Recent reviews by Sinovera

Incredible game! I can't believe it's still in Early Access. It does not feel like an unfinished game at all. It's got more polish than a lot of actually launched games. In the 92 hours I've played so far, the game has not crashed once.

I'm blown away by the efficiency of this game. Its graphics are nice and yet it still manages to render so many things without blowing up your computer. You shoot solar sails into space and you can actually see individual ones. Fly up to it and you can see that each one has details on it. Not to mention all the processes going on in the background of all your factory pieces going.

I'll fully admit I don't know squat about programming or game development but it's just so palpable that this game has quality development behind it. There are some nice quality of life things that I had wished were in other factory-genre games such as blueprints (tropic line limitations are a bit annoying but since I started playing they added blueprint rotation which is really nice), real time stats that you can filter, and computer performance info.

There's an option to edit your mech and the interface for that is insane. It's like a whole 3D blender program tucked inside the game. The dyson sphere editor is good with the ability to make your sphere in whatever shape you like. The only things about that is the node deployment limitations where they can't be too close to each other.

Some critcisms:
-Tropic lines for blueprints are annoying as mentioned before. Though I do get that the nature of putting a square grid on a sphere kind of limited their options.
-The sorters don't line up to the input/output ports properly sometimes rendering several ports on a container useless. This is another issue of the square-on-sphere thing but I feel like if they made the sorter snapping to be more lenient or go to the conveyor belt and not the grid node it might be fixed. But what do I know.
-I wish there were an auto navigate for space travel. Just click on a planet or star system and do a "navigate to" or "warp to".
-It's a bit strange to me that right now the official "ending" of the game is reaching the end of the tech tree. The game IS named Dyson Sphere Program but you could "beat" the game without ever constructing a dyson sphere at all. Yet the final tech says that your mission is complete. It's really not! I feel like it should be having to reach a certain power output level or something since powering the centre brain is the actual mission.

I enjoyed it but it lacked balance.

It has all the same elements as Black Flag and more stuff added to it. It brought back a lot of game mechanics that were in the older games that were cool and blended it all together; but the problem was it just didn't feel as rewarding.

In the earlier games like Brotherhood and Revelations you could capture bases from your enemies to gain control of a region. But you did that in order to unlock access to the shops in that area, which you needed to renovate further in order to activate them. It made it so that capturing the base rewarded you and you also had to spend money to gain access to those shops. At the same time, unlocking those shops was an investment because they would increase your long term income.

They brought back the ability to capture bases and renovate some stuff but there was no good reason to do either of those things. They both would increase your income but there wasn't really anything to spend it on. They gave you good gear for doing other things (such as managing your fleet) and you had no real reason to buy the top gear because of that. So that left tons of money for you to upgrade your ship... which made you reach the end tier ship so much faster. I never found a single elite blueprint for my ship but took on level 3 forts with no problems. It just felt like they didn't hit that balance between money/resources and power well. I crafted maybe 2 things for Shay's upgrades and I never felt the need for any more improvements to Shay himself.

Black Flag was popular for a good reason. It really hit that great balance between needing to explore, needing to gain income, and making you feel like you're not strong enough to take on something unless you get more money to buy that improvement. It also lead you to cool areas that you wanted to explore with the main story leading to the "oh wait, what's that over there?" syndrome. Rogue just... didn't. By the end of the game I hadn't explored most of the locations. There was just no point. I had everything I needed already.

The character of Shay also just didn't do it for me. I actually really disliked Edward Kenway at first but the way his character progressed and grew as a person made me really like him by the end of the game. Shay showed no growth whatsoever. He was the same person he was at the end as he was at the beginning. He had one thing he believed in (that the Assassins were being reckless and callous in their handling of the artifacts and their power) and that's all he needed, and that's all he was. I thought the parts where it showed Shay in the future in Europe was going to lead to something major about his character but it didn't. It was all "why is he here? what happened? what is he after now? Oooh mystery!" Then it basically just came down to Haytham saying "I still want that box btw". I don't even know why Shay would stick around with the Templars after stopping the Assassins.

This is the first AC game I've written a review for and I guess it's because it let me down. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely worth a play and it was fun overall. It just had the misfortune of being in the shadow of Black Flag because it tried to be a better version of it and didn't hit the mark.

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Other random points:
- The waters felt weirdly cramped. My ship felt enormous compared to the landscape and it just felt off; especially considering the landscapes in this game were supposed to be much bigger (mountains, glaciers, etc). I don't know if they just wanted to reduce empty distances of water or what but I often felt like the world scale was not right. I don't mean that it has to be real world realistic but in terms of how a world FEELS to you when you play.

