Recent reviews by loquee

Greetings from Jonathan :)

yep, it's as good as everybody says

I don't get the negative reviews.
This game is exactly as advertised.
Nice action, very nice visuals and really good sound design.
The upgrade system and resource collecting adds good motivation.

Amazingballs!
Wanted to start my review with 'Fun little brawler' but that is actually wrong.
The amount of great game modes is surprising and I can see myself spending a lot of time with each of them!
The building stuff functionality is also already really polished and loads of fun!
Will look into the player generated stuff next, that looks very intriguing too :)

can't think of any other turn based game, that kept me motivated after finishing the main campaign (60+ hours for me).

Very smooth reactive UI, animations and transitions troughout the game.
As many pointed out, the writing is superb.
Witty, funny, crunchy bit sized text snippets make up for many of the shortcomings:
- repetitive battles and events
- unlocking new ships or officers does not feel rewarding and brings very little variety
- the rock paper scissor system of ship classes is too simple
- weapons feel unbalanced and skewed to a few no brainer picks, while others seem useless

Nevertheless, for the asking price you get a game that tries something new with mixing proven formula and that succeeds in enough aspects to provide many hours of good entertainment.
If you are looking for your fix of FTL- like, it is not even close, but it can very well help with the wait for something truly worthy and from the developer replies I have hopes they are going to bring some interesting updates.

In short, give it a shot right away

FTL is one of my favorite games and in my desparate search to scratch that itch, I decided to check this game out, despite the warnings from other reviewers, to not expect a real spiritual successor.
The first hours were rather frustrating, riddled with clunky micromanagement and the unintuitive UI (70 hours later, this still remains one of the major issues for me)

A few of my early frustrations have been patched out with updates already.
The ongoing support and development are very commendable. A good reason of its own to give this a chance if you are curious.

There are nice ideas and a very motivating progression system.
My early runs with a new ship and newly unlocked items (Every run earns you fate points that must be spent on start of the next run) were very fun and even failing early because of stupid choices (too aggressive mostly) had a rewarding result or either unlocking nice perks or even permanent buffs.

If you are intruiged by a more complex, bigger and longer FTL-like, don't read on, just purchase it (and don't wait for a sale, get it now).

From now on there are multiple spoilers and mostly feedback to the devs.

While I had a really good time and totally my money's worth, the late runs with the best ships turned out to be exhausting ultralong grinds (up to 10 hours when I tried to absolutely perfect micromanagement of crew, power, modules, resources, storage space and get maximum possible loot in every system).
Some late ships like the saucer are useless, so doing another attempt to finally get the last biggest ship was already pretty uninteresting. Unfortunately, with this long desired 'big price' the game got even less fun.

My wished for the future of this game:
- a more streamlined late game that ramps up difficulty as well as interesting rewards.
I would enjoy late systems to be smaller, more dangerous, require a more strategic approach than grinding everything and fighting almost all fights
- make the middle of the game a lot more randomized. doing the metal-gathering run in the easy sector gets old quickly and annoying soon after. take note from FTL with its branching here.
- give me a reason to revisit earlier ships. maybe let me unlocke advanced version and also some ship specific perks that cost a lot of fate points, but give me a completely different way to approach a new run.
- balance weapon types better, make it less of a no brainer to go with energy weapons (maybe I'm just too focused on that tactic to see how to make it happen and it already is the case)
- Let me save and load what modules are installed. switching engines, swapping labs/groweries against shield generators and weapons, BEFORE and AFTER EVERY potential fight is necessary, but utterly annoying.
Alternatively, balance this out by applying a resource cost to changing modules (preffered option for me)

all the best, cheers!

review in progress...

So far I have played the first 10 hours of the campaign and just finished my first huge battle.
Fantasy General II has nailed the formula, it is really motivating to build your army and make sure none of your precious units perishes.
What differentiates this game from others is how the health bars work.
Every health bar divides into sub-bars for every unity in the squad (So only 2 bars for huge trolls, or i.e 7 bars for a squad of human soldiers). Damage causes injury, and injured units no longer contribute to the units attack damage. Injured units can be healed by resting (which can be interrupted by enemies, a very interesting tactical component).
Sometimes, in addition to injury, units will die and therefor are removed for the rest of the mission. This also leads to xp loss.
For me that's the most intriguing part of the game, it makes a huge difference in tactical playstyle compared to similar games I know.

The campaign is well done and I like the story.
There are a few bold game design decisions that almost spoiled the fun for me, like a stupid difficulty spike very early on in the game, that forced me to restart on easy (making the following missions much too unchallenging as well)
Nevertheless, in total I'm having a good time and recommend getting it for full price.

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update after more than 50h into the game:
wow the campaign is massive!
The middle part is exceptionally great.
You command an army with lots of very different units, composed from various different creature types, allowing for amazing tactical variety.

It is an early access title that I am happy to support.
Already really enjoyable in its current form.
If you like the genre (or like me are curious about it), get it already and contribute feedback, vote for features on trello and support this game with you wallet!

Exploring this breathtaking world and constantly playing around with camera angles is already a great experience.
The trailers gives a very good idea of what to expect, all scenes could have been captured directly from game without additional tools.
There are some clever playful elements and also a few twists in the very well crafted subtle narration.
The 3-4 hours of a first playthrough will feel like less, which makes the game perfect to be played in one sitting.
I highly recommend putting this on your wishlist and playing it without longer breaks.