Recent reviews by DeDGuY-

The game is almost good.

[Pros]
Art style, music, early game economy management, randomness of nearby island resources.
There are various interesting points that can make you want to start another game just to try out strategies or figure out how the game systems work.

[Cons]
Win conditions - imagine an RTS where you need to defend your starter building, and everyone has the ability to instantly teleport their army across the entire map to an enemy 'castle' to destroy it.

Unit control - clunky. after a few hours you will learn how to effectively move around your army. But, if you don't completely overwhelm the enemy immediately (or if your base is attacked), your units spend far too much time running around and not simply attacking something. This further restricts your strategy to simply becoming 'send everything past the enemy, directly to their castle' if your only goal is winning.

AI - cpu strategy simply involves sending a wave of flying units to scout or attack a building, then bolstering the attack with a teleported ground army if they think they have a chance to destroy you. This can be defended with just a few towers indefinitely. Increasing the difficulty setting only noticeably changes the first attack wave, coming sooner/stronger.
--ex: The first level of the DLC campaign has an objective 'survive for 90 days.' I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but I think the enemy sent 2-3 flying units a few times just to scout me, then I suddenly won without anything happening. All the work I had been doing to take over nearby islands from aggressive natives/beasts was pointless, since all I needed to do was build a few cheap towers to defend one specific side of my base.

Unit balancing - terrible. The unit armor system in this game is a flat damage reduction. The melee units in this game are given both the highest attack and highest armor values, making them effective vs everything AND take 1 damage per attack from weaker units.

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Final words: It's okay to play as a little RTS sandbox if you can get the game at a REALLY cheap price. Most of the campaign will only feel 'involved' because you are given a lot of arbitrary goals, like scouting specific parts of a large map in a specific order. After a few custom games of trying out different strategies, the game will feel empty, unbalanced, and unpolished... mostly because of how armies interact with one another and how easy it is to avoid all mechanics and strategy aside from directly destroying the enemy castle whenever you are tired of building/playing.

[Gameplay] Boring auto attack combos. Somehow removed nearly all ability to customize your character in any interesting way AND released with fewer classes than the original.

[Graphics] Same terrible anti-aliasing / depth of field blurry mess it was when it originally launched (for me, THIS is what leads to motion sickness, not motion blur. But I keep motion blur off anyway). There is no depth of field setting and a lot of shadows and textures don't render well without anti-aliasing.

Recent updates have improved the game quite a bit in both replayability and later levels not taking such a long time. The price point for what you get might still be a little high -- maybe check on pricing or sale history. Before the update I was on the verge of downvoting the game, but I'm glad to see improvements in the update.

I hated that, previously, most towers couldn't even hit the final challenge. I haven't tested all new specialized builds yet, but the possibility seems there at least. And a high DPS build can beat normal difficulty in only ~2-3 hours now (I believe it was around 4-5+ before due to simply waiting for the slow influx of invaders past day 40, which was quite boring in old patches).

Though I still think the main weapons seem VERY lackluster aside from splash damage (your towers handle huge waves while your main weapon can barely take out a few single units), it still seemed somewhat important for taking out high priority targets/tanks. I'm interested in coming back every few days in the near future to try out a new strategy and/or difficulty when I have a few hours to spare, including focusing on main weapons more to see if I'm wrong about that part.

Far too linear for the price. Game simply slides the difficulty up with your level (each level gives % more damage multiplier) so that you'll "one shot" everything in a lower World after a few levelups. Being slightly underleveled will cause you to take ~5-10x longer on a higher World, making it take extremely long / be pointless to attempt before grinding more exp. Then they have to limit the exp you can get per world (on repeat attempts) so that you don't just break this sliding scale from the getgo.

So you're stuck with only one World being relevant for progression (usually the one that takes under 30 minutes, repeat 2 or 3 times), with just a few choices in the skill tree on how you want to do 10-100x your base damage through skills and/or crits. repeat forever with no real strategy behind it.

Next thing they'll release is a 'gilded' rebirth system so you lose anything about your character that made it unique every 200 levels to go back to the linear, shallow grind... about as much content as just restarting a new character.