Recent reviews by Dūmlūpe

I saw another review say something to the effect of "some reviews say it plays too much like civ, others say it doesn't play enough like civ." This review is absolutely correct, but for the wrong reasons: what this game does is adapt all the WORST PARTS of civ without understanding what makes that formula work.

To its credit, there are a few things the game does better than civ. having to "claim" a wonder before you can build it removes the annoyance of having your wonder stolen at the last minute, resources that you haven't unlocked yet are marked, meaning you won't accidentally build over them, and the diplomacy is a lot less tedious than civ's is. However, this is about where the improvements end.

Ironically, the biggest flaw with this game comes directly from it trying to solve one of civ's flaws. In civ, science is the "god stat." Science gives you more of everything, civs with bonuses to science are very powerful, and there is no reason not to focus on increasing science if you can afford to do so.

This game tries to solve that problem by making players earn points within each technological era. These points can be earned for things like building buildings, increasing population, or settling territory. Advancing to the next era means you can no longer earn points from the previous one. Whoever has the most points at the end is the winner. In theory, this system makes science rushing less effective, and encourages the player to focus on all their resources at least a little bit.

In practice however, it turns production into the god stat instead. This game allows you to build "districts," the equivalent of civ's improvements, for almost every resource in the game. So, logically, the ability to build more of these, faster is objectively the best one. This makes the snowball effect even WORSE than it is in civ. In civ, you might at least have more culture than a science focused player, but here, the player with the most production has more of EVERYTHING. The devs should have been able to see this coming, too. Did they not sit down and think to themselves, "hmm, I wonder why civ doesn't allow you to build infinite research labs?"

This is pretty much par for the course. For every attempt made by the developers to improve civ's mechanics, they managed to add another that feels at best half baked and at worst worse than the mechanic it replaced to begin with. The war support system attempts to penalize warmongering, but in practice makes the outcome of wars feel arbitrary and out of the player's control. The gimmick in which the player starts as a group of hunter-gatherers and must acquire enough resources to found their first city is interesting, but ultimately adds nothing and increases the odds that an enemy will snipe the culture you wanted. The random events which appear occasionally are totally inconsequential and feel more like (very bad) social commentary than an actual game mechanic. Do you pay a tiny bit of gold to feed the starving orphans, or do you take a minor unrest penalty for killing them all?

This game is like if you asked an AI to generate a civ clone. It looks ok at first, but on closer inspection you realize it's half baked, incoherent, and most damningly, arbitrary. Far too often does it feel like vital game mechanics are out of the player's control, and always at the worst possible times. They need to go back to the drawing board on this one. There's just nothing it does that any other 4x doesn't do better.

TLDR: This game is flawed at a fundamental design level. A company that already made 3 successful 4x games really ought to have known better.

This game wants to be Terraria really, really bad. That's fine. Terraria is a great game. But it's missing something. I can't quite put my finger on it. It feels somehow slow and sluggish. There's a lot of little annoyances that just add up over time. Tools and armor cost a bit too much, so crafting feels tedious. Enemies spawn a bit too frequently underground, so mining feels tedious. You can't move and shoot at the same time, so bosses feel tedious. Sprinting requires a dedicated accessory and drains stamina very quickly, so exploration feels tedious.

It's not a bad game. It could even be better than Terraria some day. But it just needs some more refinement before I can really recommend it.

Was enjoying the game until I ran into a ridiculous, game breaking bug. Basically, the game crashed, got confused, and thinks I'm in the overworld and in a dungeon at the same time. This causes it to crash constantly, and I can't get out. My save file is ♥♥♥♥♥♥. But no big deal, right? I'll just make another! It's only 9 hours of my life down the drain.

WRONG. Now EVERY save, even fresh ones, crash when I try to load in to the world. I straight up cannot play the game at all. This is totally unacceptable.

I am absolutely BAFFLED as to how this game has overwhelmingly positive reviews.

As far as I can tell, this game is some kind of social experiment. the developer(s) has gone out of his way to make every single mechanic as tedious and frustrating as humanly possible, while being JUST interesting enough to make you want to continue. Go on, grind your face into the brick wall a little longer. You'll love it.

Let us name a few.

The poise mechanic. Interesting on paper. Essentially you have 200 points of temporary hp which regenerate out of combat before your "real" hp takes damage. In practice, however, what this actually means is that 99% of fights go like this: Land 1 or 2 hits on the enemy, lose all your poise hp because enemies do insane damage, run away, wait like 20 turns for your poise to regen, repeat. Here it's worth noting that you have to manually click on your character for every turn you wait. Very exciting.

The sailing mechanics. Sailing a boat is mandatory to complete the game. Lots and lots of sailing, in fact. Here again, we have an interesting on paper mechanic: wind direction. The game attempts to simulate wind, making your boat slower if you try to sail into the wind, and vice versa. Unfortunately, it is still faster to sail in a straight line toward you objective, rather than try to follow the wind. So, in practice, it's more like your boat just randomly goes really slow sometimes. In addition to this, the sea is absolutely INFESTED with pirates who will pursue you relentlessly and force you to get into a really annoying random encounter where your ship is boarded by like 6 guys every 5 seconds. I am SO SICK OF FIGHTING PIRATES. The game tries to give you a cannon to ward the pirates off, but it barely does any damage, takes ages to reload, and doesn't even slow the pirates down, so tough luck, you're fighting pretty much every single pirate ship you come across. Oh, and if the pirates find your ship while you're not on it, you have to fight them TWICE. Once on your own ship to take it back, then again on theirs.

