Recent reviews by Xeonzs

I didn't play the game much at all, but I remember it very fondly for it's art style, amazing soundtrack and sound design and being colorful yet grimdark.

Call me a normie but I felt there was a bit too much depth and the maps felt too much like small arenas, in xcom the maps were also technically small, but they felt larger because they were unexplored and there was enough room to go for wide flanks etc, I'm mostly comparing it against xcom cause it's also turn-based with small arena-like maps and squad management.

I still do recommend this game though, it's really a gem, but for me personally, gameplay-wise I'd rather play something else.

Don't know why I got this DLC, gave it a try yesterday and it's very meh, it's feels rough around the edges, I expected a bit more quality and polish from Colossal / Paradox.
For 10 euros more you can get an entire simairport game by the same name by an indie dev, skip this DLC, forget it exists and if you want to scratch that airplane itch/urge then just buy the game I mentioned.
It makes me miss the simple yet functional airport system we had before.

Content-wise I'd give it a 8/10 "Great addition", but story-wise I'd say 6/10 "Very flashy, but falls flat, feels shallow/hollow, could've been better" at least the ending is good and you can skip the story.

The gameplay elements such as repeatable content like the supply airdrops (essentially mini events combat events with a loot chest spawn all over dogtown) and the car deliveries, give you something to "farm" if you just want some credits and loot or just want stuff to do in between gigs, side missions and main missions, the game was sorely lacking activity like this.
The other is raw content in the form of playable area with more vertical design which is in clear contrast to NC's layout and a lot of cool new cosmetics and weapons.
Finally just some really well crafted key moments (the rare moments where the story is actually good) and new additional preem tunes.

Considering I mostly played CP2077 for the story with my first playthrough and now doing my 2nd playthrough after all the big patches (1,5 and 2.0 plus this DLC) I was expecting a lot, I was seriously impressed with all the extra content and polish in the vanilla game so I got super hyped to get into the DLC content.
Oh boy was I let down, sure it starts out all flashy and bombastic (think the michael-bay like scene in cod ww2 where the trains start flying everywhere in slow motion, crashing into everything), but for the most part you don't care as much because there is way less attachment to the characters involved as they're all brand new and they all get like 1 "touching" moment.

In essence (without spoiling too much) there's 1 over-used netrunner who just wants to get out kinda like Alt, I found her to be the most interesting, then there's the 2 FIA (CIA knock off) lapdogs, who even though they've been let down and stabbed in the back by their "government" after 7 years they'll gladly continue with espionage, cold blood murder and all the dirty things V hates corpo for, all in the name of "the greater good", meanwhile all the NUSA wants is to just expand their power, they don't like free states such as Dogtown and Night City.
My main gripe is with how the game handles that in terms of writing and player choice, you are forced to played along with the NUSA and their lapdogs, it's an on rails experience.
You can't for example side with Hansen, who is essentially what V to a certain degree stands for; ♥♥♥♥ corps, ♥♥♥♥ so-called governments, power to the people, yes he does arms trade, so what, so do all the corps, remember when you stole a tank with Panam which was headed to be sold off in some 3rd world country? but noooo, Hansen is a dictator, bad man, no likey.
He's made out to be such a bad guy, noone can take him on, a charismatic leader but also powerful, but you barely see or interact with him and then when you feel like you might be able to side with him, the game just lets one of the lapdogs off him in like a 5 second sequence (or you kill him later in standard bossfight), it actually made me laugh at the stupidity of it, rather than be immersed in the moment.
Remember when DeShawn seemed untouchable until everything started to go to ♥♥♥♥ and only then when he became vulnerable was he taken out by a third party, he was a relatively minor character, but felt more menacing than Hansen.

Ideally I would've liked my V to play along in the beginning when she is till finding out what's going on, but then once it's clear that this is about political influence / gains and to what ends the NUSA and FIA are willing to go to achieve that, I'd have liked the option to go rogue / branch off / stop cooperating.
My V is a streetkid, her heart belongs to NC, but the story forces my V to kiss the NUSA's feet, begging for their recognition like "Hmm yes president Myers, pls notice me senpai, I'll do anything, I'll be your personal division agent, command me around mommy", meanwhile they are actively trying to dismantle any power that opposes them or doesn't cooperate with them (the characters even admit this themselves).
Only towards to end can you gently tell them to buzz off, but still kinda do their bidding for the most part. (until the VERY end)
The writers also recognized this pattern and aren't afraid to point it out to you, as they have Johnny tell you at one point that you're starting to sound like the FIA lapdogs; "Everything for their greater good".

