Recent reviews by apyost

This game is a god-game on the very surface only. I understand this is in early access, and believe me it FEELS like it, but there are so many bugs and barely-functioning features I am having a hard time understanding its current ratings. Maybe in the future, it will be fun to play, but the current state is just simply not fun.

The bugs range from confusingly mislabeled buildings (barracks show up as "intergalactic black market") to blank notifications with no information, to game breaking issues like the town hall "overstaffing" buildings. That last bug leads to a choice: do I disable the townhall and have to keep manually staffing buildings every time a nugget dies, or do I allow the town hall to over allocate, and hope I still have a few spare nuggets to place in my newer buildings?

Despite the bugs, I played all the way to the end of the existing content (about 12 hours). My overall impression of the game is that it lacks commitment to being any 1 thing. It wants to be a god game, but your power set is incredibly limited. I found myself only using them to heal people one at a time (the herb mechanic bugged for me so I never had enough for hospitals), using lightning to charge batteries or destroy new neighbors before they could put up their "no god powers" shield, or levitating bodies to graveyards so my population didnt become infected. The powers feel like a chore, and a boring repetitive one at that. Combine this with the busted "fear vs love" mechanic, and you find yourself grabbing a nugget or two for quick power refills when you need to use a power, rather than wait hours for their opinion to improve and recharge your meter at a snail's pace.

The other thing the game tries to be is a city builder / colony manager. However, the mechanics for this aspect are similarly lacking. You cannot manually layout roads, so you end up laying out a city around auto-generated pathways that can be absolutely nonsensical. God forbid (you forbid?) that you accidentally clip one of those paths either, as years later you will be left with a slow walking zone between two roads, that never seems to upgrade, even when you clear the pathway. On top of the layout, there's no way to prioritize resource distribution (you can bump a build job to "prioritized", but its only the one level, and does nothing for the delivery of resources once built), there's no way to force the town hall to leave worker slots empty, and the production times for resources are mind-numbingly slow.

Lastly, there's combat. sort of. Late-ish in the game, your neighbors will begin sending orators to disrupt your city's happiness, sending disasters to destroy buildings, and occasionally even sending troops to kill your people. In my experience, this happens even if your relationship with neighbors is neutral. The only way to stop them is elimination. You cannot use any of your amazing god powers to destroy them, as all neighbors have perma-shields. You must send in an army. Unfortunately, the "rangers", the first military forces you unlock, are worthless against anything but wild animals. They don't move in a group/formatation, so in my experience, they most often walk one at a time into a city to be killed by superior numbers. Once you unlock tanks, however, you can wipe anyone on the planet with a single barracks. 5 tanks can take out a city with 20 rangers, 10 helis, you name it. The whole experience was so shallow, I'm not even sure why it was included. All I got for eliminating my neighbors was a reprieve from the meteors and tornados, but at the expense of an emergency trading partner.

Overall, I am incredibly disappointed. I love god-games and colony sims, so I thought this would be a slam dunk. Instead, I regret wasting the 12 hours I will never get back from this boring game. Because this is early access, I will absolutely be returning upon release to see what's fixed, but honestly, my expectations are pretty low. I will also list the bugs I saw in my playthrough below. If there's a way I can attach images, I've taken screenshots of most of these for use by the devs in fixing this.

Bugs:
- Barracks are all labeled as "Intergalactic black market"
- Town hall assigns ~6 doctors to one hospital. only 2 do anything, and the others are simply unavailable elsewhere
- notifications of dead nuggets can pop with no text, just the skull icon. This makes it very hard to find what's happening
- nugget-bots stop being produced sometimes. I have the resources, but the timer does not click down after queuing and pressing "start"
- wild animals sometimes glitch out and either freeze or sink into the ground. I found several mammoths just sunken halfway in a mountain

A good blend of a deck-building game and "Marble Hornets"-esque found footage horror. The story keeps the gameplay fresh and compelling, while the gameplay makes me genuinely curious about the story. Best new game I've played in minute

Incredibly buggy, with crashes even when you aren't really doing anything. In addition, Each of the customizable fields on a creature or world is determined by a number, with no obvious bounds. Half of the fields start as tiny float numbers between 0 and 1, but allow you to set values of 7 (or even -7) without any real obvious effect. Is it 7x normal? Is it 700% of the effect of a "1" in that field? How do you have negative fertility?

This game has a cool premise, and I'll happily check it out again once it escape early access, but only if some UI dev has gotten involved to create a human-readable interface for the game mechanics

Greatest blend of RTS and TD ive ever played