Recent reviews by Rabob

It's cool. It is a lot more forgiving than Payday for doing stealth:
- You have unlimited zipties. So you can tie everyone up.
- You can kill 2 guards/cameras without issue as long as it was silent.
- There is no hostage exchange when you die and you have limited revives.
- Gun diversity/customization is better in Payday 2 I think, but the guns in itself are nice.
- There are tools to help you distract guards or disable cameras.

Story wise it is like you are in one of those Guy Ritchie movies running a crime family.

It's just a mediocre RTS.

It's not bad or broken, but it is also not good or special. Especially in this day and age with many other games available there is very little reason to play this apart from the Starship Troopers setting.

When you look at the other reviews you will see that many are sub 4 hours. I think that says a lot.

Boring. Combine watching paint dry and a clicker game and you get this game. I played it a while to see if there is some more interesting end game, but there just isn't.

Plus it lacks some serious QOL like filling out the print sheets with stickers. I don't want to manually drag and fit 100s of stickers on there.

Easily worth the asking price

It adds Boron which have their own ships and weapons which are unique (they have a slowing ability).

Generally I also like them as a faction, they are mostly friendly to other factions and help against the Xenon.

Can't support their pricing model

Also they took offline Ghost mode

This game is like no other. If you like Freelancer mixed with production chains and supply from Anno then this is your game.

You can build your own stations and fleet (not just ship), fly every single one of those ships and manage them around. There is a lot of easy automatisation orders as well. So setting up say 50 fifty ships is pretty easy.

You can also outfit every individual ship with different shields, weapons, engines, etc.

Combat can be massive, especially with mods. You have Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large ships.

The universe is massive and so much is going on even if you are just idling somewhere.

You can play out factions against each other with certain missions and update 7.0 is promising a lot more in end game content/crisis as well.

It's a nice looking game and the foundation is there, but in it's current state it is way too overhyped.

The balance is completely off.
- You kinda start with too little families to get going and can easily get death spiraled. You need a minimum of 5 families to upgrade a house and you only get 5 families which are kinda like "workers" in other games. 5 workers is nothing basically.
- Most buildings you will never put more than 1 family in, because you simply do not have the workforce to spare without leaving out something essential.
- There is no way to protect yourself from bandits other than taking out their camps which might be on the other end of the map. Meaning you won't have production for a long time, lose troops (workforce) and perhaps starve by the time you return. Bandits constantly raid your supplies and can hardlock you from getting tier 2 housing pretty much or just run you into starvation/cold completely. Meaning that your approval drops and new families won't join you. Again if you are below 5 families, you simply cannot progress.
- Not getting tier 2 houses means you cannot make military equipment and thus units. Apart from trading, but I doubt you can make that work without development points to lower those costs.
- Not getting tier 2 also means no tier 3 aka no taxes and thus no mercenaries and no manor aka no retinue.
- So early/mid game you pretty hardlocked because you are simply left unable to defend yourself.
- When you enable the AI competitor, they will take over all regions before you are usually able to even contest one. So if your tile starts with bad deposits/fertility, you will be hardlocked as well. At some point you will be unable to grow/compete with them. For instance, you could field a big army, but if you are not able to make armor for that army they will die like flies.

I do think it is a nice game, but I would say wait off if you are looking to buy it. There are simply more fleshed out games out there. The villages and UI look really nice, but balance just is far from done. Will update over time.

BUYER BEWARE - MICROTRANSACTIONS
The game itself is nice, but it is filled up with unnecessary microtransactions for everything.

Sadly, can't recommend it. The game is just broken. Mechanics often do not repair lifts, which means you get completely stuck and need to make a new game. It is such a basic functionality in the game.

Do you like your games decided by randomness rather than strategy/tactics? Then this game is for you. Don't get me wrong, a little spice can be nice. But nearly all of it is randomness.

Prepare yourself for missions which are impossible to beat (like keeping the heat down), 99% reliability rockets crashing and all of this non sense. You have to save before doing any action basically, because of course the most important missions/milstones fail constantly...

The tech trees are completely linear. There is no thought/strategy here either. It leaves very little for replayability.

But above all the gameplay loop is just really repetitive. Click mission, click button for payload, make missile, launch and then wait for money to do the exact same thing again.

I was really hoping for a game where you could specialize rockets or mix-match at the cost of stability, but as it stands there is just very little decision making/thinking required in this game.