Iracundus

A very enjoyable and difficult visual novel style political game, with replay value to see all the possible endings. It is difficult because whether any choice is good or bad depends very much on previous choices. It is possible to have good endings in pretty much any kind of political affiliation from far left to far right. There has been improvement on player feedback from their choices but I think that aspect could be improved even further such as from decisions that only take effect in later turns.

I will not comment on the loot crate and pay to win issue as others have done that in great detail already. Suffice to say, I entirely agree with them. What I will comment on is the campaign which is actually what has me fired up. It is an example of completely deceitful marketing. Trailers and interviews made it seem like the campaign would depict an Imperial loyalist character. Star Wars has not had such a portrayal in a game since the 1990's with TIE Fighter's Maarek Stele character. Instead what do we get? We get someone who defects less than halfway through the campaign and we spend the majority of the time doing a tired repeat of the old "Imperial repents and turns Rebel". That story has been done to death in other forms in the Star Wars franchise! We could have had a chance to see an Imperial struggling in the wake of the Rebellion's victory and the disintegration of the Empire, and maybe we could have gained some insight into how the First Order formed. We could have had a character winning battles even though the larger war is still lost. We didn't need a total Imperial fanatic, acting like the stereotyped 2-dimensional villain. TIE Fighter's Maarek Stele was an Imperial loyalist but was not blind to the faults of the Empire. He just ultimately thought that for all its faults it was still better than the alternative. In more recent stuff, we have the character Rae Sloane (which is actually referenced in the campaign), but Sloane actually stays loyal even though she disagreed with the Emperor's scorched earth plan (i.e. Operation Cinder), which is pretty clearly based off **** "Nero Decree". We could have had a nuanced Imperial character. Instead we get the same juvenile depictions as if no sane non-fanatical person could possibly support the Empire, and the only "good Imperial" is a defector. Ultimately though I am angry because we were LIED to and given a bait and switch. We were told it would be an Imperial campaign to show the Imperai POV and to have some "Imperial heroes". Instead we got a Rebel campaign, which couldn't even keep its Imperial disguise on for very long.

This game rides really on the Battletech franchise, yet strangely does little to nothing to actually promote the lore or lore based gameplay. Its faction warfare is basically fighting over the same few chokepoint maps for the right to color in a dot on the map, with no logistics or consequences for fighting whatsoever. The developers seem intent on trying to make an e-sports game yet many initial fans were attracted by the prospect of fighting for a faction or cause, not just endless arena deathmatches. The balance of the game is thrown by the customizing possible, creating a meta-game of laser alpha strikes that leads to repetitive gameplay. It is possible to not play this meta but you will be at a disadvantage. The business model is a ripoff, with the price per Mech at ridiculous levels of real $, and there does not seem to be a coherent development plan beyond releasing the next Mech and maybe jiggling around some quirks, creating as many problems as it solves. The game has potential but the developers seem to be consistently picking the least inspired and easiest $ squeezing way out.

Look beyond the superficial visual eye candy and the initial novelty of the Oculus, and what you have is pretty uninspired repetitive gameplay. Ultimately what gives a game longevity is good solid gameplay, not just visuals that players quickly grow used to and take for granted. This game does not have that.

Lot of the appeal of this game frankly will be based on nostalgia for the Homeworld series. As a prequel, we know where this will ultimately end. However the story of how we get there is unfortunately a repeat of the Homeworld 2 game. Carrier/mothership is being outfitted when there is sneak attack by the fanatical Gaalsien/Vaygr. Carrier is forced to launch early and be outfitted at a secondary base. Then follows a series of missions against the enemy, including a base assault, then some battlefield archaeology and finding ancient relics, rescuing a brother/comrade, culminating in a showdown with the enemy flagship over the Game Ending Relic. While the cutscenes were nice, they could not make up for this rehash of the Homeworld 2 campaign, much like how the Force Awakens movie plot is a rehash and rearrangement of A New Hope.

The story and idea are intriguing. The letdown is in the grinding whether this is pvp or dungeons, or even mission grinding. In other words there is little replayability once you have gone through things the first time. Also I find it hard to believe how the secret world can remain secret for very long the way characters are flinging magical firepower around.

