Recent reviews by Lolisman217

Know what you're getting. This isn't meant to be an action FPS. This is designed to be a gritty survival looter.

I would give it a "give it more time in the oven" if I could. The premise is amazing, playing as scavs trying to make it out alive amidst warring factions that absolutely dwarf you in power is surprisingly refreshing for how cliche it may sound. The atmosphere plays really well into it that theme of being a rat, the world being dirty and gritty and the UI being retro. The dieselpunk-ish theme drenches everything in a layer of oil and wear and tear that is a breath of fresh air compared to the modern sleek and clean aesthetics that other modern games have. If I haven't made it clear, the atmosphere and world of the game blows me away.

However, there's a reason I say to give them more time to cook and why I am writing this review with only 20 hours of gameplay at the time of writing. While the aesthetics of the game are highly promising, the gameplay behind it is lacking. On a macro level, the game is "Loot, extract, use resources to upgrade, and repeat" You aren't meant to clear the map or go loud right off the bat. I am perfectly fine with that. However, there's both a kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that puts a damper on that loop.

Equipment selection is not particularly intuitive. You have stock guns, and you can customize them and save them as a templates, which are named "(Gun name) 1, 2, etc.". Available upgrades incentivize you to just make the best possible gun as most attachments are direct upgrades to their prior, meaning you really only need one fully kitted gun assuming you play with the intent of not dying every other run. After all, better gun means better chances of coming out of a firefight alive. Weapons don't take any weight on your kit so you can take the drum mag over the normal without consequence.

Combat feedback needs some work (Assuming you're forced into an engagement). For one, I would love if enemies could be dismantled, e.g. shooting the gun off an exo. Right now, combat boils down to "aim for the head, hold down the trigger, pray you can out tank them" or "run for your life if they're invincible". Healing items are basically fallout, you have dedicated medical items to heal quickly like stimpaks, but in small, medium, and large varieties, and then you have snacks that heal a tiny bit. I enjoy the touch of flavor it adds to the game, but that mostly incentivises healing as you facetank whatever the enemies are throwing at you. Movement is a bit clunky and I get that you have a massive backpack of loot, but that means it makes it difficult to stick to cover in combat. Additionally, there isn't much actual cover of any use that you can use to fire from.

Enemy AI. I know this is a big painpoint the devs are addressing. In my experience, my squad has gone loud many times because an AI fighting another AI randomly decides to hit my team with a stray despite us being far removed from the engagement. There's tons of one-shots and I get that they're meant to discourage combat, but getting one shotted by a massive killer mech is a little different from getting one shotted by an officer. Enemies will spawn in your field of view and some enemies are deadly quiet. Toothy has snuck up on me more than once because it is hard to hear it coming.

Character depth or lack thereof. Characters can get different skills that make them more unique, some heal more, others are able to use heavy weapons. However, only the "unlock X weapon" skills are of any use, and any further investment is a nothingburger +X accuracy or +2% sprint speed. I hope these get reworked to be more impactful as my prestige 12 bag man feels almost identical to my noob bag man.

Quests/story. They tease at stories that you can explore as bounties, and it really is nice to have lore that you can explore at your own leisure and not gate any content. However, many quests tell you "they're in the map somewhere, find them", necessitating multiple runs through a map to find them if they even appear. Water isn't an issue once you know what you're doing. These are how you unlock unique weapons (hint hint pick the heavy machinegun quests) that you can't buy from vendors. However, they ultimately are one in the same as they don't have any story outside of what you read and the button you have to press/person you have to frag. I'm fine with a decentralized narrative but as it currently stands, it is just a lot of fetch questing. Factions have reputation but it both isn't displayed accurately/consistently and is fairly easy to max within 20 hours. It does very little for you as far as I know.

General tidiness. Pretzles. Minor typos are understandable and gets a genuine chuckle out of me when I find them, it reminds me that this isn't corpo slop. Maybe pretzles are different from pretzels.