Remember when Netwatch cleared the Voodoo Boys virus out of your system, only to secretly installed their own and was later purged by Alt?
I half expected something similar to happen when V willingly lets them install implants and other doodads into/onto her body, even though mistrust is already growing at that point.
Hell, at this point in the story V is powerful enough to handle the issues thrown at her, by herself, V doesn't need their help or gadgets.


In the end I feel like the story is weak, feel robbed of player-choice, dogtown's ravaged appearance gets old fast, but I'm glad I got it for all the cool gear, extra levels and traits.
Get it for the content, at 20 dollars it's pretty good value, at 30 I feel "meh" about it, the story is rather bombastic like some michael bay stuff but is rather shallow outside of that.

I forgot how much I dislike this game.
As I love terminators and facing overwhelming odds I thought I'd naturally love this, boy was I in for a shocker.

First off everything is timed, max duration of a mission is 20 turns and ALL of the mission types require the player to be aggresive and usually spread out out, out of all the objective types (about 14 or 16) not even a single one is a defend mission, like I even tried to make my own mission but no, you're locked to the same nonsense mechanics.
So no defense/horde missions/maps, no nice firing line moments cause ain't nobody got time for that with the timers.

Secondly while I understand the dice system is supposed to be "fair" in that it can lean any direction in theory, but it seems heavily weighed in favor of the AI.
A few noteable examples of my revisit today:
Overwatch an assault on a long hallway with several blips coming in, first nid comes into view, bolter jammed, 2nd shot, bolter jammed, 3rd shot missed, 4th shot missed and now he's out of range...
So maybe you have more luck in the other hallway where you got your sergeant who has +1 melee and I gave him the storm shield and hammer for an extra die AND I put the apothecary behind him AND I put him in guard mode (reroll 1 enemy die if you'd be killed), guess what?
Kills 2 of the most basic enemies, then gets murdered by the third, fails the die roll to be revived by the apothecary, apothecary instantly gets killed by the same enemy in the same turn.

I feel like I'm in charge of the most incompetent discarded terminators with fake terminator crux on their armour, that armor being a facade, just paper and they're equipped with weapons meant to be melted for resources, not terminator grade relics.

As there is no progression really (in skirmish everything is unlocked, and in campaign things don't feel all that great) so there is no redemption arc either like you'd have in xcom 2 where yes the hit chances are hard at first and the enemy bonuses hard to negate, but as you'd get more gear and skills you'd start to see more reliable performance.
It was also acceptable because you had hitpoints and armour, if you ran out of luck and missed your overwatch hits it wasn't the end of the world, you'd have a chance to retaliate most likely or retreat and regroup, here 20% of the time you get some nice moments and 80% of the time you are slaughtered.

I never played the board game so maybe I'm just missing the post, perhaps spacehulk is only meant for a small niche of ultra hardcore masochists, but as it stands I can't recommend the game for most people.
Considering all 3 spacehulk tactical games (so not the shooters) have a daily average of 1-7 players, while dawn of war 1 and 2 still have 300-1000 average daily I think I'm not alone in how I feel about this game.

The idea is nice, but I found it rather anoying, for example while I was watching a movie, she'd move around the screen instead of stay in the corner where I put her, and then because you move her control focus is on her / the app instead of what I'm watching, so now I can't just press spacebar to pause, have to refocus on the movie so controls work there.
I mostly wanted to try it cause it was free and cause I'm nostalgic for the tamagochi vibes, but in the end I felt like a degenerate for having something like this installed as an adult male.

I forgot I had this DLC, but I always appreciated the little furrball being around in the ship.
Good way to support the devs.

The base game is pretty good, good foundation even though the core gameplay starts to get repetitive fast, I've got 55 hours in it, completed the campaign, got all classes to max level and most weapons maxxed out and I'm just kinda bored of the game, whereas with like vermintide, darktide, killing floor I didn't care if I was maxxed out, I still wanted to play more.
I see the same in my friendlist, a lot of people have already moved on.

