First the gameplay is smooth and overall it has the basics down solidly. The tutorial is pretty comprehensive, and the various aspects of the game work smoothly. I especially like the fact that you can redecorate floor/wall color and texture for no cost, because sometimes it is hard to see what a pattern will really look like from the thumbnail. (the paint job does not affect your decoration rating, so it's purely personal preference.) There are a few minor text issues in some of the (in game) reviews and item descriptions, and one piece of furniture is completely bugged showing something like "asset number 1240" instead of a name. The main thing that I am disappointed in occurs as you progress from one location to multiple locations. The game only allows you to manage one location at a time, which is fine, but for some reason despite everything going very profitably when I left it, my initial restaurant drops about 2/3 of it's profit (from about 2500 a day to 800) when I moved to the next one with no explanation of why, the sales just drop. Since I was counting on that steady income to support my expansion it was a bit of a kick in the teeth. Thankfully I saved before opening my second place, so I will just run the first one for a while and build up a larger bankroll. Overall the game is a good little timewaster that I've sunk about 15 hours into over the past week and it still has my interest, so I would say it is worth the purchase price.
I want to like this game... I really do. I just can't. The mechanics are poorly implemented, It feels like they were trying for a rock paper scissors mechanic to encourage combined arms, but it just doesn't work very well. The spotting mechanics are terrible, and the scenario's I played are just... badly designed. The AI feels like it is cheating 3/4 of the time, moving units in a way that puts them exactly where they need to be. ALL of that could be dealt with by just learning the odd way the game wants you to play, EXCEPT, that the Interface is absolutely horrible. You can't zoom out far enough to get a good strategic picture of what you want to do, the night and weather effects make figuring out your strategy even harder so i just turned the weather graphics off, and selecting units with the terrible isometric camera angles it gives you is rediculous at times. (try selecting a sub, that is under a destroyer, that is under a bomber in the hex...) Then there is the annoying action camera, that zooms in on a unit when it is ambushed or caught off gaurd by AA (which happens constantly due to the above mentioned spotting mechanics). There is a setting to turn it off, at least that is what i assume the setting is for, but disabling it doesn't change the damn camera zooms. The final nail in the coffin for me is the absolutely atrocious cut scenes... the voicing is bad, the animations blocky and stiff, and the "plot" of them is... laughable at best. Added to which, there are some serious historical inaccuracies in what they portray, which is... painful... in a game about WWII. This one will be getting uninstalled and I am going to try to forget about it. I absolutely cannot reccomend this game, which is sad, because the core concept of having a group of units you level up as the backbone of your forces in various missions has been done really well in the past by other games, and can be really fun.... just not in this game.
An enjoyable game even in its current state. A lot of things are obviously rough as it is an in dev game, but the core mechanics offer a good new take on the genre. There is a huge amount of potential here.
First, very much an early access game at this point (Aug 29) The interface is polished and the mechanics of how to do things work pretty well. I am enjoying exploring the research tree and building my first civilization but at this point (I am about 2-3 hours in as of writing this) the game is more of a peaceful sandbox than anything else. There is not a lot of game here yet, however from reading the news link from the main menu it looks like they have a huge amount of story planned, with goals and tasks in mind. They are still working on the second half of the research tree and the later parts of the game mechanics however, and so do not want to put out just half the story. In other words, mostly what is here right now is just the framework and the engine for it... I am absolutely fine with that. it is an in dev game after all. There are many tooltips that are incomplete, and some places where it is apparent that names should be inserted into the little quest/mission dialogues but are currently just blanks or placeholder values (#nugget_name_1) etc.. But the bits of tutorial that are in and the notifications/small missions that exist are quite clever and have a nice sense of humor in my opinion. For those looking for a ready to play game, I would say add it to your wishlist and check back in a few months, it looks like it is going to be a great god game. If you enjoy a very relaxed sandbox, grab it now and enjoy watching it grow and evolve into something with a bit of challenge included.
