Recent reviews by Calsetes

I can't recommend this game.

Did I have fun playing it? Sure. Is it good? It's pretty good.

Why do I not recommend it? I watched someone play the game, and it convinced me to buy it. The company, who only sponsored the person *after* their influence helped sell it to people like me, has since dropped them as a sponsor. They took the publicity and ran.

So, do not buy this game. They do NOT stand behind the people they use to promote the game, even after they make giant strides to help their sales reach their goals.

DO NOT SUPPORT THIS COMPANY.

Edit: My views remain the same.

As the game is in its current state, Not Recommended.

It is a PvEvP game - you will be fighting enemies and gathering lootables found in the world as well as other players. It is an extraction shooter - you need to get out with your goods or else you drop them and your gear on the ground for others to take. These are not issues why the game is not recommended right now.

Currently, the ways to generate income are fairly limited in the game - you can sell a few components you get from "bandit" cradles in the game for a relatively minor amount, or you can mine AO crystals, the "proposed" way to gain credits in the game, however this comes with several downsides. One, you must get out with them to have them count. Two, they add weight, thus making you move slower. Three, unless you happen to get all green-rarity or higher crystals, it's not worth it most times. Four, the only guaranteed way to get higher crystal values is to wait until it's raining (a random chance when you have a limited amount of time to be in the field) as well as use a higher-rarity extractor, as your lower-grade ones will not even be able to mine the crystal in some cases. This leads into the next issue.

To upgrade your gear, it costs money and resources - a LOT of money and resources. You can reduce these costs by finding some stuff in the field - the parts for a green-rarity gun to be upgraded into a blue one cost roughly 70k each, and require a few to perform one upgrade. However, the gun must be bought - not expensive, only 9k - and you must pay to craft it - again, not much, only about 8k. However, you can easily lose it less than a minute into a run if you are extremely unlucky - and that is a very expensive loss, even if you insure it. I've already explained how hard it is to make money using the preferred in-game means. This doesn't help when it comes to the insurance system, which seems to be inconsistently priced in general. More below.

Insurance will pay out some amount based on what is being insured. Rarer gear means more of a payout if lost. However, this amount is, as stated, wildly inconsistent. To upgrade a gun from green to blue, it can cost as little as 17k in credits to as much as 150k+. The gun sells for roughly 56k. To insure it, you pay 10% of that price. Now, where the issues arise is with something like the plasma charger - a blue gun you actually can buy in the shop, has infinite regenerating ammo, and costs 60k in the shop to buy. It insures for 5k, and when lost you will get roughly 55k back. This price is inconsistent with other blue guns, which again cost either very little (but require time investment to farm components for) or a whole lot (over triple the price you get for selling it.) This doesn't even touch cradle components, which seem even harder to find components for and are even more costly (most green cradle parts are 12-24k each, with one costing a whopping 1-2 million per piece.) These also pay out little when insured relative to the cost to make them, with several components being so rare you almost have no alternative but to buy them in the shop. The green cradles I mentioned? When insured, they only pay you roughly 1/10th the cost of buying them from the shop. You pay 1 million for a part, you pay an extra 10k to insure it, and when you die you only get 100k back. High-risk, high-cost, makes sense. Given income generation issues, though, this becomes a bigger hurdle. The only way this could get worse is if...

PvP is a component of the game. You have two factions - the Association (the co-op faction, by design,) and the Black Market (the free-for-all faction, despite the ability to team up with other BM members.) BM members have a bounty on killing them based on how many players they have killed. Association members don't. Currently, each faction has specific gear and weapons available to them the other faction has zero access to, unless you happen to get a random one in a "loot box"-like supply pack, or loot one off the corpse of someone who had it. The mech parts for the Association reduce damage against Enders, the NPC "monsters" you find in the wilds. The BM ones reduce damage against energy weapons, which only the association members have and use. The Association, as mentioned, only have energy weapons - they deal more damage to enders, but do not have bullet dropoff (but still reduced damage the further out the bullets travel.) BM members have ballistic weapons, which do more damage against mechs, and do have bullet dropoff. You can see where this is going, right? The main issue with this current imbalance is that Association members have zero way to group up before going into the field, or joining a friend already in the field. This stacks the deck against them, by not having armor to reduce other players' damage, or weapons effective against the enemy faction. Combine this with the fact that there's only so many elevators in the field, and BM players will camp those, shooting anyone who tries to leave, or anyone dropping into the map at that location. Your magus will warn you when they spot someone of the opposing faction, however the sniper rifles can shoot from outside this range, and the higher-end ones - like the one given to everyone towards the end of the current season pass, which several people have already gotten by buying their ranks or playing obsessively since early launch - can one-shot the basic starter mech, and even some of the green ones. There is literally no counter to this, period.