These are personal critiques based off of how I enjoy playing the game. This game does very little to hold your hand and being able to figure things out for myself is super rewarding while also giving you plenty of situations where you can only watch as it kicks your teeth in. I'll watch the development with great interest as no other game in recent memory has had such an interesting premise. It's much more fun with a squaddie, play it with a friend!

As for personal wants:
- Rocket launchers in recoilless or disposable flavors as a high-investment ace in the hole to destroy or disable enemy armor. Make them hard to acquire, just give us an option even if it only temporarily takes a tank or heavy mech out of the fight.
- Character expansion in both playable and nonplayable. Make skills worth getting, with "graduation skills" that are more impactful unlocked at certain prestige tiers. E.G. let old man's prestige 5 unlock a skill that lets him share his expanded healing with teammates. Let me get to know the other characters in the world too! I wanna know cool red euruskan robot dude!
- Tighten up the gameplay loop. You don't always get an out as of right now and that does fit the world, but I just go (sad spongebob meme) when investigating the bunker has led to us getting hunted down and not being something we could have predicted. Much easier said than done, of course.

TLDR: I recommend this game, but IF and only IF the devs flesh out the gameplay. Visually, the game is stunning, and I enjoy the artstyle of the mechs and weapons. It took me awhile to get a good grip on the simultaneous turn structure of battles, but I found it so rewarding when I finally did get the hang of it. All said and done, I very much so enjoyed playing this game.

Now, here's where I see room for growth:

Expand upon weapons & armor!!!
It's awesome to see a mech lugging a minigun to saturate the enemies with lead (energy bolts?). It's awesome to see a mech go gundam and dash and slice through enemy lines. But the fact that (to my understanding) all enemies are equally vulnerable to every weapon makes all of the differences in the weapons feel pointless. Maybe it's worth introducing more than just barrier and integrity (the equivalent of shields and health in layman's terms) and giving some weapons/manufacturers an edge over defeating certain integrity types to further incentivize squad diversity and taking time to analyze which weapons to use on whom. Seeing new thruster, reactor, and armor variants would be a good way to introduce such a system as well as beef up the diversity in those areas.

As for place for improvement, it would be cool to see a page from helldivers with crew-served weapons like a rocket with a separate carrier or a dainsleif from Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans with a second crew carrying the ammo. Both player and cpu could have them, and it would create high priority targets for players to structure their assaults around. And let me take mechs into battle without an arm! What if I want to throw Shooty McFace into battle in a one armed mech? Also, maybe adding a head for accuracy would open up new avenues for balancing and variety, both cosmetic and gameplay.

Expand upon pilots!!!
Pilots don't really serve much purpose other than the little dude in the mech. They don't bring any skills and they don't level up. Adding skills they can gain either dynamically through their piloting style and mech choice or with skill points to spec into certain specializations would help greatly in differentiating pilots.

Expand upon the strategy layer!!!
I won't lie, this is my biggest issue with the game as it currently is. The strategy layer is fairly thin, and here's my take on it from top-down.

End goal:
Liberate the capitol. The game shows you this as your end goal right out the gate but does little more than that to motivate you beyond the "help the oppressed citizens" fluff. To get there, you have to liberate the adjacent sectors, which entails

Sector liberation:
I'd like to see sectors offering more depth post-liberation. Maybe let us station some pilots and mechs as a way to offload or retire suits and pilots to allow them to scavenge/guard the sector. While the incentive at this layer is adequate in the form of every sector further from your starting point has harder enemies (and in turn higher level loot to strip off their mechs), I feel it lacks a tangible threat from the enemy such as them attempting to recapture cities and requiring you to sabatoge their convoys. Without some kind of looming threat, there isn't much urgency to the story. I'd like to see the ability to set up networks of garrisons in liberated sectors to act as proxy forces when your main base is too far away to combat an enemy siege, and I feel that would both further reward sector liberation and forward thinking at the cost of investing resources into leaving pilots and suits behind. Adding midbosses like generals or mercenaries you can take down to ease the capitol battle would both add more to the story with the new characters as well as add some small rewards along the way to the capitol. Unique trophy items from their mechs would be a good incentive if you could get like a unique shotgun that does heat damage from a midboss or something of the like.

