Neue Rezensionen von Varlun

Fantastic game. There isn't really anything out there that gives a similar experience. 9/10. -1 for the woke crap and pneumatic lockers being an unsorted mess.

This game is in an alpha state. Many core features have yet to be added or don't work yet. Lots of placeholders.

I may change this to a thumbs up if some progress is made on the laundry list of issues this game has. I almost want to give it a thumbs up because the dev has been extremely responsive to feedback, going so far as to add me on Discord. I've been giving direct feedback on many things. Also, the concept is very unique, and for some reason I just feel drawn to this game.

However, the bad FAR outweighs the good. Thumbs down is based on the current state of the game and the likelihood of it turning into anything worthwhile. Again, if I see progress made on critical issues, I may change to thumbs up.

It seems obvious to me that the developer(s) are brand new, making a game far outside of their comfort zone. There are bugs everywhere and with everything. Even if the dev(s) completely committed to polish and bug fixing (which they've said they would), I somewhat doubt they have the expertise necessary to actually get the game in a good state.

But with all that being said, I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I see the potential. What impresses me the most is the seamless flight from planet to space and vice versa. A very rare feature in games. The planets are GIGANTIC, I would say far larger than Space Engineers planets. Exploring the solar system is relaxing and enjoyable. There's lots of promise for the next patch, where the dev has said a lot of things will be fixed. The music is also quite nice. Overall I enjoy the atmosphere.

This game will never rival Elite Dangerous, but it may just end up providing an experience you can't really get anywhere else.

So, I don't recommend buying this yet. But certainly throw it on your wishlist and keep an eye on it.

I originally had a positive and optimistic review, but after further play I've changed it to negative. I've completely had it with this game. The ships aren't held together consistently whatsoever. You will end up with floating parts. Ship hulls held in place by pieces that aren't even touching. I have screenshots to prove it.

See my thread: https://steamproxy.com/app/2201940/discussions/0/7130962317393595414/

Go play Hardspace: Shipbreaker instead. This game is an exercise in frustration.

I had high hopes going into this, maybe that's mostly why I was left disappointed. But I also feel I have some genuine criticisms. I did finish the game, I guess that counts for something.

The soundtrack is absolutely incredible, easily the best part of the game. Everything else however, was simply underwhelming. As for the actual gameplay, I'd say it's one step above a walking simulator. Maybe comparable to something like Death Stranding except you're driving. So the gameplay definitely isn't anything to write home about. Heck, there aren't even any races, aside from timed missions where you try to reach a destination in time.

The second best part of the game would have to be the story. But that's where most of my criticism lies. I was primarily interested in the main AI storyline, but that only comprises about 30 minutes of the game, maybe an hour max. Everything else just felt like, to me, random distractions and side stories. And this is if you only focus on the main quests. But I did everything.

None of the decisions are meaningful. Just slightly different responses and it's mostly how you feel about a situation. It seems there are no truly wrong decisions. Just a reflavoring of the same outcome. Even the final decision in the game, almost harkens back to the original Mass Effect 3 endings... not literally a "different colors" situation, but... close.

The only reason this is middling for me is because I love AI, and that part of the storyline was alright. And the soundtrack definitely elevated the experience for me. But if you're not particularly interested in a story involving an AI, and some nice cyberpunk/synthwave music, I'd give this a pass. Definitely listen to the soundtrack, though!

This game will probably be great eventually. But we all know the recommendations are based on whether the game is worth the buy right now, to play and enjoy. If you actually care about being part of development then by all means, this looks like a great start. But if you're just interested in the gameplay it has to offer, hold off. Put it on your wishlist.

By and large I'm comparing this to Frontier Pilot Simulator. The only thing this game really has over that one is the ability to go to space. Which *is* really cool. And the planet is gigantic, feels like it's really a full sized planet.

But once you've made a couple planetary landings, and have launched to space a couple times, that's it. That's all there is. There's no dynamic economy, no upgrades to buy for the ship, heck there's no currency in the game whatsoever. Repairing and refueling your ship is free.

Speaking of repairing, there is a very cool destruction system in place. It seems very dynamic... you can just lose pieces of your ship. I launched to go to orbit one time and didn't give myself enough room before switching from vertical to horizontal flight, and one of my thrusters clipped the building and I lost it! But I still got to orbit with 3 thrusters. Repaired at the space station. Incredible!