- Hunting was too easy. Big ass polar bear? Just BOOP with my pistol. ONE shot. Dead. Also, the animal habitats were weird. The game tells you black bears live in this area... but it's like this tiny tiny area right in between two areas of human activities and there's not even an "illusion" forest behind it, it's just rock cliffs. So you're telling me black bears, PLURAL, are living in this tiny ass field? The fk?

- Soldiers are ungrateful a-holes. This is something that also was a gripe of mine in other AC games where you could capture bases.... like WTF? I just captured this fort/HQ for you and HANDED it over to you on a fk ing PLATTER and you're going to take a shot at me because I climbed onto a roof top? Can I speak to your supervisor??? *Karen mode activate*

I absolutely recommend this game. It's (obviously) still a work in progress but what exists so far is definitely enough to give hours and hours of enjoyment. I would describe this game as a PvE RTS Zombie Survival Game. You start with a command center and must gather resources to build a colony that can withstand the hordes of zombies that pass through and, ultimately, survive the enormous horde at the end that gives this game its name: They Are Billions. Throughout the game you will get hordes from a specific direction. The game will tell you a horde has been spotted coming from the North (or E/S/W) and will be arriving in 8 hours. But at the end, they come from all sides in massive numbers.
Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy this game, I suck at it. I fully admit that. But the great thing about this game is that it has a variety of difficulty levels that you can adjust to suit your skill level. You can control two factors: number of days and zombie population. The more days that you have, the easier it is since you will have more time to gather resources and prepare defenses before the big horde at the end. The zombie population obviously controls the amount of zombies you will get. The two settings are independently set so you have some freedom not only in level of difficulty but type of difficulty. Do you want to challenge yourself to build fast? Or do you want to challenge yourself to withstand tons of zombies? Or perhaps both? It's up to you.
I look forward to seeing what else the devs will add to the game!

Simple and easy to learn but still complex enough and challenging! You can even set your preferred level length so it's a nice game to pop in for a quick level when you're short on time. The paper art style is really lovely!

The best HOG game I've played so far. Really liked the story. I played the first one and found it pretty good but this one took it to the next level. For me, a not very hardcore puzzler, the puzzles and mini-games perfectly rode that line of not too easy but doesn't take too much effort. I just don't have the patience for extremely difficult puzzles so I really appreciated the balanced level of difficulty in this game. Made me feel slightly accomplished when solving some of the more difficult ones without driving me to frustration.

The artwork is beautiful and for a HOG the animations aren't bad at all. Voice actors were decent, especially the one who tells the narrating story.

I was surprised by how much I liked this game. Not particularly for its gameplay. The gameplay is not very good; there's way too much slow walking back and forth through screens. But I really liked the story. It wasn't the most original story ever but I thought it was pretty entertaining. I would replay it to try to get the other endings but unfortunately the gameplay is so slow that I'm not sure that I really want to sit through that.

Words cannot describe how awesome this game was and how much I loved it. The humor, the story, and the characters were all done so well but what really impressed me the most was the cinematic feel of the game. It felt like an interactive action movie at times and even when you couldn't interact (like the intro movies for each chapter) it was very entertaining to just watch. They got the feel of the game just right.

A very different style from the first two episodes... a fact which disappointed me at first but I quickly got over it. The new devs for this series, Zeboyd, did a great job with this. The non-sensical comedy is still there but this game featured a more interesting plot. It actually had me genuinely surprised at some points which I did not expect from this series.

I'm not typically a huge fan of the turn based JRPG-like combat but I really enjoyed this one. Not sure what it did differently to make me like it more than in other games but it's sparked a wider interest in this genre for me so thanks Zeboyd.

A fun little addition was that you could gender swap the characters or turn them into furry or undead versions. As a woman who just enjoys playing female characters (just cause I relate to females more naturally), I really liked the gender swap option. I actually switched back to the traditional models for the last half of the game because by that point I just kinda wanted to experience Gabe and Tycho as they were meant to be... but I really appreciated the option being there.

2733.
That's the number of words in the notes I took for this game.
This game was amazing. It instantly drew me in with the story. To find these fragments of the story and try to piece it all together was an almost mesmerizing task. To put in a search term and have it return new footage felt so satisfying. It really makes you feel like you're uncovering a mystery.

I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves a good story. I also highly recommend taking notes. It will help a TON.

You should play the game without reading what anyone else has to say on it. Don't worry about whether it's worth your money or not. It is... and money is the last thing on your mind after you finish.