Recent reviews by waitwaht

Gameplay: Solo mode will entertain you for some hours for free, it's great if you're a beginner or haven't played in years. Each chapter is set up so that you learn how its namesake archetype works and will award you a structure deck of the archetype with mostly common cards. After that (or after you craft a SR of the archetype), a secret pack at the shop allows you to pull cards from said archetype. The intention being that It's set up so that you get a feeling for each archetype and eventually you'll spend your newbie gems rolling to make a deck for the one you like the most.

The problem is, it's a newbie trap. Once you get around to actually dueling in ranked, you'll notice none of the decks featured in solo are competitive enough to deal with the strongest archetypes in the meta (Eldlich, Drytron, Virtual World, Tri-Brigade, etc).
The game uses a lenient ruleset with fewer forbidden and limited cards than most RL tournaments. Which means there are significantly more staples that work on almost every deck (Ash, Pots, Solemns, C) and of course these are very rare. You can craft them, but you'll be already stretching thin your resources trying to craft cards other rares that make your deck work like intended. Unless you're unbelievably lucky pulling AND do your research beforehand you'll have to pony up after the honeymoon newbie gems run dry. Because ranked is tied to most rewards, the casual duels are a ghost town. So most likely you'll have fun duels until late gold/early platinum at which point whales will stomp you constantly. They paid for the privilege, so try to have fun until then.

Turns are slow. Many archetypes rely on lengthy chains of special summons during a single turn. This wouldn't be such an issue if there weren't this many animations for every kind of special summon, plus the cut in animations for ace cards. You can turn them off, but since they are on by default, chances are your opponent will still have them enabled increasing the length of their turns.

The information panels during a duel are serviceable enough, but since the log features the card art, you get few lines of log visible before having to scroll up. The game features an "spectate" mode that allows you to "watch" other people play ranked duels. In reality, you're watching a replay, and a very limited one at that: you can only see the cards of the bottom player (as if you were in control), can pause but can't step backwards, and the game will boot you back when the replay ends without being able to check the field.

Presentation: The boards, mascots and cards look fine. The music is good, there is some variance onto more dramatic scores when an ace is summoned or when you have lethal. There is no controller support besides community joystick mouse replacements which work about as good as you can imagine.

Other: The game feels very hardware demanding for what it is. CPU temps, processor usage remain consistently high regardless of what I'm doing ingame. I don't experience any stuttering or slowdowns, although my rig is capable enough, I can't speak for someone who barely meets requirements. Feels somewhat unoptimized.

Overall: Fun enough until you get to high ranking, at which point you'll have as much fun as your wallet allows you to. The game really needs more incentives for playing casual matches (or simply for losing at ranked - you want your whales to have enough punching bags, right?), maybe an alternative TCG format that doesn't require you to own 3 copies of each UR staple you could possibly require. As it is, it's hard for anyone but the most competitive duelists to get (money) invested.

As the final DLC for Rebirth, the DLC definitely delivers. Tons of content and new items, the new areas look very good and their soundtracks are amazing. Which is not a surprise - a great part of the new content was imported from some of the most popular mods for AB+, mostly from Anti-birth. The difficulty curve has shot upwards once again, and while initially extremely unfair, Edmund and the team have filed down some of the most unfair aspects. The DLC is mostly targetted towards the most veteran players, but as the playerbase continues to complain, the outlook looks towards a few more balance patches until the game reaches a harder, yet not as unfair, equilibrium.

This looks like a good review. It should have been a good review. Less scrupulous Windows users may want to stop reading now. However

In what's probably a pioneer move on customer unfriendliness in the history of Steam, the team decided to drop official support for Steamplay and macOS for this DLC only, which makes little sense considering the base game and all DLCs until AB+ ran natively on both platforms. From what i've read, changes to the latest versions of macOS have made game development all but impossible for the platform. I'm not familiar enough with the Apple OSes to confirm or deny this claim, but in Edmund's defense, this warning was issued months in advance.

What was not warned about was that Steamplay official support would be dropped as well. Inexplicably so, as the game will work flawlessly if set to force the use of Proton play under Preferences > Compatibility in your library (Most users report using Proton 5.16-3, though I had to use 6.13-6). Even more inexplicably, this DLC was delayed enough that issuing a Steamplay version should have been an afterthought.

This review will remain negative until official Steamplay support is implemented.

As of this writing, this page does not list BattlEye as required software. Game crashes on linux without it on joining a server.
UPDATE: 5 December, 9 months later: BattlEye STILL not mentioned anywhere in the store page.
UPDATE: 6 January 2019: Still not mentioned. Single player games can be played now, crashes to desktop when joining a server.

Anticheat program - BattleEye agreement:

<...>
- BattlEye may further report and store Licensee's Internet Protocol address, game account name and identifier, in-game nickname, and system-related and hardware-related information including, but not limited to, device identifiers and hardware serial numbers.
<...>
- Licensor stores all information collected by BattlEye on servers located in Europe and/or the US. Licensor may share the information with its partners and/or affiliates.
<...>
- BattlEye will automatically, without notice to Licensee, download and install updates from time to time.
<...>

-Choppy framerate
-Broken hitboxes
-Inconsistent ship controls the rotation center of your ship changes depending on where on the screen you are
-Spectacularly stock SFX
-Game process stays up after closing the game falsely reporting playtime
-You need to have used this product for at least 5 minutes before posting a review for it (2 minutes on record).

(-1) out of 10, at least I got it on a bundle. Would refund but I don't think Steam handles fractions of a cent.

No competitive until you complete 500~ matches of awp_india 5/10 its ok

I got this on a sale and my only regret was getting a 4 pack of a game I now know for sure I cannot gift with a clean conscience.

The early game plays nothing like the pretty screenshots and trailers. Instead you will be hard pressed to find the necessary materials and blueprints to progress down the tech tree. Only dirt and rock as far as the eye can see. And you cannot get everywhere you can see either: radiation exposure will keep you from delving deeper unless you craft the requisite playtime-padding gear. I get the feeling this game is deliberately padding its time so as to ration the little content it seems to have.

Except for the artstyle, this game is outdone by the much similar Starbound, even though this has been on Early Access for much longer. And we all know how Starbound turned out.

I should have learned my lesson to not trust Early Access no more. This just buries the remaining hope I ever had for such a model.