Recent reviews by Vilham

I can't say this is worth your money, I really am not sure why they scrapped this as a live service game, it has all the systems and structures I would expect of a free to play looter shooter, those are fine for those kind of multiplayer games. As a mostly single player paid game it just isn't worth your time and money.

Great call back to C&C well worth the price

Frankly I do not understand at all the review score for this game, it seems its mostly backlash against some changes from EA to release and not to do with the actual quality of the game itself. I'll try and address the criticisms and what I actually like about the game.

The game uses floors and isn't a massive open world. Ok, I can understand people liked that originally but the floors actually make this an enjoyable experience when compared to something like Satisfactory. The floors allow for quick easy travel around the world, it provides a good gating mechanic that requires you to work to overcome, it creates an interesting narrative layer and progression. You should think of it like depth in Subnautica that gates your progress behind factory/research progression.

The game is abandoned. Ok what does this mean, its launched. This just smacks of entitlement and is something I despise about both players and developers. Games can just be complete, its not broken and it has good balance. There is nothing else needed, you do not need to play this 10 euro game for thousands of hours, go buy and play some other games.

As to what I enjoyed about the game. I like the sense of progression and balance within that., it isn't incredibly grindy and respects my time when compared to something like satisfactory. It has similar tech/mechanic progression to factorio where you unlock new techs that don't require you to completely rebuild but instead add new mechancis to learn and that happens every 15 hours or so.

The building itself works pretty well and easily. There a few things that could be improved or perhaps I didn't fully understand like building a whole conveyor line and switching between the modes as you build automatically forcing the placement of the mode that you linearly have to switch to. However overall I would say the building/digging mechanics are all very accessible and easy to use.

Overall I would actually recommend this over something like satisfactory and would place it alongside things like Core Keeper in terms of how enjoyable it is.

Great little Dungeon Keeper like game,, I like how nearly all the mechanics were handled. Presentation and UI are great.

Not super interested in just survival mode so the campaign drew me in. It basically has nothing to do with the core mechanics and such is slow and quite boring.

Phenomenal game, this is exactly what I would hope a sequel to any game would be like, keeping the theme and general mechanics similar but creating something new and evolved from that.

Fool me once shame you on you, fool me 15 times shame on me. Last total war game I think I will buy. The formula does not ever change or evolve and just becomes more and more min maxy.

Good game at its core that unfortunately I can not recommend.

While the game has some great mechanics it just has too many friction points that have zero respect for your time. Here's a few examples:

- Blueprint editor frankly sucks, it gives very minor gains to productivity and frankly you could end up just building things as quickly as you do designing your blueprints. This is made worse by not having the full feature early, but having it increase in max blueprint size per milestone, thus meaning your early BPs are no longer that useful. Another massive weakness are things not connecting when placing BPs so you have to do all the fiddly nonsense like hooking up power and belts anyway. I understand they have technical limitations being a 3d game but this feature is just a very poor implementation of something factorio and Dyson Sphere Program have mastered..
- One perk is that buildings are just built from raw resources so you don't need to build those structures in factories, cool. This is immediately counter acted by the resource outputs of machines being frankly a joke. I can build a huge megastructure that outputs 12/m of a tier 3 resource and to make that worse I am expected to build thousands of these things to reach a new stage. Ok, so I can optimise right. Only if you want to spend many hours optimizing and rebuilding entire factories which is something that would take 1 hour max in other factory games.
- Trains don't have automatic tower placement like belts, so even building a simple train network takes hours, again factorio I can do an entire track build in no time with blueprints and being able to build out huge sections of tracks without dealing with fiddly placement due to the world. If you want to make a 3d game make the features work well for a 3d game.
- Power done by wires is just the wrong call for the game, it should work like all other factory games and just be a radius that powers something, hooking up manually power cables for the thousand time is not interesting. Why not have foundations just distribute power or something less tiresome.

The game has some great things, the world and discovery is cool, parts of the equipment/building loop are cool, but overall it just really feels like it wants you to take hundreds of hours to complete a single playthrough.

Just a bit too simplistic.

Unfortunately the campaign balancing is terrible. Until its more reasonable I would not recommend. Its a shame as it looked like it had promise but its basically a bad version of They are billions.