Recent reviews by Sinaed

Coming from a person who has at least an operating knowledge of nuclear reactors, this reactor is twitchy and like a wild stallion, unable to be tamed. Sure, you can start it up, but mysteriously the control rods will always overheat, and the steam generators will always mysteriously run dry. Also, coolant vanishes out of the entire system for some reason???

Ignoring the inability to actually control the reactor, the game's performance is terrible to say the least. Sure, FPS might be high, but the game hitches and stutters every few seconds which is really inconvenient when you're trying to balance the pressurizer heaters and suddenly your view teleports to staring at the AI assistant while your mouse has apparently jacked the whole system up.

To say I'm disappointed in the game is an understatement. It could have been great, but the quality levels are pre-beta at best. To summarize - the core gameplay loop (controlling the reactor) is so twitchy that either you're SCRAMming every five minutes because the control rods got stupid hot for no reason, you're SCRAMming because the coolant is leaking into some mysterious vanishing pocket dimension, or you're trying to figure out what your mouse messed up the controls while your neck was broken by a mysterious force to look somewhere else.

Basically Soviet Bioshock. If you liked Bioshock, you'll love this.

The most innovative shooter i've played in years.

As of 2021 the multiplayer functionality of this game is 100% broken. No lobbies, public or private, are functional as they all continually 'time out'. My money is wasted since I bought this ages ago, but thankfully my partner can refund it.

Avoid this abandoned game. Devs are apathetic and are too busy shilling their new game to even glance at this one.

English translation is an absolute mess. "You can [x]", with obvious machine translation abound. It doesn't really interfere with understanding except in a few situations, but it's jarring and just smells of a rushed product that will be abandoned soon. Please hire an actual translator, don't just run things through Google Translate.

You get absolutely 0 freedom in where you establish your colony. You can only 'randomize' your seed, which puts you in one of four locations, with different maps but identical climates. Supposedly 'more will be developed', but we'll see. It's in the 'roadmap', but given the vaguely generic and suspicious quality it might just be abandoned.

But the game is fun, and it is enjoyable to start building a large city. It is somewhat Banished-like, but less hardcore and ultrarealistic. Kind of like a middle ground between Banished and Simcity in realism.

Aside from that, this needs a neutral review. I'll leave it on negative for now since as it is with the translation errors, lack of freedom in establishing your settlement's location, and seeming lack of communication with the Early Access users (judging from the lack of responses to reviews) it seems ripe for a product that will be abandoned. Should this turn out to be not the case and these issues are resolved, I'll flip this to positive.

Yet another game that needs a neutral review...

It has promise, but it seems like a lot of work is going to be needed to give this game legs. There's a few major problems but a staggering amount of little nitpicks that are irritating enough to stack up into a frustrating time.

• You are punished for seeing what you're doing - your electric bills go up the more you use lights...which is what you need to see what you're working on...so essentially, you're paying to see. I get the concept, but gameplay-wise this is just a puzzling decision.
  
• Disassembly consists of, essentially, clicking on buttons and watching bars go up, while getting screeched at by a large error message if you try to speed anything up. Yes, for the five hundredth time, I'm aware that I can't unscrew two things at once...but when it takes two seconds to finally wrench a screw free i'm going to want to queue up some actions. Considering this is the main gameplay loop, it becomes old quickly.
  
• Progression is so...very...slow...you wander around trying to find electronics people apparently (?) just yeet onto the street and forget about. (And keys. So many keys.) Then you take these back to your house and slowly disassemble them for hardly any profit once you factor in time and how much you're charged for seeing what you're doing.
  
• You're punished financially for actually doing what you're meant to be doing. I understand that waste needs to be taken care of, but when it adds up to taking away almost half of your profit that is a little ridiculous.
  
• Four full pages of disclaimers and CYA-style language in total - two when you start, and then the same two when you end. This is an absolute nitpick but it was just the cherry on top. Why?! Just...why?! It's totally overkill and I wonder what the mindset is that encourages this. Why do i need to be warned about common sense stuff going in AND out, and be regaled by ethics statements going in AND out? It's just...funky is all.

In the end, this game needs a neutral vote. Or a wait-and-see vote. It could be really cool if the gameplay loop is made a bit more fun and/or rewarding, and there needs to be a lot more content before it can be truly recommended.

TL:DR: A typical eurojank simulator that has the potential to be really fun if the developers sink some work into it. As of right now, it's a no-vote simply because of the amount of performance issues.

It's a very typical eurojank game, with animations that look like they were made by an alien that's never actually SEEN a human move but has seen pictures of them. Voice acting is stilted and awkward, and honestly just this side of creepy. Faces are deep in the uncanny valley, with no expressions. Units and information are hard-locked to European standards, with no alternatives.

However, the game is actually pretty fun, and weirdly meditative. I enjoy going around and fixing peoples' houses, and getting some top-grade lumber to make nice stuff. The only problem that seriously interferes with play of the game is how incredibly BAD the performance is. I'm lucky to get 25 fps, with dips down to 10 or even 5 for seemingly unknowable reasons. Given the amount of moving around you have to do, this is a total game-breaker. A LOT of performance work needs to be done before this can become positive.

Well worth keeping an eye on, though.

A very good Factorio-like with a satisfying gameplay loop and some high-tech toys to play with. My only problem is that the translation and Engrish is so bad it's actively misleading at times, not to mention focus-breaking. If this will get fixed or not, I'd still suggest it if you liked Factorio but found it too 'in the weeds' for you.

This is probably the fifth product I feel needs a 'maybe' tag. And there's a couple reasons for this.

1.) Really bad translation: I mean, come on. "Improved sanning range". "Your base a ♥♥♥♥." There's many others (uncountable, really) and they'll probably be fixed, but it's immersion-shattering to see such middle-school errors repeated over and over and over.
2.) Bugs, and thousands of them: I know the game's early access, which is why it gets a pass, but this game is buggier than Shadow of Chernobyl on release day. Just this play session I had a soldier moaning "Hey...Hey..." throughout the entirety of important plot discussion. The framerate ping-pongs between 5 and 120, and the sound is...well, hit and miss on if it actually works or not.

But...I still really like it. It feels like the old STALKER games, brought forward and with a new story. I enjoy the base building, as bare-bones as it is, and I enjoy scrounging through old Soviet buildings for the next few electronic (sorry, 'electronical') parts I need for another machine. It does feel a bit twitchy monitoring every bar lest your followers get really angry that you built a lathe instead of the sixth color TV set, but I suppose that's the way it is.

So yes. Recommended if you liked the old STALKER games, not recommended if you're looking for a game that's stable and makes any sense.

Wonderful game, full of great humor and jokes. Laughed out loud on several occasions...when the game wasn't crashing at least once a route. Still. Worth pushing through the awful stability.