Recent reviews by herbstwerk

I'm hesitant to recommend this, but there's more positive than negative... most of which is full price/playtime and easily avoided by getting it on sale.

All in all it's a charming little game. Really nice pixel art, loads of environmental story telling and details, somewhat like 'A little to the left' with more freedom. But it's over too fast. The play time is just long enough to scrape past the refund window (not that I consider refunding a game that I've completed, unless it's actually terrible.), and not even enough to trigger the 4 card drops... which is questionable, specially at full price. It's, to me, acceptable at the current sale price (-50%/€10), but I would probable feel somewhat disappointed if I had payed the full €20.

I only have finished Orpheus Ascending and about half of Isle of the Blessed... but from what I've seen this I can absolutely recommend this. If difficulty, or lack thereof, in the main game was a problem for you might be solved as well as the easy puzzles in OA are more or less on the same level as the hard main game ones.

I'd be trending more towards neutral than good, but there's still no option for that. This all pertains to the single player campaign, I haven't played the war games mode (maybe later) or multiplayer (probably never) modes.

Let's start with the good:
- The in game art direction is stellar. Both the ships as well as the surroundings look like Homeworld... which is all you could as for.
- Soundtrack is great. Same guy, same great music.
- Sound design is spot on. Everything from the environmental / ambient, to the guns and other ship sounds, the the battle chatter... absolutely no complaints.
- Most missions are fun. The fights in and around mega structures is a somewhat fresh spin. I would've liked so see a bit more open space though.
- The campaign length is comparable to HW1/2/Cataclysm (screw you Blizzard!)/DoK... no, taking an hour to mine every last asteroid in HW1 shouldn't count towards the completion time, just like staring at the main menu doesn't. .P
- Mod support will hopefully deliver more content over the coming years/months and fix some of the streamlining issues.

Then the eh... really?
- Adagio for Strings is missing from the soundtrack. Why? How?
- Concept art style and in engine cut-scenes > whatever they've tried here. What a waste of budget and render cycles. Some of the in engine stuff is once again a please to look at btw.
- There's a bit too much oversimplification in the game play mechanics. No subsystem targeting, no harvester management, and even the unit experience from DoK didn't make it over as well. It feels like a over-correction to please the attention deficit crowd.

And the bad:
- Why can't I stay in mission and salvage materials / rebuild my fleet when a mission is done? I get it when you're under pressure / fleeing, but otherwise there's no reason to just warp off asap.
- The story is forgettable, nothing new, and terribly presented. "Sands and Sinners"? Once would've been fine... but hearing it every third cinematic really dials up the cringe. Doesn't matter if it's the same writer as for HW1 - getting the same person sadly isn't a guarantee for quality. Just remember George and the prequel trilogy? If it was a book, I'd ban it off my shelve to make space for something better. And no, I'm not expecting or hoping for Banks, Le Guin, or [fill in your favorite SciFi author] level writing but I've read fan fiction better and more original than this.

Overall this absolutely isn't what it could've been and/or players of the originals hoped for, but it isn't the affront to gaming and worst game ever (until they find the next title to complain about) some people make it out to be. But nuance is dead... so that's that.

tl;dr: 6.5-7.5/10, unless you need to play it right now maybe wait for a sale.

Short and sweet... maybe a little too short for the asking price. It took me only slightly more than three hours to 100% it. 5-10 minutes of that time went into one optional achievement that was kinda tedious, and another 5 into looking for something for another. If you don't care for those, you should be able to finish the story in less than 3 hours. So if the asking price for an afternoon worth of game is too high for you, wait for a sale.

Anyway, the graphics are lovely (if you can stand the The Witness like art style), the music is fine and doesn't overstay its welcome. There were some instances where the activation/use prompt was kinda fiddly and I had to reposition myself to get it working, but that happened one a couple of times.

The puzzles are on the easy side if you're able to take notes and capable of deductive reasoning. I would've preferred if the hints in the book would display the relevant information, at least after they are assigned correctly the the fitting plant, as this would've saved me from taking notes / screenshots. Without that be prepared for some backtracking to look up a certain value needed.

