Recent reviews by Kraiklin

I think at this point I can't really give this anything except a Do Not Recommend, but that doesn't mean it's a negative review. I'm a kickstarter backer and I can see the development trajectory taking place - the devs have been completely honest about the state of this build and the videos etc. they've shown in Discord prior to the release were entirely accurate to the state of the game. This version is exactly what I was expecting.

I'm happy with how things are going and still think this will be a good game. However right now if you're stumbling across this on Steam as a new strategy game I cannot say you should buy it. It's barely Alpha yet, more a prototype it feels like. I'm excited to see what comes and hope to come back and update this to a Recommendation as the game gets fleshed out.

TEMP UPDATE 05 JAN 25: As of the Water 2.0 update the devs have now added water bots to allow collecting water offline. I haven't had the chance to jump back in and test it yet to re-review properly, but take the below with a pinch of salt for now.

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Picked this up because the setting is interesting and seemed like it might be a looter shooter that would suit solo play. Was promising at first but now I've done a few extractions I started looking up the water system and realised that it depletes while I'm offline, and if I don't play regularly and gather water I will lose any and all progress I've made until then.

I switch games all the time, and sometimes life gets in the way and means I don't play for a stretch. I lost any motivation to keep playing if I'm just inevitably going to lose everything because I didn't complete my chores. Not going to refund because the rest of the game looks good enough, will just hold out hope this gets removed or reworked in future.

Only other feedback I'd give from my short time with it is that although it's cool seeing battles happening around you, the current state of the AI is so janky that it's impossible to get much immersion from it. It's like watching a Disneyland animatronic version of a battle a lot of the time. Fingers crossed that improves through early access.

A mediocre copycat that falls somewhere between Warframe and Destiny. It looks nice and the gunplay is good enough that it kept me going to the end of the story quests but now I'm staring down the barrel of the grind phase I just have no appetite for it. The weapons are quite same-y, and although there are quite a few different descendant powers most of them just feel like farting in the wind. For a game that expects you to spend hundreds of hours grinding for loot it fails at the first step for me - being satisfying to play over and over again.

Maybe it will grow and deepen like Warframe did, but I don't see any of the charm and uniqueness that Warframe (or even Destiny I think) had even in the early days. The story can pretty much be summarised as "bad guy explains exactly what they're going to do -> all our expert advisers tell us that's impossible and can't be done -> bad guy does it as stated" rinse and repeat. Playing through it with a couple of friends multiple times we found ourselves kind of wondering why we're helping these idiots. For one of the big bads, defecting honestly seemed like a pretty good option if it had been available. Can't say I found myself getting swept along in the narrative, very quickly just became something I had to get through to unlock all the regions. Considering how annoying most of the people you meet are as well, including a couple of characters clearly set up as future Descendant releases, I'm not exactly excited by future updates either. Unless there's an option to immediately yeet her into the sun I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy folks like Luna very much.

It's a game I can see myself coming back to occasionally for some low stress shooting when I have one of those days staring at my Steam library not feeling like anything in particular, but doesn't appeal for the long haul. All it's achieved in the endgame is making me reinstall Warframe.

Great game but definitely needing a bit more time in the oven. In it's current state there isn't much challenge, seems almost impossible to actually fail and I'm still on my first playthrough - just passed day 110 and have been stable at around 60 villagers for over a year now, and have only lost 2 villagers the entire time. The only limitation to me growing more is game performance with this many people, and some issues with the AI meaning the micro managing is getting a bit tiring now. Things like in the bloomery the NPCs will just walk off when it's bedtime regardless of whether there's a bloom block waiting to be hammered out, meaning they can waste quite a bit of the (already limited) iron ore. Also not being able to set max limits on production at the workshop is a bit of a pain and means you have to keep quite a close eye on things. Overall though the AI is actually quite impressive and I'm surprised how well it works after my experience with other EA games like this. With a bit of awareness and experience it's easy to workaround.

There are also a couple of balance issues in the resources imo, especially with hardwood stuff. I have dozens of unused and unneeded logs stocked up because I'm constantly in need of long sticks, and it feels like I'm chopping down entire forests just to make the handles for a few tools. Seems a bit weird being able to get 2 or 3 huge wooden posts out of a tree but only 2 or 4 tool handles.

That said I'm really excited to see where this game goes. I'd been looking for something like Medieval Dynasty but with more meat to it for a while and this fits perfectly. The crafting is unique and cool especially, now I'm established I've been quite enjoying just playing as the town blacksmith since it's quite an involved process. The graphics are really nice, it plays smoothly and the combat seems pretty solid (though can't say that's my main interest). Just don't go into it expecting Valheim 2.0, it is not even trying to be that.

