It's definitely an escape velocity-like game... and by that I mean you slowly grind your way to bigger and bigger ships with no real story or mission to follow - at least as far as I've encountered so far. It's a fun time sink, but the Escape Velocity games were big in the 90s, so aside from notalgia, there's not a lot that these games to offer 30 years later.
There's nothing really great about this game. Character creation is constrained, dialogue is boring, combat is tedious, and pretty much all of the mechanics are worn out. There's nothing novel or engaging, nor clever or creative. The world building is mediocre. I've yet to encounter a puzzle of any kind... so it's really just "run to this map point, kill some dudes, return to the quest giver, repeat." Maybe there's some a compelling storyline buried in there somewhere, but I've yet to find it. It's a reasonably good game when you consider that it was made by a team of 3 people, but that doesn't make it actually good. Hell, even Stellar Tactics - with a team of 1 dude - has some novel concepts and ideas. I originally hadn't planned on buying this after playing the demo, but I saw it on sale and had a bored night and tried it. The gameplay is actually quite different (and better) than the prologue, but my initial instinct was right - I should've passed. The only reason I won't be refunding it is because I kinda feel bad for the devs. They clearly worked very hard on it and I'm sure it's the best they could do with a team of just 3 people. It's just a bummer they didn't have access to a bit more diversity of thought when creating the world or the game mechanics. As a heads up to people with less capable GPUs: for some reason this game makes my GPU periodically sound like a jet engine. Something about the graphics processing uses 100% of a RTX3070Ti whenever it's in the foreground; there's no performance impact, but not even playing Cyberpunk 2077 did my GPU get hot enough to kick on the fan like that. It's unclear how lower-tier cards will handle it. IMO, you'd be better off buying something like Divinity: Original Sin for similar game style with substantialy better world building and more unique gameplay mechanics.
The game is reasonably fun... not very difficult, not very immersive, but enjoyable. However, it's very linear, and if you somehow fail to notice and click the correct shiny object, you may find yourself spending hours circling the same area over and over again trying to figure out what to do next. The camera is very limited as well, making it difficult to quickly scout for these things. For that reason, I'll give it only 3 stars, and probably won't end up paying for the full version.
I've played this to death, from early access through Patch 8. It's an all-around great game, peerless in replay value. I've played act 1 at least 20 times since EA and every playthrough I still find something new. BG3 sets a new bar for what an RPG can be, and just like the original Baldur's Gate, I'm sure kids who play this game as teenagers will be excitedly introducing their children to it 20 years from now, telling them how revolutionary it was.
I've been a developer for 20 years and have spent plenty of time in low-level languages like x86 assembly. With that background, this game was really intuitive to me - the basic operations available for your EXAs are the ones available in a simple processor, so I had the advantage of a shallow learning curve to understand the tools given to me. As for the puzzles - the tutorial was trivially simple, but did a good job demonstrating the concepts. Once I got into the game, the puzzles did make me thing... originally it was about optimization, but there are definitely some challenging ones that require you to think recursively, etc. I'll probably try to get my kids into this game to help them practice thinking like a programmer, but I can definitely see how some people could get frustrated. I'm really enjoying it, but it's probably not for everyone.
Songs of Conquest does a pretty good job at recreating the HOMM3 vibe. However, HOMM3 was released in 1999. It's a fun mechanic, but games have progressed a long way in 25 years. The single player campaigns leave something to be desired, the overall story is meh, and replayability is limited due to the limited faction selection. Adding a new faction certainly expands the game, but the original songs of conquest game should probably have had this faction (and at least 2 others) to begin with to make it worth the purchase price. Adding this as a DLC seems questionable. If I were to go back in time, I'd tell past me to just wait a few years until the "ultimate" edition is released, containing all the factions and extra DLC in one bundle, likely offered at the same price as the original. It's not like you're gaining anything by getting access to this early... but by buying the game now and then buying each DLC individually, you'll end up paying a significant premium over the price of the inevitable "ultimate edition", which really ends up being the game they should've shipped initially, with the only benefit being you get it when it's half-baked. It must be some new business model for game developers - release what amounts to a limited demo and start getting people to pay for it, then use that to fund the remaining development and release the remaining features as DLCs... then a few years later, release the game you originally set out to make as an "ultimate" version of your original $20 demo. It's shady AF, but I guess it keeps development funded. Better to wait and buy the lot when they're all bundled than to buy the game and each DLC. I certainly have regrets.
It looked really good, and actually started out kinda fun. It pretty quickly gets repetitive. I didn't find a lot of variety in strategy between the different races, there are a number of control annoyances (right click is used for most things, but occasionally what you want is left click and right click performs a different action, blowing your turn). The game doesn't really tolerate casual or exploratory gameplay: you need to set your strategy and be consistent with it or you quickly become overpowered - that's fine and some people are looking for it, just be aware. It kept me entertained for maybe 20-25 hours of actual, focused gameplay... and worked pretty well as something to do passively in the gaps while waiting for other things on my computer. I'm not planning to return it, but having played it, I probably wouldn't buy it if given the choice again.
I bought this on sale for like $5, so I probably won't return it (not worth the effort), but it's not great, even by 2015 standards. For starters, it has a fixed resolution that is MUCH lower than modern monitors, so you're playing in a small window in the middle of your screen. Add to that fairly tedious navigation and clunky controls and you get a game that could have been pretty awesome, but isn't. Graphics, sound, etc aren't bad, but also aren't stellar. It's hard to get past the mild blurriness in the tiny little window. I'm sure there's someone who might like this, but I'm definitely not it.
