Recent reviews by Xyales

Don't expect actual deduction or any other gameplay, its a multiple choice walking simulator.

As some may have said "Absolute Cinema", because of how linear and force-fed this is, it might as well be considered a movie.

The story is okay-ish i personally didn't like any of the endings, they were pretty disappointing. I Despise QTE's that are functionally impossible by game design. (i did watch all 4 of them, since there's no way i'll play the game from the beginning 4 times).

The lack of a more sophisticated saving system is a problem, but probably not as much as the useless existence of "They will remember this" responses to actions, those literally don't make much difference since all they do is unlock some adjacent dialogue. Endings depend on the final conclusion and what you do at the end entirely.

True ending has lots of parts that makes me scratch my head due to how it developed, but the game is good just like the first part.

It was a beautiful experience.

Going from Satisfactory to this made me appreciate the QoL features that Satisfactory has even more so, but comparing it to that polished masterpiece makes little sense.

Its more like JUNKPUNK but with a Dwarven theme rather than that of a planetary terraform project - it has the same clumsy build system, the same annoying and in my opinion, inferior splitter/merger system and weirdly enough, i felt somewhat disoriented while manually mining for the initial ore veins.

At the time i played, i came upon these issues/bugs:
- Aligning buildings is a major annoyance as the hammer in your hand blocks a huge chunk of your vision, there's a lack of indication if your building aligns with the one next to it and grid snapping is basically non-existent or atleast didn't work for me as i'd expect it to work.
- I dislike the splitter-merger system, it takes too much space and is simply worse than what other games offer, i personally think there's no reason to re-invent the wheel... even JUNKPUNK switches away from those when you go from scrap to high-tech. The only reason those splitters and mergers are usable at all is because the game doesn't have conveyor collision/restrictions, so you can phase them through buildings and have them do 180 degree twists at the beginning/end of the belt.
- Belts and Minecart Tracks have a bug where it shows that a full length belt/track would cost you 20 resources, but when you place it, it only costs you 1 resource, honestly im inclined to believe that this bug is on purpose and thus actually a feature since the cost of belts and tracks would be astronomically high...
- Minecarts should be more economical than belts, but they're only more economical when you use 3 export, 3 import (aka, 6 or more) stations in the same loop, you always have to build 2 tracks anyway, so you might aswell just built belts, because it costs the same as tracks minus the wood and you can just ditch stations, tracks and minecarts. (you'd only need stations if you export 12 miner output worth merged into 3 belts.)
- Explosives (the demobomb and vaporizers) are somewhat fun to use, but its annoying that you have to build them, run a fuse from a detonator to the bomb and then run back to the detonator to blow it up, i kinda recommend to add a tool for remote detonation to skip this whole process... it makes it a lot less fun if the setup is unnecessary complicated...
- The games auto-saving felt rather lag inducing, even with my high-end setup.

I'll put it as recommended and hope for improvements since its EA, but i'd say that with the current system, having neat clean belts and factories as in the preview is unrealistic and really inefficient.

If you like puzzle coop puzzle games like 'We Were Here Too', you'll probably like this too.

There was one puzzle we got stuck on, but nothing we couldn't manage. Though us getting the secret ending was just pure luck as i guessed the correct input while only knowing one of the correct symbols. Tip for that: There's 4 out of 8 Inputs, 2 on each side.

The secret ending was rather disappointing considering that it wasn't much different from the normal ending, other than the obvious.

This game is great, its really fun, especially more so with friends, even if the balancing sucks half the time and the game is full of "bugs".

Great thing that PSN Linking is optional.

Somewhat fun.
Gameplay wise it was enjoyable.

Balancing wise...
I got a bit annoyed about the efficiency of the base factory blocks.
Factory blocks are simply too strong compared to their specialized alternatives and most of the time don't cost more in comparison to specialized buildings... This makes the Energy Generator, Fuel Silos, Fuel Turbine completely useless.

- Fuel Silos can only store 3 - 6k worth of fuel, they explode when destroyed while factories can store 12k and don't explode.. (albeit the silos are cheap).
- Fuel Turbines need workers which are kind of a precious resource, an absolute waste of time, just use turbines to funnel xethane into a single lvl 3 factory for 600+ fuel from one building.
- Energy Generators are even worse than Fuel Turbines because the alternative costs exactly the same and doesn't need a worker. (the only benefit is lower energy consumption)

My Feedback would be to improve the Research Tech to also affect upgraded buildings, currently it only affects Lvl 1 buildings and upgrades don't take into consideration what your current tech does... Upgrading specialized buildings should increase their capacity by 100% not 50% because factory buildings actually get a 100% increase, which further reduces the reason to use specialized buildings, especially since filling factories is easy with the blueprint mechanic.

Also there should also be either a penality to overusing factory buildings over using its specialized equivalent or a benefit to using specialized buildings, for example adjacency bonuses for buildings.

Still annoyed by the saving system.
Weird mission accept/decline system, why is it Q/E with E being decline? Really doesn't help that the decline prompt overlaps with the dialog prompt. Funny when you expect a dialog and accidentally decline a mission.

Subquests are fun the in the beginning, towards the end they start to feel more like a chore than something that you actually want to do.

The super powerful ending was both great and disappointing at the same time, it felt really fun while it lasted, and by that i mean, its a disappointment that it only lasted 30 seconds and didn't have its own combat segment utilizing that power.

pretty fun tabletop

Its okay... i guess?