I can't say too much about the performance as my system is overpowered for what this game is asking for, but it ran perfectly fine and never noticeably dropped below the 165fps I've set it too. It also runs perfectly well on a 21:9 display. (7800X3D, 4090, 64GB, at 3440*1440)

If you're looking for an OCD simulator, you've found it.

P.S. If you want/need a 100% achievement badge, bring some patience and persistence. I think I've seen a 75 dailies among them, this will take some time.

Having played 20+ hours of the demo... this was a no brainer.

A simple concept, executed perfectly, sometimes that's all a great game needs.

Edit: 110 hours later... and still not sick of it. I probably start it up once a day to play a round or two, slowly grinding towards the Completionist+ achievement. Digital crack cocaine indeed.

Only 16 hours in and in the middle of chapter 4, but so far I can absolutely recommend this. My biggest positive is the combat: While LAD was a bit too slow going and repetitive and Yakuza/Judgment devolved quickly into button mashing, the mix this game arrived at is an absolute joy. It's quick and fluid, repositioning to maximize damage with chain attacks or environmental factors (e.g. kicking a dude towards a party member who then slaps him into oncoming traffic) gives the game a whole new layer. Everything else... it's more, it's better, and I feel like I only scratched the surface so far.

P.S. Could locking NG+ hehind DLC only might be considered scummy? Sure. Do I plan on playing a 100+ hour game twice? Hell no.

P.P.S. And everyone suddenly coming out of whatever dank cellar they were previously hiding in making a big fuss about the game being woke: Maybe play the earlier ones, don't skip the dialog, and you'll realize it always has been. Please take you culture war circle jerk back to Twitter where it belongs.

While the game exploded on the launch pad at release, 10 months later it's trending towards neutral for me - can't give a neutral review though, and it's still on the wrong side of that line, so negative it is.

After the last couple of updates it at least makes it into orbit, to stay with the opening line. The performance has gotten a lot better, inclusion of a basic research tree and science takes the game out of the pure "do what you want, nothing matters anyway" sandbox, but there's still too many bugs that make it more frustrating than !fun!. Stuff like...

...separators not separating. Gone in the staging overview, but still hanging onto the rocket.
...separators separating without any reason leaving some poor Kerbal stranded in space. While the staging still claims everything is attached to the rocket.
...getting back into the capsule after an EVA might work, or not.

This all within a 3 hour session... sometimes more than once.

I gladly change this to positive if they get this crap ironed out and add some meat to the bone. Features like an economy and crew training are still needed. Until then I'll save my time and nerves and have another look in late 2024. Mün in 2025? We'll see.

This years offering for the 'one good/high-ish profile puzzle game' niche. After the rather meager offerings in 2022 (well, The Looker was good enough for a short afternoon, some chuckles, and was free... but other than that?) this was absolutely needed and thank Cthulhu it's good and a worthy sequel as well.

It looks, sounds, and plays absolutely wonderful. The writing, specially that of some NPCs, might not be everybodies cup of tea, but skipping dialog is always an option. The walking-sim / exploration aspects are also scaled up a lot in comparison to the first game. Basically it's a bit of a mix between The Witness (there are some obvious influences) and The Talos Principle.

Can't complain about performance, but that's with an rather unreasonable/almost silly build far beyond what's asked for by the recommended specs, so that's expected.

Tl;dr: If you enjoy puzzle games this is basically a must buy.

P.S. Unnecessary edit for that badge.

Contains what it claims to on the tin, a solid turn based tactical RPG with fun characters, competent enough writing, and great graphics/sound for the genre.

If you've played JA/JA2 (vanilla), enjoyed those games enough to want more, and you're okay with some 'streamlined' or 'modernized' (see XCOM 2012) game mechanics you won't be disappointed. On the other hand, if you've clocked thousands of hours in JA2 1.13 and won't accept anything lesser - spend more time with that and wait a couple of months/years for the necessary mods to come around and get it on sale then.

Can't comment much that is worthwhile to most on performance. It runs perfectly well on a high end setup (7800X3D, 4090, 64GB) at 21:9 1440p which shouldn't be a surprise. There have been a couple of instances with some slight stuttering when the environmental effects were going strong (e.g. fog and heavy rain) and a mortar barrage caused multiple secondary explosions and the rapid unscheduled disassembly of surrounding structures... but nothing too bad.