Recent reviews by VoidByte

This DLC was a lot more fun for me than the entire main game.
Sure, it’s only a single mission, but it really packed a punch. More thinking, less mindless minigame clicking. And for the first time, I could actually "feel" the story. It was great.

PGI simply doesn’t understand what makes mech games special and what fans actually enjoy. MW5 shows that very clearly once again. In essence, MW5 is just the offline version of MechWarrior Online - but heavily neutered. For example, you can’t choose which reactor (engine) to use, what armor to equip, or whether your mech has an AMS system.
Why? Nobody knows. Basically: just because.

Enemies don’t just exist in the world, they “spawn.” That means anything related to long-range combat - sniper weapons / long-range missiles; is basically pointless, since PGI decides when you can see an enemy and when you can’t. And to make it “more exciting,” they decided in their infinite wisdom that enemies should spawn practically in your lap. This means a brawler is always mandatory, especially since most mission triggers only activate when the player himself, not his AI teammates, walks into them.

The generic, non-story missions are always just quick runs across the map to blow something up, while the AI is so mind-numbingly dumb that it quickly kills any motivation. Because the AI - whether brawler or missile boat - only knows one tactic: Always rush straight into your lance. That instantly kills any immersion.
This is supposed to be a military simulation, where not only am I fighting for my life, but the enemy should also value theirs. Instead, two light mechs will happily charge straight into a lance of four 100-ton Mech´s - basically throwing their lives away.

Overall, there’s zero strategy, zero tactics. Just shoot, shoot, shoot. If there weren’t tonnage limits, there’d be no reason for anything other than Assault class mechs to exist. There are no drawbacks to running an Assault. Things like “scouting the area” or “let’s take the high ground and attack from there” or anything resembling military procedure simply don’t exist. Just run and blast, run and blast - always at brawler range. The only time you play long range is before the enemy manages to rush into your formation.
I’ve seen hobby projects by people who can’t even code properly with smarter AI than this. PGI really thought: “Eh, the idiots will buy anything. As long as it’s got mechs.” Why bother putting in effort?

The whole game feels like an “easy cash grab.” They already had a solid foundation with MechWarrior Online. All they did was strip out PvP and slap on a singleplayer mode - and did that terribly. The missions are brain-dead (run and blast), there’s no lore, no detailed descriptions of mechs, houses, the world, or anything else that could immerse players.
Instead, they cut costs and corners everywhere. The result is basically an arcade game you could have found in any 90s game hall. It neither satisfies the BattleTech community with depth, nor attracts newcomers with lore. It’s just: run and blast. Everything around that is meant to distract from it - but fails.

In short: a game stuffed with artificial restrictions, offering nothing but “run and blast” on tiny maps, with the dumbest AI I’ve seen in 30 years of gaming, zero immersion because the game actively works against it, and a home base that serves no purpose at all.

On top of that, you’ve got technical issues like third-rate voice acting, a German localization that’s dramatically bad, with many sentences that make no sense, no ability to look around your cockpit, no ability to eject from it and AI-Lancemates that only have one Job: Stay in your way or run straigt in your line of fire.
That just rounds the whole thing off.

Everything in this game has been carefully and deliberately crafted so that the average casual player, who only plays about 30 minutes a day, never experiences any frustration from anything that isn’t just running and blastig.

Do you like Trailmakers, Main Assembly, and Mars First Logistics? Then this game is the logical next step in that series. For me, it’s exactly what I was really excited about.

How long it takes depends on how good you are.
I took about 2 hours and for this price of 3€, it was absolutely fine.
The game is fun and the dev on my watchlist.

Yeah well... was fun. Good game.

Well, I bought the game on sale for 10€. For that price, it's really good. Probably one of the best 10€ games you can get. But if someone pays more... oh boy.

The game is ANNOYING. I mean it exactly as I say it. The story mode is a "Free Play" with a tutorial upfront. I eventually started clicking away the dialogues because the German translation is really poor and, as a stylistic choice (fitting the setting), it's interspersed with some Spanish talk. Since I don't speak Spanish, it's just incomprehensible gibberish to me (which is not translated into English or German, so you don't know what was said). This wouldn't be a problem if the texts weren't so endlessly elaborate. Every text bubble, every dialogue, everything in the game is like a small book (like this review :P).

