Recent reviews by Goob

It's a great game for being free. Obviously it being new means there's going to be small issues, mostly related to the schematic system not allowing you to backspace when you make a typo when naming them, and weird behaviors with nested groups, but other than that, it's a solid game.

Barely played it, but I can already tell it has a great foundation and a lot of potential. It is one of the most organic-feeling city builder games I've played, and actively encourages you to design outside of a grid-like pattern.

They claim to be releasing it out of early access soon, but there's no way they can finish all of their goals in this time frame considering it took them over a decade to get to this half-finished state. More like they're moving all the goal posts to the current state of the game and then calling it a success. Don't let this fool you.

Pal AI is like Skyrim companions getting stuck in doorways when you're trying to build, but other than that, it is an incredible game.

I'm running this with a 7950X and a 3080, but I've been stuck with an average of 70 fps at medium settings, and it's not a stable fps either, it varies between 50 at worst up to 110 at best.

Wait for a sale and/or wait a few months for them to admit and implement the optimizations that need to be done before buying.

Update:

The longer I play, the more problems I find.

For example, the ship editor is awful, I don't see how anyone thought that it was remotely ready:

You can't rotate ship parts at all meaning you need to use more materials to create attachment points for half the items available, which increases mass, which means you need more engines, more engines means you need a better reactor, better reactor means you need to level up ship building.

You spend hours leveling up all the while you are over encumbered, walking everywhere because you could not add a cargo module to the top of your ship because Bethesda decided you should not be able to rotate ship parts. The cycle repeats.


And the worst part is that you really could have benefited from a vehicle, but Bethesda says there are jetpacks so that isn't necessary.

The jetpack is actually a boost pack and all it does is give you a double jump for a split second, which you can't do because that first jump uses stamina, which you don't have while over encumbered.

Wasn't really able to run this that well when I only had a laptop, but decided to keep it until I got a better system. Now that I have a better system, it looks like ♥♥♥♥ and plays nothing like how I remembered it.

tldr: The game isn't even worth it 50% off. Might be worth it on a 75-80% off sale.

I saw the game on sale for 50% off, and decided to grab it because I remember being interested previously. However, I find it very hard to believe that this game is not in an early access state. In the beginning, after establishing my first city, and meeting a neighbor, I was able to make demands of said neighbor, and they'd literally give me whole cities/outposts for free without any negative consequences. On top of that, the trade and diplomacy features are so lacking that by the time you've played only a few hours into a game, you start to ask yourself not "what new feature am I going to discover", but rather "is this it?". And you'll never really know the answer to that question unless you keep playing because the UI design is so awful and un-intuitive, hiding entire menus until you "unlock" them, that you never know if you're missing out on something. For example, the game will refuse to let you open the tech tree or culture tree until a certain point in the game, so that first dozen turns when you're trying to figure out how to create your first city feels really empty as you wander around.

As I explore this game further, I find more and more game breaking bugs. For instance, I just made a new game on the biggest map size, with abundant resources with normal distribution, and my starting continent with 7 provinces had 2 resources. This game is a mess.

Edit: I also tried to get a refund with 4 hours playtime (not even enough to finish the tutorial game) and it was denied stating the max playtime is capped at 2 hours maximum. Usually I've been able to get refunds with under 6-10 hours on most games, but to have this being hardcapped to 2 hours on a 4x game is absurd.

I get that it is day 1, but they launched a very incomplete game. There's only 3 classes, no graphics settings, and no content other than cosmetics. The visuals are great, but gameplay-wise it plays like a mobile game. There also seems to be no factoring of ping in the matchmaker, so there's no guarantee that your game won't have networking issues. Also, from the look at the packs they are already selling, if they don't add more functional content other than cosmetics, I'm just going to assume this is a cash grab.

This is what got me started on my 100% bug diet

Update Dec 2020: Yeah, everything below still is the case, also have to add that the flight controls are so bad that they are bad even on the console version of this game.

I knew this game flopped on release, so decided to give it a few years and wait for a sale. Well I finally got it for $25 and can't even believe that it's not even worth this much. The game kills you off within the first minute playing on the easiest difficulty, so you can't even figure out any part of the game. I also looked at the keybindings, and there are 6 different menus within the keybinding screen full of keybinds that look almost the same, yet can't figure out because there's no time to figure them out when the game kills you within the first minute. There is also a cinematic thing when you start a new world that prevents you from skipping, moving your view, or moving your character, but at the same time still lets the environment deal damage to you, so you just have to sit there and watch yourself die while the camera pans from the sky to the ground for no apparent reason. Oh and the UI is extremely unintuitive, instead of having functions in the game tied to things you can keybind, you have to go through a "quick menu" which is not at all quick for simple things like changing from first person to third person that I only found on accident after my 4th death.