I own it on steam already, but I'm glad to see it here. Love this game. The retro look doesn't count against it all, since visual design really lends itself to bold colors and simpler graphics where the extra detail of a modern game would be lost on you at high speed. I think I got the old WXL soundtrack from archive dot org, but the default soundtrack is great if you aren't in it for the nostalgia.
Picked it up on sale and definitely worth a try. Scratches that space trucker / naval combat itch pretty good. A lot less tedious to get into than Elite Dangerous, but missing that sense of scale. It's better than it's sequel Rebel Galaxy Outlaw in my opinion, which is just a different kind of game rather than an improvement on this one's formula.
Several awesome core game mechanics, but the time limit every level artificially forces you to constantly run headlong into ambushes and they removed controller support that is still available in the first game. Even at a 94% discount there's just no reason to play this over the superior original and it's expansion.
The new campaign is just what was needed in career mode. It’s a good story that spans a few different planets and puts you in the middle of events in the lore with set piece battles. You get limited access to the store during the campaign, but you can typically find everything you need and usually have enough time to repair mechs between missions. Still, it pays to have a couple spare mechs in case you need more time to complete repairs and a firestarter/quickdraw for the odd raid mission or jumpjet restricted optional objective. The constraints make sense in the context of where you are and what you are doing, like in MW3 when you were fighting your way across enemy territory cut off from reinforcements. The only suggestion I have is swapping the pre-mission wall of text with MW3 style drone footage and fully voiced briefings. I hope we get more DLCs with time-locked lore-based campaigns like this in the future. Melee is great addition and gives you a bit more leeway with low ammo builds running dry or charging in and punching mechs when you’re too hot to keep shooting. It makes aggressive play possible in the early game with mechs that don’t have DHS or ES upgrades. Likewise, the new biomes look great and I'm really looking forward to the modders making use of the new assets. None of the new mech variants stick out to me as particularly useful, but I might change my mind once I know which ones have upgrades. I'm surprised they haven’t added something like that mod that identifies which upgrades a mech has. I really wish we could have gotten some new mechs though, as this would have been the perfect opportunity to introduce the Axeman or Hatchetman. I haven’t tried the all-out-war scenarios yet as I’m still working my way through the campaign, but if it’s near the same quality as the HotIS mini-campaigns, it’ll just be icing on the cake. All in all a great DLC and easily worth $20, unless you're broke, in which case stop playing games and get a job you commie!
There's no way to cancel a structure once it's been misplaced without demolishing the non existent structure for partial resources and building priority means very little since they will complete the nearest buildings first regardless. Combine these two and you can end up with resources tied to the wrong unfinished building with no way to reclaim them. They will sometimes walk up to a building and walk away despite having more than enough resources to complete it in storage, leaving everyone to starve as your docks sit at 17/50 wood with 80 in stock. Also, you can't move a miner to the mine you want without disabling the other mine even though there is a button to do so, it just keeps moving back. Granted, this was just from the demo I played, but a few little things like that have me waiting to hear if it's been addressed by a patch before I'll try the full game.
If you thought the game pass version released last year felt half baked, then this would be well done. Hats off to the devs on the AI, the cutscenes, and even the optimization. I was able to bump up the graphics to maximum when last year I had to keep it at high for a solid 60fps with my gtx1060. Glad the gog version still has mod support, but all the must have quality of life improvements seem to have already made it in the game. Only played the opening missions of the campaign and a few runs in career mode, but so far I'm really liking what I see. There's a lot of little changes to the missions and with the career mode you can now pick your background, which affects your location and starting lance. Not gonna say it's good enough to overpower my nostalgia for Mechwarrior 3 as the best in the series, but this is definitely the game I've been looking forward to for the better part of a decade.
I like space sims and want to see more of them. This game kinda shows that games like that don't need to be as big of an investment as something like Elite Dangerous. The controls could definitely be more fleshed out, but kudos to them for getting it to work on a gamepad. Still, I had 2 directions on my right thumbstick that could have gone to verticle thrust and any number of instances where I wanted to do exactly that. The lock-on for dogfights takes the challenge away, but you still have plenty to do in a dogfight, so okay. Sometimes a less complicated game is what I'm up for. My only problem with this game was when I started getting wrecked at jump points before the game had finished loading the level. Did they spawn right on top of me? Don't know, because I came in after they seemed to have bounced off me from all sides. Then you realize doing main story missions don't reward you like side missions and the repair cost from running story missions has put you further away from getting the ship you were hoping would be available by now. At that point you realize you aren't having fun, because the game loop only works if you get rewarded at the end (or at least not set back when you win) and the story isn't good enough to make up for it. Or maybe the story is eventually, idk, but the characters weren't all that great. When I was helping Marla rescue Ansel I wished there was a side with Durgan option. At least he acted the part. Pirates are supposed to be jerks and cutthroats, not cooky best buds.
The high score screen should be shown as the stock price of online superstores now that player has destroyed all the local competitors.
Gotta agree with everyone else here, awesome game, but the inability to get all of the DLC on this platform has me questioning buying anything on GOG. Are platform exclusives going to become the norm on PC distributors like they used to be on consoles? It's been 2 years since this DLC was released on steam.
