Recent reviews by NooK

This game had potential, but then it tied it's VOIP to discord, which f**ckin EVERYONE thinks was a TERRIBLE IDEA. And just ruined the only good portion of potential this game had.

This game had amazing Roleplay, but they all ended up leaving for the same reason. Chat RP sucks in this game, we we're waiting on Proximity VOIP, but they tied it in with discord completely destroying the chance to have good dynamic roleplay outside of your party turning this into a beautiful yet just... Disastrous MMO.

I'm going to be fair after learning there is a 6 week wipe of progress timer, globally. (Effecting those starting even like 3 days prior to the wipe) I just lost interest. Progressing this game isn't worth it, if everything you do is gone in just six weeks. I don't have the time or dedication to get to end-game content if I have to literally restart all my progress every six weeks. I'd rather go play First Descendant or the new FFXIV Expansion.

First Descendant is a fun mix of Warframe build and hero mechanics, mixed with a Destiny style combat and gameplay loop. HOWEVER, this game is a mess.


Lets list off the major issues most folks I talk to have including myself:
1st - Operation Bosses vary VERY little, and I mean that. Most bosses have the same shield mechanic and three health bars. You repeat these missions every time.
2nd - The controls are clunky, you cant run unless you move only forward, and the grapple is VERY touchy and finicky. I was hoping I could easily use it to get around the battlefield and gain momentum but it doesn't do that well at all, even for it's initial use of getting on top of areas, it's hard to do so.
3rd - Missions also vary very little and the enemy types are just re-skinned variants of what Destiny has had since Destiny 1.
4th - Colossus (up until literally last night) had the exact same adds, and scenery.
5th - Play the game audio in Korean, you might not be a dub fan, but the English voice acting is two things:
- Not synced to cutscenes AT ALL, (I mean it, they didn't try to do it.)
- And terribly voice acted, the emotions, and accents are all over the place.
FOR EXAMPLE: The Guide is American, English, and Scottish at random times. (This is not expanded by the story.)

Now if you want my more detailed recommendation you can keep reading:

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Movement is clunky as all h***. Seriously.
The running mechanic is toggle by default, and to start running or even CONTINUE running you need to keep moving only forward. Hold W and use your mouse to steer. Because any other direction slows you down considerably.
The Grappling hook is clunky, you can swap between predictive and true aiming. But that's not the issue. The hook will allow you to grapple to a location, simple enough right? Sorry.
The grapple hook will detach if you don't have enough momentum built up in the first .33ms of grappling. I.E. If your dropping or moving in a direction other than the heading of the hook. So no momentum building like your playing Titan Fall.
This also means if your falling to your death, don't count on the hook to save you.
There IS a module to increase the distance at a cost of recharge time, however it doesn't fix these initial issues.
Also there is no crouching. Which, I'm honestly surprised to see in a game like this.

Combat is interesting when you mix and match heroes. This is genuinely a fun and engaging process and isn't that big of a bother. If you played Destiny and liked the combat, you'll enjoy shooting the enemies and seeing numbers fly around your targets.

Enemies will spawn with various attributes as you go further along the game and these can enhance gameplay. Note using the Tab (Eclive) button will reveal enemy weaknesses as well! A nice note, though I still wish the Eclive had more use in the game.

This is where the Warframe aspect of the game comes in, while you may like the warframe style gameplay. This game limits you heavily on what you can acomplish with crafting. Most craftables are actually all the same rarity and are quite difficult to make. I really wish First Descendant's developers included the ability to craft simple weapons or purchase blueprints for the simple weapons that you can use to make your own simple non rare common weapons with lesser stats.
This would prevent having to go farm for a specific weapon type just so you can have a good one on hand. Albeit these weapons are not hard to get.

I personally was stuck trying to get a beam weapon for the last 9 levels of my Descendant and two mastery ranks. Despite knowing where to get the items.

A highlight of this system however is it's tool-tips and also a downside.

On one hand you can easily find where to get more of an item, or where to reconstruct it or it's details...

On the other hand, all tool-tips are hover of item only. Meaning you can't look at the specifics of a reward if your hovering over the mission that grants it. Which to me, sucks, because that means I have to grind a mission that gives a Amorphus Material for it to drop so that then I can see what it potentially drops.

The way the game explains mechanics is useful at first, tons of pop-ups and tips. But then it halts, and grinds you against the floor. The tooltips broadly explain how things work, and what you can do at specific points and menus. But when it comes to things like Amorphous materials, it's not well explained, and could use better direction and tooltip explanat. A small gripe, but in the future I expect wiki's to pick up the slack where developers couldn't remember to explain mechanics.

When it comes to Nexxon, I don't really expect super engaging stories, and this one is the same. It's not a super engaging story, and doesn't really drive me to feel for the heroes and hate the villains. This is likely due to the over the top fan service, and acting that is all over the place from american voice actors. I started listening in Korean and found the VO to be alot more consistent and appealing honestly.

