Recent reviews by LAJ-47FC9

Disclaimer: I like this game, quite a bit. I think it's fun. However, it's also held back by a number of baffling design choices, suboptimal netcode, and annoying bugs that mean I'm unable to recommend it in good conscience.

This game promises that it's a modernised Freelancer spiritual successor, with Lovecraftian elements. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, does it deliver. I'm going to be playing more of this one, for sure.

The Half-Life survival game (with bonus SCP elements) that you didn't know you wanted.

The game might look clunky at first, and it is, but that clunkiness is very deliberate. Each button click has weight to it, helps it feel grounded in some kind of reality, and makes it into a vision of what it really might be like to pilot an interplanetary spacecraft. Plus, it's fun to click buttons :D

Space Museum? Space Museum!

Mechanically, this is nothing new. Narratively, I can save the Baol in another universe. That alone is a big old positive.

A lot of people really don't like this one for some reason. I think it's fine, once you figure it out! The graph end missions are super cool, as some of them give you glimpses of things only previously hinted at (like what was going on in Getsu Fune during the Shutdown), or are just straight-up remakes of significant events in previous games (Mike-Zero fight ahoy!)

Plus, it adds some super cool ships in the sandbox. I want a fleet of Sapporos.

A really tall three-armed guy came at me with a sword and killed me, but then my little astronaut guy brought me back, and then the three-armed guy got really angry and stabbed me again.

Would get killed by a three-armed guy again.

Phew! Now that that fiasco's over, this is probably the most fun I've had in a video game in a while. Even in spite of the bugs and issues, the gameplay is just so tightly designed, the sound design so good, that I really don't care. I just wanna play more Helldivers.

For some strange reason, this game makes me think of Three-Body, hit novel series turned TV series (not the Netflix one, the good one¹). This is kind of Three-Body's ideological opposite: while Three-Body is a story of holding fast in the face of a hostile universe, DSP is about fulfilling humanity's greatest dream, englobing and harnessing the full power of the stars.

In that vein, my favourite thing about this game is that it actually has a point. So many factory games are about nothing more than expanding your factory's expansion capabilities, but this? This has a goal. That alone makes it actually playable for me. The sci-fi flavouring and epic scale of that goal is just icing on the cake by comparison.

¹ - Note to self: correct this statement if the Netflix series turns out good. Unlikely but possible.