Also, compared to Frontier Pilot Simulator, landing is super duper easy mode. This game may actually be more realistically considering air braking, but for gameplay purposes it just makes the game easy. Your ship will very quickly slow to about 65 m/s if you point your belly in the direction you're going. You only have to use your thrusters for the final 10% of the landing. But in FPS, you have to be careful and using thrusters the whole way down.

But yeah, there's just not very much here YET. Hold off on this puppy. Frontier Pilot Simulator, if you haven't played it, is a purely better experience, except for being able to go to space.

It's a cute game. Might be worth the price eventually. And I see the other reviews where others have a lot more hours. But me, I feel like I experienced pretty much all there was to offer in under 10 hours.

That's my main point with this review. Content is very limited. The only thing I could've done was aim to have more people to experience more difficult combat, but I wasn't really interested in that. My focus was on wanting to design a colony.

The problem is, the higher "tiers" of this game are all identical to the first. You can pretty much experience everything with no more than 4 people. Make 4 bedrooms and a dining room, some storage shelves, and the crafting tables, and that's literally it. Anything beyond that is more of the same. More bedrooms, bigger dining rooms, upgraded shelving is about all you have to look forward to.

I don't know, anything past the first tier of the game just wasn't varied enough to keep me interested. It wasn't really going to be a challenge in terms of base design to keep growing. It would just be adding more rooms.

So yeah, for the price point, I definitely don't recommend this. Wait for Dwarf Fortress to come out on Steam. Or just play Rimworld again. And if you haven't played Rimworld yet, what's wrong with you?

Distant Worlds 1 but better.

Except for performance. Game has awful performance problems right now. Once you get so far into a save, opening the research screen reliably drops your FPS all the way from 60 to 3 or 4. Stays there until you close the research screen. Framerate isn't great while zoomed out looking at the galaxy map either. I've also noticed this weird thing where you pause the game and stuff keeps happening for a while... ships moving, events popping up. Eventually it does pause, but it's clearly playing catch-up.

Anyway, as for mechanics, everything else is pretty much straight out of DW1. I like how they changed ship/station designing. Still tons of freedom but everything is just reasonably constrained.

I don't like the blind and/or random research, thankfully you can turn it off. I can see why some might like it, but I like being able to see my options and just research exactly what I want.

My only real complaint is the same I had with DW1... passenger ships. They don't reliably move people around and you don't have direct control over them, so it can be frustrating. In fact, you don't have an option here which you had in DW1, to disable engaging in all tourism. So 75% of your passenger ships are messing with tourists meanwhile your homeworld is sitting at max population.

But overall, it's a great 4X. Once the mods come along, it'll be a thing of beauty.

For those choosing between this or Stellaris. I would say that Stellaris is more expensive, more polished, has more content, but is also more convoluted, and makes a lot of questionable design choices. The coolest thing about Distant Worlds is the vastness of the map... all of the space between the stars, you can go to. And you can seamlessly zoom out from planets and star systems to the entire galaxy. Lots of cool things you can do with ships as well like converting energy to fuel, the new fuel tanker ships, etc. Distant Worlds is a more straightforward experience. I also like all the different technology options. Different types of hyperdrives, shields, engines, reactors, on and on.

I recommend you read my review of Distant Worlds 1 since it pretty much completely applies to this game as well. I managed to write one of the most popular reviews for DW1. I hope this one will get up there as well. :P

Thanks for reading!

The Long Dark in space.

I feel like there's few games that tackle survival in precisely the way these types of games do. This game is all about resource management, as you try to repair your completely broken station.

I enjoyed my time here. The experience was fulfilling in an OCD sort of way.

As far as polish, it's pretty good. Bugs were scarce and superficial. Mostly what the game needs is quality of life improvements. The interface is a little clunky, it takes a few too many clicks to do things.

I wouldn't be put off by the obviously small amount of attention this game has received. It just hasn't had its moment yet. It hasn't been picked up by any big Youtubers (or hardly any) yet.

The developer is extremely responsive to feedback. Due to how small the "community" is, if you were to opt in now, it's pretty much a guarantee that you'd be able to have your own feedback impact the game, as mine did.

Overall though, I recommend just wishlisting this game for now. Content is a bit scarce. The busywork is there and I enjoyed it, but there's not much in the way of end goals. He's working on it.

For the most part, this game just needs more time to finish out its content. What's here so far is good.

Oh, and for those looking for a challenge, worry not. I would say the game is balanced a little harshly. It's received some updates to make it a little easier, but it's still harsh. On the normal difficulty, it takes a lot of time to get stuff done. The harder difficulty just blows this up even more. So if you really want to punish yourself, the option is there.