The cutscenes are real time, which is nice, but often characters, backgrounds, and such clip and have weird stiff physics.

This can most noticeably be seen within seconds of playing the game.

1st - The stunning beauty colossus in the background of the main menu has a very clearly clipping pipe. Which didn't bode well...

2nd - In the first series of cutscenes you see bunny's ponytail whip around and slide from one side of her head to the other without her head moving. The hair just decided **** physics I wanna be on this side of her neck, which I audibly laughed at, sorry Nexxon, love your games but seriously?

When it comes to progression and leveling, it does a good job until it suddenly doesn't.

It's awesome being able to tweak your loadouts, modules, and components to make shiny number go higher and higher. But about half-way through the starting regions when you get to Toxic land. You notice you start doing less damage, and as you progress that feeling of getting weaker while shiny number goes up, the feeling gets stronger. That's because the scaling of your damage output with weapon stats, components, and modules do not scale that well with the enemies you start running into.

I found that in order to keep the momentum up going through the story you need to face some considerable time into going back and grinding and farming previous regions so you can level up, so you have more module slots, so you can upgrade those modules, and get stronger.

While you can continue the fight and go through the main story well enough without doing this, the enemies will become considerably bigger bullet sponges, and harder to kill. I feel that when it comes to Colossus and Special Operations, and Hard mode. This would make sense, but getting the feeling of falling behind in the main story, feels off and makes me feel like I consistently have to abandon the MSQ and go back to farming and grinding just so I can keep that feeling of becoming the hero.

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In summary, the game has potential. Personally I would like to see a few changes like Player Trading, Movement Revamps, English VO Mouth-syncs, and better attention to diversifying the enemy and boss mechanics. Right now it feels like a lot of missions, bosses, and enemies are copy paste reskins. I know that everyone I worked with hated the 2nd major operation boss because we just sat there shooting all this multiples of shields, over and over again, making very little headway to his actual HP bar. The whole shield and shield with baubles seems like a cop out from making any real boss mechanics.

Many games utilize bosses in such a way where they have unique ways to kill.

I hope Nexxon can make it better.

This game is a blast, far better than I anticipated and after a bit of fiddling with the calibration tool I got it right and just started jamming for 6 hours straight.

This game is fun, it's Angels Fall First Esk-Game with the Ground Battle Focus that was Idealized in EVE: DUST. However, with this comes the exceptional hatred for early alpha games. It will get better of that I have no doubt. But the first and biggest issue is A.I. and optimization. The A.I. is extremely 'dumb' and lacks any optimization ever. A server with 12 players will quickly start to lag and delay to the point where commanders simply will not be able to order anything, and players will find themselves dead after a few minutes of running around magically due to an enemy that has been dead for 2 minutes logging shots on the player. The game is exactly as it is advertised and explained. It's Alpha, expect what you expect from a game in Alpha. Do not purchase however if you do not intend to support the creators, or want to deal with a buggy game. Even Steam tells you that. If you want to my overall synopsis it is at the bottom past these lists.

A.I. is a brick with legs or wheels. It will take obtuse and random pathing that will often lead to the following situations:
• AI Crashing into each other.
• AI perpetually backing up, and going forward in an attempt to turn around, but never doing so.
• AI Getting stuck on eachother.
• AI Taking a route up to (I've seen it.) x8 longer than the actual fastest path.
• Harvesters deciding that certain resource nodes are no longer good enough when they haven't been depleted, resulting in harvesters casually going to your front lines and getting themselves killed.

To top this off. Players are not effected by Fog of war, at all. Only commanders. This results in several issues that I will address quickly.
• Players will snipe structures and harvesters from across the map with ease.
• Players will use the terrain to get into positions where the AI simply will not attack them or will not access.
• The radar (To increase the view units see in the commander's eyes) adds like. 10 feet. Once. So the radar installations end up becoming just nice view blockers from in-coming fire.

Vehicle's feel that they lack any good speed, and there is no way of transporting troops. So if you have infantry, regardless of how well you can use them, there is no way at all they are helping assault another facility.

My suggestions are as follows:
Player Infantry:
• Introduce Fog of some sort. Players should not be able to see units across the map.
• Change how "Auto-Tasking" works. Because this is how players can detect players with no commander intervention from (Literally) thousands of meters away, even if they're an alien burrowed.

Player Vehicles/Heavy Type Aliens:
• Introduce more drop to heavier more damage dealing vehicles. The Railgun, Tank, and Siege weapon are all almost pin-point precise allowing a player-commanded Rail-gun to take out most if not almost all player facilities from across the map.

