dragon0085

I oringinally gave this a 9 when I wrote it for a professional review. Initially, this game is awesome, the exploration is cool etc, let me get into the problems: The scope is so huge, and you are forced into 'diplomatically' killing people instead of blowing away planets. Let me explain, in EVERY other game, you can bomb a planet dead, or invade and take over - not here. You invade, and 'hold' the planet, and if you go enough of these, you reach a diplomatic goal and they give you a planet. The universe is so big, and so slow to fight, that you will almost never finish a game. Its disappointing, and I've played nearly all 4X games out there.

Its not very good, there are some parts which are interesting like 'threatening' during dipolmacy, or empire wide industry, but on the whole everything is subpar, and the game is in alpha-quality despite being released. I even like these type of games.

Do NOT make the mistake is getting this if you liked Drakengard, or Neir, this is absolutely the worst game I have played in a very long time. The actually gameplay is not that bad beyond just its simplistic button mashing but the story is horrendous, and the characters reminded me as if a 9-year wrote them to be as 'adult' as they could. You get compltely one-dimensional characters that swear alot, wow so cool...

This game is VERY funny and the story is entertaining, the thing that stops it from being 'perfect' is two major flaws that detract: item grinding and simple battle system. It is typical Idea factory grind, meaning it takes forever to get anything. The battle is a simple combo system but really it could have just been 'attack' and saved time. It is unfortunate, because I have not laughed as much as I have with this game's story that takes two different sides.

I had to create a profile so I could review this game amidst the obvious rating bombing this game is getting for positive reviews it doesnt deserve. The game suffers from FAR too much micromangagement, bad user interface to make it happen, bad pacing, and the problem of attempting a realistic space sim but losing playability in the process. I have played all the classics, I am the target audience, and I found this game terrible. For reference I have completed games of Space empires, and that is about as hardcore as it gets for 4x games. One of the biggest problems of this game is the scale, and the scroll speed, the fact you constantly have to bounce between system and 'galaxy' view but at a slow rate. To explain, consider a game like master of orion, it took place in a galaxy view, you saw all your stars, and it was clear, you could click on a star and it went INSTANTLY to system view, you saw planets, and could click on it. This game is nightmarish, it it almost a literal size ration of a system to a small section ****, meaning you have to zoom out...zoom **** theres one planet...zoom out...30 seconds later you FINALLY can see the stars. It is literally this bad. I understand the game was going for this cool thing where your ships are flying around the system from different sides, dropping in from **** it is just so hard to control meaningfully. Systems are HUGE and ships are nearly life size...meaning invisible. No big icons at all. Multiple times I clicked on the ships icon and could not find my ship despite being in the middle of the screen. The stars that are part of the background are not obviously different from system stars, so it was annoying trying to find actual systems. So beyond the massive scaling problem (and terrible scroll speed) the pacing is bad. It is real time, but basically the only way to really play is a 'turn based' style of pausing, issuing orders, playing at 4x speed until new orders...pause...repeat. What I hate is how slow your ships move in a system, again it was as if he was going for a realistic sim, at the heavy cost of gameplay. The user interface for ships and colonies is terrible. You can have a list of colonies (good) but not actually click on them to go to them (very bad) I mean how obvious of a feature was this to include? Every space game I've played from the 90s on let you click from a list to actually GO TO the planet. Last...ship design. It is not good. You have a whole bunch of squares, and you throw stuff in it (imagine space empires if you played it) but the problem is you have a LOT of stuff to throw in, and very little difference. You have a gun that does 15 damage and cost 500 or a gun that does 14 damage and cost 460 and does the exact same effect, woah such depth. You have the annoyance of placing power plants and then connecting wiring to all your stuff. If I wanted to be WIRING my ships I would have gone into engineering. There is no auto complete, and whats worse is there are certain areas that you cant place stuff in. Ship design in normally fun, or at least not a chore, it is very very annoying in this game. There is not a good info screen or anything either to decide if your ship is even good or has good stats. In closing there are some things that need improving like scroll speed, but that is a little thing that could get patched, but real things like the far too complex ship design, VERY bad pacing, very bad scaling of ships to systems to stars, and generally not fun because it isnt clear what is even happening makes this a game not recommendable, and this is from someone thats played a lot of them.