoles when randomized. Right now which consoles succeed and fail is largely out of the player's realm to influence, but this is minor a late game nitpick. There is hours of game before you start trying to do weird stuff like that.

I got this game near Day One. It was interesting but it had a lot of flaws. Fast forward years later and one of my friends had started playing it so I reinstalled and wow has it come a long way. A lot of polish and thought has made this a very fun game. There is something for everyone, and it balances the need of private work and public effort really well with its timed private stashes. What really makes this game work though is the community. Only 7-10,000 players are active, but they are all cream of the crop, most of the *ssholes and insufferables have long ago filtered away making even someone playing solo feel like they are part of the team. People can get testy, but no one has been trolling on purpose, which is pretty astounding given how many people are interacting with each other in tight spaces, either in the factory areas or on the front lines. Give this game a shot, you won't regret it.

A jumbled mess that is poorly thought out and crumbles under it's own weight. You feel more like a spectator in each game instead of having agency, there just isn't time to comprehend the possibilities and take action. It's a paradox: the game is so complicated that you can't make meaningful decisions and that in turns makes the game simple and boring. Town of Salem is a much better product and better attended.

If Ark was better optimized and Conan had better PVP and then they had a baby, this is what it would be. The game will take a little longer to learn then other survivals because it has a fresh take on bases with its mobility-based theme. The quality system is not intuitive but it makes sense once you learn it and honestly feels less grindy than Ark and Conan. The game isn't perfect, the devs are experimenting with some different ideas regarding realms/servers that probably isn't going to work out in the long run, but honestly that's a great thing, you can tell how much thought has been put into every portion of this game. It is all very polished and I have yet to experience lag.

Replayability is really high here. I enjoy how you can play as solo-trader/nomad making their way east trying to get access to valuables before the bigger clans arrive, or as a small clan or 5-10 people who roam in just 2 or 3 walkers and do hit and run raids, or ambushes. Or as a member of a big clan, carefully crafting high-quality walkers and customizing them for war (there are only 15 or so different walkers in the game, but the quality system and module customization system makes it much more in-depth).

I would say if you have been on the fence for a while, or have just discovered this game exists, now is a great time to buy the game and learn it while the season is halfway through because for sure this game has not seen it's best days and there is more to come. It's like if someone made a game inspired by the Mortal Engines book series.

Edit: Issue one has been resolved.

This update has two big problems:

1) And this is the biggest, the Intel/Espionage dice are broken. When running operations for gathering intel or acquiring assets you ALWAYS get an insight every dice roll, even if it rolls a negative number and lands in the 0 insights bracket. In fact, based on the tooltip definitions it shouldn't even be possible to make progress on the Intel because the difficulty malus of FIVE makes rolling a TEN equate to rolling a FIVE (10-5=5) and if you have 5 or less you gain 0 insights... So something is wrong here, and I am not a minmaxer by any means but in a game where the selling point is simulation I like the simulation to make sense. Otherwise there is no accomplishment. I already had a big enough problem with Fallen Empires not actually building anything on worlds they conquer, but with this it just feels less like a simulation where anything could happen and more like a facade to make you think there is a simulation. Fallen Empires are just getting resources from nowhere, not from colonies. You are just making the same progress on Intel/Epsionage rolls, and codebreaking or difficulty values don't matter. It's honestly mindboggling how this DLC got released and no one realized the dice were broken. It feels like they left it on some developer mode where its suppose to make incremental progress no matter what to test other facets and then someone forgot to turn it off for release.

It's really just sloppy and immersion-breaking.

2) The other issue is with first-contact. It works fine, and does add an air of mystery, but it needs to be spaced out longer. 60 days instead of 30 days per phase tick. Otherwise, even with Xenophone (my first playthrough), it ends too quickly to do anything interesting with the mechanic.

It's cute. Not quite as engaging and engrossing as Long Live the Queen, but there is something here.

The game is 80% of the way there, and it is fun, but the developers keep making the galaxy bigger instead of better. They need to focus on AI AI AI and they seem to have given up on improving the AI combat and the AI Faction strategies, which is where the game suffers. They can add more sectors and shinier ships all they want, if I were them my top three priorities would be:

1) Improve combat AI and make simulated combat more in line with actual combat results (for combat that occurs in unobserved sectors)

2) Run more simulations on how Faction AIs operate and interact, especially with massing fleets. The starting fleets in the game never seem to be rebuilt, especially the human factions. If they lose their fleet they tend to send 1 capital ship at a time to its death as it gets built, there is no strategic reinforcement or falling back to regroup or rebuild. This is frustrating because if a player is helping them they often will see their efforts wasted.

3) The simulation on stations could be deepened with more rooms and events. It would be interesting if you could attract NPC dignataries and business merchants to a station as it becomes more prosperous or secure. Right now its only random NPCs get spawned as a reflection of the crew quarters you build. It's fine, but there is opportunity here. It's a shame because the station builder is one of the most polished parts of the game...

I reinstalled DOTA 2 a few days ago hoping it had gotten better, because the base game is actually quite fun. But the only way to play the game is with a team, the developers have allowed people who don't speak the same language to play together on teams in a game where communication is paramount. This isn't a hard problem to fix, they are either lazy or the simply don't care. The incompetence demonstrated by the developers in this regard is so egregious that 95% of games are unplayable, each game a lesson in frustration and a waste of time. Do not play this game, there is no joy to be had here.

It's pretty much everything you loved about vanilla Battle Brothers, but deeper. More bridge weapons like a mace/spear hybrid, a small perk rework, lots of new beasts with new mechanics and drops, crafting and painting (finally my band can build up a color scheme!), and a bunch of new lore/contracts/writing. You can help rebuild towns that have been raided (but not destroyed).

The Unhold are pretty brutal, especially when charmed by a Hexe which seemed particularly unfair for a day 30 run-in, but hey, the raging unfair brutality is why we love this game. Please keep rolling a string of 90s whenever my highest level melees attack. It makes me so happy /sarcasm/.

I am about 10 hours into this DLC and am very satsified with my purchase. I have also seen some new recruit backgrounds which is neat. Also some great quality of life adjustments on ending the turn of all your mercenaries. There was ONE, solitary bug where a merchant approaches me with vials, it's only one paragraph long and it seems like maybe it's missing a ton of other copy because that one paragraph makes no sense alone. Then it asks for Deal or No Deal. I chose No Deal because I didn't know what was going and was just leaving the city on a parcel delivery quest and couldn't afford to accidently screw it up.

I get that this game is suppose to be about a plain mercenary company fighting in a low-fantasy world (with witches and necromancers and orcs just to spice it up a little). But I would kill for like a $9.99 DLC where there is a 1/100 chance a brother develops sorcery powers or something days after your hire him. Make it optional like this DLC. I would pay for it. Think the Psi warriors from Xcom2, but more rare. There is nothing more fun than taking a beggar and making him a vicious level 12 swordsman, I think having the chance to take even rarer journeys with someone becoming a wizard would be awesome. Especially for us Iron Man addicts.

Anyways, back to Beasts and Exploration. I love it, you should buy it. These guys know what they are doing.