Commanders:
• Introduce abilities please. Just make commanders more strategic since players can yoink any significant pieces off their board just by running up to it. Or allow commanders to designate (Key) units and lock their access from players to prevent some random kid from taking it to the middle of nowhere and having all those resources destroyed.
• Increase Fog of War distance from units.
• Commanders have access to both nightvisions?
• Add Quick-Grouping to units? (Ctrl+1->Ctrl+0)

Building:
• Honestly, HQs should be build-able anywhere a unit is and is within bounds. Having to daisy chain nodes/radar stations just to build another HQ makes no sense to me.
• Building is really, really finnicky, if you could place buildings slightly closer to eachother and with a greater degree of options I'm sure some serious strategic planning could be set afoot. But right now it's like a 500m radius for 1 placement position for each building.
• Add more defensive structures. There are virtually no good defensible permanent structures aside from the Alien options and the HQ for humans. However, if enemy opponents get to the Human/Centari HQ it's already to late for it to be useful.
Defensive structures could be as simple as walls, trenches, turrets, bunkers, towers, shields, or even some type of unique bubble shielding that can be placed one at a time to help defend critical locations/structures. Units would have to pass through it to destroy/attack anything inside.
• FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD. Please, if nothing else. Please allow players to set a "Waypoint" for [newly] built units to deploy to.
• Add keybinds to select type of unit to be built. (Example click the Vehicle Factory and "G" Would be a (Light) Quad.

Graphics/Ideas:
Aliens grow their "Territory" but there is no visual/gameplay feedback from that aside from units and structures. Perhaps some kind of miasma or change in terrain color could help denote the range of territory?
Centauri feel indistinguishable from Humans. Maybe a slight design change or significant color scheme that would make the difference more obvious would help.
Add air assets.
Night visions are cool and all, but they feel like they impede gameplay more than help induce it. It can be at times much harder to see at night with nightvision alien or human.

Overall, the game is in Alpha and needs a lot of work to get to a truely gameplay loop state. It has no feedback for gameplay. Nobody is screaming, nobody is giving out orders, death is temporary, and if your a commander the players on the ground will always have the advantage. So if your 1x5 a team of players vs 1 commander. The commander would lose every time against an AI commander. Simply due to the fact that infantry have, and always will have the advantage. It has potential, and I would love to see it get there, it just needs a lot. Actually, that's an understatement. It needs everything. Player feedback, both audible and visual. Player feedback is like, hitmarkers on successful hits, flat line SFX when you die, commanders radioing in good job, onto the next objective. Player cooperation techniques, when the servers are not lagging literally 20 minutes behind, players don't have any way to cooperate. No squad system, no voice systems, no objective pinging systems. There simply isn't any way for players to organize themselves effectively. No reward system either, resources are shared amoungst a team, as such a new player can waste lots of resources buying commandos and dying rather than helping further key objectives. Commanders, also recieve no feedback. No alerts when they're under fire, when harvesters are being damaged, when a building is destroyed, when units are built, etc, etc.

I will give this a bad recommendation for now until I See progress because too many times have I Seen alpha games with potential be green lit just for the developers to split the difference and quit updating the game. For an Alpha lover such as myself, I recommend it. However I would not recommend to new players. (If you read this far you should understand why.)


Edit: With recent updates and changes I have high hopes for the future of this game, many quality of life and optimizations have been added that create critical gameplay improvements. Obviously it is still lacking much of what is needed to create an atmosphere of replayability, but I expect that would come with time in development.

Honestly, I tried playing just the second mission for about 4 hours and I'm just not having fun. I can't even unlock more parts of the game unless unlocked through the normal difficulty. I spend more time pulling my hair out figuring out how the hell I'm supposed to beat this game. I lose because of stability, so I focus a bit on civilian stuff, then I lose due to corruption, so I fix that next time. Then i lose to terrorist activity, then I try to focus on that, then I lose to one of the other 3 ways to lose. The game is too complex without enough tutorials or explanation on it's mechanics to properly learn. There are a multitude of ways to lose the game, plus the side effect that the "terrorists" can easily take locations over and over breaking through your defenses because you have an extremely limited amount of forces you can have unless you want to lose due to reputation loss. It doesn't look like there is any logical way to beat this game, plus the fact that there are no community guides just proves it more to me that it's simply not easy for the common player.

I love this game.

Great building system, amazing community, huge modding base, and the development team are probably some of the hardest working devs I've seen personally in a few years. Quite the game they've created and they pay ALOT of attention to the community. And thats what matters when it comes to a Voxel-Sandbox Sci=Fi Game that is Space Engineers.

Whenever you have a small infestation problem call the Imperial Guard. Set out 20000 turrets, then ground shakers, and expand like the damn plague. Game Over, you win... >:D

I belive this is a fun immersive and interactive game where you can go from decorating and building a dojo for your clan to going to ravashing bloody raids on infested orikin ships...

(Edit) Since I posted this, the game has only gotten better.

It's alright.