Recent reviews by swiftdraw

You get to make air and landships like from Super Mario Bros 3 and conquer the world with them. Whats not to like?

I am going to start this with "It's not a bad game, but..."

Seriously, the core of the game is solid, building your university from card drawn from 6 "decks." Train your mages and have them give back stat increases dependent on the job they got once they graduate. You also can curry favor from other factions for bonuses and use graduated students to raid dungeons. It is not a bad looking game and it runs smooth. But it's not for me, mainly down to one big reason and a couple of small ones.

My big gripe with the game is you CANNOT remove rooms once placed. This absolutely sucks. For one, the placement of the rooms can be very finicky depending on camera angle. Once the building is placed, it immediately goes in, no take backs. This also sucks because it makes it so you have to plan out everything in advance using RANDOMIZED DECKS. You can't place something figuring on removing it later once you get what you want. If you have some grand plan to maximize the efficiency of your school layout, you are fully at the mercy of RNG. So, this whole mechanic really sucks and really is what kills me on the game. The only way around it I found is using cheat engine to max out my gold/mana and just cycle through the deck until I get the room I want.

So yeah. Pretty solid game that gets let down by a design decision by the devs.

To start off, this is more a matter of personal taste and the expectations I had coming in based on how the game was pitched. I haven't found anything technically wrong that horribly egregious as of this review.

Only about 90 minutes in, but I am not feeling Tempest Rising. I kept hearing about how it feels like a throwback to the old Command and Conquer series, and I have to disagree. While the base building and presentation is much like that series, the rest of the game is much closer to StarCraft/StarCraft 2 in feel. A lot more micro, some resource juggling instead of single source funds, and a unit cap are things I don’t think of when it comes to C&C, but rather StarCraft. I never got on that well with StarCraft…

Meh. It is a visually beautiful game, but I feel dealing with the camera is a bigger challenge than most of the enemies. The bosses thus far feel designed to exploit this; spam out attacks and jump around while teleporting in stun lock enemies behind you. It's really annoying trying to get the camera into position while this is all going on. Probably a skill issue and the fact the last I played this style of game was Jak and Daxter 3 for PS2. So, whatever, recommended based on the strength of it's visuals.

Mainly been playing in offline mode on my Deck, so I have 157hrs rather than the .3 Steam shows. Anyhow, it's a fun StarFox-like rail shooter that I find enjoyable for a 30 minute run here and there. Problem with it is that it feels like a game that the budget ran out on. Like, I see evidence of planed and cut content throughout the game and there are still a lot of bugs. The most egregious is the enemy pathfinding that has the enemy frequently stuck on terrain, particularly on the third zone. I have had the game crash twice and a instance of all my upgrades that weren't drones disappear before the third zone boss. Ultimately, however, it is still a fun rail shooter to pick up for a run or two every now and again.

The UI on the map can be a bit finicky when trying to choose the next mission and the post mission refit screen while playing on the Steamdeck. You really have to pay attention to where the thin golden border is before hitting "A". I have missed out on many upgrades and started the wrong mission quite a few times by hitting A by mistake before choosing what I meant to. Other than that, the graphics and AI are a bit simplistic, but there is a surprising amount of mechanics and gameplay options available. It makes the game very replayable. SO far my favorite I managed to get was my "Swarmlord" Battleship with two suspendium cannons and two flak cannons with 6 escorts. I didn't manage to max upgrade my weapons or escorts, but the amount of fire I could throw still had me mulching through everyone to the final boss. The Stealth Skybase was also a hoot. Overall, really fun game, especially on the road with the Steamdeck.

It's like the dev's listened to what could be improved from Sins 1, and implemented them. Then they had a few ideas of their own and they worked. If you liked Sins 1, you'll love Sins 2. It is a improvement in every way.

My first time playing an X game in about a decade and man is this frustrating. It says it is for new players coming out of the tutorial, but frankly I think they'd of been better off doing something with trading, station building or fleet management. This basically throws you into a bunch of combat and a few racing scenarios that are ok at best and absolutely frustrating at worse. Why can't I lock the target right in front of me? Why does my ship suddenly move like it has a mind of it's own around capital ships? Why are half of the scenarios horrible defense missions? Those feel like bad throwbacks to the late 90's to early 2000's games, where you have to deal with overwhelming odds effectively by yourself, with an idiot person/vehicle you have to defend, while fighting clunky controls as much as the enemy. I hope the ships that get unlocked in universe are worth it.

