Recent reviews by Plymoth45

After having owned this game for many years and never having completed it, I have finally finished it and have a mixed review about this game. There may be some plot spoilers below, so keep reading at your own risk. Ultimately, my complaints are about the story. The gameplay mechanics I found to be at least as fun as New Order was, and if that's all you care about I do recommend the game. Otherwise, if you expect a solid story, you may want to look elsewhere.

On one hand, the game play was fun and I enjoyed some of the new mechanics such as smashing through walls, going toe to toe with Supersoldaten, some of the heavy weapons, the new perks tree, etc. The 1st half of the story was riveting and felt very on edge and enaging. I had mixed feelings about how the leadership of the Kreisau Circle was more or less just handed off to people we didn't even know after rescuing the Manhattan survivors, and how if felt like they more or less just moved in to Caroline's spot without so much as an objection from the still-mourning Evas Hammer crew, but the 2 main story missions afterwards just about made up for the odd choice. I chose to try and keep enjoying the story, and for the most part did right up until the New Orleans mission. Rescuing fellow resistance members makes sense, but there was very little utilization or character development of the characters after the mission. It made it feel very... pointless and added in as an attempt at showing "rescue" of fellow fighters. Also... what in the story writer's right minds thinks a pregnant woman would be able to do the things that Anya did during new Orleans or any part of the 2nd half of the game with the state she was in? Especially at the end of the Ausmercer mission. I don't know about anyone else, but I've never seen a pregnant woman move like she did without some severe discomfort, not to mention the risk of injury to the children themselves while in the womb. I get this game is more or less fantasy, but we're departing from sanity or even the pseudo-science explanations of what makes a Supersoldaten with that one. The entire second half of the game felt like random non-sense story wise, and the ending was very unsatisfying. It felt like the story writers did exactly what the entire Evas Hammer Crew did after the Venus mission and wrote the script while either high, tripping, or nursing a very bad hangover while trying to meet a deadline and just threw whatever came to mind into the game without even thinking about it. It's because of this serious lack of quality story writing that I can not recommend this game to anyone seeking a good, semi-believable science fiction alternate-history narrative while keeping your feet on the ground. It's pure fantasy at this point.

I had fun with this game. Story was ok, gameplay is extremely arcade but fun when you just want to fly any airplane and blow things up. The models are beautifully done, and the sounds match the aircraft reasonably well.

Played with a Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS and CH Pro Pedals. My biggest complaint is the digital yaw input, and the difficulty/research required to get the pedals to work in the first place. Wasn't a serious issue until the final mission of the campaign. The lack of analog yaw control made the mission absolute hell.

I was a Beta Participant for this game, and sadly fell away from it due to life happening. I came back to it a few days ago and it is every bit the fun, engaging, and challenging arcade style ship command game it was during the Beta. There is a ship gameplay style that will suit just about everybody. The Dreadnought class itself covers the slow, tanky, hard hitting brawler playstyle. The Destroyer is for those who favor high damage output with more mobility at the cost of survivability. The Corvette is for those who like to be light on their toes and perform hit and runs. The Tactical cruiser fills the 'healer' role of other games, being a great utility role for team players. And finally, the artillery class ship for those who prefer to play a sniper role from the back. All together the developers have managed to achieve a good balance in this game that is fun and engaging. Think of it as the world of warships of space, and the best part is its free to play.

Generally good tycoon based game. I have gotten many hours of enjoyment just watching my trains and such go back and forth, and growing the towns in the game as a by product. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys tycoon type games!

Things I like:
- Lots of variety on trains, buses, and aircraft.
- Ferrys a little less so, but still not bad.
- Good track/road building system.
- Game looks great and runs decently on all of my machines.
- There are some really good mods for this game

Things I wish the game had:
- Better traffic management, specifically the ability to force truck routes to use a particular lane on multi-lane roads. Traffic jams become a real problem if you aren't ultra careful with the planning and placement of truck stations
- Expandable, multi-purpose stations.

I was a bit dubious at first as I tend to be a bit of a graphics snob when it comes to games like this. But the gameplay more than makes up for it. The best way I can describe this game is falling somewhere inbetween space engineers, mine craft, and the X series of games. It has a lot of gameplay elements from the X series that I had always hoped for when it comes to fleet command, while also still sadly being limited in functionality. Something that I hope will be remedied in a future update. But overall the game is solid and fun.

Having now played the Campaign in full and gotten a real taste for the game, I now feel I can write an effective review. Please note that I played the campaign through on normal difficulty.

Let me begin by saying I bought this game primarily because I'm a BSG fan, and secondarily because I enjoy space based strategy games. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I started looking into the game until I watch EnterElysium playing the game on Youtube before release. I fell in love with the type of game being developed at that point. Never before had i seen a turn based space strategy game that played out in real time allowing you to see the consequences of your actions and also giving you the time to think out your every move.

The campaign was quite a journey. While the story was for the most part weak (Definitely left something to be desired), it was interesting enough to make it feel like each battle was for a reason. The real jem is in the journey with each battle having an unknown outcome no matter what you entered it with. There were several times I jumped into a fight with 2 battlestars and a reasonable support fleet that I was unsure if I was going to win the engagement let alone make it through with heavy losses, where earlier in the game it seemed like my frigates were doing better on their own. However, with a little more game time (And several heavy battlestar/officer losses later) I finally learned how to use those more expensive ships, thus securing a nearly clean victory in every battle there after.

The one exception to the victory rule above is when a Cylon Basestar fleet spawed on top of one of my smaller fleets consisting of 2 frigates and a corvette. While I got initially caught off guard, I was giving them hell until more ships jumped in, which again was unexcepted. That engagement caught me off guard, and I'll admit I was left wondering why that didn't happen to any of my larger fleets (Which would have made sense).

Anyhow, enough about the journey and on to my list of Pros and Cons:

Pros:
- Turn based system for tactical decisions (Made it easy to walk away when I needed to take care of something else, and ensured I had plenty of time to think about my decisions)
- AutoCam (Great beaty shots for the realime replay of the battle)
- The realtime replay feature
- Good balancing of ships and abilities (This one is up in the air for a lot of people, but I've found that spending some time with each of the ships and learning their strengths and weaknesses will cause you to adjust your tactics accordingly. Just because something is heavily armored doesn't mean in can withstand sustained fire from 4+ ships for long on one armor front)
- Intelligent AI that makes you think on both the strategic and tactical levels.
- Reasonable graphics for a game of this scale and type
- The tactical need to use different types of ordinance and fighter/utility loadouts

Cons:
- Interface was a bit klunky (Cycling through 10+ targets when selecting fighter targets was a pain)
- I don't recall a tutorial talking about planet fortification. There was a bit about needing offensive fleets with officers, but it failed to explain the benefit of planet fortification. Trial and error is how I figured this one out.
- Storyline was a bit weak (If getting this game, get it for the gameplay, not the story)

Utlimately I feel this is a solid game with great visuals and tactical gameplay. It also provides a strong foundation for hopefully some great story content down the road. I paid the full $40 for this game and I do not regret it one bit.

It saddens me to write this post, but while this title holds great potential its current state is entirely unacceptable due to the dev having stopped development. The stability issues make it nearly unplayable, and the sheer lack of true content just drives the point home that this is not worth the money spent (Not even for $15). If development resumes, I will change my rating as patches are released.

I do not recommend picking up this game for even $5 as the state will just leave any future players disapointed and heartbroken.

Even after resumption of development, the dev team finally announced their intentions to abandon the game DO NOT PURCHASE!