For a game that touts the PvE as much as the PvP aspects, one of these is clearly lacking, and the PvP is currently imbalanced towards one faction than the other to a significant degree. Until they fix these issues, I do not recommend the game. This is all without even going into the microtransaction portion of paying to speed up research, crafting, and upgrade times - things typical of a free mobile game, but not expected in a full-priced AAA game, especially one where the real money you pay for something can quickly and permanently be lost less than a minute into your first outing.

If Bandai-Namco improves the social / co-op aspects of the game, and / or addresses the imbalance between the two factions, then I can recommend it. If it goes free - completely free, with some sort of compensation for those of us who bought it day one - then I can recommend it. In its current state? I cannot. If you want an extraction shooter, go play one of the others on Steam. If you want a PvE game with mechs, go play one of the others on Steam. If you want to make waifus, go play one of the others on Steam (seriously, most games with a character creator would fit here.)

This is basically Anime Star Fox but with an upgrade system and a separate roguelike mode. I played through my first "campaign" (and similar to Star Fox, there are multiple routes you can take which effectively are easy, normal, and hard. I only encountered one boss on my first run that was a bit confusing on what to do, but locking on with a missile showed me where I needed to hit to continue with the fight.

Highly recommend if you like Star Fox and other similar rail shooter-esque games like that.

SECOND UPDATE: Devs have finally made good on their promise to remove the requirement of an EGS account to play online, it's now optional. As stated, I will change my review back to positive. I'll be updating the end of it to include my experiences of the game since then.

UPDATE: Devs / publishers looking into the EGS aspect to change it if possible. If it is changed to at least be unobtrusive (not need a separate account for it) then I will change my review to positive, but not until then.

First and foremost:

This game requires an Epic Games Store (EGS) account to play Multiplayer and requires Epic Online Services (EOS) to be installed to play the offline single-player campaign. This was NOT announced or present on their store page until AFTER release. This right now is the only reason I am rating this negatively.


I really like this game. It's EDF as you'd expect - a direct sequel to EDF 5, where you continue to play as Storm-1, the hero of the Earth who defeated the alien supreme commander. 5 years pass and you start off with a rookie squad cleaning up some remnants of the invaders.

Many systems are carried over from 5 - armor is applied in some smaller amounts to other classes you don't play as, and you can unlock and upgrade some weapons for those other non-played classes in missions.

I haven't had a chance to play much, but the biggest disappointment (other than the aforementioned EGS fiasco) is the opening level is again slow and unengaging. Most EDF games throw you into the fray from the get-go - a horde of bugs after maybe 30 seconds of exposition at most. EDF 5 had you go through an actual mini-tutorial, followed by a lot of running around while they do plot setup in a sense, with maybe 30 bugs through the whole mission. 6 continues this approach with a long, drawn-out walk through corridors, listening to a captain demean his green recruits, and then run off to practice some shooting before "oh no, aliens again!" The first few missions also start relatively slow - you start with the frog men and fight maybe 20 in each mission before you finally get to bugs around mission 3.

Overall, it is a good recommendation - but the score is negative due to the EGS incident. If you want EDF without EGS, pick up 4.1, 5, or Iron Rain.

UPDATED REVIEW: So, I've finished the game's stoy, and it is incredibly awesome. You won't need to have played 5 for it, but like all good games playing it makes it about 100% more epic, as you go back to that game's earliest moments and do something amazing.

Not Recommended, at least for right now.

It definitely feels like someone's first attempt at making a game, which isn't a bad thing. It's also fairly cheap, which is why I'm not straight-up refunding it. However, two stages in, I can already tell some stuff feels "off" about it.

Menu movement needed my gamepad to navigate, as the sensitivity for the "cursor" is so high my gamepad's left stick not being perfectly dead center caused it to always drift in some direction - not an issue with the gamepad being old or used, this game must have zero "dead zone" for what is the default neutral position for the stick, the tiniest wiggle in some direction would send it drifting in some direction. Not an issue, but if you have a gamepad hooked up, and you decide to use the mouse and keyboard, it doesn't take any input other than the gamepad - because the cursor is moving, thus mouse input is immediately overwritten. Having some degree of "neutral" for the stick would prevent this. This also isn't an issue once in-game and opening your inventory, as they apparently abandon the same cursor on the main menu for a regular mouse cursor without the super-sensitive dead zone.

Ok, so into the game itself - animations feel slightly off, can't put my finger on it exactly. Also, while ammo drops are frequent from enemy kills, the eggs you encounter in the first level not so much, and you'll get roughly an ammo drop at the end of your clip, which won't refill a whole clip, and you might need to melee an enemy once or twice to get the killing blow if your ammo runs out. It's not an issue of missing too many shots, either, as we'll get to in a bit - the eggs are just very weak, but tend to not drop ammo nearly as much as enemies do (as it seems every enemy drops at least one pickup.)

