Recent reviews by A_Nerd

$50 USD for a prettier version of KSP 1 that doesn't have as many features. It almost feels like a demo. It does really look pretty but the fact that they were unable to get this game even to the point of the first game in terms of features is disappointing.

Now that development is done with the studio laid off, what you see is what you get, for me it isn't enough.

Other than the stupid Ubisoft launcher, the port is pretty much perfect. Runs well in a resizable window, has UI scaling and a new settings menu, but is functionally the same game you played 20 years ago (and is still just as fun). All the negative reviews are about the launcher (and they are fully justified) but once you're past that the game is perfect.

Ruined by an update that basically killed custom maps and several major gamemodes.

Introduces a complicated new system to the game, that's great.

Does not include a tutorial on how to use said system, that's not great.

Also only has one unique mission included as far as I can tell (you can do free fly and the other generic missions that the other planes have). I obviously haven't been able to beat the single mission since I have no idea how the plane works . . . because there's no tutorial.

The variable wings are cool though.

So this is two different games in one. The first, which you have to play for the first few hours of any campaign, is an agent driven pseudo political strategy game. You play a secret agency/Illuminati type secret society to take control of nations, direct their spending and diplomacy, while upgrading your agents to protect the nations you control and trying to seize the other factions' nations. You can also investigate and try to kidnap/assassinate the other factions' agents.

That's one game, on its own that functions almost entirely independently from the other game.

The other game is a near future space combat sim, a la Children of a Dead Earth, albeit simplified (in some regards, not in others). You construct slower than light spacecraft and manage Delta V (fuel basically), Speed, armaments, and defenses in order to maintain control over your productive assets in the solar system. These assets are bases, either orbital for ship production, supply, and research bonuses, or surface bases for mining (and also some other bonuses). Control of these assets is essential to support your space fleet.

Oh yeah and theres aliens, but they kind of ignore you until you're strong enough to face them for some reason? It's not really clear why, except that maybe they're really dumb.

This game is weird, and its kind of frustrating that you are forced to play the spy/strategy game to get to the space strategy game. At a certain point once you've gotten control of the countries you need to support your space operations (USA, China, Russia, or Europe, ignore everything else) you can just set your agents to continuous missions or automatic missions and ignore them more or less. Alternatively if you like the agent focused game play, it is frustrating that you have to do Children of a Dead Earth Lite in order to progress the story and stay competitive.

This game has a lot of cool stuff, but it isn't quite sure what it's trying to be and it clearly suffers for it. It is immediately apparent that they had several different ideas for what this game should be, and instead of picking one, they just threw in everything and the kitchen sink. One of the frustrating things is you can play for several hours and not really ever get into the space combat aspect in that time, so trying it out within the refund window isn't viable. That being said, if you are here for the space combat, just go play Children of a Dead Earth, it does that much better (and without weird frustratingly slow battles). If you are here for the Illuminati strategy game though, then you can try it out within the refund window and you'll know whether you like it or not.

I've played two campaigns. I did get bored and cheat through the last 3rd or so of both, but I guess I had some fun, so maybe it was worth it for me? Definitely don't buy at full price though. Don't spend more than $20 USD on this game.

EDIT:

I am adding this edit to say that I eventually found a "seam" and managed to get to a win condition. I do like certain things about this game, I would not have pushed through if I didn't. There is a ton of depth, history, and care in this game. But at the end of the day, if you are looking at a Kremlingames game you know what you are getting in to and this one is rough even by their standards. Therefore, I still can't recommend it. I wish they would just spend a bit of money to get a good functional English localisation, or even just fix the acronym nightmare. Until then stick with Ostalgie, Crisis in the Kremlin, or my favourite China: Mao's Legacy

END OF EDIT


I have tried and tried and tried to learn the perfect combination of decisions that will allow the player to have a chance at surviving, but I just can't figure it out. I have gotten game over screens every single time I play, on the easiest difficulty, and always within the first few years of starting the game.

The translation is rough, which I can understand somewhat, but the number of acronyms for things makes everything so obtuse that it is almost impossible to know what effect your decisions are even having. Also there is very little documentation online about how to play, only very basic guides (yes I even searched in Russian using google translate).

The ususal game goes like this:

Pick a party, wait a month til the first election, win a region or two and get enough power to control one or two ministries, they start with some money, corruption and effectiveness. Then the corruption in your ministries and regions just starts going up extremely quickly (whether you fight it, do nothing, or help it, it makes no difference). Next your party unity will fluctuate for reasons you have no way to know, hope you don't click one of the decisions that tanks it, what decisions will do that you might ask? No way to know, there's no real useful tooltips. You can raise money or unity in your party screen, but sometimes you get a gameover as soon as your money or unity go down before you can get to that screen.

Oh and by the way there is Lower, Middle, and Upper class aggressiveness, these you can almost understand what would theoretically affect them (laws and such) but in reality I have never seen these change when laws are changed.

Also there is a crime stat, can you see it anywhere? No, you can't. Better keep crime down though, or else you get events that cost money and support and then you lose. How do you affect crime? No way to know.

You can look at the regions and ministries/portfolios that the other parties (the AI run parties) are running and see their corruption/budget/effectiveness, and it is always way better than yours. How? Why? Who knows. I can't emphasize enough how little time it takes for these things to get completely out of control. In one game I tried taking the Prime Minister portfolio, it started with a balance of 400/600 (600 being theoretically maximum effectiveness), and a monthly decrease of 150. This meant that within 3 months the Prime Minister portfolio would be at -50 (a situation that has pretty bad consequences oh and also means you can't do anything), all my other ministries had deficits as well so there was no way to reallocate funds. What causes this deficit? How does the AI avoid it? What do you do? No way to know any of this. You might be noticing a pattern here.

I want to like this game so badly, I want to understand what the trick is to get it to work, but right now it feels like a game that was designed to be as obtuse as possible so that only the creator could actually understand.

If anyone knows what the trick to getting it playable is please tell me, but if you are thinking of picking this one up because it looks interesting and compelling, stay away.

Yes it's free, no you don't get to drive the cool tanks/planes.

Not without paying a huge amount of money, or for playing with boring bad tanks for literally thousands of hours (and also still some money)

I paid money to play this, I wouldn't even play it for free now

It's pretty darn good

Ok so the war system is not bad, when it works, albeit a bit shallow. The actual problems seem to be more related to the fact that there is something missing here to make this as immersive and compelling as it really could be, rather than just the citybuilder type game that it seems to be at the moment.