Recent reviews by A_Nerd

This is a game that is still unfinished and hasn't received a content update in over a year and a half, with no word of one on the horizon. Play it when it's done in a decade maybe.

It's pretty much the best accessible modern combat flight sim in VR. You don't need anything other than your headset/controllers. The single player missions are decently fun and there's an active multiplayer community that seems to be a 50/50 mix of tryhards using military lingo who are insanely good, and literal children. But it isn't a toxic community so learning isn't too hard. The DLCs aren't really worth it in my opinion, the base game has the best and most popular 2 aircraft. If you want to do some military combat aircraft simulation without needing extra equipment or to spend more than a couple hours learning, this is the game for you. It is tough though, and like real modern air combat, its mostly just shooting missiles guided by various kinds of radar and computers. If you jump into multiplayer expect to be shot down a lot.

I paid $80 CDN for one third of a campaign and worse multiplayer than Reach.

Honestly found it very boring, you just do the same thing over and over.

Sony pulled a bait and switch to steal your data.

UPDATE: They backed down, democracy won.

$50 USD for a prettier version of KSP 1 that doesn't have as many features. It almost feels like a demo. It does really look pretty but the fact that they were unable to get this game even to the point of the first game in terms of features is disappointing.

Now that development is done with the studio laid off, what you see is what you get, for me it isn't enough.

Other than the stupid Ubisoft launcher, the port is pretty much perfect. Runs well in a resizable window, has UI scaling and a new settings menu, but is functionally the same game you played 20 years ago (and is still just as fun). All the negative reviews are about the launcher (and they are fully justified) but once you're past that the game is perfect.

Ruined by an update that basically killed custom maps and several major gamemodes.

Introduces a complicated new system to the game, that's great.

Does not include a tutorial on how to use said system, that's not great.

Also only has one unique mission included as far as I can tell (you can do free fly and the other generic missions that the other planes have). I obviously haven't been able to beat the single mission since I have no idea how the plane works . . . because there's no tutorial.

The variable wings are cool though.

So this is two different games in one. The first, which you have to play for the first few hours of any campaign, is an agent driven pseudo political strategy game. You play a secret agency/Illuminati type secret society to take control of nations, direct their spending and diplomacy, while upgrading your agents to protect the nations you control and trying to seize the other factions' nations. You can also investigate and try to kidnap/assassinate the other factions' agents.

That's one game, on its own that functions almost entirely independently from the other game.

The other game is a near future space combat sim, a la Children of a Dead Earth, albeit simplified (in some regards, not in others). You construct slower than light spacecraft and manage Delta V (fuel basically), Speed, armaments, and defenses in order to maintain control over your productive assets in the solar system. These assets are bases, either orbital for ship production, supply, and research bonuses, or surface bases for mining (and also some other bonuses). Control of these assets is essential to support your space fleet.

Oh yeah and theres aliens, but they kind of ignore you until you're strong enough to face them for some reason? It's not really clear why, except that maybe they're really dumb.

This game is weird, and its kind of frustrating that you are forced to play the spy/strategy game to get to the space strategy game. At a certain point once you've gotten control of the countries you need to support your space operations (USA, China, Russia, or Europe, ignore everything else) you can just set your agents to continuous missions or automatic missions and ignore them more or less. Alternatively if you like the agent focused game play, it is frustrating that you have to do Children of a Dead Earth Lite in order to progress the story and stay competitive.

This game has a lot of cool stuff, but it isn't quite sure what it's trying to be and it clearly suffers for it. It is immediately apparent that they had several different ideas for what this game should be, and instead of picking one, they just threw in everything and the kitchen sink. One of the frustrating things is you can play for several hours and not really ever get into the space combat aspect in that time, so trying it out within the refund window isn't viable. That being said, if you are here for the space combat, just go play Children of a Dead Earth, it does that much better (and without weird frustratingly slow battles). If you are here for the Illuminati strategy game though, then you can try it out within the refund window and you'll know whether you like it or not.

I've played two campaigns. I did get bored and cheat through the last 3rd or so of both, but I guess I had some fun, so maybe it was worth it for me? Definitely don't buy at full price though. Don't spend more than $20 USD on this game.