Recent reviews by Lidon

The latest update basically broke the game. If you had a character built up through hours of play, hard work, and investing lots of time to grind for valuable resources: tough luck, now the inventory size is crippled that you can fit maybe 25-30% of your mods in if you're lucky.

This means the difficulty rating is vastly increased - no more relaxing mining on harsh planets (where you used to enjoy the comfort of your hard-earned shields and protections), no more exploring dangerous areas safe in the knowledge your collected technology will keep you safe, no more confronting dangerous sentinels with a matching arsenal of your own that you have acquired through hard in-game slogs.

This is an incredibly blasé attitude towards the players' time investment, and it utterly discourages me from touching it again - why should I make the effort of growing powerful, if the devs can just take it all away with the click of a key? Why should I have to play with a crippling restriction like this when before I could feel like a truly hardened explorer?

I really wanted to like this game. There are many positive aspects to it: the exploration on the huge planet map is fun, the level design is mostly great, with many out-of-the-way secrets to find, and the characters and voice acting are both nicely done.

But there is a definitive feeling of something lacking, of a game cut short due to money or time running out. One of the hints in-game says that a modification can be removed from a weapon only at skill level 150 - and it is impossible to reach that during a normal playthrough. The first planet you explore is huuuge, with a ton of connected maps to seek out, quests to explore, and items to find... and as you progress the new worlds become smaller and smaller, with fewer quests, and the items become "the same thing but with higher numbers", with no different types or mechanisms added.
The same goes for the depth of customization - yes, there is a skill system, yes, there is a weapon modification system, but they both feel really unsatisfying. The skill points you invest hardly seem to matter during normal play, except for critical skill checks that rely on hard values and not randomized chance - so you better have leveled up the right skill!

The aforementioned weapon modification system is pretty lackluster, too: you get one barrel slot, one magazine slot, and one sights slot, and two or maybe three options for each; and they all seem to matter very little. I had hoped for a "rock, paper, scissors" system of elemental damages, but it does not seem to do much beyond coloring your shots.

My main complaint is that the game feels so short - the first planetary map paints a completely wrong picture of what to expect from the other planets, and the solar system map looks as if there were three times as many locations as are actually reachable. There was a time when I felt sufficiently powered up and leveled, ready for some tough content and epic battles only to find out that I had basically only the last quest in the main questline left.

I would only get this game at a deep discount, and lower your expectations before playing.

This is a lovely time waster of a game - no pressure, go at your own pace, and keep improving nevertheless. You can feel real satisfaction for cleaning up an abandoned property, then indulge in your inner architect by creatively redecorating the rooms.

I like the many different routes you can take to a finished property, and the freedom you have in most missions; while some require you to stick to certain recommendations by the customers, in the end you can still give them something that shows your touch.

Very entertaining game, although I'd recommend watching a playthrough of a level on youtube before buying - it is something of a niche thing, and you really have to enjoy this genre to be as happy with it as I am.

A bit short, but a nice puzzle game that has nice mechanics and is not too challenging.

I am a huge fan of Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley and many other crafting and farming games. So I really tried to like Staxel - but in the end, I could not. It has a few good ideas, but is hampered by a horrible UI (honestly, sorting and organizing your personal inventory and your "stash" at home is so much of a chore you will want to quit) and a terrible crafting system (oh, you want to craft one of the few items you actually can create by yourself and not order from the cop-out-catalogue? Get ready to buy a ton of basic ingredients you literally cannot create or find yourself, and then walk among the ten(!) or so different crafting stations assembling them step by step).
There is no sense of progress, of growth throughout the whole game, making it feel stale after a few hours.

I got it on sale, and I think I managed to get a few hours of entertainment and a lot more hours of bored "there has to be more" out of it, so maybe try it out if you can get it cheap.

Very nice little logic / puzzle / factory game. While it is easy to figure out what shapes are required to progress, assembling them in a compact and rapid manner becomes a challenge quite quickly in later levels.

The only thing I dislike about this game is that there are time-sensitive achievements - I love to play games like this without time pressure, and so I probably won't ever get those.

This game seems like it has some neat ideas, but the execution is severely lacking. The interface is really, really, bad, and the overall gameplay seems ridiculously unforgiving: you get three or four commanders, and practically _every_ action in the game requires the presence of one. Building starbase extensions, creating transport drones at mines, commandeering a fleet ship - all require an officer present, so you're constantly micromanaging the tiniest increments.
And don't think it will get easier over time; quite the contrary, every success in-game is immediately punished by a drastic difficulty increase and more waves of vastly superior enemies spawning in droves.

I am not new to 4X games, and I am willing to put up with a bit of grind or unfair computer enemies, but being constantly pounded into the ground on the lowest difficulty setting is no fun at all.

Buy it if Dark Souls is your thing, or you really enjoy making Excel sheets to plan out your moves.

While this game is online free-to-play and therefore needs to include monetization mechanics, I think it has the fairest system I have so far encountered: there is never a paywall that simply blocks off content for paying customers, at its worst you can alway grind out the premium currency at a reasonable rate.

I really enjoy the gameplay, which is fast-paced, but not as much relying on twitchy gamer reflexes as it is on tactics and learning to target the enemies' weaknesses. The individual missions are mostly brief (several minutes), and although I generally loathe joining parties in multiplayer games due to the unpredictability of your teammates here it is most of the time a positive experience of quick cooperation followed by equally quick group dissolution.

Of course there are aspects for people who like to focus more on the multiplayer components; but speaking as someone who prefers solo play, I can only recommend this system.

First of all: this is not a Final Fantasy game. The FF I know consists of exploring an ever-wider opening world, grinding, trying out different tactics, configurations of jobs and equipment and spells, fighting boss monsters for huge rewards in power... almost none of which can be found here.
This game is one linear corridor from beginning to close to the end. There are encounters along the way which you can't skip - and you don't want to skip them since you are expected to have leveled up a certain amount when you have reached the next inevitable battle. This makes for an extremely predictable difficulty curve, with occasional back-and-forth required to grind up to the next power level.
The character configuration options are ridiculous: you get one accessory slot and one weapon slot. That's it. No more. You can sort of use that to kind of specialize in either physical or magical damage, but apart from that it barely qualifies as fluff, let alone a valid mechanism for the player to influence the combat.
The battle system itself is interesting, and if it was not quite as frantically paced and allowed for more precise interactions it would be a nice change of pace from strict turn-based play; but as it is it involves the player staring at the lower left corner of the screen, switching between "heal" and "damage" configurations as the situation demands, unable to actually watch the battle taking place.

All in all: a big disappointment that is not worthy to carry the words "Final Fantasy" in the title. I might play it through to the end if I have excess free time, but I can't say I'm either captivated by the story or the mechanics of this below-average on-rails pseudo-RPG.

Pro:
+ Gorgeous graphics, level design
+ Soundtrack is wonderful and worth listening to on its own
+ Story is overall quite nice, if not mind-blowingly original
+ The "Remix" mini-games where you edit someone else's memories are awesome

Con:
- The fights get repetitive pretty quick
- Enemies tend to swarm you, making any kind of strategy wishful thinking
- Very linear, more of an interactive movie than an RPG where you make actual choices

All in all a recommended game if you can pick it up cheap and are not deterred by repetitive combat. It is a pretty short game, too, so you should be able to go through the story on the lowest difficulty level in an afternoon or two.