Recent reviews by Mr. Gherkin

Gameplay: more in-depth than Jump Space, though lacking its on-foot combat (i think).

Like a way more polished Pulsar: Lost Colony, though with a bit less depth to the world and content than that.

The movement through space is submarine-like: there's only one plane of rotation, but you can at least move vertically up and down in it.

Theming/story: what if the Korvax from No Man's Sky decided to dabble in a bit of space privateering? With a bit of Helldivers-style tongue-in-cheek fashtablishment thrown in.

There's a good amount of character progression and ship upgrades that keep me interested.

It feels a lot more satisfyingly tactile and manual than Jump Space, which keeps things relatively high-level. Pick up the missile, load it into the payload launcher, fire it. Reminds me a little of Carrier Command, though that has way more going on in terms of drones and screens to control on the bridge.

is good!

You've got to hand it to them at the end of the day, haven't you?

They turned one of the most memorably ♥♥♥♥♥♥ releases of the 2010s (this was before ♥♥♥♥♥♥ releases became normal for AAA games in the 2020s) into 10 years of graft, actually creating the game they would have created anyway, had Sony execs not pushed them out the door several years too early.

Fair play to Hello Games for ignoring the haters of yesterdecade, keeping their heads down and producing a truly stellar (ha) game!

Not worth £38 - maybe worth £15.

Soon-to-be abandonware most likely. Why else would you claim it's done, when after 11 years it's clearly not?

They deleted my play-style a few updates ago, so it's no longer the assymetric play experience for varying skill levels that I came for - it's now Raid Or Die.

It's still a janky, buggy mess as it alway has been. But now it's an *old*, janky buggy mess. And the 'finished' sticker they just slappd on it implies they're giving up!

The development has been going round in circles for years redoing already-built stuff, with no tangible progress towards 'done'. Just asset drops and redos.
They never finished building what they promised in their original kickstarter 11 years ago, and they've been changing their minds on the design for so long that they've had to go back and modernise older parts of the game.

And the whole time, they've misused the Early Access program as a get-out-of-jail-free card for being bad at games dev and project management.

If you enjoy this game as-is, that's good. But don't expect anything from the devs -- including keeping their roadmap promises, or not replacing the core game loop.

An interesting sidenote in the history of the RTS genre; a very early 3D entry, with a heavy emphasis on research, and unit design. I've played it since 2001, but not on Steam.

wobble wobble DRAGON wobble wobble YAS PIRATE QUEEN wobble

TLDR too much moneygrabbing DLC, not enough attention to detail. Play Civ 5 instead, it's better and cheaper.


civ5 has, but is DLC in civ6:
golden ages
circumnavigating the globe
world congress
diplomatic victory
Alexander The Great
science-focused civs

civ5 has, civ6 doesn't have:
enough historical context in the loading screen (don't believe me? read it!)
full workers (that don't expire)
complete domination (fully wipe out a player to defeat them)
One-City Challenge mode
Venice
resource icons
editing your civ name
text descriptions of what everything does in the game
building your civ tall instead of wide
gift military units


civ 6 has, civ5 doesn't have
districts
a culture tree equal to the tech tree
districts
the base game split into millions of overpriced DLCs

Disney CGI art style
clash of clans
dumbed down
lack of attention to detail



I went back to play civ5 to do a more rigorous comparison.

amenities are happiness.
But a lack of happiness won't cause rebellion?
Oh wait they've put that core mechanic into a DLC
food is stilll required for growth,
but Housing caps your max size throughout the tech tree,
so there's less reason to expend energy building a good city.

most city buildings are locked behind districts,
which override, replace and occupy space for improvements
(although tile improvements are still technically in the game,
all your work improving tiles early-game will be negated when you need those best tiles for districts).

Workers (now inexplicably called builders) now only last for 3 uses.

Religion is actually a little better; it's basically a parallel battle system that mostly ignores the rest of the game
so you can fight other civs without bothering with diplomacy.

Spies are now built units on the map, so you have to worry about them more - the game doesn;t tell you when you need them

Culture is now sometimes called civics, sometimes called Policy, and sometimes called culture.

You gain culture to research civics which unlock policies. SiMpLe RiGhT?

It's represented as a parallel tech tree to the real tech tree (whoops I mean the Science tech tree),
which is... a choice. Neither better nor worse imho.

The crippled workers can no longer build roads in their diminished form,
so traders now do it automatically while building trade routes.
Enjoy having to choose between passively spreading your religion to other civs,
and being able to move around your own.


Without being able to fire on them with cities until you research AND build (AND regularly upgrade!) walls,
barbarians are a much more significant threat in the early game - and with your city buildings spread out across more tiles,
they can pillage way more of your work

the historicity of the previous games has been thrown out the window,
in favour of a cutesy, disney-pixar cartoon approach to depicting real human beings of the past.

If you enjoy being drained of wealth and being played by the skinner box known as Clash of Clans, you'll feel right at home here.
Plenty of opportunities to pay $10-$50 for a piece of what was in the base game in previous releases.

what the game says about promises in civ6 doesn't match reality.