Main base/inventory:
First off, I love the way you can see the mechs on the back of the base as it trundles through the countryside. It's such a cool feature. I find the UI a little unintuitive, as sometimes stats for weapons/armor don't show up when I expect them to, but that's something that can be hammered out if there's enough people who share my opinion and the devs do listen. My biggest issue is with the modules, as not all items you find have the same amount of slots/locked in modules. While it's cool in theory, I just found it annoying when I was trying to get the perfect Vulcan when some came with the wrong module welded on. Modules themselves are pretty neat with a good amount of variety, I just wish there was a better way to allow players to improve their weapons beyond praying for the right combo of slots and innate modules. I find this especially annoying in the armor slots, where there are so many places this can gimp a good build because an unremovable heavy plate is welded on. All in all, it makes the game feel grindier than it is liberating for players. There's also the issue of seeing an item in the post-battle salvage with a module you like, and you have no choice but to take it with you as you can't simply scrap it there and take only the module. I don't care that it costs more supplies to take the entire item, but I would certainly appreciate if we could just take modules from the salvage screen. It would also be nice to see a simulator mode where we can test the mech loadouts without taking it into combat. Upgrades for the base itself and the workshop unlocks could certainly use some work too, as I find the base upgrades grindy when it comes to rare components when the only source of those is the occasional post-mission reward of like 6 (when you need like 20 to buy a single upgrade) or scrapping rare weapons for them. Workshop unlocks are fairly random in my experience, leading me to constantly blitz the convoys and caches in sectors just to get every workshop recipe. While a neat system, I feel it would feel much better if it had more direction than a simple diceroll of a mission reward. Maybe have experimental facilities with only certain weapon categories to narrow down the rng needed. There is a cap to how many supplies you can hold, and the fact I was able to max it out did make me feel a little pointless in playing any more without any good supply sinks. A solution could be investing supplies into liberated sectors for defenses or to keep them happy.

Story fluff & world:
What's up with all the +1 booze and +1 mysterious box? It's nice to see the story fluff, and obviously it doesn't have to be fleshed out, but it feels somewhat pointless when you are given the option to decline it. Also the "mystery market" is silly being a random event imo and even sillier with what you can get from it. Weather events are neat, but it would be nice to see a spot in the worldview ui to show exactly what weather is happening. It took me a little while to figure out why my sensor range dropped to next to nothing.

Missions:
Most mission types are the same, kill all enemies before more come with the occassional "don't allow x building to be destroyed (which enemies don't even target unless you hide behind it)". There are objectives, but it was always easier and less risky to just concuss all the enemies to get the win instead of rush in to cap the point and leave. Maps are beautiful, but there aren't many from what I've seen (or maybe some are just rarer than others). I'd like to see some more maps, like on a dam or smth :)

When all's said and done, I can see great things happening with this game if the devs keep their noses to the grindstones and flesh out the game some more. It's this close to greatness ><. To any prospective buyers, try to gauge whether the repetitive gameplay is a dealbreaker or not.

ETC:
Please add more heavy weapons. I like to see big dakka go boom. Maybe even two handed shield for lols. Two handed rocket pod, two handed plasma flamethrower or smth.

Good game, but too many people seem to get sent to the backrooms after a mission, never to ready up for the next ever again... I hope the devs can look into these mysterious disappearances

I'll be honest, it's a little rough around the edges, but that's to be expected of an early access game. I bought it on the winter sale. This game gets a thumbs up from me, but it is NOT FOR EVERYONE. It has the qualities of a colony sim, alongside some interesting quirks. If a colonist has the Liar trait it seems to make them claim another colonist will turn on them, I've always stopped them from taking preemptive action, but I find the interaction amusing. .