I write this review shortly after it becoming my most-played game on Steam.

It's difficult to summarize what is- without question- the best space 4X that exists.

With all my hours, I've never even really played past the midgame. There's so much replayability just in restarting galaxies with different settings. I constantly got somewhere in the midgame and realized there was a setting I wanted to change.

You'd be surprised how much some of those galaxy generation settings make a difference. Things like pirate amount, pirate strength, colonization range, galaxy size, colony influence range, and even the generic difficulty setting.

I constantly toyed with all of them. Trying less but stronger pirates. More but weaker pirates. I finally found the balance I like.

Colonization range matters. Too large and empires jump over each other's borders. Too small and you run out of in-range planets you can colonize.

Galaxy size, in relation to star amount. You can do 15x15 with 1400 stars, or 10x10 with 1400 stars. The difference of course is the density of the entire galaxy.

Influence range. Colonies project "influence" and these influence circles are considered your territory. This is a setting typically not thought of- just set to the recommended setting- but this matters too. For example I'm experimenting with having it set to the minimum setting- 10%- and this is all kinds of interesting. The influence circles basically don't extend beyond their respective solar systems, leaving the vastness of space permanently unclaimed. Multiple empires can have mines within a single solar system, and not ♥♥♥♥♥ at each other for having mines in the other's territory.

The difficulty setting. I played on Normal for the longest time. But I began to notice that towards the midgame, I would have like 16 colonies and every other empire would have like 3 or 4. I was vastly ahead. Bumping the difficulty up to Hard allows the AI to keep up with me, and it's common for a few to stay ahead of me as well. An extremely welcome change, to not just breeze through the entire game.

Ship design is amazing. I love unlocking new components and building ships from scratch. Testing them out in battle. When they wreck face, I feel like it's because I designed them well.

Lots of people describe the game as a space opera and it really is. The stories it creates, the politics that unfold, are amazing.

This game swept me away. I've played it for countless hours on end. There is a feeling of vastness to it that no other 4X has given me, whether in playing them myself or watching others. The fact that the game is real time rather than turn-based is a big part of this.

Look up pictures of the galaxy map for this game, largest size. You actually feel like you're a pathetic little nothing, in just one of the 1400!!! solar systems in the galaxy. Many empires, you'll never actually meet, just because they're so far away.

The reason this is the best is because of immersion, because of its mechanics that effortlessly cause such immersion. Fine control over resources, ship design, and surprisingly good diplomacy.

You can design your mining stations to be weak and have fleets to protect them, at the cost of state funds. Or you can decide to make them extra freaking beefy so that they can hold pirates off on their own, at the cost of the private sector, which usually has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of cash laying around anyway.

Need I go on?

I really hope you guys found this helpful. Comments are greatly welcomed!

Alright, so after 14 hours of very enjoyable play, I've decided it's time to write a review.

This is going to be a fairly lengthy, very technical and detailed look at the game, from the perspective of an ex-Runescape player. If you played Runescape in the past, and are interested in nitty gritty mechanical details, then this review will be for you. I'm going to be comparing pretty much everything to how Runescape did things.

TL;DR: Hands down recommended 100% to any ex-Runescape members. This game is overall absolutely fantastic, and I've just been filled with so much excitement and joy and nostalgia, on top of the fact that this game is better than Runescape in a lot of ways.

Rather than Runescape where you have all of your skills mixed up on one tab, here your skills are sorted between two tabs: Gathering and Crafting.

For Gathering, you have: Fishing, Skinning, Farming, Foraging, Forestry, Prospecting, and Crystal Cutting.

For Crafting, you have: Cooking, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Alchemy, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing, and Jewelry.

There is indeed a Skinning skill. Rather than RS where you kill a cow and it drops hide and a perfect little red and white steak, now you actually need a knife and can skin your animals, which will give you those, and skin as well. Very enjoyable difference.

Smithing has been split up into Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. This makes sense and from a gameplay/economy perspective, promotes people to specialize in one or the other. I enjoy the change.

Forestry is Woodcutting. Prospecting is Mining which includes smelting, rather than RS where smelting was considered part of Smithing. Foraging is what it sounds like, all different kinds of gathering, from apples to various plants which are used in alchemy. In RS, Herbalism was a combination of gathering herbs and alchemy.

