Title says it all. Game was alot of fun for me, until a few campaign missions in i realized, that i cannot respec or even beable to prepare for future missions. The game has zero hand holding, and completely reminds me of C&C except at least with C&C each mission let you upgrade to a certain point, not restrict what you could unlock per mission. This game does that in the campaign. Oops, you bought the wrong tech, and beat a mission or two, to find out you need different tech? Tough, gotta either save scum, or backup the auto save to get around that. Massive headache right off the bat, campaign punishes you in a way unexpected, for not knowing simply because, you dont know. I shouldn't need to start from scratch in campaign when even on easy im missing vital "researched" tech tree skills which, are not obvious what so ever. That said, i'd avoid the game all together because attempts at encrypting saves, and making it extremely difficult to get modding working on the GOG build was purposefully done, to be super anti consumer, well besides the whole campaign just plain sucking due to the previously mentioned lack of knowledge about the map. If you like Trial by fire and a never ending do or die error scenario where, if you dont put research points into the right tree, screwing you later on down the line with say, hoard missions in campaign mode, this is your game. It will frusterate you, turning a 5min battle to 1-2hrs depending on how much tolerance you have for trying to "make due" with out that vital tech/research, unless your willing to re-slog through the entire campaign just to trial and error the right tech, which save scumming will help, but thats just... thats only good for as long as your patience holds out. All this said, its fun in survival, campaign is a reminder of C&C but with severe negatives, and major hoop jumping for getting any type of mods steam or otherwise working. Avoid unless you like hassle.
The game is okay. Parry is your best friend, if you don't master it you'll struggle a bit. Text/chat dialogue is barely there, besides everyone once at 4 hearts basically trying to either hit on the protagonist alongside providing some sorta boost/support item. Story is... "meh". Really revolves around unlocking memory fragments about basically 99.9% of the populace being female androids. The biggest gimmick that upsets folks is the time mechanic, its not to bad at all. Its really easy to manage, its just about not dying often, and actually semi quickly breezing through stages. You'll get to a point where farming for resources is unneccessary and you just wanna beat the game to "complete" it. If the whole time constantly ticking away is a big killer for you, just enable explorer mode. Co-op is local, i asked about this but it didn't seem to answer too much about playing on two seperate machines for simplicity. Its not that simple, you load it on a computer, and either hook up 2 physcial or wireless controllers (xbox 360/xbox one controllers seem to work best), and then set the game to 2 player mode. Its kinda a hinderance as far as movement goes because you really need to coordinate with your local team-mate to get anywhere, on the flip side, they basically get a copy of everything you have equipment wise so it helps out alot, as far as quickly plowing through the game. Solo is a challenge, actual communicating coop is a cake walk. arcadia reminds me of the megaman zx series, i think this is some sorta distant relative or in the same universe as megaman, but with out megaman/zero/zx. I suggest checking out the demo first, i personally enjoyed it.
For a early access title, it runs okay for the first hour or two. After the first mission though, the issues start showing up. From infinite enemy spawn spaming making it a nightmare to even progress in the forced story mode, to priority settings setup for the "humans" and machinary not working as intended. Some things that infuriated me personally was, the crashing. I understand Early access, luckily theres auto save intervals as frequently as 5min. The problem here is that in a hour or less, you'll run into memory issues, where the game will have severe memory leaks and everything will stop responding. That is my largest gripe, but it is to be excpected in EA. All that aside... here are the pros and cons.. Pros: - Can be addictive, think of a extremely unstable space haven game, still a ton of fun just horribly buggy - First few missions your units respond and follow commands - Graphically appealing, 3D/2D textures is really cool to see implemented Cons: - Chucklefish, my experience going back to starbound, sdv, etc... was pretty bad, but they did make a turn around so there is hope - Graphical bugs, this also leads to crashes, the UI may bug up causing a crash - Horrifically laggy, you go from 1x to 2x or faster, and the game goes even slower. Tested on i3-i9 machines with GTX 980MX to 1080TI's w/8, 16 and 32gb loaded laptop/desktops, all mentioned specs and this game does DRUDGE along (so expect fast time loading to be unstable or crashy) - Units dont correctly follow instructions or function ingeneral (storage issues, no fall back storage even with multiple unconfigured storages, units just doing nothing looking for work despite having researched & unlocked priorities and customizing it) Theres alot here thats negative, but i personally am enjoying it minus the annoyances. The memory leaks are my biggest problem, going from 512mb-4gb ballooning is nuts. Otherwise check it out, im still giving it a chance, because i find it fun still.
