This game has the worst on boarding process I have ever seen. I think they don't want new player. After about 50 hours I have no idea why or what is the point of the story mission. The galaxy map navigation is terrible. Just trying to select which star system you can warp to is not intuitive. After 10 years you'd think they fix bugs like doors not opening, objects clipping, and boxes floating in space. The combat is really bad both on foot and ship. The ship flies like a bowl of mashpotatoes. If they revamped the shooting that would really improve the game. Where I am, just starting, picking a fight with the robots is a terrible experience. Shoot, do little damage, then run and hide as you get swarmed. I really want to like this game but after 50 hours and making about 20 bases it's meh. I'm not going to give it a one star because the exploration aspect is fun to a certain point. If all you want to do is mine resources and base build then yes this the perfect game.
The single player experience is not fun anymore after the 2.0 update. You will spend a lot of time NOT doing research because you cannot afford the cost of resources. You will run out of tower ammo in a fight because they changed how much you can store. You will run out of ammo for you guns in a fight because they limited your ammo. You will have enemies of OP you cannot be on the same screen as them without getting shredded. Yes fighting an Omega enemy they you cannot see, what fun. Exor did the worst thing possible to the single player game. As you progress you feel WEAKER. I loved this game, I have played through the base game on "Brutal" with low resources many times. I hope they fix the balance for single player.
So much hype, not much game.
When you start Stronghold determining your opening moves can take a bit of time to get used to. That is maybe you need to start cutting trees before focusing on food or weapons. Then comes the decisions of what ground you will defend and what to leave exposed. Spread your forces too thin and you risk a disaster. The key with Stronghold is the missions are long enough to be a challenge but not a painful slog. As you build can feel yourself making progress towards your mission's goals. After two missions (after the tutiorial) and almost 20 hours invested in Diplomacy...well I am back playing Stronghold HD. Note the 5 stars are for Stronghold HD.
Very slow pace in certain areas with no voice acting and unskippable dialogue. The graphics and game play are nothing special but it caused my graphics card to work harder than if I was running CyberPunk! 5/10 meh
Interesting concept for the modern gamer, but not a game made for me.
Riftbreaker is one of my favorite games. This DLC has a good story and some fun game play. The DLC took about 6 hours to finish. One thing I really like is finally they create some story missions that requires the use of certain advanced tech. In the base game you can research lots of tech that you will never use. For example, you can research all the way to a Fusion reactor without ever needing to build one. There are some minor bugs in game, in some areas when you place a pump into liquid nothing will be produced (no mud or sludge). This bug was present before the DLC. I hope they are working on Riftbreaker 2.
I bet 90% of people quit this game after about 10 hours or less. I have about 5 failed play throughs, 50+ hours total, and I am not even passed chapter 3. I have only played on the default/normal difficulty. The game punishes you for playing the game! That is both its strength and weakness. If you stay in a sector too long you get a crew penalty. That's really dumb, why would your crew have a problem with you trying to gather more resources, so the ship doesn't explode? The resources needed to keep the ship and crew running will run dry and you are screwed! The frustrating part is you won't realize you are screwed until you have sunk a bunch of time into the game. You should have the option shutting down a sector and putting some of the crew back into cryo sleep. That would open up a way to slim down when resources are getting low. Will I finish the game? Probably not, if I do it won't be any time soon. But I don't regret buying it.
The "Halsin And Astarion Romance Scene" is on YouTube. Yep, it is what everyone says it is. Does this make me want to spend my money on this game? Hell No! If the game play is really good, would I buy it? Maybe, when it is on sale. I know people are losing their minds over this. However, you can always say "no" to romancing the man-bear. I tried romancing Morinth in Mass Effect 2. It did not go well! ;)
If you like Riftbreaker this is more of that! One complaint is there are lots of tech unlocks that are not needed in the game. For example, the shield generator system is cool but way too complex and resource dependent for what it does. In other words you can beat the game with 10% of the toys. If would be nice if they created maps (in the sequel) that forced you to use most the tech unlocks.