On that note, you are heavily disincentiveized to actually fight any random encounters since they drop very little loot and there is no exp in this game. This has the effect of turning said very frequent random encounters into an annoyance which are usually better avoided than actually fought. Woe if you chose to worship the strength god, because you will be penalized for doing this.

The developer seems obsessed with having the player catch fire every 5 seconds. A frequent hazard in dungeons is a big pool of lava which spews fire onto random tiles. If you touch one of the fires, which are much, much harder to avoid then they seem, you catch fire and take a large amount of damage. Some dungeons are made of nothing BUT lava. Worse, if the dungeon floor is made of wood (also very common), the fire will spread to all of the wood tiles, which will then burn for a very long time. You wanted to go into that room? Too bad, you now have to wander around for about 50-100 turns until the fire goes out, or else take a lot of fire damage. You can put the fire out by using a bottle of water on yourself, but having to open your inventory, scroll down to the bottle of water, and click use every time it happens is very tedious when it happens so often.

Some enemies are extremely annoying for how common they are, such as the magic skeletons who summon exploding wisps (hello again, fire damage) and can self revive. Others are just blatantly overpowered, like the recolored white "scarabs" which have the power of an endgame enemy despite being able to spawn as early as the first dungeon.

On top of all this, some mechanics are either poorly implemented or just flat out don't work. Armor is a waste of money. The hunger mechanic adds nothing. There is a mechanic to upgrade a town's shop stock by spending money, which you will never use because it's far too expensive for too little gain. There is a luck stat with exactly 1 equipable item that raises it and no description of what it does. The list goes on.

I'm about 20 hours in and I'm very, very close to beating the game, but I just don't know if I can take it anymore. It's too tedious. It's too frustrating. It's very interesting, and making it free is very generous. But it's just not a very well designed game.

At first, I really liked this game. I came so, so close to buying it. Then, I realized that the ai does that same typical cheap ♥♥♥♥ every other 4x does where they're given a stupid amount of free bonuses to try to make it "competetive" with the player. The problem is, this game is very, VERY snowbally. if you have an early lead, by god you are KEEPING that lead for the entire rest of the game. by around turn 20 the ai has already gobbled up every last valuable resource on the entire map and you are left to scrounge through the scraps it couldn't be bothered to snatch up. Absolutely miserable experience.

This is slightly more tolerable on larger maps, but then not only do turns take forever, it also increases your chance of running into a really annoying bug where clicking the next turn button doesn't work and you have to load a save, among other things. It's like the game can't handle itself.

Tl;dr: Love the aesthetic, but manages to fall into all the common 4x pitfalls: cheap but stupid AI, too snowbally, frantic early game but slow as molasses late game, weird stability issues late game, etc. Not worth the price imo.

Props for having one of the few 4x diplomacy mechanics that doesn't suck, though.

Game crashes consistently on loading in despite the fact that my PC exceeds the minimum specs

You know this game is good because any time you mention any other fallout game a million fanboys come crawling out of the woodwork to tell you that this one is better.

The game called me an "Omega Idiot" and I agree tbh

A good remake of a great game, but honestly not as great as it could have been and left me feeling slightly disapointed. For every good change to the original there is one that is questionable.

All spritework was lovingly redone and looks much better, and the game defaults to a more zoomed in camera setting so you can admire it. Too bad the game was balanced around the original level of zoom, so you will either be turning this setting off or suffering because of it.

Another much-touted change was the fact that you no longer have to tediously kill every enemy in the level to activate the teleporter. Unfortunately, it seems that in an attempt to compensate they dramatically increased the rate at which enemies scale over time, which makes everything take a pointlessly long time to kill after about the third area or so. The developers seemingly attempted to remedy this by adding the option to change the amount of damage you take and deal in the settings, but this setting should not have to be there - ideally, the thought of changing a setting like this should not even cross the player's mind.

The new characters are fun and mostly well designed, albeit Artificer was clearly not designed for this game and it shows. On the bright side, enforcer is no longer the worst character in the game. Also, the option to have alternate character skills as in RoR 2 is a nice feature, even if not all of them are useful.

The providence trials, another much-touted feature and the source of most of these new skills, is also a mixed bag. It's essentially a set of mini-games which mainly serve to showcase some of the new items and abilities. Usually, if a trial features a new ability or item, you will unlock it upon completion, which is nice. The trials themselves range from fun to tedious to "are you serious" levels of frustrating, not helped by the fact that there is an unlock tied to getting "crown score" on at least 25 of them. These clearly did not receive much play testing and could have used some tweaking.

All that said, I still recommend it. The improved controls alone are a big help - the original had the second worst keyboard controls of any modern game I've ever played, this one's controls are... fine, at least if you pick the RoR 2 controls option.

If you were a fan of the original, get it. If you never played the original and want to give it a try, get it. If you played the original, didn't like it very much, and wanted to see if this version improved things, you're probably going to be disappointed. Still, for what it is, it's worth it: a great game made even greater, even if by just a little bit.

New name, same great game. UQM was game of the year in 1993 and for good reason; it was truly ahead of its time with fun gameplay and a compelling narrative which still hold up to this day. There is a certain creative spark to UQM's version of outer space that few other games manage to capture. Additionally,

PRIORITY OVERRIDE. NEW BEHAVIOR DICTATED. MUST BREAK TARGET INTO COMPONENT MINERALS.