In essence, it doesn't matter because every quest in the game boils down to "bring X goods to location Y." It gets tedious after 5 minutes. The difficulty level is, de facto, non-existent. The game practically bombards you with money, and it never stops. After 60 minutes, all my underground bunkers, villas, airports, and ship harbors are bursting with money, so I went through phases of just demolishing all buildings and letting the game run in the background at full speed to launder black money into legal money. The game has absolutely zero balancing.

Annoying point number 1: The enemy AI is just there to annoy you. The cops are just there to annoy you, always in pairs. That means if you mess with a hostile gang, you can bet money that in the background, the cops will disable your operations, even if you have 0 attention. And if, like me, you have no buildings left because you're waiting for black money, then it becomes apparent how poorly scripted it is. Because the cops still come even when you're practically doing nothing. If they don't have production facilities to raid, they'll take something else that belongs to you. Whether it makes sense or not doesn't matter. The main thing is they always come when you have trouble with a hostile gang.

Annoying point number 2: When you demolish buildings, a piece of road always remains. You then have to painstakingly demolish it separately. With 200 buildings, you have 200 small pieces of road hanging at the entrance road. Have fun!

Annoying point number 3: The granularity of this game is so annoying. You build a new warehouse, and it automatically connects to everything within reach. You then have to manually disable it in every supplier. If, like me, you build super compact, the list can be 60 points long. And this "generate extra work" aspect really permeates every aspect of the game. Whether it's a quest where you have to manually bring counted goods somewhere or buy TVs and game consoles manually in a bar menu, of which you can only buy very few at a time because... well, there's no reason except deliberately making it annoying.

Annoying point number 4: As mentioned in point one, the AI is only there to annoy you. In plain language, it means they neither build production buildings nor do anything else. Enemy gangs occasionally send a troop by, that's it. And you don't even have to react because they just go bang bang a bit and then leave again. Just like that. But what's even more annoying is that the cops only annoy the player. As mentioned, they always come when dealing with gangs and occasionally without any understandable reason. But only to the player. The enemy AI never has to deal with the cops. Coupled with the fact that they always come together with the enemy, it creates the impression that there is no difference between gangster and police.

In terms of content, the game only consists of putting farms side by side. You then choose which drug to produce there and may need another one to four buildings to refine the drug. All of this is then provided with the two always identical logistics buildings (logistics office and warehouse), and that's it. No matter which drug you produce, the process is always the same. But why even change the drug? There's no reason. Regardless of the drug you choose, the profit margins are so absurdly large that there's no reason to optimize anything. After a few minutes of playing, you have so much money that you have to start burying it (literally), or the buildings will overflow.

Have you noticed that many people write something like "I only sold avocados" or "I became the vegetable cartel"? It sounds humorous but is simply a valid game strategy to avoid the mountain of annoying details in the game. You just produce fruit and sell it. Money is not an issue in the game anyway, but in the case of vegetables, you don't have to wash them beforehand. And since salaries or ongoing costs are practically imperceptible, it's just the much better way to play the game.

Giving a review about this game is not easy. Now that I have a few hours of gameplay, I have to give one. I want to start by mentioning that the game is advertised as a 'simulator.' Like in most games, that is just a buzzword... nothing is actually being simulated here. You cannot program mechanics, manipulate components, or interact with the parts in any meaningful way. Wheels don't even require an axle to be steered. Not even any form of mechanical joint is needed. Its Magic.

For those who were hoping for something like 'Trailmakers' set on Mars... well, you'll spend 90% of your time just driving from point A to point B. It seems like the developer didn't consider vehicle building as a sufficient concept. Someone put in a lot of effort to make the planetary surface of Mars as inaccessible as possible. As a result, you hardly invest any time in building the vehicle or loading cargo.
Most of the time, you'll find yourself stuck in the desert, bouncing around like a bouncing ball at the slightest sand dune (because you can't adjust the engine power (and thus the speed) or tire pressure since it's not a simulation). And that's what makes it not a build & use game, but rather a truly enduring test of your dexterity.
In my case, it's also a test of patience. It's not that great to drive 5 miles to the next job, especially when you know that the developer has invested a lot of time and effort in turning those 5 miles into an impossible obstacle course. And even IF you get close, you realize that you have to activate a radio mast beforehand because... well... because no one was prepared for your arrival. You simply popped into the world, and your presence wasn't preplanned. That's just how it is with Mars travels. And activating a radio tower... that's another 2 miles of obstacle course you have to drive separately. Once you reach your destination, you quickly build a vehicle and transport the cargo. That constitutes the smallest part of the game.