Rating this a 0 because this broke with its predecessor Supreme Commander and its spiritual predecessor Total Annihilation in favor of dumbed down simplicity. The storyline is laughable tripe but given other RTS's, that is not a huge flaw. What is more fatal is the removal of the unique resource and tech model and large scale for something more in keeping with other RTS games.

This game was in no way ready for release. Aside from the bugs and freezing such as during the station interiors, there are so many bad design decisions. The cockpit view fills my POV with needless clutter and obstructs the view of outside space. What is the point of having awesome space environments if you are looking at it through a tiny window? Then there is the whole nonsensical station interior gameplay where your character wanders around and scoops up anything not nailed down. That isn't trading. That's scavenging and stealing. Instead of the convenient comm based interaction with stations or mission givers, or being able to see what is for sale at a station, we have to land and wander the station looking for that one person that we need. Only then we find out they are not in this section of the station and we have to get back into space and land at another landing pad and repeat the same process. The control interface clearly shows this was designed first and foremost with consoles and any PC release was an afterthought. Paging through multiple menus just to do a simple and common task is infuriatingly annoying. Suffice to say, that X Rebirth has managed to take just about anything that worked with X: Terran Conflict and previous X games and thoroughly break it or render it a chore rather than enjoyable gameplay.

The spiritual successor to Total Annihilation by the same developer. The graphics are improved and there are now 3 factions with what appear on the surface to be diverse playstyles. Unfortunately this is mostly on the surface as the large map sizes often meant ground combat became a total stalemate and it turned into a sheer brute force weight of numbers and economy battle rather than tactics. The existence of the shield generator buildings made it possible to create mass overlapping shield bubbles that made most attacks incapable of doing much critical or significant damage. Finally, the Commander unit itself while nice is a far cry from the Total Annihilation commander with its D-gun. The Commander was near the end of the game more liability than asset due to its volatile death explosion, and its gun, while in theory capable of one hit killing most things, was not enough to save it as the gun did not penetrate through multiple units like the D-Gun. This meant the Commander in mid to late game could not fight its way from any reasonable sized collection units, and was often reduced to hiding in its base.

Ahead of its time, and utilizing a unique resource model that monitored rate of resource gathering as well as total reserves, allowing for deficit spending of previously gathered surplus. However as officially released it did suffer from key flaws that reduce its score. The developer clearly had a bias in favor of the ARM faction, as there are many CORE units in critical roles that are clearly inferior whereas the few units that CORE has an advantage over the ARM are in less vital roles. There are also a lot of redundant or useless units that sound nice in theory but are obsoleted in competitive play by far more cost efficient units or units that require less micro-management.

This is classic hype followed by failed delivery. Not surprisingly this has been exactly what CCP has been doing for years. No doubt they will promise iteration and such but then forget all about it as they then rush off to hype the next latest bling expansion, just like they have done all these years.

The bugs ruined this for me. Far too much time spent trying to chase down fixes and implementing them rather than time spent on the game itself. Enough of that and it's more tempting to go load up another game instead.

A game where the developers have been caught playing favorites with players and rigging roleplayed events that were touted as open ended (hence rendering the sandbox a lie). The game community is easily the most vile psychopathic gaming community I have ever seen in any game, and this is not only tolerated but promoted by the developers. Combine that with a developer studio that is endlessly chasing the latest shiny project and promising the moon, then delivering a kludged together mediocre mess, promising to "iterate" it in the future. In reality, then they go off chasing after the next project and never come back to the mess they created. The mechanics are illogical and the result of jury rigging over years, resulting in the rightful name of "spreadsheets in space".

A half baked attempt to jump into the FPS market. Frustrating awkward controls, poor frame rate, graphics that look last generation. Lag and hit detection are also sub-par. This comes off very much as a poor man's FPS. Mediocre at best and a flaming wreck at worst, despite all the EVE fans trying desperately to up-rate it. Mediocrity combined with the pay to win monetization system. The touted link to EVE is really just a gimmick and that won't save this game when the core gameplay is so poor.