Fantastic looking city builder which brings some really nice features to the table. It's very much early access and there is a lot locked away but I've had a great time with it so far. If you're into the city builder more than the combat then probably worth picking up even in its current state, but if you're more after the strategy/combat side then perhaps hold off a bit. It's already had me up late a few nights though and I can't wait to play more.

* The village building mechanics are really nice and give good flexibilty with your layouts, without being locked into grids. The way housing has different modules/upgrades is fun and introduces some nice variety.
* The graphics are great for a city builder like this, and the towns look awesome as they develop.
* I like the way the economy works, with regional wealth representing the people and your personal wealth taxed off that. Works well and feels intuitive.
* The AI seems to be pretty solid, I've now got around 500 people in 1 of my towns and everything is still working as it should, no weird bottlenecks or problems distributing to lots of houses like some city builders start to show
* Combat is actually quite good and detailed, when you get into battles it's basically a light version of Total War mechanics with enough depth to be interesting. Excited to see what's coming here with the upgrades etc. which are currently locked, but even as it is there's enough room for tactics and good preparation to let you beat larger forces.

There are negatives but a lot of them are just early access things, missing content. Based on what's here I expect it will expand a lot in coming updates, but in case the dev reads this some main thoughts:

- Late into the Restoring the Peace scenario it feels like time is the only thing holding me back now. Early on the rarity of the raider attacks was great but now I have a full army and good economy and just need influence. I've spent the last hour or so just on x8 speed waiting for the minimum raid time to pass so I get attacked and can earn the 2k influence I need to claim another territory. The enemy army can't touch me anymore so it's just become a bit procedural.
- I'm guessing army size is limited for performance as much as anything but the fact I cap out at 6 militia forces takes away most of my motivation for building mulitple towns. I have 1 Large Town with enough population to completely fill my army slots, and I built 1 other on a rich iron region for the infinite weapon/armour crafting, but beyond that I don't have any need for more except if I really wanted to get another retainer army.
- No way to have bulk supply routes between your towns. Yes you can barter but it's fairly slow and relies on having something valuable worth trading. In some ways I do like this - you don't end up in an Anno 1800 scenario where your brain is melting trying to remember where all your supplies are going and making sure needs are met in every town - but it takes away a lot of my motivation to expand and fill the territory I'm claiming. Maybe I'm missing something but if I build a farming town it doesn't seem like I'd be able to really push enough food back home reliably enough to be able to use it as a way to feed a big population. Seems to be better off just building large vegetable gardens and more wheat fields at home.
- Body cleanup seems a little frustrating at times. I had a large battle in my town centre when I first started expanding which left over 200 bodies. Even with multiple families in the corpse pit and church it took too long to cleanup and I got a massive -80ish debuf to happiness which made a bunch of families leave and nearly ended the playthrough. I get that bodies are bad but it felt a bit of a harsh outcome for my first against-the-odds major victory against the Baron.
- I've only had 1 noticeable bug so far, for some reason in my 2nd town my trading post occasionally decides it's not connected to the main road anymore despite being there for years, and then a couple of days later it's ok again. I think it's just the status message glitching as it *seems* like traders are still arriving fine.
- Off map enemies. I suspect this is maybe just an early access thing? But it feels a bit underwhelming fighting for empty regions with the enemy forces just popping in from the edge of the map. I hope in future there are going to be actual AI factions that will build villages as well, at least in some game modes.

Updated for Realms Rebuilt 16/12/24

Overall a very enjoyable game with huge potential, held back by some issues and limitations which seem like they should be 'easily' improvable throughout Early Access.

The core of the game feels solid:

• The crafting system is a fun and interesting take on the usual survival mechanic. The way different materials affect outcomes is quite cool and I've been really liking the experimenting phase of finding materials in the different realms and taking them back to see what they do.
  
• The workbench system is also quite fun to get to grips with, though it can be a bit intimidating at first due to the poor UI and explanation. It's quite Valheim-like in the way you build additional furniture items to augment the base workbenches and unlock more recipes in them and it leads to quite satisfying workshop setup. Since initial release we can also now craft from storage which is a fantastic addition.
  
• The building mechanics are nicely done, though with a couple of rough edges still. The build limit has been significantly increased since release and though it's still something you might be able to hit, it's now large enough that I haven't found it it frustrating in my latest playthrough. The devs have said it's for early access only while they test the server tech and so on, and since they have already bumped it up it seems like that's true. Also due to the way Realms work with Minor Cards, you tend to end up building your base across multiple anyway making it easy to work around the limits if you do hit them.
  
• The graphics are generally quite pretty. Overall the art style looks nice and the world is looking good, I just hope a bit more variation comes to the Untamed Realms in future.
  
• The way the realms work and make you explore is fun and adds a nice twist to the usual. The new story progression does a much better job of breaking you into the system and as you unlock more major and minor cards the possibilities open up a bit.
  
