I'm going to add my nearly 1000-hours-on-steam counterpoint to these negative reviews. Do the following to MOO2 and you have this game: * Add the hint-of-anime art aesthetic and atypical-for-the-genre almost-perky electronica. I personally love both. The look/feel of the ships is particularly nicely done IMO. The artist/designer goes by Arioch and I believe well of souls, well-known-to-homeworld-fans is his site, which is how I discovered the game IIRC. * Remove custom races but add features that are harder to balance in a customization scheme like hard-pointed ship templates unique to each race, wide range of biome preferences, unique research options, etc.. * Add a mineral resource required for ship-building. This limits fleet sizes in a more natural way. Also mineral poor planets can still be massive manufacturing hubs. All that matters is space for factories. * Keep the transport mechanic from MOO2 but add the ability to actually break them out of the pool so you can do stuff like load tanks on them for ground invasions. Maintaining free transports contributes to trade route income which is key for rapid growth. * Build on the subterranean races adding to max pop thing by giving all races biome preferences. All worlds have 2-4 biomes each. Diversity makes for larger planets. * Yoink espionage (for now) * No heroes yet (coming soon hopefully) * Keep combat essentials but add some nice nuances like being able move and attack with multiple ships at once. Sadly not as many gadgets or weapon mods yet but expansions are in development. * Reduce the ridiculous variety of buildings that bogged everything down mid to late game in MOO, to farms, markets factories, labs, mines all with tech levels that autoupgrade buildings when researched and a repeat-build option. * Add non-faction races, some of which are uniquely good at more hostile biome types like inferno and airless. I'm a huge MOO2 fan. I don't know about y'all but this is the one I was waiting for.
I think I'm more 3/5 stars on the actual game experience but it's an historically important game and it's 5 bucks. And I've gotten at least 30 hours of entertainment out of it already. Not sure about finishing it but it might be interesting enough. I do not regret the money spent but I think nostalgia may be skewing the reviews a bit hard on this one. Speaking as somebody who constantly heard good things about this game while discussing MOO with people in the '90s but could never find the silly thing (this was pre-Amazon), I have to say now that the two games really never should have been compared. It's more of an adventure game with 4x elements than a 4X game worthy of being compared to two of the best damn 4x games of all time. It has a somewhat interesting colony and tech development system under the hood but it has a lot of flaws that I have to admit surprisingly don't sink it. These are: * Space combat sucks - pathing-finding primarily * Ground combat is even worse * Lots of stupid what we once called "fmv" or "full motion video". Low res, uninteresting garbage depicting things like your character awkwardly walking to a shuttle with a briefcase or your wife telling you upsetting stories about your son who is too stupid to grasp the concept of scale models. * UI is a !@#$-show. I am a UI developer. !@#$. Show. The weird thing is that it's somehow greater than the sum of its flaws. I found reloading and trying to sort out a quicker way to repair the busted up planets you start out with to be pretty satisfying. I actually enjoyed the not-saddled with badly-translated-wife messages from people in the sector I was policing/reconstructing. And as you progress further, the colony/tech development options start to get more interesting (from not-super-interesing at first). I think it also actually succeeds at fusing the adventure aspect with the 4X stuff and I would definitely be surprised if this game didn't have a special place in the Halcyon 6 dev teams' hearts.
Most negative reviews say "Too hard." It's not. It's as hard as it's meant to be. You will not win most games, often because you made a mistake you will hopefully learn from and not repeat constantly (some lessons are hard-learned); other times because you played the perfect game and just happened upon the ship that was practically designed to kill specifically your ship when you were just too damaged enough to be able to run away successfully and still had that one Achilles heel you were nervous about but couldn't find the right upgrade cure to. Learn to laugh and think about next time with this game and it will be one of the best games you've ever played. I will end this with tips for the too-hard kids willing to try to appreciate sometimes losing the perfectly-played game, or new players looking for some hard-earned advice. * The spacebar pauses. Use it. Think. * Heavy damage loses the war. Only the final battle is worth 1/3+ damage. Run away sometimes. * Avoidable expenses like excess damage, reliance on missiles in the LT, or recovery arm-less drones kill you. * Avoidable risks kill you. Avoid non-trivial chances of getting screwed. * Killing all crew gets better loot. (but see above about risks) * Shields 2 makes you invulnerable vs a lot of area 1-3 ships, even if you have to turn off oxygen and engines to power it. Some upgrades don't require upgrades to reactor power to be handy right away. * Engines to 3 or 4 is also a big survival enhancer. * Nothing kills unshielded faster/more-efficiently than beams. * Shoot for versatility. Having a backup to every counter is what you want. * Hacking is stupid-versatile. * Get excited about the following if you can afford without self-cannibalizing: Pre-igniter (especially with slow-charge powerful weapons); Tele Reconstruction/Cloning/teleporter/badass boarding team; drone arm/awesome drones * Amazing ships: Mantis B, Engi Stealth Cruiser, Crystal Cruiser B, Engi Drone Ship C * Laugh > Rage Quit
Ignore old reviews. Especially the particularly pissant ones who don't know what early access or in-development means. If you had told me every feature they were planning on implementing for this game I would have declared it vaporware even with 5 years to develop. They pulled it off. They pulled it all off. There are too many features for a massive 10-20 page review to actually describe and I have not run into a feature that stinks yet. It's basically Metroid/MInecraft/Gigantic-Galaxy-exploring-Sandbox but that woefully underdescribes everything this game is and has. I recommend the RPS review. It was what sold me and it was dead on. Word of advice. Check out crafting stuff early. I was under the wrong impression I'd be introduced to that as I moved through the intro-phase of the game. You aren't really but it's straight forward. Don't wait for it. You have it the second you land on a planet and cut down your first tree. Get that Anvil/Armor before you do your first mission to fix the ship.
