Recent reviews by LucyTheBrazen

A really sweet and cozy game, I definetly want a longer version of it

Finally got around to actually playing it and I'm in love.

Most of the things about it have been said, but it really is immersive and atmospheric. I could not put it down while I was playing it.

I really hope the second Systrem Shock gets a similar treatment. This is the best remake I personally have ever played.

Over the past 50h I've been really enjoying my time with the game. It deffo has a lot of "weirdness" to it, given the setting that is not surprising.

The gameplay is very close to what you'd expect from a CRPG. Personally I absolutely love it. It avoids having overly obscure and opague systems, while still having quite a lot of mechanical and story telling depth.

One thing I kinda disliked is the fact that the character you play doesn't really have an ark/relationship with the companions that goes deeper than an affinity slider and some speech checks. Sure, there are missions for your companions, but you can't really have a lot of conversations with them, which I found a bit limiting.

But again, I'm spoiled by BG3 since it came into early access. Still, I'd 100% recommend this game to anyone who likes CRPGs

I've been playing this game since before release, and I have to say, it has come very far. It really captures CRPGs of old (apart from being round based, back then they thought real time with pause was superior??????), including locking you out of content if your specific build/party composition doesn't allow for certain paths, and combat being actually difficult, if you aren't properly prepared/build for it.

Now to some this might be annoying or whatever. But I do think it raises the replay value a lot.

All in all, if you've enjoye late 1990s/early 2000s CRPGs, you'll feel right at home! (minus all the yank and crappy UI)

Okay, this is gonna be difficult.

I do like the game a lot. The fact that I played about 60h in just a week is proof for that. The pull of "just one more turn" is too difficult for me to escape.

However the game is a mess, which is fair, given that it still is in early access. The tech tree is very extensive, but half of the technologies are outright useless, you have way too manypropulsion systems, that aren't doing anything fundamentally different than the next one. I've found that having the ion drive for early game exploration, the (advanced) cavity drive as a early-midgame workhorse, and then the orion drive for midgame serious ships being all you need. Afterwards the propulsion systems actually get interesting and you have meaningful choices (IMHO). Of course there are alternatives to all of them, however the way my first (as of yet incomplete) playthrough went, they showed up way too late to be of any use, or have disproportional requirements as standalone drives. I'm not implying that getting the tech that unlocks those drives are dead ends, many of them are required for very useful tech later on, but by themselves they are pretty underwhelming.

In general, the tech tree is too big. Maybe not too big, but too untransparent, because it isn't always obvious which technologies are actually worth rushing, which you can generally skip and so on. Obviously you can/should study the research tree, and plan things out. But for a first playthrough you don't know which technologies actually matter a lot, some sound better on paper and end up being underwhelming, and vice versa. I'm all for the right research at the right time being a potential game changer, however this shouldn't be something you only really are able to know on your second playthrough. You should be able to figure it out "blind", or at least get some good hints.

The AI has such a hard doing anything useful and advance their goals (well, except the servants). By the 2040 I had about as much mission control as all the other factions (apart from the servants) combined, and was the only one (again, apart from the servants) with triple digits MC. Generally the AI has such a hard time not getting completely outpaced by the player, and the invading forces.

I like most of the concepts, like going out, colonising the solar system, setting up mining outposts on resource rich asteroids, fueling my economy. However I feel like, even on decent asteroids your mining output feels very anaemic. A fully built tier 3 mining outpost barely covers the resource expenses of filling in the rest of the colony with shiny tier 3 buildings. Maybe that is intended design, maybe I'm supposed to at best keep a handfull of fully built up tier 3 colonies/stations around, and make the rest just dumb mining colonies with the bare essentials.

The tutorial isn't great at teaching you what actually matters either, which given the sheer scope of the game is not surprising. The hints, while often useful on a very basic level usually don't teach you the specifics you want to know. Usually it just tells you where the buttons for certain actions are (which, thanks, I can read an UI), but doesn't really explain any specifics. Especially the shortcuts you need to adjust a ships trajectory/heading during space combat is kinda unintuitive. There are lots of great players out there who put their gameplay on YouTube, who can pull off crazy manoeuvres, and who have mastered the system, however for a new player (or at least for me) it is very hard to pull off most useful manoeuvres. Which isn't helped by the fact that in the early game your available drives aren't really combat worthy due to terrible acceleration.

Another big gripe I have with the game are armies. You get a pretty hefty investment point malus, if troops aren't in their home region. Which I think is implemented to balance out the effectiveness of just taking over a region/nation via ground invasion. However in combination with slow troop movement, especially early-midgame makes that yet another chore you need to consider when moving/using your armies.

But before this turns into the ramblings of a mad woman I'll end my review by saying: Playing this game often feels like a chore. However I cannot in good conscience give this game a negative review, because these are just balancing issues in a game that isn't even finished yet, and overall only sour the overall great great experience slightly.

I don't know what the best way to contact the developer is so here we go:

Currently there seems to be a bug with the linux version. It is stuck on the start screen, fills up your entire RAM and swap, and that's about all that happens.

It works fine with Proton Experimental (on the 2. of November 2021), and the game is amazing, so thumbs up

As someone who has absolutely no clue on how to use Blender and the likes, this tool is amazing.

It is really intuitive to use, and most of the features work as you'd expect, just making actual through holes through objects is something that still evades me...

There is a great game hidden inside Cube World. The progress since the beta a few years back is great, but it also made some steps back...

I could not believe it myself, but EA actually managed to release a decent Star Wars game.

It is a Souls-like, reminds me a lot of the Metroid Prime Series with character advancements unlocking new parts of the map, Tomb Raider with its climbing and acrobatics.

Sometimes the game feels like it lacks a bit of polish, because of some slight bugs. But so far nothing gamebreaking. And considering I have 100% on the second highest difficulty I don't believe there is anything gamebreaking in there

Welp, it has been a long time since I promised to update my review, but never gotten around to it.

I've played my fair share of game dev sims, and this is by far the most comprehesive one I've played so far. I've recently gotten back into it, and it has made amazing progress. There are some mechanics that are a bit more obtuse than they should be.

For example it would be nice to be able to sign up for conventions from the E-Mail informing you about them, it took me longer than I'm willing to admit to find out where to actually do that.

The system around Launcher/Online functionality for your games/platforms is a bit unituitive, and might need some time to get used to.

It also would be nice to start a marketing campaign for a game from the information tab on the right side of the screen. But all those things are just QoL things.

I'd like more hairstyles and colours for the character creation, but that also is just a mild preference.

The game itself, as I've said before, probably is the definitive game dev sim I've played so far. Your games actually impact the market, you can and do shift the marketshare of platforms, simply by releasing a couple of banger games for them, create your own systems basically from the get go and are even able to set a licensing model for your custom game engines!

All in all the game has plenty of systems that make sense, interact with each other, and give you the feeling of actually enabling different playstyles/strategies, instead of just being in the game just for the sake of it.