Recent reviews by world's best prophet player

Pains me to give a “no” recommendation, as I’ve already clocked in hours into this, but anyone considering the DLC should wait until they release a balance patch. Some of the design decisions are both heavy handed and questionable (such as meteor resistances, or Epic quality being locked behind Gleba and not Fulgora.)

Gleba ruins the entire DLC and really drags it down. I burnt out really hard on it almost immediately. I beat Gleba and I understood it, but I still walked away from the planet feeling defeated because it made me stop playing the game. Fulgora is OK- the concept is amazing but they need to seriously simplify how many items you get from recycling because it’s really boring to deal with so many items. As is, there’s nothing stopping you from just putting down requester chests everywhere, and it’s impractical to deal with 10 items on one belt (honk shoo to setting down 10 splitter filters). Vulcanus is easily the best planet of the entire DLC. I have zero complaints about it.

Hell, the entire planet of Gleba is questionable. The soil mechanics are confusing, on top of being completely inaccessible to colorblind folks. In-fact, there’s a lot of these things in this DLC that have had zero accessibility considerations. Does Wube just raw dog everything with zero QA? (answer: yes and it shows)

Also the music in the DLC sux. Do yourself a favor and set the music slider to 0% and bring your own music. No shade to the composer but the moment you threw in the Oboe is the moment I gave up trying to find the good in it.

Anyways, if they release a balance patch that fixes a lot of the issues I’ll flip the review. But until then they could really use the criticism.

P.S. the space platforms are really cool and I’ve spent too many hours designing space platforms.

this game has an immense more amount of swag than Halo Wars 2, despite Halo Wars 2 having more to it.

MARINES, OORAH!

the art style of this game is "looks bad and is impossible to read things" - i've never seen a game just look so unapologetically bad. important things such as quicksand, TEXT ON THE MANUAL THAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLAY THE GAME, the various steam pipes that will block your jumps over mines are all outright impossible to see/read.

you enter the building and you die. the core gameplay loop tells you not to die and punishes you for it yet there's literally at times nothing you can do. the second moon i did had a generation of 3 landmines where it was straight up impossible to parkour around. the next moon had a landmine in steam that we couldn't see and killed all of us in a single blast.

none of the items work- all of the items fail at doing their job. the flashlight doesn't offer any advantage over just the natural light you get. you cant hear anyone over the walkie talkie because the people around you are 10000x the volume of the walkie talkie. if you don't buy the shovel and there happens to be one of the Literally Teleporting Enemies That Latch Onto You With No Sound Queues Whatsoever (MORE ON THIS LATER) then you can do nothing but watch the person die. remember how left 4 dead solved this problem by adding a main mechanic of shoving which ties into everything else in the game? apparently the developer didn't remember this.

someone is forced to use the computer. you are FORCED to have someone on the computer or else there are literally obstacles you cannot get past. you have to type the full name of the person in order to lock onto something.

there are no options other than volume and push to talk keybindings. it is the year 2023. this is unacceptable.

this is also a wiki game and nothing is explained to you in the game. there are no audio queues in this game. like all of the monsters are silent. the mines flash but they make no noise. when i die i dont even learn anything. when i got eaten by the giant sandworm i didn't even know. i had to ask my friends what happened.

if there was respawning in this game it would literally be ok. 90% of the things in this game are instakills. it sucks that when you die you cant do anything and are forced to simply Wait. and you are dying constantly in this game. because that's all there is to do. the spectating also sucks. the only fun i had was when i coerced with the other dead person to just actively grief and call a vote to recall the ship.

this isn't even mid. this is actively one of the worst games i have played in a while

Devs seem to be more concerned about balance and fairness more than what's fun. The fact that you're limited to a maximum of 3 perks is crazy. It's a damn shame because there's a lot of perks to choose from but you quickly hit a wall with what you're able to experiment with. Most of the perks have some pretty awful downsides for little to no reasons, too.

Not a fan of the quests, honestly. They feel too much like padding. ESPECIALLY the ones that require you to use a specific weapon. Like, come on.