I'd still recommend the game if it was only those issues, sadly there were some worrying things happening in the patches and the devs addressed them saying things like "we also don't want to make enemies bullet sponges", well guess what we got patch 4.0 and it's nerfdivers 2 all over again, make the enemies even bullet spongier and do more damage, make the player more fragile, but nothing interesting like more/larger group spawns, or higher rate of special enemies spawning and nerfing the most used things instead of buffing the weaker/less used stuff.
They saw what arrowhead was doing with helldivers 2 (before they changed their mindset and changed the way they balanced stuff) which was killing the game and everyone hate everything and what they went like "Wow, we should do this exact approach with Space Marine 2"..... bro you literally had an example of a potential GOTY doing what you SHOULDN'T BE DOING and then they went ahead and did it anyway.
Also tight formation is horrible game design, some of the classes literally play in getting away from the team, like an assault jumping into combat first, well he can't replenish his armor until the rest of the team in melee with him, so why bother launching in first now, or a vanguard grappling an enemy to cancel it's call for help, well he can't restore armor now cause he's away from the team, it's a neat idea in theory, except they didn't think it through.

I want to recommend the game, but stay clear for now and see if they change course on their balancing changes.
If they do realize they're ruining the game and change course, then feel free to ignore my warnings.

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Edit February 2025:
Still full of networking issues such as:
Chat delay, after 2-3 matches there will be a 1-3 minute delay in messages so you can't properly communicate with teammates.
Quick matching broken, puts you into games where they aren't queued for a mission, so then the host leaves and then the other guys leaves, now your session is bugged and when you quick match you won't get anymore results, temporary fix is returning back to main menu (more loading screens)
Sometimes you get infinite loading after a mission is complete or you get infinite joining server which is also essentially infinite loading, meaning you have to alt f4 and endure even more loading screens.
Cinematics in coop still aren't auto skippable, especially now with mods disabled.

Game is still essentially unplayable in coop modes.

Dead game.
Their slow development, weird design choices and worsening performance (due to engine switch from UE4 to UE5) basically scared off the last few players.
The player peak the last 30 days was 950, but the average is 370, if you spread that out over the entire day and all the timezones you're lucky if you can get an entire full match (probably the weekends only).

I had fun when I first tried it out, albeit it was very glitchy, cluncky and definitely still needed work, so the early access title is warranted, but by the time this goes 1.0 it will be forgotten and have even less players.

If you really want it just keep an eye on it for now and if they somehow are able to magically get players to return when the game is done, then it might be worth buying during a sale.

Sadly I can't recommend the game, I did enjoy it for a bit, but after several years of early access and now several years since 1.0 release and almost a year of inactivity the game's development is basically dead, while at the same time a lot of the game still feels unpolished and there's still various bugs such as the AI breaking, buildings spawning on a different level/floor when construction of it is finished, weird design choices such as the underground fuel tanks saying they need the space above them clear during construction, so you think you'd be able to build over them, but no, so then you might as well just build normal large fuel tanks and still have the -2 level/floor space available for construction.

A lot of the issues can be fixed by reloading your save which is a hassle on it's own since there's no load function in-game, you have to quit to main menu first and then you can load it up again.
Sadly this isn't foolproof, one of my first airport's save files got corrupted, all the taxiways were missing on loading the save file, so I figured I'd just sell the airport and start over, but that was also impossible in that save file, clicking the button doesn't do anything.

The game also randomly switches between it's rendering engine, one day it decides to load the classic textures, another day it decides to load the modern textures, whichever it feels like more at that time.

It's a shame cause the game has it's charms, if it was more fleshed out and polished I could've seen myself enjoying this as much a Prison Architect, City Skylines or Rimworld, but alas, now that I'm 30~+ hours in I just feel like giving up on the game and playing one of the mentioned games instead, hell I'd even play sim city over this, the amount of issues (Clunky UI, bugs, unpolished) you run into aren't worth the bit of fun you can have imho.
Especially not full price, if you really want it, then at least wait till it's on sale for like 10 dollars or lower, that pricing feels more appropriate for the condition it's in.

Even though I only have 15 hours in the game, I quite enjoyed it, I replayed the campaign twice and did a few skirmish matches.

Sadly gearbox and epic games had to do their usual anti-consumer ♥♥♥♥ to an otherwise fine game, the game is already 8 years old, but they figured they'd make it always-online and needing an account, whereas before it was just a standalone game.

Don't support this anti-consumer practice, buy DRM free on GOG or pirate it.