There's likely a good game in here somewhere, it has a lot of depth and mechanics and nuances that would make early paradox games jealous. However, like early paradox games the concept of QoL and Accessibility for the player was utterly ignored by the Dev, the game makes little to NO effort to explain anything to you. The manual is a weighty tome, but I'm sure diagrams on how a nuclear reactor works would be more clear, a lot of pages are just the dev showing off the games equations and formulae, but again, DOESN'T explain any of it. The games unwillingness to explain anything can also result in Hidden fail states, one for me being that your zones can get admin strain not too dis similar to empire sprawl in Stellaris. But Stellaris WARNS you about it, this game? Nope not even a pop up from your advisor so by time you realise its too late. I know there's YT vids from people like Das tactic etc. But sorry if I'm having trawl forums and wikis and watch hours of YT videos just to know how to even play a game then it has failed in my opinion. If you have the time and patience to play hundreds of hours in a game before you can even start grasping the core mechanics then have at it. If like me though you have a full time job and other commitments don't bother, the game just ends up an exercise of confusion and frustration. I clocked in 50 hours and just gave up...I've got better things to do and games that are more fun to play.
There's Difficulty, then there's this nonsense. I'm all for challenge but this is just stupid, and the dev is only listening to try hard sweaty "Yes men" telling them to just make it harder and harder. You can die at the drop of a hat, realistic fair enough, but I don't have a squad, I'm on my own, and you have ALOT of enemies to deal with. Everything that needs to be crafted needs materials but your starting backpacks are useless so your inventory fills up far too quickly. And this whole "you cant leave until you do the job" is BEYOND STUPID. So if you're in a hopeless situation, oh well tough, no using common sense and bugging out. Great game design.... The "Insurance Kit" which used to give you basic gear each time you died is gone, so if you die a few too many times? Game Over. Lost all your good gear on an unlucky run at a later point of the game where the already difficulty cliff has gotten higher? Games tanked. Got be one of the worst games I've ever played. Difficulty is fine if it adds to the games fun, this however, is the equivalent of eating a glass sandwich, in fact no. Eating a glass sandwich would be MORE fun than this. There's far better Roguelikes out there than this garbage, save your time and money. Sseth is rarely wrong, but man he was WAY off on this one.
Got it for free and I still feel robbed... Rogue likes are quickly becoming synonymous with talent-less amateur hour developers covering up the fact they cant make a game by "Just make it a rogue like" Rogue likes CAN be good, this is NOT one of them, half a game, tedious by unbalanced difficulty with heroes getting cheap game breaking abilities, and you losing because you've either been conned by the awful difficulty design or you've stopped paying attention because you've fallen asleep, due to the game being so god damned boring as its YET another boring half baked rogue like. IF you really want a Darkest Dungeon like where you're the bad guys get Iratus, that is actually made by competent developers
People saying this is the best of the trilogy need drug testing, its atrocious. The Premise for this game is interesting, but man oh man if you need an example of how to utterly make a hash of executing an idea look no further. Who ever was in charge of difficulty had no idea what they were doing, its all over the place, some missions are a joke then others are nigh on impossible as it expects you capture a beast man whilst getting hammered by acid grenades from all angles and shot at by 15 other beast men and matriarchs running up to you and blowing your slow dawdling troops away in one hit. Add this on top of your territories getting attacked almost CONSTANTLY. Then there's the suit mechanic, if your suits get broken or isn't strong enough your guys take DoT a good idea on paper but executed abysmally which is the running theme of this game as the aforementioned grenade spam makes this a source of endless frustration. The voice acting will make you wish you want to smash your speakers and enjoy being told "some scientists are unemployed" and "you can attack new territory" and "you need to equip the team" and "some characters have more than one class" over and over and over again. Seriously Aftershock is far FAAAAAAR better than this, this is just a mess of game design. I know a lot of people say its playable modded, but I'm reviewing the game at face value as is out of the box, and out of the box its dreadful. Play aftershock, or one of the many great Total conversion mods for UFO defence and avoid this mess.
Ever wondered what FTL would be like if it had bloat, tedium and micro management that sucks all the fun out of it, all on top of some of the most laughable difficulty balancing going? After about 4 to 5 hours clocked in I can tell you to look no further, its this game. How this game got good reviews and warranted DLC I will never know. All this game did was make me want to play FTL instead, since that game is actually good. Do yourselves a favour and avoid this like the plague and play FTL instead, it is lightyears ahead of this piece of garbage.
