Recent reviews by Rock Stonegroin

Despite a charming aesthetic and neat ideas... it's got problems.

Pros: visuals are great. The art style and concept is rad.

The music is catchy but without being too upfront or attention grabbing. Fits well to the idea of the game.

The game runs well and doesn't have any technical issues that I could see.

Cons: fundamentally flawed gameplay design. Too many spinning plates. Heat balance, power management, punch card selection and loading, dodging manually and shutting down arms, swapping between defense, balanced, and attack programs. It's too much.

Only a few elements have a hotkey bound on the keyboard. The rest are manually clicking. So you have to focus on UI elements in the corner while the fighting happens. As the game gets harder you increasingly ignore the visuals and are micro managing mouse clicks on a corner of the screen.

tl;dr- the game has too many mechanics and almost all of them require clicking. Difficulty increase turns it into a game where you're so focused on the clicking in the small corner to win its more like micro managing competitive rts than a fun rhythm game.

A surprisingly fun little timewaster. Enough complexity that it's not just mindless, but at the same time it's not overwhelming. Definitely a fun game and worth the modest price of entry.

The game has a promising foundation, but it needs a lot more polish to be worth the price of entry. One of the fundamental problems I had right away was the lighting engine and how it handles transitioning between sources of light and your characters "vision" adjusting. Even on the highest brightness settings it seems like torches barely give you more vision that lighting past your nose. And then you get flashbanged when you go anywhere with light sources from the outside.

Additionally, moving feels too "floaty" both in how you swing on things as well as just move around.

The last solid complaint I have is that the building system is kinda rough. Where it's hard to know where you're placing things and ultimately the most reliable way is to just pull the objects in as close as possible and then stand on top of where you're putting stuff to have a chance for them to be placed roughly where you want them to go.

As flawed as it can be at times I was really missing the build engine from something like conan:exiles when trying to build and place things in this.

I will give them props for going out of their way to get John Rhys-Davies to voice Gimli in this and do narration. That actually was a really nice touch.

Edit: in retrospect I realize the game isn't being sold as Early Access. But as a "complete" release. Which just makes my issues with the game even more glaring. The quality of what you're getting with this game feels like an EA title in its first month or two of release. Not a game that's considering itself complete. Definitely stay away unless they do some serious patching.

The game feels very unbalanced and really unforgiving. After playing a match and spending every fight being killed in less than 5-10 seconds? I found the experience incredibly frustrating and unfun. Even when it was 1v1 fights.

I'd say give the game more time to cook before playing it.

I can't in good conscience recommend this game. It's far too prone to crashing. If you're willing to put up with your runs dying cause of the game randomly deciding to either die, or disconnect you from other people you're playing with... Then it's the game for you.

Otherwise whatever fun you experience from the game's setup is lost amid the game's technical issues. Which, given the age the game has under its belt... are unlikely to be fixed at this point. The straw that broke my patience's back was when the game crashed so hard I blue-screened. I've not had any other game be this crash prone.

After a slew of updates, both for bug fixing and for game features. The quality of the game has jumped by large amounts. Classes feel more unique, you have more options now, and it's worth the time to play. Especially get the game if you can get it on a sale.

So, as much as I like the visual style, the mechanics of upgrading your ship and the general setting/plot... I can't recommend this. Your ship's movement has momentum in a way that makes it feel floaty and awful. When you want to move you start to move but there's a weird momentum to it. Where it takes a split second to hit full movement speed.

The real problem comes when you want to stop moving. Where you keep moving a little bit, and this floaty movement is a big portion of the difficulty for me. It seems counter to other shmups in a way that does this game no favors. Especially since even your basic weapon has limited ammo before it reloads to let you fire again.

So you have to juggle multiple weapons and ammo, can't fire them simultaneously, and your ship is floating/sliding to a stop while there's quite a few enemies on screen simultaneously. I hope the devs change their minds as time goes on with how the ship moves. It just "feels" bad.

A pale imitation of everything the original hawken was. The graphics are clearly meant for a mobile game. The interface the same. The assets all being ai generated and poorly wiggle animated nonsense doesn't help.

The only positive, the only one, I will give this? The voice acting is actually decent. That's it. Everything else is terrible. Pass on this. Especially if you liked or cared at all about the original game.

Rug pulling this game onto EGS a year after its release is an absolute scumbag move to do. And I don't even know why I'm posting this review since you can't even buy the game on steam anymore. ♥♥♥♥ this company.

The game is unrelentingly brutal of a grind past the ww2 era vehicles. To the point that if you aren't getting a kill or two a match by the time you're even in early jets. You'll actually be running negative on income. They actually were going to make this worse. To the point that if you were an F2P player? You would have had to get several kills to stand a chance at coming out ahead of repair costs.

Add onto the dlc where vehicles are so expensive. And it just makes spending money, or time, in this game a mistake. One that I have regretfully made.