Recent reviews by Psylem

Addictive

I've only played for a short time, but I can say that the controls are well thought out, much easier to build than the old 2D version even with the new dimension of complexity.

I knew nothing much about this game when I bought it on sale. I can now safely say it is epic! It's not in a perfect state, but it has thousands of hours of amazing playtime to offer if you can overlook some blemishes. I've only explored about 5-10% of the world so far (my Steam playtime is a lie as I've spent about twice as long again playing offline). I have just hit day 100 in-game.

What I've found is that when anything buggy happens with path finding, hit Ctrl+Shift+F11. If that doesn't fix it, save and reload. If one of your squad gets stuck, you can save and load then check the "Reset squad positions" checkbox to move everyone to the selected characters position.

To ensure I got the most out of the game, I spent a day just researching mods I might like for my first play-through and came up with this (mod order matters and I think I got this right, please reply if not)...

1. Unofficial Kenshi Patch
   
2. Compressed Textures Project
   
3. Reduced Weather Effects
   
4. Dark UI
   
5. Nice Map [Tpg + Zones + Zone names + Roads]
   
6. Fixing Clipping Issues
   
7. More Names!
   
8. Little Better Farm Fences
   
9. Martial Arts Fast Dodger: Revised
   
10. Attack Slots x3
    
11. 256 Recruitment Limit
    
12. Bounties Galore!
    
13. Leisure Objects and Furniture
    
14. Slopeless (Nexus version)
    
15. SCAR's pathfinding fix (Nexus version)
    
16. SCAR's Better ai for NPCes (Nexus version)
    
17. New Weapons Dissemination Mod
    
18. Let's Talk
    
19. Recruitable Prisoners - with dialogue (pls read description)
    
20. Reactive World
    
21. RP & RW Compatibility Patch
    
22. Profitable Slavery

I was aiming for an actual post-apocalyptic experience, hence for instance "Attack Slots x3". I don't see why starving thugs should wait to fight you one-by-one.

In terms of caveats from this selection of mods, I guess you could Zerg Rush through the game if you built a huge squad as soon as you work out how to recruit prisoners (assuming you could afford to feed them all). Just show restraint with recruitment, especially if you want to go for even more attack slots. More attack slots makes very early game much harder, but once you have enough dudes to vastly outnumber enemy squads, it makes it much easier.

I still haven't figured out how to sell slaves and I haven't needed to (perhaps Bounties Galore! is all you need).

Feedback about my selected Nice Map mod is that it's a bit spoliery seeing region names first play-through. I didn't really pay that much attention to the region names on the map to be honest, but having the roads was very useful. Perhaps disable the map mod until you feel the need for it.

I feel like "Let's Talk" made it easier for me to recruit prisoners by ensuring the dialog was always available, but that may have been because I didn't understand how the prisoner dialogue was triggered. The author has published a google sheets document which explains the technique to use on each faction to recruit them.

Great little time killer, the tutorial alone took me almost 20 hours.

Ah, that hits the spot! After this I'm going to have to go back and play Half Life and Half Life 2 again.

Cool story. Really get a great feeling of exploring a soviet space installation with big chunky machinery from a parallel universe where things went in a slightly different direction. Quite cleverly appealing to both fans of sci-fi and supernatural VR experiences (I'm not a fan of the latter, the game does a good job of letting you decide if there's weird science or something else going on here). About half way through the game I realised the "menu" room was keeping track of your discoveries to some extent. I wish I'd realised that earlier so I could refer to it occasionally. It would be great if there was a way to review any documents and photos scanned since you can't carry them around for future reference. I thoroughly enjoyed my first play through and intend to come back for at least one more play through to see if I missed anything.

First impression is that it's more enjoyable than Prison Architect. Maybe that's because my compound is still small enough to keep track of what's going on. It's a bit difficult to search through my cult looking for people with undesirable traits to get rid of, but I expect they'll sort that out as it would simply be a matter of ensuring the trait tab stays open while I click on each member of the cult from any screen that lists them and allows you to click people in the list to open their properties.

unoriginal

Well that was a thing

I originally didn't buy the game when it was released because of the legal controversy. I just bought it on special tonight and felt a bit guilty until I read up to find out that both parties resolved their legal issues, yay! Started playing the game and it's great! It's actually much better than I expected so far.

As some other reviewers have mentioned, it has that Starflight feel about it. I think it's perhaps the location of Sol on the star chart that immediately reminded me of Starflight.