Recent reviews by Vaendryl

they say it's entered into early access extra early, but this does not look like something they've been working on since october last year (when they first announced it). this looks like they put something together within a month of sweaty crunching, and functions as a vertical slice prototype or tech demo at best.

it looks terrible. the performance is terrible. the jank is unreal and nothing is either explained or obvious, even if you have a lot of experience in the genre.

all in all, this seems to take quite a bit from dyson sphere program and a tiny bit from games like satisfactory and factorio. there's a bit of a bare bones skeleton there for a semi-decent factory/logistics game, but this needs many years of further development to maybe someday turn into something actually presentable.

from the start I was very curious what ideas they had to properly combine RTS with factory gaming, because on the face of it the combination is practically almost impossible. every RTS requires people to have "builds orders" optimized to a T to be competitive, while all the fun of a factory game is to carefully and patiently optimize your builds. it should be obvious that anyone who doesn't use cookie-cutter factory lay-outs is going to steamrolled, so in practice the tedious logistics aspect is just going to be an albatross around any players neck in competitive play.

so far I see no evidence at all they even considered any of this, which is quite the disappointment.
so what is the future of this game? a great campaign? fun and engaging co-op multiplayer that replaces pvp? maybe. realistically I don't expect the devs to manage either because they never have before.

let's hope I'll be eating those words 4 years from now.

opened up the game and the game windows was tiny
I can't drag the corner to resize it. first mark of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ jank game.
I can only choose between four set resolutions. 4k res is not one of them. just "fullscreen" is not an option. so I'm stuck with a tiny window even at highest rest. second mark of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ jank game.

I start a game anyway. get to choose between different characters. art is nice but it's pretty obvious the choice doesn't matter in the least.
instantly start fighting one monster after another. I get gold that I can spend on skills that really don't seem to do anything at all. max health doesn't matter if you never die. same with health regen.

not sure what I did but suddenly I get a popup where I can add a "secret code", which I have to go get from discord.
I give the obvious "funny" answer and get a load of resources. so that's nice.

can't say the game hooked me in the least, though.

10 minute "game" start to finish.

just don't be a ♥♥♥♥ and get ending A.
be a ♥♥♥♥ 3 times and you immediately get ending B.

that's the whole game, and neither ending is a particularly good one.

you're probably not overpaying at this price but is it worth your time? depends if you like the colour red, clicking through repeating lines of text and angsty children.

it's no mass effect but it does have the bioware stamp of quality if only in the narrative department. the rest of the game is clunky and distinctly dated, but you can get a lot out of this game for very little money - if you're willing to put up with some fairly aggressive MTX pushing.

build a base, fend off raids. capture enemies and other poor fools and either sell them as slaves or harvest their organs and sell those instead. grow your colony. establish an empire. research advanced tech. upgrade fleshbags into cyborg master race. become invincible and start work on a space ship. never finish it because it's far too expensive.

one of a kind game. be sure to try out some of the many great mods from the workshop.

a lot to learn at first but good fun to be had here

apart from a few minor issues/glitches the game is fairly competently made. mostly.

the art overall is okay (with the CG's especially standing out next to the spritework)
music is mostly forgettable but servicable.
plot is kinda silly but there's a lot of foreshadowing, making you want to continue and find out what happens.

where it fails, at least for me, is the ending(s). the main "twist" was obvious as long as you don't skip past the opening few scenes of the game. romancing the heroines is very time intensive and ultimately ends up pretty unsatisfying and is immediately rendered null and void by all 3 endings, which aren't really very different from one another. a lot of foreshadowed plot points are completely dropped, never having been touched on before the end. I'd love to go into detail and explain what I mean but that would just be spoiling too much.

all in all it leaves the player with the feeling they just wasted their time playing it, which is painful as it did take me almost 14 hours to finish it. like anticipating a sweet cake at the end of a meal but it tastes like ashes.

all in all I'd say the first half of the game establishes expectation that never really get met. and I don't recommend a fan of traditional visual novels/dating sims to buy it. even if you really like doki doki literature club (a game which' influence "how to date a magical girl" proudly wears on it sleeves) I don't really feel like I should recommend this to you.

game performance is very unstable with occasional hickups right when they will bother you most, like when you need to give a critical order.

the campaign is short, very easy and not very interesting. very much the opposite of the original homeworld in every way.

skirmish with other players is perhaps the most interesting aspect, but there are plenty of games that do the same thing way better, like the supreme commander series. additionally, you're offered 4 'factions' to choose from but 2 have the 'accept' button greyed out and the game doesn't even bother telling you you're supposed to buy DLC to play as those.
that's right. DLC for skirmish factions. wow.

maybe you could have some fun with this if you get it at a particularly sharp discount but don't expect too much if you know how great homeworld is.

Saw this game listed for only €2,50 with rather positive reviews so I thought I'd pick it up.

started playing and I didn't stop till I finished the game 20 hours later.

It's not the kind of game that will blow you away with it's quality and depth, but it is an extremely well crafted skinner box. (it's even got a skinner box INSIDE the skinner box as an mini-game in the tavern!)
Because there's always *something* right around the corner you can do to either develop your town or your own power you just have to keep playing just to see what new cool thing you can get your hands on.

At the start of the game you're really weak and you will have to play quite carefully as not to get annihilated by the slightly tougher enemies, but before you know it you'll have gained a few very powerful skills and some equipment and you find yourself turning into an onstoppable dwarven death tank.
Similarly, developing your town is slow going but always rewarding.

There are plenty of bad parts to the game too, however.
there are something like 200 or more regions to explore for loot or quests and most are quite similar to each other so it can get a bit tedious.

at around the mid-game point you'll discover you'll have tons of workers who usually will have nothing to do, as not all regions unlock the opportunity to gather anything, when they do it's usually not what you need at the moment and even if it is there's probably only very little of it. which requires you to do A LOT of region grinding just for the stone/leather/coal/food/ore/lumber/cotton you need in your town. every time you get something to harvest your goons will strip it down within moments and they'll be idle again. you'll really start to wonder why with all the land you've cleared and conquered none of it is any use to you after the initial stripping of resources.

putting a check mark next to your 12 plot coupons to unlock the final boss can get real tedious too. I like a good jumping puzzle as much as the next nerd, but these just overstayed their welcome. 8 would have been much better. preferably 6.

game balance seems a bit off even when playing on the standard human difficulty. I became nearly invincible quite early on and only got more and more powerful as the game went on. at the end I had around 300% resistance against ALL elements, and tons and tons of HP and armor. And talking about overkill, I was easilty critting for like 500k damage. even the final boss was done in a few blows.

it was absolutely worth what I paid for though, and I'll be looking forward to a sequel.

This is a very poor port from a vita game or something. the controls are completely insane and cannot be remapped. the game has no mouse input at all. there is no cursor. and yet, the "cancel" button is exclusively mapped to 'right-click'. that's too stupid to even imagine. who comes up with that ♥♥♥♥?

and maybe you think "just use a controller!", and right you are. However! despite the store page claiming "full controller support" it doesn't actually recognize any controllers.

As if the primary premise of this game isn't completely balls-to-the-walls insane to begin with, it's pretty much unplayable from the main menu onward.