Recent reviews by Xeoz

X4 to me is a sandbox game. That is the primary focus. Timelines is a break from that which introduces a new arcade system of missions for you to play. So let me review what content Timelines adds to the game, focusing on the sandbox mode.

Gameplay content

• Timelines missions
  Some are fun, but most are a slog. It's too arcade-like to have general appeal to the type of player who enjoys X4. And the trading, mining, and space suit missions are just plain tedious. There's a reason that we don't do those tasks in the main game if we can help it. In the end, I only played the missions to get access to the rewards in the main game. After I got through the missions I simply never had any desire to go back and play any of them again. It also doesn't work as a tutorial because many of the missions will be extremely difficult if you don't know how to play at a fairly high level of competency. Oh, and there are player leader boards if you are signed in with an online account. It seems that EgoSoft leadership really wants online content to be a thing - something that worries me.
  
  
• Timelines lore
  This was very interesting to me. In the end, the overall story was clever. And "grandmother" had a bit of an emotional impact after you got through the full story. But it just wraps up so quickly with a few lines of dialogue - never to be seen or spoken of again. It's very anti-climactic.
  
  
• Barter system
  If you're like me then when you read "barter" in the patch notes you thought "Awesome! I can probably create some interesting production chains! Trade microchips for advanced electronics or something?". Nope. It's not even part of the trade system. It is done via the mission interface. Only you -the player- can participate in the barter system. You cannot automate it. You cannot do it remotely - other than the final delivery. You cannot predict the desired products, nor the resulting rewards. And the player's faction is completely blocked from using the regular trade system with the barter faction. There's just nothing that you can actually do with them economically at a reasonable scale.
  
  
• QUE faction and sectors
  Three new sectors. Very pretty, nice soundtrack, but mostly useless. The only thing they add is a new source of gasses in a corner of the gate network that previously had very little, and a couple nice station module blueprints that you will likely want. But you have to grind to 20 reputation to get all of the blueprints, which is super tedious since you cannot automate it and don't gain anything else for your effort.
  
  
• New non-QUE sectors
  Four new sectors. The three new sectors by Argon space don't seem particularly valuable. There's a resource field in one, but isn't impressive enough to have your miners work it since second contact and morning star are nearby. Then there's a cool custom designed SCA pirate station with repeating radio chatter that will annoy you whenever you're nearby. It doesn't seem to have any particular purpose. The trader is a typical pirate trader that you can find at any pirate base. The other Argon sector has a custom designed trade station. Then last, there is the new sector in the Tharka's Cascade Xenon cluster that looks like a good candidate for scrapping if you wrangle the Xenon in that area. Other than that, the new sectors don't really add anything except for a couple points of interest that you may or may not ever bother to visit. Super pretty though.

New ships

• Xperimental shuttle and Odachi
  These are your new player ships. Beautiful, strong, quick, and free for the taking with minimal effort - they are just awesome. The shuttle is very fast and powerful, with guns that do good damage and have enough accuracy to do mine removal and laser tower missions with ease. The odachi is simply a joy to fly - agile and extremely strong early game, with enough capability to carry you through the whole game if you like. I ended up sticking with the shuttle the whole game so far, and favored the odachi for non-capital combat until I had the money and resources to fully purple-mod a hydra - though I could still happily fly the odachi even in end-game.
  
  
• Sapporo
  This is a very unusual L-class ship. It's not really a combat ship, but seems meant for combat fleets. Instead of firepower it offers good speed and agility, along with a uniquely high radar range. It may have some tactical uses - like sector patrols with subordinates set to "intercept for commander". But it will be very situational. I think it's a neat addition, but I could easily live without it.
  
  
• Xenon H
  This ship is technically available without timelines, however they've made it almost impossible to obtain without timelines. You can acquire it via boarding, but you will need a lot of very high level marines to do so. So I'm going to consider this Timelines-only content for the review. It is an L-class gunboat and drone carrier. Since drones have some game-breaking behavior problems ("Recalling subordinates [critical]"), it is really only useful as an L-class gunboat. It plays that role well, but due to needing your own L-class equipment dock or ship yard to outfit it, it is very late-game content. By that time you don't really need such a thing. Super cool looking ship though.
  
  
• Racing ships
  Entirely useless. There is almost nothing you can use these for. Just dock decor or teleport targets - you'll never fly them. Other than the Dart, they don't have travel drives, so they are actually incredibly slow compared to any non-racing ships.