My biggest bone to pick is the lack of noncombat quests. Every quest is either a "go here and kill whoever is around" or a "build this thing in your base" with few exceptions. I hope it changes so there are more diplomatic solutions, i.e. giving a colonist a diplomatic trait so they can talk. The maps are from what I can tell identical every time, but it's not terrible since the worlds are pretty large to begin with. Another issue I take is that you cannot directly interact with colonists' inventories. I would like to bring an emergency stimpack or bandages with me on quests and not walk miles only to find out that all my colonists are carrying logs. Also, the majority of the NPC interactions I've had has been "I'm here to kill you". I very much so hope that changes.

If the game was given a few more pointers towards starting out well and the ability to abort investigate location quests once they begin, I feel it would be much less punishing.

As of writing this, I have ~15 hours, and I can say with confidence that the first 8 were spent just trying to figure out what does what. Maybe I'm a slow learner. However, the struggle of taking care of my colonists (RIP PANCAKE, the number 1 bodge bomb operator) and learning how to survive in the hostile world is why I'm giving it a thumbs up. It's hard, yes, but not intolerably so.

There are some loose bugs here and there that I hope get cleaned up eventually, i.e. a miniboss having the colortagFFFCFF or something tagged onto the end in plaintext, and a few spots where colonists got stuck. The game has an odd atmosphere as well, using earth plants and creatures. I suppose colonized planets would have plants & animals native to earth introduced anyways... Also, the presence of crap golems and crap damage was something I did not expect, but enjoyed finding out anyways. Atop all this, creatures have googly eyes, something I found amusing but somewhat out of place. It's definitely not going to sit right with everyone.

The one thing that I found odd was the presence of preexisting structures, but no way to use/salvage them. They do contribute to the game and gives it more a "wasteland" sim rather than "uncharted planet" sim feel, but that is not a bad thing in my book.

Last but not least, even if you buy the game, you need to make an account with an email address to unlock the other worlds. Why?

I don't usually write reviews for games, but I feel somewhat compelled to vouch for this game. I bought it in spite of it's mixed reception to see for myself, and I have ultimately mixed feelings about the game. It has a lot of potential to grow and evolve (heck, that's what the loading screen says), and I'm excited to see where it goes and pray that it doesn't become another Osiris:New Dawn.

What I would like to see is making it a little bit more beginner friendly, i.e. finding ways to shorten the learning process. I understand that may be exactly what you are going for, but it does become frustrating when you lose your very early colonies to worms.

TL;DR: The game is solid, and if you're into long learning processes, it's for you. The recurring theme of this review has been "I wish 'x' changed", but the spirit of the game as a whole is there. It's fun to ultimately see yourself succeed in the hostile environments presented to you. I hope the game continues to receive development and blossom into an amazing game.

Please, feel free to correct me as I'm far from a good player.

Great game, somehow the most stressing and relaxing games at the same time.

111 Hours later update:
The devs are still hard at work constantly improving the game. Firstly, I will caution anyone who grows very attatched to a save/character: the devs tend to wipe entire saves when pushing big updates, forcing everyone to start anew. I welcome this as I enjoy new-game-itis (the enjoyment of feeling like starting something new), but I have heard a decent amount of outcry about this.

I enjoy the variety of ships the game has to offer, each with a unique layout and strategies for salvaging. You go from tiny single-cabin Mackrel class ships to spear-shaped javelin class ships, to massive gecko class ships each with their own unique layouts. They have clearly put tons of work into this system and no two ships are exactly alike when it comes to minutia. That said, their superstructure and general shape is constant and that adds a skill curve to the game as you learn little tricks to salvage the most of each type of ship. It's in the perfect sweet-spot of familiar and different in terms of challenge.