• The always-online aspect gets a lot of criticism and rightly so, I'm glad they've added an offline option, but playing with someone else it's actually very nicely done. I love that I don't need to be running a private server just to be able to share a homeworld with my gf even when I'm offline. The servers are slow when loading realms sometimes but I've not had any real issues yet.

At first play I wrote that the major drawbacks for me were the dodgy UI, poor character/NPC animations, poor AI, and lack of real visual difference between a lot of the realms. They have begun to address every one of those points with Realms Rebuilt and other updates since: animations are now much smoother; NPCs don't break all the time and now have more functionality/behaviour options (with resource gathering automation coming tomorrow); and Inflexion have begun a complete overhaul of the Realms system to make it more interesting.

Every update the devs push feels considered and well put together. They listen to feedback but don't knee-jerk and pander to every whim if it's shouted loudly enough. They clearly have a vision for the game and are working towards that while learning from the community as they go. There are still issues but with every dev video and update release I'm getting more confident in the team and the future of the game.

Pre-Realms-Rebuilt I ended this review saying I'd recommend it under certain conditions. Now I'll confidently recommend it to any of my friends who like survival games, and will happily place it next to Valheim as one of the best in the survival-builder genre.

It was my girlfriend who unlocked the achievement for sleeping with the Emperor, I swear

Absolute gem of a game, highly recommend it for anyone who plays RPGs more for the story than the RPG mechanics of levelling up etc. Took me 6.5 hours or so to make a complete playthrough without getting all the achievements so quite a nice length, I did it all in one sitting.

**Warning: some very mild spoilers below. Nothing clearly stated but might be enough to put 2+2 together and spoil some plot points so be warned**

The story is solid and draws you in quite well. There are a couple of issues I have with it (seriously something as important as the MPT went down and we just...gave up? I get this is supposed to be a resource-scarce future but pretty sure we'd be using literal babies as fuel if we had to in that scenario) but it gets going pretty quickly and is interesting. I liked the fact they have sort of a double-story going on, the whole-of-humanity thing which is the core of the game but then also a very personal story underneath that grounds it very well and really helps draw you in. It can be hard to sell motivation for saving a world we've literally only just learned about and have barely seen, but it's much easier to sell motivation to save actual people and that works well here I think. Some aspects actually reminded me of Horizon Zero Dawn's story in the way it conveys the desperate struggle to survive and thrive against the odds, and the decisions that are made to try and make it - as a massive fan of HZD I don't think that's a bad comparison for any game to be bringing to mind.

The actual mechanics are pretty straightforward but kudos to the devs, it really doesn't have the feel of a small indie game. The controls are smooth and for the most part everything just works. I had no crashes or noticeable bugs for my entire playthrough which is more than I can say for most games. The only exception was the main stealth section of the game where for some reason whenever I respawned it would put me in a spot where half of the enemies could immediately see me and I was being shot at before the game had fully even loaded me in and given me control back. Not the end of the world though and got past it with a bit of patience.

The visual quality is also surprisingly high - a couple of character animations showed a bit of jank here and there but the environments and vehicles looked great and it's overall a very cinematic experience.

I picked this up to play before starting Deliver Us Mars, which I actually didn't realise was a sequel until I bought it at release. I don't get the impression that you *need* to have played this before that game but I'm very glad I did and will be thinking about it for a long time. Definitely recommend this, and am now very excited to head to Mars.

I've been really unsure whether or not to make this a recommend or not, but I've finally settled on yes for now because I have overall enjoyed the 12 hours or so I've played of it, and at the end of the day that's what matters.

The environment is nice, and well filled with undergrowth and plants to make it feel good and forest-y. There are some weird things there, like the ground is just a fairly low-res terrain map with 2D stones and stuff that looks a little jarring compared to the well rendered 3D parts, but overall the look is really good.

I really like the mission-by-mission approach, where you complete your objectives and extract rather than having a single world you use forever. Makes a nice change from the usual survival game loop and I think will hopefully keep it interesting for longer, even playing solo as I have been. The tech and skill trees also look good and big, so there should be plenty to be going on with there for progression.

I was also surprised to see the different mission types, rather than just straightforward "go down, grab exotics, come back". So far they seem ok, although the early Exterminate mission did drive me up the wall a bit for other reasons, but the variety looks interesting and I'm looking forward to getting a bit deeper into the list.

