Recent reviews by Zwibby

TL;DR: There's too little to do and most mechanics are not thought through pretty well.

The combat really does feel janky. I wouldn't really mind, but, since it's the only actual thing you do in this game, it feels lackluster.

Some of the mechanics outside of combat are not really thought through pretty well. The betting system doesn't make any sense. You get a random set of challenges you must complete to get extra money. But, it can very well happen that you can't physically complete any of them (e.g. Get 5 kills when there's no match with 5 enemies). Also, bets like "Deal 400 Team Damage" are just really stupid.
The favor system feels completely unnecessary.
The item progression is the only thing that keeps you playing for a couple of hours but I feel that the ratio between items price and earnings is too high.
The game clearly wants to be Roman-themed but features late 15th century French armor and weapons. Bruh. If that doesn't kill your immersion yet, eventually, some guy will show up with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ santa hat. I feel like I'm playing fortnite.

My biggest problem with the game is that there's just not enough to do. You only fight but all fights are the same no matter the modifiers or opponents. What you can do outside of combat does not have enough substance.

The game has potential and I'm very impressed that it's made by one guy. As it stands, though, it's more of a tech demo than an actual game.

I have only had around 90 minutes of actual playtime and here is what impression I got, which led me to refund the game.

Pros:
- Very good graphics
- The world map concept is pretty amazing

Cons:
- The camera work is terrible. If you played some other sims before and would like to have a somewhat similar experience with your camera in this game, you'll spend some time being frustrated at the camera controls. Despite adjusting your settings you'll find it's just not possible:
* When trying to reset the camera it does not always go to the actual point of origin, especially when using head-tracking
* Zooming can only be done by pressing buttons, no axis can be assigned
For me it seems you're just supposed to play this game in external view so you can admire the beautiful graphics.
- Controls are pretty wonky. Flight models seem arcadish and controls are over-sensitive.
- The interfaces are a mess. They look great but functionality is counter-intuitive and unresponsive. When you try to change your key-bindings you'll see what I mean. Windows close when they shouldn't, If you have more than 3 input devices and select the fourth, you'll have no Idea what's going on as it's outside of view, etc. They're also quite buggy; when you try to clear controls it just doesn't work half of the time.

Other remarks:
- You're not downloading the game through Steam. You're only downloading a client which then downloads 91GiB in-game. The time you spent downloading counts towards your ingame time which infuriated a lot of people during launch due to fears of not being able to refund it but Steam was very generous as far as I can tell and I got a refund with 10 hours of "playtime".
- Performance on my setup was extremely poor, mainly seeming to be because of CPU spikes, despite me having a high-end system, but that doesn't seem to be representative of what most players experience.
- Coming from a sim like DCS, this just doesn't seem like much of a simulation to me and also I think it's rather boring when you'll just fly straight ahead for hours but that's just me.

Conclusion:
Thoroughly check many reviews before you buy this. People on Steam seem to have a rather negative opinion on this game while others (e.g. on Reddit) seem to absolutely love this game. My impression was that FS2020 is a beutifully looking but unfinished game with poor performance and a poor flying experience especially considering the price tag. I'm sure most of the negative points I had can be remedied through proper setup and future updates, but I don't see the need to stick around as I didn't enjoy it either way.

Absolutely LOVED this game. I bought it on sale and intended to try it out after I finished X-COM2: War of the Chosen. Coming from a visual gem like X-COM2 to Xenonauts, the graphics immediately turned me off and it was hard to grasp what was going on at first. Put it aside for a month and decided to give it another chance which was a good decision.
If you manage to look past the graphics which seem bad at first sight, you'll find an extremely addicting X-COM type game (it resembles the X-COM from the 90s more than the recent X-COM or X-COM2).
Most of the bugs or inconveniences you'll encounter in this game can be remedied by using the community mode version of the game, which I defenitely recommend to get.
Spent hours playing this game when I shouldn't have because I was too addicted. Looking forward to Xenonauts 2.

PS: Still don't get why you have to fight the greatest threat to humanity in history with 2 F-16s and 10 soldiers when you basically have the entire world's army at your disposal.

Best flight sim for fighter jets out there. I absolutely love the sandbox-type mission making which I've already enjoyed for hundreds of hours in Flaming Cliffs 2. The game itself is free, but you'll have to get aircraft you'll like through DLC as you're probably not gonna have a lot of fun forever playing the Su-25 forever.
A worthy DLC to start with is Flaming Cliffs 3, as it gives you access to a lot of different and relevant aircraft to get into flight simming for a reasonable price. They're low fidelity which means no clickable cockpit and they're generally easy to learn, fly and fight with.
If you find you like it and want a more realistic experience, buy one of the high-fidelity study-level modules such as for example the F-14B or the F/A-18C which is where this game absolutely shines. They're expensive, but they're on sale frequently.
I recommend having at least a joystick to make this game playable. An extra throttle stick will make the game even better. Head-tracking or VR is optional but will even further improve your experience.

The game is 8 years old by now but the graphics are still one of the best. If you have never played the story mode it's defenitely worth it, don't recommend playing online at all though as it's just a grief-fest and you'll never meet a sane adult ever. I had the most fun playing this game with the LSPDFR mod.
There has been a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the past with Rockstar trying to make modding against the TOC which didn't make them look good. Read up on that if you want to know whether you should support the developer/publisher with your hard-earned money.

Best CIV imo. Recommend playing with friends though as the AI is no worthy opponent. On higher difficulties they're just equally stupid but receive unfair advantages that make zero sense.

Absolutely loved this game. Though, it has huge performance issues even on high-end PCs which requires you to do some config.ini editing. Some of the concepts in the game make zero sense which is further obvious when you see how they have changed in the War of the Chosen expansion. Still an awesome game; recommend getting the expansion too.

Before you play, though, you need to be aware of how RNG works and know that 96% hit chance still means you're gonna miss in 4 of 100 cases.

I bought this in sale for $5. Best investment ever. The 2D Minecraft comparison is not completely true as Terraria is so much more. Huge replayability & fun with friends.

I bought it for $20 when it was in early access. Defenitely worth that. The best part about the game are the visuals and building entire cannon towers on rafts to troll your friends with. Don't recommend playing on public servers whatsoever though.

Buggy mess. If you embraced it for what it was, it was extremely fun back when people actually played this. It's dead now, don't bother.