Recent reviews by Kirblam

I remember looking at videos of this game, purely gameplay and not looking at the story, and couldn't imagine I would ever enjoy it to the extent I have. I purchased it on a whim and have been pleasantly surprised at every turn with the gameplay. The story is quite extravagant and enjoyable. I've found myself looking forward to seeing what happens next.

As much fun as I admit to having in this game, I have similar issues as many others seem to have as well. There's an insane amount of clicking in regards to preparation for each duty/mission. The game is literally designed to be overwhelming, which works in some ways because at the end of a mission it can be quite relieving and satisfying to know you did a good job, but it can also just feed into more irritation in my opinion. Tedium for the sake of tedium essentially. You worked as hard as you can to finish that grueling mission and get that wonderful 400K paycheck meaning you can finally get that extra ambulance, boat, squad car, firetruck or whatever only for it to not be enough for the next mission and you find yourself grasping at straws just to scrape by. Then you find yourself continuing the annoying cycle of climbing a ladder made of thorns by getting not enough money for what you need, and barely making it through the next mission. Rinse and repeat, to me it felt that was the gist of the game.

The worst part of the progression to me is that you get promoted as a dispatcher, which is cool and all I like getting a bigger map and new toys, and because of your promotion you get to create your own team and hire more dispatchers to help lessen the load, or so they claim. Except they literally do nothing to help you out. As mentioned by a dev, Earl Grey, they're only designed to help out with "lone incidents that you have forgot about every 10 or 15 seconds." Although if you're currently micromanaging all of the other 25+ simultaneous pop-ups, they don't have any units to use to take care of those "forgotten" incidents. You're better off just never investing a dime in dispatchers and hoarding your scraps of money to save for another unit. There are also some facilities you can get in the game like drones and speed cameras, these seemed like an additional money sink that just provided no benefit for me. CCTV cameras at least seemed to do something in regards to increasing the amount of incidents I detected meaning more money down the line. Field stations are life savers since the placements of hospitals, fire stations and police stations are just terribly distributed on the maps.

A pretty common issue I ran into was not being able to select the right unit from a stack of units on an incident. Sometimes you need a fireman, medic, and a policeman all for one incident, and maybe they don't all finish at the same time, so you take whoever is done first and you move them to the newest incident to keep the ball rolling, except you accidentally grabbed the medic who still needs to patch everyone up. There's no simple and easy way to grab a unit out of a stack, or to easily cancel orders if you moved a group of units to one area, seems like a bad design choice to me. Final note that I want to touch on is that some of the devs are pretty far from kind or understanding it seems, such as instead of taking some criticism or complaints some reviewers had, they instead would brush it off by saying the player is obviously just not experienced enough, or should just use cheats to get what they desire. Kinda takes away from the fun of it if you have to cheat just to enjoy it I'd say. Not sure if they've changed recently but plenty of reviews back in 2021 show some of the devs being a bit harsh or even outright rude to reviewers just because of their grievances with some bad design choices in the game. If the devs ever implemented some more QOL features, I may consider coming back and reviewing my recommendation, but as it stands with my experience, I wouldn't suggest this game for anyone, especially not for 24.99. If you do want it, get it on sale.

Foolish ambitions to beat this game still haven't been put to rest.

Unforgiving pain.

Pre 2.2 it was a really fun game. Spent hours and hours playing through it with friends, staying up late and enjoying how simple and challenging the game could be. The game was simple and clean but with obvious room to grow. Post 2.2 the game got over complicated, for me at least, and some of the new resources I actually liked, but the new management for planets was not at all something that I enjoyed, it confused me and was incredibly boring. With how the game is now, I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Before 2.2, I'd say go for it and play it to your hearts content. Not anymore though.

Still bad, used to be good. Big sad, game has big gay. The neglect is pretty cool too.

Still revisit every now and again, doesn't have the charm it used to. Mods make it fun at least.

Even in 2025 I think it's a shell of what it used to be, also just money grubby cash grab DLCs. idk