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Sometimes fun but can be buggy, crashes, slow progression. It's actually a more fun version of WarThunder because you have infantry participate in tank battles now. But the vehicles are extremely limited and you can't specialize because you're forced to bring infantry squads to every match.

The squads are really annoying. It basically means for every human there are 3-8 bots. They always die before you, can't keep up if you run, and give away your position when sniping. They should have made humans be part of the same squad. Best use of the squads seems to be kit out all soldiers the same as your main guy and have them wait at spawn as "extra lives" so you can skip the respawn timer.

Progression is terrible. Too much grind for insignificant things, just like WarThunder. And the UI is really convoluted, simple things take multiple clicks and animations. You have to level and equip each squadmate separately, which is a pain. There's a "template" system for load out, but it can only equip items and can't buy, so it's useless.

Balance is hit and miss. It's fun when you get matched with similar players and end up in a part of the map with interesting tactical terrain. Other times you're just forced to march into the meat grinder across an open field. Or the other side has some uber snipers that drop you from impossible distances. Dunno if it's cheaters like other reviews say or just people way too skilled being matched with casuals, but not fun either way because you get stuck in a respawn loop with no chance at all.

I'm not a big Doom fan (it was okay, back when I had nothing else to play) but I like WH40k and I got this hoping for basically Serious Sam in WH universe (that's how the trailers looked to me), but with crappy graphics. I'd say it was meh.

I could barely tell I'm playing a WH game due to the retro graphics and minimal voice acting. The cutscenes didn't work. Apparently this is because the devs messed up the filepaths of the videos, so you can fix it by renaming the game's files... But come on! I paid 20 bucks for this, and I'm supposed to fix bugs myself?

The pace is weird. It's not nearly as fluid as Doom-style games IMO. Movement feels sticky. A half hearted attempt to mimic the heavy footsteps of power armor? Using melee enters some kind of bullet time so you can pick a target, but it really breaks the flow for me. I think attacking enemies stunlocks them, which makes the game much easier than you'd expect (I only played on easy, but the difficulty setting didn't mention this). Honestly, even the game Space Marine had controls that felt tighter.

I'm not a fan of the retro graphical style. I know, you can tell from the screenshots, but there's not a lot of alternatives for 40k so I was hoping it's better when playing than it looks. Actually it was worse. Something about the visuals is just too cluttered and noisy. Gave me a really bad migraine, that was a first for me. I know I know, old man can't handle action games, haha. Well, Doom came out 3 decades ago, so this isn't exactly a game aiming for the zoomer market is it?

The problem is that it wasn't made lo-fi start to finish like Doom was. They did lo-fi-ish models and textures with modern hi-fi tools, and then slapped a color/pixelate filter on it. The result is like a retro-3D version of those pixelshit platformers with rotating/resizing pixels. The billboarding is really annoying as well. Wish they copied a later game, like Quake 2.

Level design is another thing where you realize that classics like Doom may have looked simple, but actually a lot of effort went into making this simplicity play well. Boltgun, not so much. A lot of going in circles in confusing levels. Action gets interrupted by boring maze solving.

If you're a hardcore Doom fan, well it's not as good as Doom but you'll probably enjoy it. If you're just here for the WH40k stuff, it's kind of mediocre. Is Space Marine 2 out yet? Maybe wait for that instead.

Oh, and, by the way - the original doom was like 2.5 MB. This bad boy is 2.5 *G*B. I get that we live in a consumerist dystopia, but this 1000x space increase is sacrilegious IMO.

tl;dr: Game went EA last week, so there's a good amount of WIP. However, in its current state it's pretty fun. $10 is a good price for it and I'd recommend buying it at that if you like production chain optimization games.

The game makes me think of Factorio if it was more like a board game and streamlined. It's actually not similar to Factorio at all - for example there's no conveyor belts and you don't have your own character run around the map. However, they both rely on organizing production chains and assembly lines to make more and more stuff.

This game has very simple components: For example, truck and train stops can only have one route, so you have to build multiple for hubs. All buildings are one hex. Storage depot tiles also handle transferring resources with their own builtin drones. The result is a pretty streamlined and abstract experience. Designing assembly lines is ultimately a graph layout task. This game is more on the "pure layout" side where your concern is only the arrangement of elements. You don't have to worry about oversize buildings, rotating input/output ports and so on.