Aiming down your gun's sights will sometimes lock up when you reload, and you have to toggle the aiming button again to "fix" it. This prevents you from sprinting. Sprinting is also not a "mode" that is activated when you click the stick and begin sprinting, and stops when you stop moving - you must click and hold it while moving to sprint. Again, another small change that would be good. Haven't seen a need for the roll in the first two stages yet, but you move pretty far and I think your direction is fixed forward, which again could prove an issue down the line. Jumping feels extra-floaty for some reason. Objects you move with the gravity gun once found feel as if they have no weight, despite them obviously being heavy cargo containers. You can pick one up and plow through the others as if they were made of cardboard - and they do little impact damage to enemies as well. Have not tested to see if I could hurt myself with it.

Stage 2 you get your first armor piece - the titular Cosmotroid's "hands" unit. This... tells you nothing. I instinctively went into my inventory to equip it, which is what you need to do. What does it do? The item itself doesn't tell you. There is no tooltip when you pick it up telling you what it does. I found it in the middle of a maze of corridors which has you running from one "branch" to the left to the other "branch" to the right and back and forth a few times, before you encounter a large open room with a bunch of cargo crates and two big enemies in it. The big enemies aren't hard - you fight several prior to that and the default gun can take them down, however when they are stunned, you will keep firing and your shots will miss, passing through them as they are essentially invulnerable for a few frames. Not a terrible thing since you do have another not-Gravity-based weapon by that time, a handgun, so ammo won't be an issue, but it can be worrying to waste shots in your starter weapon because of it, and it starts running low.

So, back to the large room. Cargo boxes hide nothing. Earlier there was a room with a locked door across a pit I couldn't jump across. Maybe I go back there? I go back there. I notice while climbing out of the pit (I didn't make the jump again) that I was not climbing or wall-running or something. I do that to cross the pit. Door's locked, I'm informed something is in the hangar. I return to the hub and talk to the only NPC I've seen so far, who hasn't done much but stated the obvious up to this point - "kill enemies, clear doors, get out." Except now he notices I have the armor hands, and tells me I can wall-run, and I should go to the hangar. Where is the hangar? I'm still not sure if it's the room with the pit or the big empty room, nothing so far has seemed "hangar-esque" with shuttles or anything in this stage. So I go to a previous area that was very foggy - too foggy, I think, though I know they want you to have limited visibility for a reason I think it could be done better - and run up a ramp. Maybe I'll wall-run to the other side, it looks like a flat wall but who knows. I do it - and somehow go out of bounds, but not so much that I'm outside the level geometry. I'm stuck on a "floor" above where I should be, and can't drop down in any way. I attempt to break the boundary again, and do so, only to arrive on top of the map. No way back in. I jump into the pit, and fall... and keep falling. Nothing stops. I spent a good bit of time in this second level already, so at this point I quit out entirely.

It's extremely rough. It needs some tweaking here and there, I'm guessing a considerable amount if you consider these first two stages with these issues. That said, there is something there underneath it all that could be good. A diamond, stuck in the middle of tons of coal and dirt and clay surrounding it. The premise of an alien outbreak on a colony planet isn't anything new, but sometimes it's best to stick to classics when trying your hand at a new venture. The voice acting was... a bit odd, might have been AI (not positive), but again something that could probably be fixed in the future.

To summarize, it's right now a Not Recommended. While cheap, you'd probably be better off buying lunch at a fast food place instead (or half a lunch, given inflation.) But there is promise and potential, if the devs keep working at it.

Still in my first year, but so far it's managing to scratch that itch I've wanted from "something like Stardew Valley, but *not* Stardew Valley."

A lot of the systems are similar - the year is 4 seasons long, the seasons are 28 days long, each week is 7 days, etc. You plant seeds, water them, crops grow, quality varies depending on factors. You build a place to keep animals, you get animals, you clean up their messes and feed them, you get stuff from them. You fish. You upgrade your stuff. You talk to people and give them gifts, then marry someone.

However, it's in how all this stuff happens that it's different from Stardew. For crops, you need to first find seeds in the wild before you can "buy" them from the guy who sells them. You can swing by every few days and get more seeds for free, too (however, I'm still working out whether it's better to buy them or get the free ones after initial crops are grown, due to how crops work.) As you grow and harvest these crops, you learn more about them - how long they take to grow, etc. This knowledge then not only improves the chances of getting higher-quality crops, but also they go from "wild tomatoes" which give few contribution points and restore little stamina to domesticated tomatoes, which give more points and restore more stamina.