There is no general "Crafting" skill. It's all been split apart into different things, like Leatherworking and Tailoring and Jewelry and Crystal Cutting. It should be mentioned that getting crystals, or gems, is part of Prospecting.

There's quite a few skills missing, although missing isn't really an accurate word. Construction and player housing is really the only skill missed. Strength, Attack, Defense, Ranged, and Magic aren't part of the skills set. You can make fires, though I'm not sure which skill it's a part of, or if it's just a thing on its own. Fires can be used to cook and provide a small "rested xp" area like a tavern.

Prayer, Constitution, Dungeoneering, and obviously Runecrafting are also not included.

Alright, so now I'm going to focus on mining a little.

First of all, the animation is different and how you get ore is different. In RS, when you mine a node, you play through a lengthy animation, and at any time during this animation you can get a piece of ore. If you get ore, the animation is interrupted. If you don't, it just loops again. The animation was that you'd first take 3 little picks at the rock with the point of your axe, then take a couple short swings, then a really long hefty swing.

With this game, you always take two short swings, and you always get ore after the two swings. Sometimes it's 1, in my experience it's almost always 2, sometimes you get 3, rarely you get 4. I'm not sure if this is influenced by level, it doesn't seem like it. I don't know if you can get more than 4.

This is an extremely enjoyable difference. It's more realistic, a LOT faster, and from an animation standpoint is just purely better.

On to crafting. Crafting overall, I really prefer how RS did it. RS was simpler. There are so many arbitrary ingredients thrown in to recipes, it's really annoying. For example, cooking. In order to make cooked meat, you have to have salt (which is bought) and basil (which is farmed). Why do I absolutely need these things in order to roast a slab of meat? Why can't I just make some unsalted, unseasoned meat? This is super frustrating coming from RS where you just toss the meat on a fire and call it good. In my opinion, you should have the option of adding salt. If you don't use salt, it should make regular "cooked meat". If you add salt, it should make "salted cooked meat" which would have better effects.

Anyway, moving on to smelting. This is annoying too. In order to smelt copper ore, you need flux, and you need coal. Again, this is extremely annoying where in RS you just tossed the copper in. It makes sense to need flux, and it arguably makes sense to need coal to keep the furnace going, but needing a hunk of coal for every copper bar is just... frustrating.

Random note, while it's nice that ore and different things STACK in general, it is annoying that they stack to different amounts. Copper bars stack to 5, copper ore stacks to 10, coal stacks to 25, flux stacks to 50... etc. So when mining you need to figure things out like you need 5 stacks of copper ore for every stack of coal. (because the recipe for smelting copper ore needs 1 coal, 2 copper ore, 1 flux.)

Also, when mining you have a rare chance to get "pure copper ore". This is all well and good, but how this ore is used is a bit strange. The purpose of smelting regular copper is to get rid of impurities, and make it just copper, i.e. pure. So it makes no sense whatsoever for this "pure copper ore" to be used directly in crafting a superior piece of armor. The only difference between pure copper ore and a copper bar is that one is in the shape of a bar. They both get melted down and reshaped into the item anyway.

From a gameplay perspective I get it, you have a rare chance to get something that'll allow you to make something better. That's fine. But from a realism standpoint, it makes no sense. I think that instead you should have a chance to make a "pure copper bar", which you managed to get more pure than normal.

A quick note about farming. It's pretty fun. I haven't done much of it, and I never really did it in Runescape, but I can tell you it's a lot faster and a lot more engaging. Rake the plot, plant the seeds, add water, and it starts growing. Growing takes about 30 seconds. While growing it can start to develop some kind of disease so you need to prune to stop the spread. The more disease, the less yield you'll get from harvest. I like this system a lot.

I'm just going to start bullet pointing things because I'm running out of space.

The game isn't tile-based, you move exactly where you click, and can move using WASD and control the camera with RMB. It's pretty nice. You can also move by clicking on the minimap.

The pathing distance is extremely small. So you can't path around buildings or fences, it's really annoying. If you click on the ground off in the distance, it only registers out a very small way. The same applies to actions. If you right click to open a door or attack an enemy, your guy will run up to that distance, then stop and say he's out of range.

You can't set waypoints.

It has WoW's hippogryph-style travel system, except with dragons.

There are mounts.

You have a homestone, again like WoW's hearthstone.

You can't fly (mounts) or jump.

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Overall, it does have its problems, but it just feels like a better, more modern Runescape.

Give it a shot! You won't regret it.