It's pretty, the UI is pretty slick in many places, I actually don't hate the combat even though they're taking forever to get all the actual weapons tech up and running. I'm on the fence about starlanes. Now, the problems - note the recurring pointless micro theme. * Pollution. You have to stop everything to clean it up occasionally or your biomes degrade rather than simply having cleanup count against production automatically. Somebody on the design team has a broken sense of fun. * You have to research embassies, and then get permission from the AI to have an embassy (which has become a chore in its own right in the most recent updates) before you can have a trade or a research agreement which now expires, contributes very little to building up a relationship with the AI beyond an initial uptick when you initiate the agreement and agreements give you nothing until the very end often leading to declarations of war to sabotage them giving you no return on the initial investment, Because the AI is a moron, this happens a lot. I've stopped bothering with diplomacy for anything other than trading tech. It's that bad. * You have to research population and marine transports now. Your first colony currently just has to sit there and farm for dozens of turns while you wait on the technology you need because your first colony ship doesn't come with a colony base which provides some food production out of the box (you have to research that too). That might change because it's really obviously a drag on the early game but civilian transports you have to research won't. * 5-slot build queue. How did they actually regress from MOO2's build queues which weren't quite big enough themselves? It blows my mind. * Poorly thought out tech dilemmas. Battlepods or fighters? Early (more mid-game now) fighters no longer play a role in this MOO unless you can convince an AI that actually has them to let you trade half your empire for the technology.
I've been gaming since 1980. I'm grateful that it inspired Fallout and reasonably satisfied with Wasteland 2, but I never played Wasteland back in the day and I just couldn't go back to this. I get the sense that there's gold if you can look past the dated interface and extremely primitive combat but as gamer and a UI dev, I just can't. On the combat, it's not so much the lack of visuals so much as the complete lack of persistent feedback of the condition of enemies. You're often flying blind on how many enemies are still alive in a given group until you reach certain phases. There's plenty of room on the screen to handle that. Like its sequel, the game is very much invested in exploration and combat but combat stinks. Exploration is interesting but interesting enough.
We're talking 20 megabyte hard drive, 640K RAM hercules/monochrome graphics, no sound card and it had full audio, music, voice, etc... That deserves a mention for technical achievement. Otherwise it was a game with boatloads of technically impressive stuff for the time but lousy on the game design front. I have vague memories of annoying puzzles, a pointless flight simulator that could have easily been replaced by a 2D map with clickable icons, frustrating dialog etc... I'm pushing back against the nostalgia curve on this one. 20 megs only allowed for so much and this one quickly got deleted. Or was I playing form disks? Hmm... I wonder if it was this one where I learned what "del *.*" does when accidentally in the root directory.
First off, it's fun. On fusing newer '90s+ elements with a lot of the classic late '80s stuff without the really yucky bits, it's a smashing success. It's definitely easy to jump in, start playing and get that sense of urgency and relevant exploration they don't tend to pull off as well in modern games. On the flipside, the reason the game is easy to jump into is that it's perhaps overly under-complicated. Take combat. It's turn-based and basically mashes X-Com's cover and opportunity fire with a lot of the weapon balancing and crits vs. bullet spam strategies of Fallout's 2D games. But beyond equipping well and starting off in a good position it's never a tactical chess game from turn to turn and you never get that wow-my-characters-can-do-THAT-now feeling without the perks or targeting of Fallout. Similarly, character building and advancement is a bit overly simplistic. There is a Charisma attribute and there are diplomacy and barter skills. I'm not sure charisma has any impact on the diplomacy or barter. That's all skill-level-based. If you have enough levels, you get the candy, which really makes it hard to not emphasize the Intelligence score. It's the same with most non-weapon skills. Charisma really seems more about boosting leadership radius which helps keep your NPCs from running off and being stupid during fights. As such, it really makes more sense to spread your diplomacy and barter skills around rather than make them all the focus of a "talker." Too many character builds are better off going high Int, IMO since attributes have no bearing on skill success and that bugs me. The game could use something like perks to make characters feel less like skill/derived stat buckets. Is it as awesome as Wasteland or the early Fallouts? I'll stop at "It's worthwhile to people who loved those games." I'm digging it. I'm glad to have participated in the Kickstarter. It scratches enough of the right itches and will be on my PC for at least a year.
These are definitely classics but it's hard to get as excited about the gameplay after more advanced space combat engines were released. I think one of my fondest memories was of blowing up a Kilrathi carrier you were supposed to scout with a Hornet in one of the secret missions packs and then getting a mix of praise and being cussed out for not following orders on returning to home base. This was considerably cooler than X-Wing's approach which was to simply to rename the ironically named "Invincible," "Invincible 2," "Invincible 3" etc... when you blew it up on missions you weren't really supposed to.
