Recent reviews by Cuddly

Tons of meaty, fun and challenging puzzles to solve with no true hints of any kind. Lots and lots and lots and lots....
okay quite a few puzzles but the more the merrier, right?
lots and lots and lots
...okay cool it with the puzzles guys. this game took 3 or 4 sessions because of my lack of desire to open a door and see another flipping puzzle with something slightly different than before. I'm not saying the story was bad or the puzzles weren't GOOD, but it certainly was not engaging enough to play so many puzzles to beat the game, because only a few puzzles were truly satisfying to figure out. and the good feeling of realizing how to solve most the others was curbed because you had already figured out how to solve them, but now you have to wait for the cubes to rewind all the way through the cube changer and then on the laser button and off the laser button and on the elevator button and the door button to another cube and then back and then--Oh $H!%& I forgot the put the cube on the final button so I have to jump down and setup the whole thing again. NOW I can go through the exit! One of the times I quit was when I had to set up 5 times because my brain solved the puzzle 10 minutes before my hands figured out how to control in midair, causing me to miss the bridge and fall, meaning the 2 minutes of setting up and rewinding cubes was to be done all over again. Good Night. I didn't feel smart--I felt like the clumsiest circus trapeze clown in the tent with only myself to blame.

An ending so good, they pretty much put it the middle and the beginning too. The end was so painfully predictable that it was the reason I gave the whole game a thumbs down. The ending sequence was so slow, not climactic and out of the player's control (while still making you move around/press a button) that I was physically screaming and begging for something cooler to happen than what actually did, and I only finished the last of the puzzles because I was desperate to see it! Oh what, the main characters have actually been looping for a while now, and you may have finally looped to a timeline that fixed the problem, but we're gonna put you in the same dreamscape from the beginning of the game and end on a pseudo cliffhanger? Woah, broke new ground there.I REALLY wanted a more solid ending or maybe even an epilogue on how the Earth is doing now that you saved it (or didn't, WHATEVER). I also did not enjoy the characters' interactions with each other. I think they were voiced well, but they just kind of "clashed" with the theme the rest of the game was putting out. I know writing is incredibly difficult and I couldn't do any better so it didn't bother me too much, it's just the main character did not seem like someone who was in peril, running around from incredibly dangerous room to incredibly dangerous room. She would say something like, "wow. I can't believe the Earth has just exploded. There must be something we can do, Astra." Meanwhile, Astra's like,"don't worry! your survival rate is calculated to be at 69% percent. Nice! Yeet!" I still thought Astra was awesome but it became too human and non-logical way too quickly and it their feelings toward each other was not really earned. You can have Astra sacrifice itself, that's a good step but it meant nothing because you pretty much knew they'd both be fine. Fake-out deaths are a bit overused nowadays. Maybe the main character could have thrown herself in harms way to save astra instead? Except she pretty much did that, but it more like a "I need this super advanced weapon back if I want to get out of here" more than "I want to save my friend" Maybe instead of the main character weaponless the whole time Astra is gone, she finds a duplicate or prototype entropy device that doesn't have Astra on it, or at least, the same Astra. Boom. Now she has a choice, and decides to save her Astra even though she didn't need to. Simple stuff like that can go a long way. Neither of the characters really had a difficult choice to do anything that was done in the game.

In conclusion, if you like lots of challenging puzzles, you may like this game. Lord knows it took me a while. I sure hope some of my 19 hour playtime is me leaving the game on overnight or something because yikes.

DISCLAIMER: I played this game on a laptop's RTX 3070 on high and a desktop's RTX 3090 on ultra settings (alt+x). I could not play the game before updating my drivers on GeForce Experience.

Given that I was not expecting a crazy high frame rate, I was surprised by the fact that the 3070 did very well and the game looked as advertised: frames were not terrible--maybe 30-35 max. The 3090 did so well on my 1440p monitor that I played the whole game and didn't once think, "Boy this framerate is really killing my experience." It was probably around 45-60 the whole time (low for my typical standards but this is not like playing CSGO or Rocket League so it was more than fine.) A lovely experience just to watch light dynamically flood and change the entire feeling of a room. Amazing.

Frustrating I can't even seem to load the game as the option isn't in the menu. Tried everything short of their customer support but at this point my disappointment is on par with all of these knee-jerk reviews. I guess I'm not missing much.

Edit:

After actually playing the game I would like to apologize to Frontier Games for jumping the gun. The add on is so very close to what I always wanted out of the game. It's VERY satisfying to storm a base and kill scavengers. It's a bit too slow of a viable money making strategy, but it's so fun it really doesn't matter to me right now. Maybe it's because I haven't upgraded anything yet. Good Job.

I still want to land on Earth Likes! And walk the interior of the ships. And also build. But honestly I can't ask for more for the current price. Maybe next expansion??? :3

GS:GO is the gold standard. If you're good at CS:GO, you're pretty much good at every other FPS.