The game seems ok at first. The longer you play the more it seems to fall apart. By the time you get used to the UI and bash a few local aliens things stop working as you would think. It seems like an attempt to make a fresh take on Alpha Centauri but it tries to do the same thing in the wrong way. Like they wanted to be different but couldn't make it work, but they kept trying because they didn't want to do a one to one copy of Alpha Centauri.
Spend hours working on a save being careful and a zombie glitches around a wall corner since there is a window nearby causing a clash in the game "physics" and it just glides through and bites you. You are dead. Hours of work and playing carefully wasted due to a bug. Power outage hits and bam your save is gone. I like what the game is trying for but it misses the mark. I tried and tried and tried but couldn't enjoy my time with it. Even if I didn't lose my saves and progress due to frustratingly stupid and cheap circumstances I will admit I was just not enjoying the game while I was playing. This is the important part, the fun factor. It's missing here. This is just work and grind with no enjoyment.
Title says it all. This game tries to be like Factorio or Satisfactory, yet it's too light to be really engaging. It tries to be a tower defense yet it's a poor one. It tries to be a top-down action game yet the combat is unsatisfying. All of it together? The whole is not greater than the sum of it's parts, and none of the parts are good. It's a shame, they put a lot of effort into high quality graphics and effects but the gameplay is very lacking. You are better off getting a proper tower defense, factory, and shooter/action game separately and actually enjoying them.
To begin with, yes this does work on Win10. You have to adjust the settings for SE5 though. You start the game it will pop up a menu. Instead of hitting play go to settings. Change the video adapter, the default option will have symbols and stuff. Choose the option below that should have the name of your GPU on it. That will run the game in a window. Choose a resolution if you want. Save that, start the game, and it will run without the massive mouse lag. Some people may need to change a few more settings but this was all I needed to get it working. Yes it is windowed instead of fullscreen but it works! SE4 and SE5 are still the best 4x games on the market today. Everything else has too much fluff or makes major mistakes like focusing on heroes or inventing extra micromanagement. The design of these games allowed for easy modification with modular races and shipsets, techs etc. The gameplay has no chintzy mechanics, everything is straightforward yet the complexity is still there to keep you in your seat for hours. Ship building is fantastic considering when it was made. There are consequences to making the wrong choices, like focusing on politics or terraforming techs instead of better weapons and defense when in a hot war with a close neighbor. You can defend yourself with minefields effectively unless the AI starts putting minesweepers on every ship. Or go with grand fleet unless it gets spread thin from too many wars. Or lots of defense platforms on every planet unless the enemy has more resources and overwhelms your turtle strategy. There is always a counter. SE5 lets you research a tech as much as you want instead of just a few levels like SE4. In SE5 can have super-refined railguns that can compete with higher-tech lasers etc. but research cost goes up in time. SE4 some techs get overshadowed, SE5 progressive teching prevents some of that. I do think GOG or whoever is cashing the royalty checks from sales should fix the full-screen mouse lag
It looks really cool and has a cool premise, a Syndicate/Satellite Reign styled game with more focus on larger numbers of units and religion. Doesn't work out like that. The marketing and media around the game as well as the graphics in pictures are ok, all of it starts to fall out once you get into the game yourself. Commands (and the lack thereof) and many mechanics are simply frustrating. Very poorly done overall, with just a little more effort and better planning this game clearly could've been much better. That's what hurts the most and what this review about. I'm not talking about how bad the product is, I'm saddened by how great it could've been.
Bought this game not expecting too much, turns out it's much better than the mobile weed-topic tycoon games. Honestly bought it for my wife since she likes any game with this theme. Turns out I like it too. Don't listen to initial negative reviews about bugginess and lack of a patch. For starters I played ~15 hours without any issue with the 1.0 release version. It was also less than a week and the updates hit GOG. This is to be expected at this point, most games get Steam versions updated first then take at least a few days to filter through to GOG versions. UI can take some time to get used to. Not bad but not good. Lots of small stuff to do, some people bash the simplified chat system but to be honest if it was more complicated it would be wasting your time. Very well made, a few good comedic references, if anything it was funny growing crappy product in trashbags full of dirt so you can sell that smelly ditch-w33d to homeless vagrants. There is no consequence of picking skills either on the legal or illegal side of the skill-tree, just get whatever points you can for both because both sides unlock good skills. It's not a mindless clicker but if you want to watch TV while playing this casually in the background you could. In the end is this worth $20? Hrmm, I am set to cross that $1-per-hour of fun threshold that many AAA games can't reach. I'd say you could do a lot worse. You can spend more ordering pizza to feed a family once. Speaking for myself I'd say this is not a bad buy at full price and a good buy if you catch it on sale.
Title says it, I'm giving this 5 stars and I don't like bullethell games. I got this when it first hit early access on Steam, been through lots of changes including invisible pistons blocking critical areas of maps forcing restarts, rotary cannon being rebalanced (along with lots of other guns), the Rook suit losing it's starting shotgun since a double-shotgun with the infini-shield was a pretty potent starter, I seen it all. Tweaks, new suits, balancing, fixes. The dev listened to the community and was actively communicating with us during the development. About the game: You control a zero-g combat suit raiding derelict alien ships. Atrophied legs that look like they perform no function other than to protect your own legs kinda give a sense how this game goes, you fly around freely inside the alien ships. You are the equivalent of a space treasure hunter paid by a corporation to go through the massive alien fleet finding anything of value. The story begins to suck you in as you get clues as to why the ancient derelict alien fleet is the way it is, and why it's so hostile. AI that seems organic controlling the ships, various alien species that have been captured and turned into killer cyborgs, the fleet AI even adapted saw blade cyborgs to recycle other broken down ships. The story unfolds in a neat way, doing special objectives like not using explosives or HP packs on certain levels. Difficulty is fairly high, don't expect to do special objectives at first. You pay for ammo and weapons each time you go out, and can pick from various ships at each stage of your run that pay differently with differing difficulties. Some have better tech and weapon unlocks, others pay extra cash. I suggest you get a bit extra ammo and just try surviving through each wreck at first before trying to min-max your loadouts for efficiency. Lots of guns, each suit plays very different from each other like teleporting or shielding. Great game, great atmosphere, random levels. 5-stars.
You run around and kill people. The starter blaster is frustrating, pulling it out warns people in a radius instantly just by sound and it takes 3 seconds to charge. This means if a person is walking they can walk out of range or around a corner before you can fire. Dumb. You have to pay for weapons that fire like normal, pull the trigger it shoots. But the bigger ones cannot be taken through a security checkpoint, leaving you with the bad blaster. It is a little fun, I like the atmosphere, can get repetitive. It's really a roguelike on fixed maps. You kill people for money until you can afford to leave that area, then it's done. Small variations in gameplay are nice but not enough, you still just end up following a person through streets filled with random NPC's until you finally get lucky and have an opportunity to kill without reprisal. Sometimes it just takes too long for this to happen, other times you just run into the person in a back alley alone. This is a game you pick up for like half an hour or so at a time, maybe an hour. Occasionally NPC's blend in certain spots and you cannot see them properly, the pixel-art nature sometimes leads to NPC's looking like trash on the street. Recommend buying it on sale like I did. Not good, not bad, small pick up and play game. Change the movement setting, default is terrible and the alternative mode moves like Crimsonland.
