Gah! I accidentally spilled a cheap phone game onto my PC! Quick, grab a rag!
I'd like to begin by saying that Unity was a mistake, and here we see yet another game that shows us why. Yes, it looks pretty, but optimization isn't even a thing with this junk engine. As others have pointed out, the same PCs that can run Witcher and Skyrim at max graphics with fluid animation get bogged down by this clunky, garbage engine. Once in game you've entered a world of endless grind that would make a Korean F2P MMO otaku cringe in terror and boredom. Endless possibility? Wrong! The difference between one planet and another are literally cosmetic only. Every planet has the same ratio of plants, rocks and animals. Every planet is either toxic or radioactive and yet every planet has both plant and animal life. Every planet has the exact same bases, trade centers, and artifact sites. Which means that every one of them is, once you look beneath the pain, exactly alike. There are no Earth-like, perfectly inhabitable worlds. There are no truly barren worlds devoid of all life. There are no gas giants, no asteroid colonies, no major cities, no different types of space stations (again, cosmetic changes only). Which means that not only is every planet alike, but every star system is exactly alike as well. Each will have one perfect copy of the one space station that exists in the game and bunch of functionally identical planets. Space combat is cringeworthy. Running a freighter is as pointless as everything else. Exploration has no meaning when there is nothing noteworthy to discover. The "mystery" of the plot is something anyone with an IQ over 50 will figure out within the first hour of the game. Worst of all is this is coming from a late buyer. I waited until the rumors came around saying that this mess of a game had finally been fixed, that the missing features were finally added and that it was actually fun now. Those rumors lied.
Let us for a moment forget that they apparently never played the tabletop version, because things like initiative have been inverted, synchronized fire is gone, and most other mechanics could only be described as "loosely based on Battletech lore." Let us ignore that scenarios are silly, the campaign script writing is amateurish at best and it is clear that no one at Hare Brained ever so much as picked up a copy of the Mercenaries Handbook before writing a game about mercenaries. Instead I'm just going to point out that this game was made with Unity, and if you aren't yet aware of what that implies then sit with me while I explain: Unity is beloved by developers because the base version is free and it is very easy to use. It is often hated by consumers, however, because Unity is notorious for being a buggy, unreliable pile of fecal matter that crashes if you look at it funny... or even if you don't, for that matter. This game exemplifies this issue. It freezes when you load. It freezes when you save. It freeze on mission launch. It freezes on mission completion. It freezes when you go to dock with a jumpship. It freezes when you arrive at planets. It freezes when you leave planets. It also tends to corrupt save files when freezing. In short, if you've probably got a 1-in-10 chance of making it from creating a new character to getting back safely to dropship after completing a mission without the game crashing, corrupting or otherwise freezing up in some way. Before you ask, I'm running this on a Ryzen 8x core processor with a modern 4gig video card, solid state drives and more RAM than I could ever use. I've run it on both Win7 and Win10 with no difference. This game is bug filled piled of junk code that seems like it went through absolutely zero quality control before it was released. It's fun when it works, mind you. It's just that it only works for maybe ten minutes at a time on a good day.