In short the concept is great, and there's enough meat there to be enjoyable today. Where it lets itself down are all the minor issues around the edges that range from just immersion breaking to downright frustrating:

* The animal AI/behaviour is dreadful. Half the time they spot you a mile away, the other half you can riverdance 3 feet away and they continue grazing happily. They can attack you through walls and floors - I died early on to a wolf that got stuck underneath my house and was able to attack me through the solid wooden floor. It couldn't *move* through it, but its attack range just went straight through. Had the same issue with walls, but at least you can move far enough back to get away from that. I can't levitate though sadly. Their pathfinding is also hilariously bad - they seem to just try and make straight line to you, and if you can put something in the way like a rock outcrop they'll generally just get stuck attacking the rock while you spam arrows at them. Except bears. Bears don't give a f*** about your physics, if they wanna fly to the top of a hill to mess up your day they'll do that.
* Building durability is infuriating. I get that there should be effects from storms, but it is seriously aggravating to have taken the time to carefully setup multiple bases with beds as respawn points only to then die and find that a strong wind has destroyed them all and you're now respawning back at the starting area miles away. Seriously, I built a wooden lodge with storage and a bed, came back after just 1 storm and all my storage had been destroyed, the bed was gone, and half the walls and roof had vanished with it. Kind of makes me wonder what the point of building even is at the early tiers. There are skill points to reduce the damage inflicted by storms but this was what nearly made me just give up.
* Bugs. On day 1 I was crashing almost constantly, but thankfully they seem to be on it and one of the patches over the weekend fixed that for me. Similarly with the performance issues - I was initially struggling to get more than 30 fps on a PC that normally runs all AAA games at highest settings and an FPS high enough it's not really relevant, but one of the patches also boosted that so that I get a solid 60 on Epic now (does kind of beg the question of why it wasn't in at release if it was that easily fixed, but hey ho). There are other more minor things, like sometimes I'll just get stuck in a nearby tree or sapling while walking and have to cut it down to get free. None of them are game breaking but they do get a little annoying.

This final one is more a feature than a bug I think, but worth mentioning anyway. Playing solo is kinda grim in my opinion. If nothing else, the respawn mechanic is quite punishing. Playing multiplayer you have the chance to be revived when you get downed, meaning you don't need to respawn at all, keep all your stuff and your XP. In solo though this obviously can't happen, so anytime you get downed it's just immediate death which means you lose all the XP for your current level (as well as dropping all your equipment and having to start over). Not much of an issue at lower levels where you can get it back by mining a few rocks, not so much fun when it's a significant amount of time you've just lost.

Overall though, I like the concept and there's a lot of potential here, but it's currently just lacking a bit of polish. If you're a survival fan looking for your next fix then you'll almost certainly get your money's worth out of this, but if you're just looking at it as a game in its own right then I'd say perhaps hold off for now and see how the update plans pan out. They've been great so far with fixing the major bugs, but we'll just have to see how it develops from here.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this review the devs have pushed updates adding more variety and challenge and addressing some of the drawbacks I mention, so don't take those aspects too seriously now. I really like the direction they're taking and most of my doubts on replayability have vanished.

tl;dr: really cool concept, fun core loop, but limited content/game time currently and more of a chilled-out experience than an actual challenge. Looking forward to future updates to see what the devs have planned to add more variation.

I'm really intrigued about this game. It's a pretty unique idea which has a lot of potential, but at this stage is a very bare-bones experience. The gameplay is fun and really kind of relaxing, but there are only a few ship classes to choose from just now (although the interior layout varies for them).

In general I've found performance to be decent for a game this new. There are a few bits of physics weirdness when grabbing stuff like fuel tanks or powered components sometimes but nothing you can't work around, and I imagine those things will be ironed out over time. On that subject, the devs so far have been really good. Regular patches and some content put out since release into EA, and they listened to community feedback and added a no-timer mode (although personally, I don't know why they also removed oxygen use too).

The cutting 'physics' are pretty impressive - cuts will actually appear exactly where you aimed at whatever angle you aimed it at, not along some predefined break point just-near-enough. You can be as precise or rough as you want. Destruction simulation is also pretty cool. Explosions or decompression events will genuinely shred the nearby metal. I can't say I'm any kind of expert on what space ships look like after exploding but I can definitely believe it would look something like the expanding ball of twisted metal shards and buckled plating that you have to deal with in this.

My concern with the game long-term is replayability. At the moment the hazards are kind of easy (I only actually killed myself once, before I realised properly how power works) and once you've handled a couple of them there's no real danger. Even with the timer on, the layout of the key components is always pretty similar so after your first attempt it's pretty easy to complete the work orders in the time window. Greater variation in ships etc. will help but I hope there is a greater puzzle element added as more complex ships come along, rather than just scaling up the current challenge. Something like daily challenges might be good too, to give some competitive element, or high-hazard jobs with ships that are already partially wrecked when you start and are more unstable than usual.

I'm kind of waiting to see what the devs add in future before I decide whether I really love this game or not, but if you like the space-y engineering concepts, or like me will happily spend an hour on one ship trying to correctly salvage every single component, then I'd highly recommend giving it a go. Even in it's current state, I'll definitely drop back in now and then to chill and tear a ship apart, and I don't regret spending the money at all.