So what timelines gives you in the sandbox is two really great ships for the early game and beyond, a couple nice -but grindy- station blueprints, and some lore. The rest is either insignificant or entirely useless. Version 7.00 of the base game (released simultaneously with this DLC) added some other stuff (like the crisis and Paranid area pirate sectors), but you don't need Timelines to play that content, so I did not include it in this review.

Overall, it was worth it for me because I am an X4 fan with over 1,000 hours and will blindly whip out my wallet any time EgoSoft releases a new DLC. But I cannot recommend it to others. Especially if you're new to X4 and just trying it out. Most of the content isn't especially desirable to sandbox players and you won't miss its absence.

Factorio is one of the most polished, optimized, and balanced gaming experiences I have ever had. The development team behind it have a commitment in software quality that no other game dev studio has ever demonstrated. The product reflects this, and is perhaps one of the most well designed games ever created. And it keeps getting better.

This game is built on increasing complexity from layering simple systems on top of each other, and is mostly about expanding your factory while managing the up-scaling process. It is a specific type of person that will be drawn to this kind of game, but if you are that kind of person it will probably capture you for hundreds or even thousands of hours.

I strongly recommend this game to anyone who likes building things.


Pros:

• Amazingly polished product
  The software quality is simply unmatched. The game runs smooth up to very large scales, is almost bug free, and has very intuitive game play.
  
  
• Essentially unbounded maps
  Each world is dynamically created, and, in practical terms, limitless. You can expand for as far as you would like and the only side effect is increased save file size and save time.
  
  
• Unique and attractive art style
  The graphical elements are well designed and contribute to a utilitarian feel that is quite consistent and immersive.
  
  
• Good background music
  You will be treated to a somber musical score that manages to add more depth of immersion without being distracting.
  
  
• Greatest dev team ever
  Wube, the development shop behind Factorio has been consistently the most prompt, reliable, and quality focused team I have ever seen. During development cycles we often see bugs fixed the day after they are reported. This is the kind of team that we should be proud to support.
  
  
• Excellent mod support
  The base game can be expanded and altered via third party mods. There is a vibrant modding community building amazing mods that can expand the game almost without end.
  
  
• Native linux support
  Runs flawlessly on linux. Devs treat linux as a first-class build target.

Cons:

• Takes a lot of time
  The process of planning, designing, crafting, building, altering, upgrading, scaling, and maintaining is a time consuming process. It is of course quite enjoyable, but don't expect to be able to pop in for 30 minutes and accomplish anything. You'll notice a trend that most people who really like this game have many hundreds of hours logged.
  
  
• Map generation can be a bit weird
  This is something that the dev team has been tweaking since the game was conceived. The problem with procedural world generation is that the algorithms can produce unnatural things. While this has been greatly improved as of 0.17, the worlds still have a tendency towards unrealistic water and cliff patterns. For instance, expect archipelagos more than lakes and rivers.
  
  
• Fluid system is unintuitive
  Fixed in 2.0. (You can tell I'm trying to pad cons here.) This is not something that "normal" players will run in to, but once you start scaling your factory past around 400 SPM (science per minute) you will likely begin to run into the fluid system scaling problems. Basically pipes do not work the way you would expect them to work and cause unrealistic and frustrating problems that are difficult to work around.

There's a lot left for the developer to polish, but Avorion is a solid spaceship building game even in it's present state, with huge potential if development continues in the same direction.


Pros:

• Excellent ship building system
  This really is the heart of the game, and it makes several steps forward from the usual voxel based building system. The parts are resizable, scalable, can be offset, and can clip to some extent. This makes assembling parts far more flexible.
  
  
• The universe is huge
  The map has 1,000,000 sectors that you can travel to. Most of them are empty, but the scale makes space feel large, and even in the end game it will still take time to cross the galaxy.
  
  
• The graphics are quite good
  You wont find any pixel art in this one. The textures and backdrops are made to look fairly realistic.
  
  
• Solid background music
  It has a nice EVE-like ambient sound track that fits the mood and makes long hours of building and traveling feel immersive.
  
  
• Active development
  While development is slow (very small team), it has been fairly consistent. If the trend continues then you can expect a significant feature update every few months.
  
  
• Good developers
  This feels like a true labor of love project. The development team has been continuously improving the game for a long time and appears to be making steady progress. They listen to feedback on gameplay and take bug reports seriously.

Cons:

• Lack of polish
  Really, this is basically the root cause of any cons in the game. It is still very much in development, so there are partially implemented features, unintuitive progression, and the occasional gameplay bug.
  