Edit: I take it back. Who ever decided doing a drift track with this narrow FOV and fixed forward view was a good idea is a sadist. I have gone from being frustrated with this DLC to loathing it. Not worth the $15 unless you either really like how X4's fighters fly or you have the peripherals to help overcome it.

TL:DR It's an interesting and good looking game to be sure, but I'm not entirely certain on how to go about things.

After just about an hour, I have concluded that City Builder is inaccurate and this is more of a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.) The city building part really is more expanding districts to gain population and connecting to resource nodes than fiddling about with on goings of the city. You don't even have to worry about food and services for your city, just gaining the resources you need to expanded it to house more workers to gather more resources. The problem I've run into is figuring out how resources from those nodes are routed. In my current city format, I was originally producing 12 wood and 5 stone. After upgrading the bridges to stone and nothing else, I was suddenly producing 7 wood and 7 stone. More fiddling revealed the direction I connected various bridges effected how many resources I was producing, but I am still not entirely sure why. Press Tab to show the flow of resources didn't see to help as I couldn't see any changes in flow from what it had been before the bridge upgrades. Also, I haven't worked out how to acquire more extractors, though I assume base on current gameplay I find disabled ones to deconstruct and relocate at some point.

Outposts I find at see are also a bit of a mystery as well. As far as I can tell, you deconstruct them, carry them via your airship back to your city, plop them down, connect them and things happen. The refugee settlements are rather straight forward, you gain population. The others like the Surveyors and the diplomacy guilds... It's more difficult telling. Surveyors allow you to spot things farther out, but by how much I can't tell. I guess I spotted one refugee camp further out than normal, but it's hard for me to say honestly. Diplomats I truly have no idea what they do. Trading thus far has been difficult. I found one minor faction to trade with, they told me to bring in more workers to initiate trade, so I put the wood and worker transport captain on it, then I get told to connect the trade harbor to them to gather wood. Except I can't seem to do that and I don't appear to be gaining any wood or further diplomatic actions with this faction.

Combat has happened, but I missed it. Some birds flew around, I saw lasers, and by the time I figured out where it was happening and got the airship and camera oriented towards it, it was over. We won. Yaaay. No idea what happened and I had absolutely no input in that event. Maybe later as I stumble across other factions I'll figure it out. Oh, and I have a sloop on my longest trade route that will shoot at things I guess. The trade route was labeled "Risky" before is now "Safe and Protected." Now if I could get that trade route to produce something with that minor faction, that'd be great.

So now that my gripe fest is over, what so good about it? It sounds like I don't like the thing, so why give it a recommend? Well for one, the aesthetic pushes all my buttons.Stone towers and ramshackle buildings clinging on for dear life on jagged rock outcroppings jutting out of the sea. A mass of humanity clinging onto civilization in this hostile environment. The storms, the monstrous creatures, and the sea and air ships bobbing about. Oh yes please. Also, I feel that there is a game in here that interests me, but I've yet to unlock how to go about playing it in full. I keep getting flashbacks to the early '00's real time 4X games like Rise of Nations and Empire Earth. Now those games had more in-depth game mechanics to them, to be sure, but this game keeps bumping against the same base concepts and basic mechanics as them. I have a primary settlement, I expand it and my ability to bring resources to feed it's expansion. The game suggests that I set up other settlements to bring in more resources, though I have yet to figure this part out. I encounter other factions in which I engage with in either diplomacy or warfare, depending which benefits me most at the time. The biggest thing I am missing is constructing units to enforce and protect my expansion, but you do gain units in the form of recruitable captains to defend you trade routes that feed your expansion. It's causing an itch I haven't felt in some time, and I want to explore the game more to see if it can satiate it.

And I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't say that the game has seem solid in the performance department and is free of engine jank and weirdness. Sure the mechanics and controls can be a bit... Inscrutable? Obscure? But the base from which they are built are solid. To do that and make such a, in my opinion, good looking game by one person is laudable.

So yeah, the game has issues that you might have to work around and fiddle with to get the most out of the game. But there is something there and the game is good (and cheap) enough that I am willing to find out exactly what that is. So good on the solo dev for making a solid, if a bit fiddly game.

Has some bad bugs, like connection and terrain collision issues, but it's still really fun. Haven't had this much since the first couple years of DRG.

EDIT: Whoops, now requires a Sony login which I have no interest in. Much like prior games that tried to shoehorn in a third party service, I gotta say no.

Edit 2: Sony backed off their oopsy. For now.

Edit 3: The game balance changes so much I went from loving it, to hating it, to thinking it was ok, to "wow, it's good again.' Serious waiting for Arrowhead to much up the weapons again.