Recent reviews by ModusPwnens

I'm someone that is a huge fan of complex game mechanics with depth as well as challenging high risk experiences. I've played Eve Online in lowsec and sovnull PVP corporations, lost a lot of ships, had a lot of fun.

I also enjoy Hearts of Iron 4, Starsector, Crusader Kings and games with a ton of meat on them. I play XCOM games on ironman legendary. I was looking for and fully expecting a game that I'd need to consult a wiki to play. Happens a lot these days and I was rearing to do that for this game, especially after all the research I did pre-purchase.

All the stars seemed to align on this being the experience for me. A space ship captaining RPG with a lot of meat to sink the teeth into and tons of room for customizing the overall difficulty of the experience.

Good things: Narratively there are some amazing beats right off the bat. Heavy Dune influences with houses and politicking. Lots of routes to go and things to do in the sandbox that is clearly evident of a ton of love being poured into the game.

The issue I had is not one of the game being too complex or having too many mechanics, or being too hard.

Instead it's the design philosophy that permeates every level of the game. There is an intense desire to layer **oppressive** levels of abstraction and dicerolling upon the most mundane actions, along with attempting to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily at every turn.

That itself wouldn't be too bad, the problem is it simultaneously puts up roadblocks to understanding how the wheel has been reinvented across each of the mechanics, despite a very detailed wiki and some great content creators on youtube.

Basically there is no "intuiting" here.

As an example:

- Dicerolls are fun.
- A great many in the gaming community understand the idea of X-sided die and rolling saving throws / difficulty checks.
- Mitigating RNG is a fact of life in many games and I'm always on board for it, being an XCOM player.

However, Instead of using an intuitive system like D&D that clearly connects your attributes and skill to your dice rolls, it's abstracted away to "strong" and "standard" dice rolls, which right from the getgo you have to go searching for explanations on the special terminology the game has defined (strong dice are D10s where values 7,8,9 and 10 are successes, and standard dice are D10s where 9 and 10 are successes).

Extending from this, there's no real chance to hit indications given to cut through the abstraction or give you a sense of scale for how much impact your stats are having, no readouts of how much damage you might expect to do based on your attributes being X, Y Z, whether in ship combat or crew combat.

E.G I know that the game tells me that piloting skill is used to roll "strong dice" in close range attacks in ship combat while navigation is used for long range and hopefully if I jack those stats up on my pilot or crew I'll be more successful at those things.

But by how much? and what my chance to do something specific is? I have no clue.

You click, a thing happens, two numbers show up, but how those numbers came to be? The game won't tell you. Do the math on a napkin after reading the wiki. This is pretty much the way.

Ship skills such as piloting and navigation have cap shown in parentheses, but that cap is actually meant to be exceeded by up to 200% in order to get the maximum bonuses from your dice rolls. You can't really intuit this.

I'm sure there's a reason why 200% can't be normalized to be the actual cap, but in that case, can we really not design something a little more elegantly?

All of these things and more, at every level are abstracted away from your understanding in ways that are baffling.

Even crew deaths during battle aren't given as much as a flyover text indicating that they've happened. It's all happening away from your eyes and you have to look into the combat log to find that your E-tech got killed, after seeing that you're one suddenly one less than your max crew and you have one less "save skill" to mitigate the bad RNG that happens every 5 seconds as you're flying.

There is absolutely a great game here, but even as someone that is willing to put in the effort on complex systems, I just can't do it here.

The disappointing part is that the arcane nature of these systems is completely unnecessary and just hampers you from what otherwise could, and should otherwise be an enjoyable narrative, emergent sandbox experience.

It's there though. I can promise you that.

Extremely poor performance on a 4080 & Ryzen 5900x.

FPS drops like a rock when simply rotating the camera. It stabilizes when the camera isn't rotating, but the middling level of graphics this game outputs should not be this demanding of the hardware.

The font choice is puzzling and makes for a very busy looking UI.

Right from the getgo, placing your town center presents you with a directive to place it near important resources. Makes sense so far.

It gives you a dynamically updating UI that is showing you several icons and whether those icons are green or red presumably indicates whether you'll have access to those resources close by.

However, for a new player, you have no context for what these icons are yet, what they do, and whether or not it's important to have them. You can't mouse over the icons to explain what they are until after you've placed your town center. Really big UI pitfall for a new player.

Played for a bit, but by comparison to other city builders both modern and old, I couldn't be motivated to make it through the poor performance. Don't doubt others may have a better experience.

Elegance in simplicity really wasn't a core design tenet of this game and it really suffers for it.

Unlike most deckbuilders, this game's cards are designed with far too many interlocking, inscrutable mechanics and side effects at play that ultimately take an unreasonable amount of time to unpack and evaluate.

e.g "This card deals X damage to targets but Y damage as long as the target has a named, non movement, non-power effect attached and last used a melee attack while eating at Wendy's at 3:51 PM on Saturday. If the target ate at Arby's instead, you may instead draw 1 card."

and that's before factoring in the mechanics of having a separate deck for each ally and enemy on the field, with things like discarding cards being tied into both board movement, resource gain, and armor simultaneously, but only for certain heroes depending on which hero's deck the card is being discarded from and only if the resource gained from that card is not then used by a different hero... it all just gets to be a cluttered mess.

Equipped items also forcibly insert cards into your deck you may not necessarily find useful, above and beyond your normal class cards, but they also increase your armor and add perks. Too many things are linked into this tangled nonsensical web of endless side-effects.

Additionally, a side effect of this is battles can take an extremely long amount of time to resolve, and the time to finish a run is on the high end for a roguelike deckbuilder.

It's not terrible, but there's better options out there.