You want to improve your tools, you need to find materials to do it - but you also need to give them to your tribe's toolmaker to figure out how these chunks of different rocks make your thing that cuts stuff cut better. The one advantage here is that while they make you a better water bucket, you still have your crappy waterskin, and don't have to plan on killing your crops for a few days or waiting until the right day when it starts raining to take care of it.

Animals aren't bought, but tamed - this means you go to them each day for a few days and play a quick little rhythm game to get them on your side (it's not hard, I suck at rhythm games and I've only failed maybe 5 notes the entire time I've done it.) Different animals give different things - boars give fur, goats give horns and milk, ostriches give eggs, etc. You can also ride an animal as a mount once you get their affection up and "discover" the idea from the right tribal member.

This brings about the reason why you do all this - contribution. Contribution is both your in-game tribe level as well as your own personal "currency." Everyone in your tribe will contribute to the tribe's total every day, and whatever you contribute is a bonus. You need certain amounts to "discover" ideas - be it "hey, if we hang up sticks by the river, we can just wash and dry our clothes right there!" to "If we build something like a house for animals, we could keep them here with us, instead of having to go to the forest and track them down every day." Your personal contribution is used, as mentioned, as a currency - while it helps the tribe's totals, spending it won't reduce the total amount earned, so feel free to use some for seeds, or save up for a bigger animal shed or whatever. Much like in Stardew, crops on their own won't sell for much, so the advantage is to find out how to make them worth the most contribution points and then turn them in. Some stuff is relatively simple - fish you catch can be dried, which gives them a larger bonus than smoking, cooking, or fermenting them. However, you can only do 4 items per drying rack, and they take 3 hours to dry, so you might put your "best" fish in there, and then smoke or ferment your lesser fish. Stuff can be crushed into juice, increasing its contribution. Past a certain point, you'll find it's not worth it to have "wild tomato plants" growing, or "wild tomatoes" in your storage when you're now growing regular domesticated ones, so you'll pulp them all into juice and carry it with you for a stamina boost whenever you need.

I haven't tried the multiplayer out yet. Not sure if I will get a chance to. However, I imagine it's similar to Stardew, where everyone just kinda works together, or does their own thing to help out. Overall, it's a nice alternative to Stardew Valley, in case you want something that feels very similar, yet still different in its own unique way.

Edit: The devs are very quick so far to fix dialogue issues. The problem I ran into the day I wrote this review was fixed the very next day. Big recommend from me now.

Good game, but maybe wait a week or two before picking it up. There's a few dialogue bugs.

Overall, it's your basic "raising sim," combined with a dark atmosphere as well as a bit of a "recycling" mechanic. The standard gameplay loop is as follows:

• Summon succubus using a combination of materials
  
• Raise their stats (one boosts gold gain, one boosts XP gain, and one is their affection stat, needed to use higher-gain jobs / trainings)
  
• Send them to work to gain money and XP
  
• Kill them off for better mats and to gain their XP for your use
  
• Repeat until you have the right stuff needed to complete endgame conditions

It's repetitive, but simple - a good way to relax when you don't want something stressful, or if you only have a few minutes to put into a gaming session (it can be played in bite-sized chunks easily, each week takes only a few minutes to assign people at its start and midway through it, and "tidy up" at the end or start of every week.)

However, like I said, right now there's a few dialogue bugs that prevent you from moving forward along those paths. Devs seem to be working on them, which is good, and it likely won't be an issue unless you're a completionist who puts a lot of time into games right off the bat. If so, then hold off for a week or two, maybe three while they get some of those issues ironed out.

Somewhat short if you're good at puzzle games, but the voice acting is top-notch, the plot raises quite a few interesting questions, and the "special twist" that a lot of these sorts of sci-fi games have isn't the usual same-old, same-old twist you'd expect.

For $20, if you like puzzle games in the same vein as Portal, and if you want a little bit of probing into what differentiates machine-thinking from biological-thinking, then you can't go wrong.

Left the first planet, been exploring the second. Thoughts on it so far:

-Units seem to be easy to get so long as you scan and upload everything. As such, I'd recommend getting the scanner upgrade ASAP.

-Inventory is a bit of an issue, but I've heard that's alleviated further in. Only found two suit upgrades, none for the ship or multitool.

-Schematics come from a variety of places - terminals in buildings, destroyed drones and other debris, helping aliens, etc.

-Some lag in the menu screens. Could be my system, unless other users report the same.

-Randomly had massive framerate loss after playing for a while. Could be related to memory not dumping correctly. Restarting fixes the issue for me.



I plan on updating this as I come across more features / issues / things of note. So far, it's what I wanted from it - light survival aspects (it's not hard at all to find Carbon to recharge your suit / mining beam) and a big, big focus on exploration.