Recent reviews by Magnus

You just... wipe things completely clean of varying levels of gross.

It's perfect.

A Fatalis ate Amy.

Cons: Kucos area light brown, like all of the structures they're on. Combat mostly boils down to the attack, Sonic Boom, after a point. Not entirely, but a lot.

Pros: It's fun. I love a good Sonic game, and that's a rarity. But this is a good one. Nice story, enjoyable characters and representations of old ones. Fast gameplay, fun levels, and neat open world.

And what a soundtrack.

But yeah, it is literally just Breath of the Wild but Sonic, and that's pretty cool.

Dead on arrival. At the time of posting, already down to only around five hundred people playing a day. Expect that to drop, and rapidly. Hilariously enough, despite such a low playerbase, you'll be hit with "Pending Operation" quite a lot, unable to do anything at seemingly random.

The ship building is extremely basic. While a lot of it can be made to look nice, and I mean very nice, often it'll come at some strange cost. Wings, for instance, can be completely covered, and in fact they're encouraged to do so, but not at the back, where they "work". Many ship designers use the same "grill" approach in back, like some kind of vent... But you can't just have armored wings.

Base building, everything is just kinda thrown around haphazardly because of these magic links. It lets you build more creatively, but there are limitations on how many things something can plug into... so you can't just have all of one type of resource in one container, which can end up being equally annoying.

Moving up in "tiers" is also grating, requiring you to get a lot of needlessly rarer minerals just for Tier 2, encouraging people to rush towards asteroids where they can fight.. but, only partially. You can only fight in ships, and ships without shields get it bad. So whoever has guns will win, while it's a pain in the ass to even get guns in the first place. And shields are more difficult to obtain. The only way around this is to find a hex that actually has tier 2 materials in it, and that's lower than a 1% chance.

The community, much like Starbase, also seems to chase itself off. Because there's not better protection for people just trying to get into tier 2 or 3, they put everything into a ship to go asteroid mining, and just lose it all quickly. Because of that, if you're playing alone, or in a small group, you're essentially worthless.

Despite mostly being a first person game, on top of all of this, there are no guns you can use. Run into someone else on an asteroid while mining? Whoever gets back to their ship first, wins. Or you have to ignore each other, because neither has guns... So if someone you find runs, they're going for their ship to find yours and destroy it. And you can't do anything to stop that person. It's comically poorly thought out.

Now, losing your ship entirely sounds bad. But equally tedious and awful is actually managing to save your ship, or reclaim it, and it's entirely broken. It takes over ten minutes to repair something using non-valuable scrap. It used to be, you could click to repair, alt tab, and it would hold that click and keep repairing while you go do something else. That was changed. You have to be there, holding click, the whole time. It's incredibly mind numbing.

So, odds are, with difficulty in mining valuable ore, how dull and flat combat is, odds are small organizations and solo players are going to fall into credit (quanta) farming. And that's just driving back and forth between places. There are HUD mods that you can download that practically automate it, just completely not even play it... But at that point, what are you doing? You're spending money monthly so you can... not play the game, and avoid it? What a joke.

To make that worse, most of that money is going to go into "schematics", unless you're in an organization. Most of your work will be taxed, essentially, requiring you to print out one time use "how to smelt copper at all but just this once" items. Larger groups can take this easily in strides, and essentially make their way of playing far more viable and the rich will get richer, making the fancier parts in the game to sell. So... Why even start production when you're just gonna be grinding money anyway if you're a small group, or worse, solo? All to buy parts just so you can... taxi back and forth more. The core gameplay loop.

All in all, this game is purely a waiting simulator without any of the interest, depth, challenge, and especially without any political intrigue like EVE has. There is only flat combat, taxiing packages of varying colors, staring at rocks until they pop, and waiting. That's it. That's ALL.

It gets worse. The UI sucks and is massively clunky and just awful, you can't build ships that can mine planets or asteroids because no drills, hands only, and once you stop paying your sub, you lose everything physical you own.

I wish people could buy this still.

I've been waiting for this game to come out for years, with everything they've shown off.

99% of all that is not here.

If you like building space ships, this game's great for that. And that's it.

You can build a station. However, they're very small. They don't really serve as anything but extra storage. You can't exactly use them for anything beyond that and a marker.

You can commit to researching better technology in hopes of using it to earn money more easily by selling products instead of just ore. This takes days and millions of credits to invest into. But then people on the Auction House fight over singular credit undercuts until one person has a tantrum and drops the value of a product down to just what the ore is worth to "make a point" in a brilliant display of pettiness of not "getting their way".

You can go mining. Only asteroids, of about 7 varieties. Most of them so small that they're not even worth stopping to hit. You can go out deep into the ring, but the valuable ore is used very little and not bought as much, and its price is consistently dropping. And then you learn about PvP.

Pirates like to camp the border of the safe zone. While it's not a high chance, it's still a chance you run into someone just sitting on the border waiting to shoot someone up. Do they even salvage your ship or steal the ore? Nah, they simply destroy everything with complete disregard and do it simply to be as petty as possible.

And speaking of petty, that's what most of the community amounts to as everyone seems to be fighting over scraps. Very few people actually want to coordinate towards larger goals, and the ones that do, well, the leadership of their groups also seem entirely petty in their squabbles. And that's just glancing at the "diplomacy" so far.

If you like designing ships, again, this game's great for you. Don't expect much enjoyment beyond that.

I waited to 100% to review this game.

This was great. It is just more Psychonauts, yes, but that's a great thing. A little more powers, a lot more worlds, and a ton more dialogue and characters that are just a lot of fun. The combat might not be perfect, and sometimes, the game itself can come off as too easy, nothing ever comes off as hard as the Meat Circus. But the story is just really good, with the characters all interlinked and diving into their minds lets you see how they all see each other.

It's fun. The characters are fun. The story is actually really good and has fun twists. And the minds are fantastic. A top notch platformer collectathon.

I've nominated this for Game of the Year.

You cannot customize how you look. The armor at low levels is actually nicer looking, and when you're at end game, you're going to look like a complete absolute clown. You cannot change how your armor looks and you do not have costume armor slots.

There's plenty of other issues with this game, but the fact this game forces you to look like a clown is something that's been thousands of times before this game, and they didn't remember to put it in at all.

Take that as the bar for quality of this game.

There are thousands upon thousands of hours I have on this game that aren't on Steam. Multiple years where I would just play this and little else. I'd log onto servers I know, hang out with people I know and explode them violently. I'd play with Rocket X on the old Rosebum server, hop from CTF to Assault servers. I'd use any weapon I could, and each one felt great, real ones and modded ones, and I'd apply pressure and death around every corner. With maps and characters, both in game and modded, so diverse, it was always exploring new worlds and fighting new people from all around.

This was a defining game in my childhood, and it's aged wonderfully. Maybe the polygons are a bit ugly now, but I'm happy to remember it just like this.

This small, stupid, free game is actually pretty fun.

Think of a roguelike like Risk of Rain 2, and instead of always running around fighting monsters, sometimes you need to take a break to quickly gather materials, build a house and workbenches, and properly equip yourself in order to fight better and get more coins to engage more with the random buffs from chests, which help both with combat and the actual resource maintenance.

It keeps you busy and engaged, and it's really kinda fun. It's no gold star but it's free and you should try it. It downloaded so fast that I accidentally double clicked Install and it launched the game.