Recent reviews by Cryptomancer

Never ending !!FUN!! colony builder. You're not going to make a purchase decision based on this review. You're going to watch other people play it, read about it, dive into the wiki, and decide for yourself.

Good game, can get 100-200 hours of gameplay out of it without visiting deep desert or ever encountering PvP.

Recommend this? Absolutely not. The only reason to use this is because you know what you're doing.

This game is fantastic for several types of gameplay I like: mining resources, digging holes, crafting things, building bases. It's still good for flying in space and exploration, but maybe not quite as good as dedicated space games that don't have crafting and base-building. Still, an overall fantastic way to lose track of time!

It definitely scratches the itch for open-world neo-futurist setting, with a large variety of gear and talent tree builds to try. Are there still some glitches? Of course, but nothing game-breaking so far (crosses fingers and knocks on wood), just some wobbly vehicles and unnatural animations. So, amusing glitches that haven't gotten in the way of satisfying gameplay.

I love base builders, I love logistics puzzles, this is right up my alley!
I'm looking forward to multiplayer, and even *randomizer* mods, too!
Yes I'm only 20-ish hours in when writing this, but I fully expect this game to be one of them that gets 500+ or 1000+ hours from me.
Update: Took me 450 hours to finish my first Space Age run.

I'm back to playing this but past reviews have been up and down.

There is a wide gulf between "frustrating" and "challenging" and Bungie thinks it's a fine line.
The only thing this game does well is the shooty mechanics and the art.
There is no "new player" acclimation or tutorials. It was so bad, they took it out of the game entirely.
Everything else comes down to a grind. Plenty of activities, and step by step progress to some nebulous goal, but it's just a treadmill with some cutscenes and groan-worthy writing- and all that ends after 10 hours.

Neither VR nor HOTAS work "out of the box". It was a pain to get VR to work- turns out you have to make sure that Steam VR is NOT running. And then, even once I got VR working, it kills the sound. That's right, VR but no audio.

And you can't even rebind controls until you start the prologue mission. Even then, my HOTAS wasn't even listed. No, I had to finish the two prologue missions with a controller before I got into a proper control-configuration-rebind menu!

HOTAS didn't work either, I had to go and try and rebind every control, even for menus or functions that I've never seen yet (I'm just trying to START the game!). And then, it's labelling all the buttons as 1 through 32, rather than Trigger, A, B, POV as these controls are shown on the device itself. Other games display the native control iconography just fine. But no, SW:Squadrons shows unfamiliar numbers on the UI and you're left guessing what button or control to hit.

The things that would make this a stand-out title and not just another console-port license are VR and HOTAS and it is terrible at them.

Fantastic MetroidVania