The control scheme is a challenge of its own kind. As mentioned before, you cannot program anything yourself, neither with code nor with the genre-typical visual programming. But what really bothers me is that I cannot disable this channel system, where I have to iterate through the joints I want to use every time. Like almost every modern game, it's purely optimized for game controllers and doesn't even give me the option to customize it for PC. My keyboard has 102 usable keys... but they simply refuse to grant me that option.


All in all, it must be said that the game is still in Early Access. Maybe the terrain will become more drivable. Perhaps there will be support for PC peripherals. Maybe we'll eventually get to drive with tires that don't have 29 psi. And maybe we'll at least have a visual code editor if we don't get a direct interface.

But it won't become a simulation. You don't have to lay cables, and everything from engines to joints to hydraulics is predefined. It's more like LEGO Technic than "Main Assembly." However, for the price of €20, you can't complain. For that price, the game is great, and you should definitely give it a go!

I used to love this game. Zombies would build towers in which they reproduced themselves. You had to approach it militarily and tactically and reclaim every inch of the map by any means necessary. The atmosphere was dense, and the constant threat was ubiquitous.Unfortunately, a game like this also attracts all the RTS fans who used to celebrate small orgasms in games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, and Command and Conquer. And military gameplay is not fast enough for them. Apparently, the developer gives in to the pressure. So, what was once a tactical game is now... well... this. Everything has to go fast now. It's best to memorize all the hotkeys before you even start the game. Zombies run superhumanly fast, and you've barely built the first buildings before nearly invincible giant creatures come and destroy everything. From now on, the game no longer appeals to WarGame fans but only to kids who love to frantically press buttons and to RTS fans from the 90s, who will all end up with the upcoming "Tempest Rising" anyway. And then Cepheus Protocol will only be a frantic kiddy game.It's a shame; it used to be incredibly exciting and atmospheric.

This is one if these puzzle games that getting more and more complex just for the sake of puzzling. That means you are not in front of a situation you need to solve with the full toolset. You never ask yourself:
"Do I use this? Or that? Maybe it's more efficient if I..." ..
because there is only one way to solve the puzzle. The whole game flow is also disturbed by extremely annoying babbeling of some post-apocalyptic nonsense that has litteraly NOTHING to do with the game just to set up Keywords for selling the game on the cost of playability. The game would be better off without the nonsense story behind it.

I would consider this game as Scam.
It is NOT an Simulation. If you are 5 Years old and you love to destroy things after you build it, then this game is exactly made for you.

Every Human Building is exact the same, no cultural differences between the behavior or the buildings.

The maximum world-size is really tiny. In a reality Scale, this is not even a World in the size of a town.

Humans don't need much for reproducing. Not even humans. If you want to populate your entire world with People, just place one human. He will produce babies out of thin air.

Climate has no effect on anything. Its -20°C or +50°C, noone cares. Not Animals, not Humans, not Nature. Its just for "painting" purposes.

If the whole world is a Desert and you plunge a river through, that changes nothing. While in reality, water is life, in this game, nothing cares about anything. Noone is attracted to it, not humans, not animals. Even the desert doesnt change.

The Humans dont even try to build in a realistic manner. The "town-layout" is as fancy as an excel Table. Sometimes farmers place crops on houses, which is the only thing that breaks the rasterized layout.

Humans just spread over the map. Even if there is no food, no land to claim.. for absolutely no reason they just populate every corner of the map. Or at least they try. Having a ship come by and place 30 Humans on a rock, where they die starving? Yeah, nothing rare.

This game makes no difference between Salt water and Drinking Water. ..

Regardless if in deep Ice or in burning hot steppe, people start to create crop field and sow it, as if it is furtile ground.

Gold and Food are no motivations to gather or fight around a certain location. Its just "there" and will be conquered by the before mentioned "we seddle just everywhere"-Mechanic.


The sher amount of "Haha Yolo! Watch how funny this destruction is!"-Tools are a clear sign that this is not a simulation. And was never planned to be one. Sadly, I played more then 2 hours so the scam was working and I cant refund it.
But be aware. This game is full of nonsens, like Exploding santa clause, comet-size bowling balls, gods that throw atom bombs, but a single sheep could reach an age of 30.000 Years because something that simple was not important enough to programm it. This "game" IS just a rip of.