I really despise the kiting mechanics in this game- it feels like I'm forced to engage with it, else enemies will just mulch my town center in seconds. Dying is also such a mood killer in this game.

People are ragging on the game for having set levels and set places to build, but I thought it was honestly the game's strong suit. I liked the hybrid puzzle-strategy. But, like I said before, the cap on perks along with being forced to use weapons for quests made it feel way too much like a puzzle game.

Had my fun for the first few hours but it really started to bog down after that for the reasons above. Sorry.

edit: frontline solves a lot of the spawning issues. armor is still annoying though. once frontline is no longer Experimental the game will be much better off

this game is great, but two things that just ruined the fun for me:

1. armor/blue hitmarkers
it took me a bit to realize this but the helmets on characters are not for show. it actually soaks up a few shots. makes sense but it honestly feels like dogwater to lose a fight because you hit their helmet. it's a cool idea on paper but i feel like i just watched my wife's boyfriend take her out to dinner every time i lose a fight because i got Blue HitMarkers.

2. the spawning system (ZERG SWARM)
the entire game is just a zerg vs zerg match. except both teams are restricted to only using zerglings. every match really is just a sausage fest because all you do is respawn on a random squadmate, shoot, die, and repeat. it really sucks when you're pushing something and One Enemy gets behind you and suddenly the entire enemy team spawns behind you and slaughters everyone. i got real sick of it quick

everything is there for a great game. it's just that these two things spoiled the fun for me. mainly the spawning system though.

I don't genuinely recommend this game, as it's pretty much dead these days, but I think it would be unfair to give it a negative review.

This game is a genuine masterpiece that was overlooked. By god is this game absolutely gorgeous. Whoever the artists are for this game should give themselves a standing ovation because this is one of the most creative, characterized, and GORGEOUS games of all time. I remember when I first played this game some odd 10 years ago I thought it looked absolutely stunning and I still think it does today. The UI in this game has a lot of character but it loses zero functionality. The only issue is this game wasn't built for today's larger monitors- but that's expected.

The overall direction of this game is just perfect. The gameplay design is great and fun. It's really difficult to get this kind of gameplay idea executed correctly and they nailed it. There's some great back and forth tug of war and the positive feedback loops are managed and designed quite well. Have to focus on defense for a bit? Well that means your opponent is forgoing their defense which can give you the perfect opportunity to knock them down a peg.

The writing is very, very, very charming in this. This will touch up on the art direction thing again but all of the towers, animations, characters are characterized. There's cute little lines that play when you unlock a unit and hearing the king yell "Single file, and to the death!" every time I send out my lil army brings a smile to my face.

There will never be a Tower Wars 2. Which is a damn shame. But at least the bots in this game are pretty good. You'll get your ass handed to you by the level 1 bot until you understand the game but once it clicks then you'll have a good time. Enjoy this game for what it was rather than what it wasn't.

this game sucks. it just sucks man. i boot up this game after like a month or two, get hooked for a day and then realize that it just sucks. you'll have more fun skipping rocks on the lake and you'll get more ladies by showing off your rock skipping skills

At first I didn't love this game because it wasn't Creeper World. But playing it after a little bit I've really come to appreciate it. The music and atmosphere is amazing. You'll feel those awesome star trek moments of begging a ship just to hold out for a little bit while longer while it gets absolutely pounded on.

There are shortcomings in the gameplay, though. There's little difference in the way of all of the weaponry. They all just felt "stronger than the other". And speaking of which: Battering rams are OP. Lasers are OP. Learn those two factoids and you'll shred through particulate like no other.