  
• Some resources are basically useless
  You're likely to find that you barely use several types of the resources that you'll be collecting, even skipping some entirely. The game tends to treat resources as a progression tree, working your way up to the next resource "level", but it makes some quickly useless, and you can just skip a couple tiers without even trying.
  
  
• Economy needs work
  This is something that is being worked on, but the economy isn’t especially well flushed out. Combat/salvaging is basically always better than mining, and end-game station ownership and factory chains are very time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, and don't actually provide much return.
  
  
• Unintuitive main quest line
  You will have to look up instructions for stepping through the quest and triggering events. There's almost no explanation in game about how to progress, and you're likely to never trigger some required events during normal game play.
  
  
• Procedurally generated ships and stations can look pretty bad
  The game likes to use repeating patterns and part clipping for generated ships. This will lead to some pretty unrealistic designs and the infamous "noodle ships" which are basically long, thin ships that rotate in unnatural ways, and are frustrating to fight.

Wonderful engineering game. Great challenges, countless hours of fun, very satisfying experience. The more effort you put into learning how to play the more rewarding the game becomes. I believe that KSP is an absolute must-have game for anyone who likes building things.


Pros:

• Challenging tasks that require significant planning and engineering
  I've probably spent two-thirds of my game time simply starring at the vehicle assembly window planning and tinkering with my space ships to get them to perform a specific job. This game heavily rewards forethought and competence.
  
  
• Wide variety of vessel components that can be combined in virtually limitless ways
  After you've unlocked most of the tech tree (or in sandbox) you have a lot of parts at your disposal. With some talent and imagination you can craft some astonishingly clever (and beautiful) space craft.
  
  
• Intuitive and flexible ship building system
  The one thing in this game that doesn't take 20 hours of research to be competent with is the vehicle assembly system. Even a complete novice can launch the game and start sticking parts together (learning the parts is another story). But like everything else, there is a skill to it, and it rewards learning advance techniques.
  
  
• Players are encouraged to "eyeball it" and fly their rockets manually
  Personally, I like that the game wants me to fly by the seat of my pants and guide my space ships by hand. It is very rewarding to learn orbital mechanics and figure out how to maneuver my rocket.
  
  
• Endlessly mod-able
  The developers spent some time to make almost every aspect of the game open for modding. Thanks to this effort there is a very healthy ecosystem of mods that can change the game to your preference.
  
  
• Educational
  While not the primary focus of the game, you will learn about physics in space. Orbital mechanics, delta V, acceleration and mass, just to name a few.

Cons:

• Vessel physics is really quite bad
  Wobbly ships that act like they're held together with rubber bands. For a game which is basically a big physics simulator, the one place where the physics engine actually matters completely falls short. This can be seriously frustrating when it destroys rockets for no obvious reason.
  
  
• The game chokes on large or complex ships
  Early on you will notice that there is a "Part count" number shown when building ships. Later on you will learn why. When you reach a certain number of parts (the number varies based on computer performance) the game starts choking and has major FPS drops. If you're building a very large space station you may find that it becomes nearly unplayable as you add more components.
  
  
• No tutorial or basic flight school to help new players become proficient
  This game has an exponential learning curve. Unfortunately new players have virtually no in-game resources to learn basic flight proficiency. Just accept that you're going to have to do some research and watch hours of youtube videos before you have a chance of even reaching one of the moons.
  
  
• Little to do on other celestial bodies
  While the addition of resources has helped greatly, nine times out of ten, after spending hours designing your vessel, carefully planning and timing your flight, and painstakingly setting down on another world - you will step out, look around for 10 seconds, then hop back in and fly home. It's really rather anti-climactic.

The game that never ends, Skyrim is an incredibly immersive and addictive experience. The story is compelling, the visuals are stunning, and the level of freedom is simply unmatched. But by far the most impressive aspect of this game is its large and incredibly detailed world filled with adventure.

If you enjoyed Deponia then you will enjoy this sequel. It has the same quality gameplay, art, voice acting and puzzles from the first installment. I would highly recommend playing Deponia before Chaos on Deponia.

The game that changed the game industry. Half Life 2 was probably the greatest game of its time, and even after all these years it's still immersive, beautiful, and great fun to play.

The first adventure game that I've truly enjoyed since the era of Monkey Island and Space Quest. Solid story, good jokes, excellent art, great voice acting, and frustrating puzzles. Great game.

This isn't a thinking man's game. Turn off your brain and enjoy hours of fun and comedy.

One of the best action RPGs ever made.