SYLOH

Let me preface everything by saying that I actually bought this game on impulse before watching the trailers. I like space, I like exploration, some of the early reviews were positive, so I bought it. I regret that impulsive decision. Take it from a 5 year veteran of Eve: Online this game is BORING. Imagine Eve minus the hordes of players trying to kill you, it's more boring than that. There is supposed to be septillions of stars and planets generated, but their algorithm is poor. This results in maybe 12 different planet types and 30 animal species. I'm being very generous with the planets, for the most part they are just different colors with a different icon showing you what is killing you today. Now I wasn't expecting Spore like creature variety, but this is insulting. All of them look the same. There might be some slight variation between the crab like species trying to kill me, but I honestly couldn't tell. The entire game is far too easy, in my trek from the start to the center of the galaxy my shields dropped a total of maybe 10 times, I still don't know what the death screen looks like. The interface is utterly terrible. You have to hold to click EVERYTHING. There I cannot fathom a reason this has to be for literally EVERYTHING. The galaxy map is the single worst aspect of the UI, a rather galaring flaw for something that wants to do space exploration. The path to the center is utterly useless, as I got close to the center it literally got stuck in a dead end. It ignores your hyperdrive upgrades meaning it's course will take you through about a dozen short hops and then abruptly stop, while you can reach the end in one jump or infact go much futher. There is a total disconnect between "Distance from Center" and "Linear Distance", 500ly for the former is about 1,500ly for the latter. You are down to luck for finding any particular location, even ones you've visited before. The game play is more or less a resource grind, you land on a planet, shoot at a rock with a mining laser, you leave the planet to go shoot at a different rock. There are NPC, they are of three races, all of which just stand or sit alone in one place. They never do anything, you can talk to them and maybe get a blue print or something, but thats it, there is no personality, not even real interaction. There was an Atlas quest line, that brought you to 10 admittedly rather spiffy looking space stations. Actually I lied, there are 4 rather spiffy looking space stations that are repeated a couple of times in no particular order. It starts no where and ends in a non ending. This may last you a couple of hours (or however long it takes you to realize the map system is trash and just jump to the end). But it pales in comparison to reaching the Galactic Center. Thats the final insult, what happens at the center. I'll rant in a spoilerific manner after the next paragraph. Suffice to say if we reached the center and had a planet sized MIDDLE FINGER to explore, this would still be less of a **** YOU than what we got. Because at least the Flipping Bird of God would be an object of interest and discussion. It was after I had played for a while that I went out and watched the trailers, holy **** I wanted to play that game, too bad it's not what I bought. I'm angry I wasted money buying this, I would have been furious if my expectations were that high. This isn't a case of a fandom hyping in a vacuum, the developers were outright lying to us. Not just in the trailers, but in the words they were speaking. **** this game. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER You start jumping to the center, the game silently says "nope", plays prog rock as it holds the scroll backwards button on the map screen, fade to black and dumps you at the start of a new practically identical galaxy with all you stuff broken. I think it might even have gotten the color on my ship wrong. I can't tell because my game bugged out and put me in slow mo, and I was already fighting the urge to just toss my computer out a window. So no, you don't even get to see what is so shiny at the center of the universe, you just start over again. Seriously **** this game.

Play of the Game is an upskirt shot of my Symmetra corpse getting ragdolled around by explosions while my turrets mow down the other team. 10/10 would die again. In all seriousness though, it's really good. TF2 diluted the clean design of it's gameplay by introducing hats and weapons. It made it progressively harder and harder to actually get a read on what the characters were and what they were supposed to be doing. Overwatch displays a much more coherent design, every hero has a playstyle, every hero has a counter, its the interplay and the meta that makes the game work.

This game is officially out, but it still feels unfinished. They spent all that time polishing the engine, but everything else was abandoned half-way. You can’t rebind the controls. There is absolutely no voice overs in game for the campaign, which by the way is only “Episode 1”. Mechanics are strewn about still needing work. For example, the Army system is a very good idea, but is completely unwieldy. Try assigning multiple dreadnoughts to an army and the thing falls apart. Form an army out of a long stream of units and the ones that are about to take the objective will retreat to some centre of gravity. Still haven’t figure out a good way to detach just a few units. The mini-map shows an utter contempt for your desire to have situational awareness. Is that coloured blob territory held? A swarm of factory units? A colossal rush of dreadnought? No idea! Now in supreme commander you could just tactical zoom and look at the icons, but if that’s a feature it’s never been explained. The campaign is just "Episode 1". All the missions that aren’t tutorials are basically just a skirmish with some wonky starting conditions. The plot basically starts from nowhere and goes nowhere. None of the character have anything approaching personality, and even if they did, it’d be hampered by the fact they can only communicate by texting you in the midst of battle. The mission difficulty is either laughably easy or face smashingly hard. No, you can’t choose a game difficulty, that wasn’t in it. All of this was sacrificed for the graphics, which I admit are pretty, but utterly wasted. In Supreme Commander you got a good sense of scale. People know roughly how big a tank, a destroyer or a battleship are. So when you see that giant mechanical spider stomping a tank, you instantly think “Damn, that’s a big unit!”. Ashes’s units are all some weird sci-fi thingy that’s so disconnected from our experience that scale becomes meaningless. I’m sure that dreadnought is big, but I don’t feel it in any meaningful way. It might as well be dots and blobs. I don’t recommend this game. If you want an epic strategy fix just go replay Supreme Commander. The list of things Supreme Commander had that Ashes of the Singularity doesn’t would easily be as long as this review is.

I love this game. I've been seeing alot of people complaining that the turn limited objectives make the game less tactical. This is a position I don't understand. That's like saying having a limited budget in a management sim less managerial. There is no real time counter ticking down, you have to be tactical in your approach to survive the turn limit. None of the missions require you to kill all of the aliens within the turn limit anyway. You have to make the tactical decisions that let you turn off the timer. You got alot of tools in your belt to get to the timer location, armor that lets you walk through walls, remote hacking with a specialist, blasting a hole in a wall with explosives, a ranger that is still in concealment while the rest of the team lays down fire, the list goes on. The turn limit reinforces the theme of the game and provides a link between the overworld strategy and the low level tactics. You are on the clock, humanity's days are numbered, if you take too long the aliens will win. You are a desperate and hounded resistance movement going against incredible odds. Another criticism is the reliance on random events. Which I define as a core feature of the gameplay. This game is all about managing risk. You don't put all your Colonels in one mission, you don't dash out max distance into the fog of war, your plans don't rely on a single point of failure. All this risk management has to be weighed against the clock, adding another layer of complexity. Finally there are the bugs. This I have no counter to, the game is buggy as hell. Granted the majority of the bugs are graphical, and I haven't run into anything particularly game breaking. Also the text in item descriptions and tooltips outright lies in some places. (HINT: The haywire protocol tooltip is a lie, turrets are NOT permanently under your control). This knocks it down from a 10, but it's otherwise one of the best turn based games in the current market.