I spent far too many hours with this game. Which tells me that at one hand, the game has potential, but at the other hand its shortcomings hurt a lot, because the game just falls short of its potential. Shortcomings: - Quests are undwerhelming fetch quests. - Not streamlined: if you send out a party to the wasteland you will get a call for every location they pass if they should to search it and then another call aksing you to examie the items. Effectively, you spend most of the time stupidly clicking on the radio. Instead, the game should offer some automization options, like: search every location, take everything you can and let me decide about the rest. The lack of automization shows itself also in how you need to manage the inhabitans of your bunker: it should be possible to assign a person to repair everything in your bunker if they are idle, or to train whenever they don't do anything useful. The way it is currently, you just keep doing busy work. - Useless encounters. I ended up trying to avoid encounters as often as possible. Not because they are so dangerous, but because the encounters take forever and are totally boring. First, you must click 'confirm' for no reason in every encounter. Second, the combat is extremely bare bones. Third, recruits outside the shelter are always trash. Fourth, sometimes there are forced encounters - you can auto-resolve them, but that may lead to the death of one of your crew, so in the end you probably want to get involved in each one of them. Which doesn't help make them less boring.
The only thing this game has really going for it is that it is charming. The core mechanic, the turn-based battles are repetitive and boring. You quickly find a combination of costumes and 'battle stamps' (items that can boost your characters stats or let you stun enemies etc.) that works well and from there on there is no incentive to ever change them again. There is no variation in the fights that matters and the quick time events that let your attacks hit harder or parry enemy attacks just grows extremly boring. After finishing the original campaign I didn't have the motivation to try the included DLC - but as far as I know it doesn't change the turn based battles, so I wouldn't expect it to be any more fun.
The mechanics of this 2D oil drilling game are pretty simple. You bid for a patch of land, hire dowsers to find oil, build oil towers and drill until you hit an oil reservoir. Then, you transport the oil from the tower to tanks, or sell it at two factories. The oil price you can sell it for changes over time which results in boring busy work to make sure you don't miss a high price period. After one year, you return to the town, buy upgrades and bid for the next patch of land, or buy shares of the town. New upgrades and game mechanics like rocks and gas reservoirs only slightly change the basic formula, so that in the end the game ends up being pretty repetitive. Still, if you are looking for a relaxing game that you can play without too much thought, you may want to give this a shot. I wouldn't recommend it for the current full 10 EUR price tag, but this is very decent sale material.
First off: so far, I haven't encountered a single crash (on Linux). The game seems stable to me. So, this is basically a heist puzzle game. It's not awful but also not great - it's quite okay. My main gripe with the game is the conrols. It just sucks when you feel you lose a game not because it was your fault, but because the controls are somehow imprecise.
- Luck mechanic is unusal, but works well - No saving in a mission is annoying.
Don't hesitate to try this superb space sim just because you don't own a joystick ad you really don't need one to play the game. The reference card is a good starting point for your own keyboard layout. I use ESDF for movement in conjunction with my mouse for fine-tuning. So I have moved the standard S key (next subsystem) to W, E (next escort ship) to 4, F (closest friendly ship) to 5 - respectively the SHIFT+S, SHIFT+E and SHIFT+F combinations to SHIFT+W etc.