Either way, incredibly fun game. I hope a sequel comes out for this kind of gameplay. It's an absolute blast commanding a space fleet against vast swarms of enemies.

every single item in this game has a negative downside, barring only a few

some of the items are so stupid like +10% damage -6% attack speed like whoopie whatever dude give me some items that actually matter

the items that matter usually have some horrible downside (triangle of power: +20% damage but every time you take damage you gain -2% damage.) which is dumb because these items already have a horrible downside of having a high price point

80% of the items in this game are a noob trap. when you download the mod that lets you see harvesting returns you realize that all of the harvesting items give no returns after like wave 6.

i just can't get behind the game design of this game. i didn't find it hard i just found it frustrating after i realized how to game the system

It's a solid game. The guns feel great to use. The classes are not balanced in any way, and certain design choices (COUGH, DOC) for them certainly raise some eyebrows, but the class system is still fun. It's cool that there's a large variety of weapons and perks to equip- and you can even add attachments to your guns. But all in all? It feels shallow. The progression system feels limiting rather than expansive. I thought I would unlock more and more perks and guns to buy as time goes on, but nope. What you see in the requisition shop is what you get.

But onto the campaign levels. Spoilers ahead, obviously. The first set of levels- or "act"- is solid. All you're doing is fighting xenos, and the xenos are fun to fight against. Everything in this game (minus the cover system, which I will get to later) feels like it's designed for xenomorphs.

The xenomorphs themselves are shallow, unfortunately. You have the run of the mill runner xenomorph, essentially you're "common" xeno. Then you have the burster, which explodes upon death, dealing damage to anyone nearby and leaving goop. But there's no real way to easily distance yourself from these. In Left 4 Dead, you could shove the Boomer, or simply gain distance because they were slower than you. But bursters are just as quick and agile as xenomorphs, and even beefier.

Then there's the Prowler xenomorph. These can spawn around in the map, hiding, waiting to pounce on anyone that walks by. That's a lot of fun. I've genuinely jumped out of my seat more than a few times because of them. They're similar to the Hunters in Left 4 Dead in that sense. But the weird thing is that when you're caught by one of them, you're given a quick-time event and after a bit the prowler will simply get off of you on its own. I have no idea what the quick time event does. Does it make you take less damage? Does it make the prowler get off of your quicker? There's no feedback for this. Speaking of no feedback... When a teammate is caught by a prowler it flashes a warning icon on your screen, urging you to help your teammate. But the only sure-thing that seems to help out is to completely kill the prowler. And prowlers are BEEFY. The only time I've been able to kill a prowler that's on a squadmate is if we lit up the prowler beforehand. Also, there's a shove button? You can shove xenomorphs but shoving the prowler doesn't seem to do anything.

The spitter xeno. Again, questionable design choices all around here. The spitter xeno sits in cover in the backlines spitting out hot acid at you. They're pretty inconsistent about when they decide to spit, sometimes they'll sit behind cover for like 8 seconds before popping out again. Other times they're like a machine gun. Their aim is also on point. All in all this makes them very clunky to fight against- they become impossible to kill if there's any amount of pressure but they're also really hard to dodge because they also leave acid on the ground as they spit while also functioning as snipers.

The drone and warrior xenos are... pretty much the same as prowlers except beefier. That's it. It's such a shame. They could do some really cool things like lay down xeno weeds or do cool tail whips to disperse players.

Okay okay. Perhaps they ran out of time to design the xenomorphs. I can understand that. But the reason they ran out of time is because on the next two acts they completely throw away xenomorphs and introduce two new enemies. The first one is synthetics- there's not really much to say about them. They shoot you with guns. Some of them have shields. Some of them are snipers. It works out fine. But a million other games have made you shoot people with guns. I thought it was insanely boring. I guess this is why the Gear's of War cover system exists which only gets in the way of the fun part of the game (Shooting xenomorphs).

The next is... parasites? They felt like a complete downgrade to the xenomorphs. They were essentially Halo's Flood, and the common enemy of them was actually just straight up the Flood's Popcorn. Extremely small, extremely fragile, and explode upon touching you. Why did we switch from cool xenomorphs to POPCORN? They also have a cloaking elite type... but why not just make the Xenomorph Drone cloaking? That would have been cool.

Overall? Okay game. Grab a couple of friends because the matchmaking is complete garbage. Intermediate difficulty is too easy with friends but Intense is too intense with friends. But I simply cannot recommend this game because there's better, more focused games like Left 4 Dead if you want to play a horde shooter with friends.