Recent reviews by overrandom

FREEDOM NEVER SLEEPS.

medieval shouting simulator

UT2004 is back.

The majority of developers that create a game with overwhelmingly negative reviews try to shove the game under the rug never to be seen again. Hello Games believed in their game, kept with it, and look at it now.

Changing this review from No to Yes. This is the No Man's Sky I wanted.

It's only going to get better. While this game does have potential for being excellent, it doesn't seem to be completely thought out and finished. There isn't anything glaringly wrong that should prevent you from buying it at some point. Just for the moment, it's not all there.

I will use a Not Recommended tag for now, only because I do not think Stellaris is finished yet. Once it is patched up, this review will change if it's good to go.

Here are the PROs that I found
- The music is quite grand and fitting. I never felt like I needed to disable it.
- The nations and species are diverse. You'll find species based off of humanoids, avians, bugs, and so on, and those species break further into sub categories. In a galaxy, the main empires will mostly not be alike the other. You can potentially find a primitive race that seems to be similar to an existing empire, but that's a believable idea anyway. The nations themselves will be fairly diverse as well, from democratic soceities to xenophobic nations of faith to reclusive nations.
-The options for elimitating micromanagement are a good idea (more on that below)
-The beginning of the game is full of exploration, quests, and danger. You'll start by exploring your system and the neighboring system, finding anomalies and resources on other planets. These discoveries can also lead to quest lines that reveal more about the galaxy, such as a story line of a long lost race.
- End game crisis is an excellent idea and allows for a legitimate ending instead of "Ding, got conquest victory, done."
- It has space cows.

Cons:
- This is galaxy full of implied activity. However, if you are looking at everything, it's quite dead. Capitol planets, for example, have absolutely no visual activity around the planet despite being potentially a galactic center for commerce. There should be visual elements added to increase the feeling of a large empire. For example, civilian and trader ships that you cannot interact with moving from sector to sector.
- Horrendously dumb AI. They will send colony ships everywhere without actually using them, or transport boats with foot soldiers that never land. This also extends to AI used for determining pop migration. On a recently conquered planet (inlcludes the -25% happiness debuff for recently conquered), despite being super unhappy with the situation, will williningly migrate to a planet controlled by the conquerer.
- You cannot "fail" a first contact, it just happens. When another species or nation meets you for the first time, how that interaction will play out is already decided. They either like you already or they do not. There is no challenge in first contact, and it ends up being a chore. This is because the decision of the other nation party is decided by the traits that you picked at the start of the game. For example, a democratic nation will start off as friends with another democratic nation, whereas slave nation will be hated by the freedom nation.
-Your responses to primitive civilization events (such as reaching the Steam Age) is almost literally "That's nice." There is no other purpose.
-If a primitive civilization exits the early space age and reaches your level, they instantly are granted the entire system if you do not already have a colony or frontier outpost. This inludes any mining/research/observation you have in that system. The primitive civilization already appears to be very familiar with the galaxy, as there is absolutely no benefit to being the first one to contact them. There are uplifting mechanics you can do, to manipulate the civilization to get to the space age faster, but what if you do not want to meddle with their progress until they reach the stars?
- While the end game crisis is an excellent idea, it is not executed well. For example, I ran into the robotic uprising crisis. This did not happen within my borders since I refused to take on robotic pops. However, my neighboring federation ally did. However, that nation took absolutely no steps to retake the systems or even prevent it from getting worse. In my efforts to free the nation from the robotic overlords, I tried to give systems I liberated back to the ally, only to find that they then went back and put robots back on the planet and lost it again to the uprising. Furthermore, I only wanted to get rid of the robots, but since this is the same thing as taking over a planet by hostility, it also destroys the planets atmosphere (for example, a tropical planet will become a tundra planet). This made any further attempts to free my ally to be not worth the effort.
- Sector management is almost punishment for making a large empire. The idea is that it will do all the planet management for you, but it quite honestly has no clue how to do that. You just have to cross your fingers and hope they do contribute to pop happiness. I am ok with a system to manage multiple planets at once, but I also need to be able to control that system easier.
- Upgrading ships needs to be reworked. It is currently not beneficial to upgrade fleets as the amount of time to upgrade them is basically a rebuild.
- Foot soldiers need to be able to be healed while in orbit of a friendly planet. You have to land armies on a planet in order for them to heal. This is tedious when your army is larger than the planet can handle.
- Trading Star Charts causes you to not see the discovered primitive civilizations until they achieve the space age.
- Democratic nations need more customizations. I made the mistake of supporting a presidential canidate only to then discover that this causes the leader to never lose an election and ended up serving 11 presidential terms before finally dying of old age. There needs to be controls on how the democratic elections are run.
- There is no more space exploration once you discover a few nations around you. Unless if you negotiate border access with them, you are boxed in. If you do become friends with them, they will spam you with Star Chart trades to the point you've "explorered" the entire galaxy.


Stellaris is also quite buggy for the moment. Here are some:
- I had an Admiral that reached 186 years old, with a death chance of 104%. He is still alive at this time and leading my main fleet.
- If a system changes hands while you cannot see it, you enter the system to find stations in space with no owner and tells you to research an alien race that doesn't exist.
- If you trade star charts with another civilization and they discovered a primitive civilization, you can't see their civilization, only the fact that they exist on the planet. If you try to put an observation post on the planet, you cannot control it as it says you do not own the observation post.
- IF another nation also has researched the ability to put Xenos in positions of leadership to the point of being the face of the nation, the Diplomacy screen will refer to them as the wrong species, causing confusion. For example, it will show a human as an avian migratory flock if a human is their president.
- If you play as the United Nations of Earth pre-made nation, you may find another Sol, planet Earth, and humans, all identical to your own. I ended up needing to rename this new Sol and Earth just to avoid confusion.
- You may accidentally put a Pre-Sentient species in control of a system. If you conquer a planet, a faction of pre-sentient beings may appear at which point you can grant them independence, even though they are marked as pre-sentient. I had a nation of Snakeoids put an embassy on my world even though I'm pretty sure they cannot read, speak, think.







There isn't anything wrong with the idea behind the game. I think it's all there, it mostly needs tweaking. I'm sure I will be seeing a lot more of this game some day. For now, I'll wait for the next major patch.

Space western adventure that won't be canceled by Fox!

Even 100 years or more in the future, we'll still have trains and busses.

i dont have enough time to write a review as i need to go back to bouncing off of stars.

I honestly forget this game is early access, save for the crashes or glitches that occur not very often. If you have an itch for a Hack and Slash Action RPG, similar to Torchlight, Dungeon Siege, and Titan Quest, then give this early access title a try.

yea.