Recent reviews by Astral

Fun game, charming art, pleasant music.

Fun game. Could use some improvements with the build and object placement system, as that can feel a little clunky at time, but otherwise a nice experience. Pleasant music, nice story, gameplay loop and upgrades were nice.

Pros:
+ Nice visuals
+ Clean and fun upgrade system
+ Base building is mostly great (I would like some different connection points, and actual module snapping inside habitats, but it's fine as is)
+ Story is good
+ Well done voice acting

Cons:
- One of the achievements requires you eat nothing with meat for the entire game. It is incredibly easy to miss this achievement given that an easy food product you can make which the game throws at you has meat. An extremely awful move by the developer to include this, which basically means not getting all achievements, or likely replaying the game. There's no way to know this in advance unless you read the achievement list before playing. If this game were on a */10 rating system I would take 1 or 2 points off for this alone. I hate this kind of crap.
- Weight of some specific materials should probably be a little lower

Overall a great game, but seriously what bad manners from the dev to include an achievement like that. Just trolling their player base for the sake of it. Like a bad mint after a meal ruining the taste in your mouth after finishing a nice meal. If you make more games in the future, which I hope you do as this was nice otherwise, please don't do this again.

Fun game to play. I've played Warhammer 2 and 3 exclusively co-op, never done a single player campaign. It can be buggy at times (use the community bug fix mod), and the DLC can be expensive, but it is still an incredibly fun game that I don't believe warrants 'mixed reviews'.

If you're on the fence about the game pricing wise, and its DLC, they've pretty regularly had 75% or more off sales for things in the past. Just wait for a sale.

As far as the bugs, most are negligible with the community bug fix mod. It's not great that a mod is required for this, but it's available, Theoretically I'm even playing a buggier version of the game since I doubt they actually put a lot of QA into the co-op experience, and even then it's still barely noticeable when it happens. An example of this was me playing Aislinn and my friend playing Ostankya, and at a certain point later in the campaign (we believe after I confederated someone) he just flat out lost the ability to trade settlements in diplomacy. The button just entirely disappeared and never came back. Silly, but not a deal breaker.

If I had to give a numerical rating to this game, rather than just a binary yes or no, I'd say easily a 7/10 overall, 9/10 if it was less buggy, 4/10 for its pricing scheme.

Short but fun. No downsides, other than perhaps wanting more, but it's perfect for the price point.

Great game, quite fun.
Pros:
+ Gameplay loop is straight and to the point
+ Nice upgrade system where everything feels well balanced price and power wise (I might have asked for one more pickup upgrade, but it's not 'needed')
+ Pleasant music
+ Cute graphics
+ A short story, but well told
+ VA did well

No negatives, just a very nice game.

Pretty good, but the last achievement to get up to 14 days is pretty much just in the game to double your playtime. Still nice enough for the price point.

Wait for a performance patch. Wait for a sale. Wait for improvements. This is undercooked, and even if it was well done it still had some really questionable ingredients thrown in the pot for seemingly no reason. Full reasoning below.

The performance is playable, but still worse than the first. Which is weird since the game somehow looks worse too. While not related to engine or performance, why do the characters all have giraffe necks?

Camera is still objectively bad. It feels even worse in this one because of so many giant boss fights where if the camera was zoomed out more it might actually feel nice, but no. Have fun observing 30~50% of the boss or less while trying to dodge or block their attacks.

The addition of full open world was a horrible choice. It feels like a ton of pointless padding. I would have strongly preferred the mostly linear pathing of the original game to this.

The base idea of the story is fine. You're a revived individual who is working to help prevent a calamity from destroying the world. The presentation of the story is absolutely, hilariously bad. Things just kind of happen for the sake of the plot needing to move forward without any real build up, and in incredibly ridiculous ways too.

Combat is fine for the most part, but the camera is woefully awful as previously stated. Though one issue I've seen with the bosses that I've fought is that they have some of the most ridiculous hyper tracking I've seen in any video game in a while. One example was a boss leaping back and charging up a streamed fireball attack, and I had no recourse to really do anything from the movesets I seemed to own. Blocking it resulted in guard break from too little stamina. Dodging resulted in being hit anyways since you can still be hit while chain dodging in the time between dodges. Moving away and running resulted in being hit. Moving toward them and trying to get out of it just resulted in more hits. I would like to think the devs built some kind of solution in mind, but if the boss didn't literally snap its head across the arena to track you with a laser focus it feels like it would have been more player skill based rather than relying on some hyper specific action the dev imagined you would take.

Music is ... okay? It feels really inappropriate at times though. Like they just hit the random button on the soundtrack for some fights. They force heavy action tracks on combat all the time too when it's not really needed.

If they had just used the same engine from 1, made new maps, enemies, bosses, and expanded on the existing systems, I feel like they could've made a significantly better game with a fraction of the budget. What a disappointment.

Early and midgame are great. The art and sound direction is amazing. Combat is smooth and hitboxes are fair. I love how the movement system turns out once you get a few upgrades, it feels amazing.

By later in the game however, the game becomes an exercise in frustration. The map is disjointed for no reason other than to pad the game time. Platforming sections are unnecessarily long with no healing in the middle (even Path of Pain had heals). Controls for the later ability is also unrefined. Hints on where to go are essentially non-existent for anything other than main content, relying on either pixel hunting or luck - most Metroidvanias provide better visual indicators of where to look.

If you want to just beat the game, you'll probably enjoy it well enough for a Metroidvania. I'm slogging through the "post-game" content, but it's like the person responsible for late and post-game was a completely different person than the one responsible for early and mid.

Overall still worth playing if you like the genre. Get it on sale if you're on the fence.

Post 100% Achievement Edit: The main story is great, optional content ranges from okay to outright bad. The game needed more quality of life too. Still overall an okay game.

Short and fun. Cute story and graphics. Doesn't waste your time, and has an upgrade system that is fairly robust. Not really sure what other reviewers are talking about with late game being a grind, as long as you move your points around it stays the same speed the whole way. You're freely allowed to refund or make different builds too. So it might need build balancing? I might have had a stronger build than whatever they were using.