What's impressed me more is the work the devs have put into the story. I had bought this game just on the premise of being a shipbreaking simulator but I was pleasantly surprised to see the devs add a story and other characters. It really adds another dimension to the game, and I like what they're going with the story. I very much look forward to the continued development of this, wherever the devs want to take it.

As of late, I have noticed some bugs here and there. Sometimes a heat spreader and heat sink will spawn over a power cell, causing the two to be phased into each other. As such, you have to vaporize the heat spreader to grab the cell. There is the occasional blob of doom that grows across the screen, only solved by closing and restarting the game. Once the innards of my Gecko flew away from the outer panels when I separated them as if they had been pushed by a massive hand (beyond any impulse I could exert with tethers, grapple, or demo charges). Still, actual game-breaking bugs are far and few and these seem to be pretty rare. It's not a perfect game, but it still stands head and shoulders above most in terms of keeping me immersed.

It's a great game and well worth the money if you ask me. The newest radiation hazards are awesome in visuals and challenge-wise, and I am excited to see where this game will go.

Pretty fun three hours in; the progression system stops all the plentiful skill trees from becoming overwhelming.

108 hour edit: Still fun, game gets intermittent improvements.

Game is toxic. What more can be said? Reinforce a wall? Teamkill. Pop a hatch? Teamkill. Run out of spawn? Spawnpeek. I respect the devs for making such an impressive game but the people who play it invariably act like 12 year olds jittery on red dye. The game is great but the players all need to take a good long look at themselves and how they act. FFS everyone who plays this needs to get a life.

The grind is real. 8.5/10.
In game i am mastery rank 14, halfway to the top.
This game is pretty fun, got involved in around 2015 when i got my laptop (coming after tf2, l4d2, and terraria). Overall this game is my favorite third person shooter out there, but DE seems to have plotted a different course.
Pros-
Space ninja
lots of guns and weapons
gunblades
beautiful artwork
i can run it at 30 fps
ORDIS
trading lets you earn the premium currency
you get to make a tenno skoom
puppies later in the game

Cons-
Power creep (each new weapon/frame makes the older ones obsolete)
Hema research cost (SRSLY DE?)
hyper exclusive raid culture from what i've seen
Crit domination on meta
DE churns out new material instead of fixing old bugs
Helminth charger pet still needs reskin
banshee=bardframe?

If DE were to stop churning out ridiculously powerful weapons, and focus on fixing bugs (I'm looking at you, Nidus!), I'd be happy. Even make it a joke update, like the bug within or something like that (not very creative guy :P). I recommend you give this game a spin.

Man, I love pot simulator 2000! It lets me escape to a reality where I do not murder every plant I touch. plant/10 would water again

Game is broken.
Pros:
build your own robot
planes, cars tanks, etc
paint them
cons:
Lock on missile launcher and proto seeker require no skill whatsoever
months of grinding
terrible matchmaking, matches are lop sided with one team being clearly better with no auto balance
devs keep nerfing air
devs dont fix bugs like the one where your tank is stuck in reverse
devs keep adding no skill weapons like the lock on missile launchyer and proto seeker
fire andforget=free kills
they do insane damage
proto seeker is straight upgrade to smg at long range b/c literally no spread


this game was fun in phase one, before all the Lomls, proto seekers, and aeroflak. The tesseracts could be managed with relative ease if you just kept eyes to the skies and stuck with a group
better tactical function because now with the 'maximum loadout' if you dont have a line of sight to your enemy and it gets spotted by a teammate, you have no idea what they have making ambushes difficult. In phase one it would announce what they were, for example, 'rail walker spotted' or 'smg cruiser spotted' making it easier to determine whether to strike or not. Also, after 4 months of farming just to get to lvl 32-33, they hand out lvl 88 from the alienware giveaway. This meant they shaved off months or even a year of grinding. I am starting to think the devs just don't care. :( I had hope for this game.