Recent reviews by ijirving

Uninstalling after 4 hours, as I got to the point where the unfinished parts (mainly trade) impacted gameplay, so there wasn't much more reason to build forward.

Happy with my purchase as long as the devs continue to update, will definitely revisit!

Giving it a thumbs up but with the "It's just fine" qualifier.

The concept is amazing, the execution is close but hits just far enough that the game lands flat.
I think the biggest flaw is that growing your colony of humans feels almost an afterthought, when, in a post-apocalyptic underwater survival game, should be WHAT THE GAME REVOLVES AROUND. Your population is just drones buzzing around, then you have a handful of humans that don't really do anything because the skill tree is so horrendously structured that there are no meaningful dome items until you're nearing the end game.

If you want to just turn your brain off and listen to podcasts, this is fine, as there's virtually no challenge and everything is automated. If you're looking for deep gameplay with careful decision making (which is the core of colony sims) then this aint it.

I love the concept of this game, and have enjoyed it a lot. It's kind of got the long dark feel to it, but in a desert.

Im currently in the middle game, have a little base built and am going on longer expeditions. This game is great at rewarding exploration while also punishing you got not being prepared.

It's pretty janky and areas are definitely just lazily textured, but I'd still recommend this if you enjoy the patient survival genre

Fun passive city builder game. Population can't die, they just get less/more efficient based on happiness level. There is no permanent fail state.

The skill tree is odd, but still works in a weird way. For example I once had to do an interplanetary shipment of...8 glasses of milk, so my wrestler could upgrade and beat up a minotaur. Shortly after this, I discovered how to make cement, lol. How I'm an interplanetary traveling species without the knowledge of cement, I'm not sure.

The game sort of falls apart in the end game I found. It quickly becomes a trade/storage micromanagement sim as you have multiple islands on multiple planets that need to shift resources back and forth. You need to perfectly optimize your trade routes or things will get jammed up and butterfly effect into every planet missing a vital resource. Trading AI was hit or miss sometimes, which could get frustrating.

If you're someone that likes to min/max, I'd say there are other games that do that better. But if you're just looking for colony sim with light ramifications for mistakes, I'd recommend.

Really enjoying this one. Game lands somewhere between Banished and Tropico, leaning more towards the former.

Only gripes so far is that population growth is very slow, even with immigration decree. I think it would be interesting if building a ton of empty houses increased the likelihood of immigrants showing up. This way if you wanted to try rapid expansion at the risk of not having the infrastructure in place you could go for it. I've found that I'm super stabilized and basically am just sitting and waiting for my population to age so I can build more buildings/jobs.

The other gripe is that some of the research tree items seem oddly placed. For example. why is something as simple a stone house basically a late game building? lol

I gave it a genuine try, but it's simply not good. Although I will say that it's very close to being something good.

It plays like a mix between the original Baldurs Gate, Dragon Age and KOTOR.

You pause the game pre-battle, queue up your abilities/spells, then unpause and let things happen. The issue is the pathing is HORRENDOUS and your characters will almost always get in each others ways as the dungeons are very narrow, which will unqueue your abilities, which will make your entire plan fall apart.

There is also virtually zero balancing done in the game. You will get to the point that if you can't stun-lock and kill enemy spellcasters you will 100% lose the fight. As I mentioned, the game has tight corridors, and enemy spellcasters also have AoE stunlocks and knockdowns. These are like 10 seconds where your entire party is just disabled. If the enemy casts those spells, just reload your last save because you've lost. There is also no counter play that I was able to find. You can pre-cast defensive spells, but unless their duration happens to be active when the enemy spells comes out, which is virtually impossible to time, you just have to take the stun lock.

Killing enemy mages at the start of fights is pretty common for these types of games, but with the pathing, narrow corridors and insane amounts of healing spells, it's a nearly impossible task. An impossible task that if failed, basically means you lose.

I got decently far into the game, and genuinely enjoyed the game when it worked as expected, but it oh so often didn't work as expected, and I eventually just had to give up.

Game was broken for me. About 15-20 minutes into the game you have to make 2 high jumps inside a tree. You play a 4 sequence song which enables you to jump higher, but for some reason I couldn't jump high enough.

I found other people that had this issue, and it was due to resolution/Vsync issues. I tried turning vsync on/off, tried turning auto-adjust on/off etc, but nothing made it work (as you can see by my playtime I took nearly an hour trying). The game would also bug out and change resolution on its own. I think the issue might be my monitor being a gsync 144hz 1440p and this game only supporting up to 1080p. Running windowed mode should have resolved this, but there's clearly some issue deeper causing frame losses or something? Not sure what the issue is exactly, but the game was literally unplayable for me, so I cannot give it a good review.

I have hundreds of hours in the other M&B and still got demolished on the tutorial

10/10

If you're looking for something casual to play while listening to a podcast, this is it.

This game is good
The handling is true
but no matter what happens
Mercedes 1-2