Inshort, i thought i'd love this game. Turned out to be more about micromanaging connections more than anything else. This is a major dampener on the game as a whole because a large portion of the game mechanics revolve around connection micro management headache. If it wasn't for that this game would be alot of fun. Outside of that, the game has a unique story. You'll wanna watch a lets play to really get into it. But the meat and potatos sadly seem to revolve around connections and may also put a massive dampender on your gameplay. I mean once you get done fiddling with connection issues that sometimes do work the game becomes fun so theres that. Feels like if Faster Than Light (FTL), mixed in with space base builder mechanics, but far more tedius to do just about everything. If this game ever updates and removes the hassle mechanics (just make it auto connect or allow players to freely modify if they so choose) then ill update this review to explain that
Can't buy this on GOG solely because you need to buy the full game for a completely stand alone audioable file.
As far as i can tell, the GOG platform has been abandoned by the Dev. GOG build sits at build 4.0.3, Steam build 4.1.6. Massive changes. I'd like to say its a fun game, but its quite repetitive. It seems like the GOG customers will get done in and lose out on their investment. It has its charmes, but those charms quickly wear off after you get tired of the same old same grind. Not gonna lie, i loved it at first. But then i started wondering why i didn't get any new updates or hear anything about the game. Anyway, if your gonna buy it, at least go through the steam platform because its quite clear the dev has abandoned us gog buyers. This is how you support piracy, by deliberately withholding content from your paying customers, but paying attention to another platform. Looks like that kickstarter and Multiplayer update, is something we WONT be getting. I hope im wrong and the dev comments, but as it looks, not gonna be happening.
A very fun game, with alot of mods that really keep the game going. Its quite challenging and some of the contracts ingame career mode will literally drive you nuts. Anyway onto the more important thing, the spyware the part that i was skeptical about as well. Its integrated into the .exe now. But theres a caviet, you can opt out only during the first run of the game, heres the opt out, the token is generated based on your machine snapshot at the time of token generation. Lets you opt out of being "spied" on but then again, it already took a snapshot to phone home with all of our devices information. To me this is a big BIG turn off for any game, and or developer to implement. Hard core privacy invasion and intrusion. Just a huge heads up if you buy this game like i did, wondering to what extent the software inshort spies on. Also to determine whats being phoned home about your machine now, its all clearly stated, but you need to attach a debugger to the games ksp_x64.exe to find where it all points too. Current opt out link from the unity appliction (Token= is your devices unique UUID which ID's your hardware, your device). "https://dataoptout-ui-prd.uca.cloud.unity3d.com/?token=" "sdfajmephivkohlcvlm2234rg4h5t0lvo8l9prr8tkobses56r345prf5p4s" Now if you can get past the fact these devs literally spy on you if you don't opt out during first runtime and you don't see the notice again (unless you reinstall the game), then this will be a fun game. Especially if you only intend to run the game on a unnetworked device, then it wont really matter because the software can't phone home, if theres no network connectivity period. Or you could literally block everything network associated using windows or linuxes inbuilt firewall management associated with Kerbel Space Program.
Great game, lots of fun. This was originally released on the google play market. But they had significantly locked almost all of the heros and extra bonus items behind a paywall. Cool to see it come to gog, but the distaste it left me for literally being a attempted cash grab after you already pay for it on the play store (you need to also pay with in app purchases for the heros) was a major kick in the nuts to all the folks who supported these guys. Just figured i'd give you all a heads up. if your buying this, buy it on GOG because everything isn't hidden behind some bogus pay wall, unlike the google play store version (identical but with touch control support) Pros: - Fun to play literally able to beat the game in under 5hrs - Quite a few different heros to pick - No pay walls on the gog version - Easily hackable using cheat engine, or on the android platfrom using game guardian Cons: - You bought it on google play, you had to pay extra $$$ for the other characters and content - Doesn't support touch controls IE on a touch screen laptop I can't play the same as the android version - Been a few years since the games been out, waiting for the new maps promised saying "coming soon" but haven't came since the release of iron marines back on sept 13th 2017. (They removed the coming soon prompts now just updated to find out its gone, but loaded with plenty of advertisements for a PAID FOR game, with tons of unwanted crap advertised). - Android version is littered with advertisements in the load up that are unavoidable (unless you modify the .apk file)
Tested on dell optiplex 7040 micro, dell optiplex 7020, 7050, with only 30-48fps (I tweaked my settings for the intel hd 530 , intel hd 5000, intel hd 7000 series gpus), works fine on my gaming desktop and laptops that have gtx 1050, 1060, 1080ti. Game is only repetitive if you cant find objectives to do. If you like games like empyrion galactic survival or in general, space games with resource, inventory and building mechanics then this is your type of game.