Because the elements are very simple, you also have to come up with more build patterns. That's kind of fun, since the game has a suitably smooth UI and it's not too hard to experiment and figure out what's going on where.

I haven't "finished" the game, I made it about halfway through. But you mainly advance by unlocking new production chains. As more chains unlock, logistics rapidly becomes more complicated, because of the combinatorics. As you go on you have to plan more carefully, and invent various transport patterns to support your chosen way of organizing different production areas on the map.

Visually the game is very nice. From the screenshots, it looks a bit bland, but the animations make it look a lot better when you're playing it, in my opinion. Visually, it manages to have a satisfying feel to it. I also like the audio. The sound effects are minimal and the music is very calming and pleasant.

Overall, it's a great comfy game where you can just build and chill. There's a lot of puzzle solving, but ultimately it's more like a creative medium where you can make pretty designs you like. It's a bit like legos in that way.

The game is very early in development and there are quite a few minor, but pretty annoying issues. For example, there are no production limits, so you end up like that scene from Fantasia with the bucket army and realize the factory built 2k trucks while you weren't paying attention. The dev has a Trello board where you can see and vote on individual tickets, and seems to be making steady progress, so I think these will probably be fixed soon. He is also very responsive to issues and bug reports in the Steam forums. However, there is a mod pack (search Steam forums) which basically solved every UI and QoL problem for me. Without the mod pack, the game is good. With the mod pack it's great.

I really like the complex strategy in this game and the developer seems to be great.

Conceptually, it's like XCOM but you control the council instead of XCOM. You have a small team of councilors who try to take over Earth governments and steer them from the shadows. Crucially, you play as the power behind the throne, not the countries themselves, and it's like the majority of the Earth's population is not aware of you, nor are they necessarily willing to cooperate with your vision of how to respond to aliens or whether the aliens are even a priority vs. warring on their neighbor and dealing with their own economy. There are multiple factions and each have their own goals, they have a lot of personality and seem inspired by Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, they even have quotes about the sci-fi tech you research.

The game plays a lot like Europa Universalis 4. There's generic manas like money and political influence, but also more thematic stuff like boost (used for launching rockets into orbit) and space water (your space bases need water which must either be mined on asteroids or lifted from Earth at great cost to boost). The councilors are like the diplomats and traders of EU4, you have similar "armies". For obvious reasons the councilors are more prominent and detailed, while armies and navies are simplified, compared to EU4.

There are "orgs" like companies, crime syndicates, national intelligence agencies which are basically items that you can buy and equip on councilors to get plusses. It's a clever concept that helps make it feel more like you're actual movers and shakers.

The mechanics are pretty original and cool. For example most research is global, unlike games such as Civ where after one country discovers a tech, other countries must inexplicably reinvent the wheel (even literally) instead of just copying it from their neighbor. You can build spaceships to fight aliens, and they have DeltaV. Even the aliens have DeltaV, they just have more. You have to plan orbital transfers to move around.

Main reason I decided to write this review though, is the developer. Initially, I was put off by the $40 (I'd expect more like $30 with occasional $5 off sales) and some negative reviews (Sep-Dec 2022) complaining bad UI and tedious gameplay (especially the councilor system and their RNG actions). After 10 hours I'm in mid of early game and the UI seems pretty nice to me. It's a bit choppy sometimes but I'll accept minor technical issues in a big concept-small team game like this. Many specific UI flaws, like not being able to see how much of a threat the AI considers you, seem to have been added to the game now. I started playing a week ago, and one annoying thing I noticed was having to go back and forth to figure out what councilor has what action and how much is his skill point used for that action. Today I see that the UI has been changed and now when you recruit councilors, it groups actions by skill and also says how many councilors you already have that can do that skill. It makes councilor management way smoother, and that's a big part of the game.

Clearly the dev respects his customers, listens to criticism, and improves the game based on what the players actually want, and not just what he thinks they should want. I respect that and I'm hopeful the game will get better in the future. It's already pretty good and playable as is.

A common complaint is that the game is long. I haven't played that much but it sure seems long. That said, I play lots of grand strats/4x like EU4, Vicky2, CK2, Total War, Civ, SMAC, ... These games always take a forever, and I hardly ever "beat" them. The process of playing the game is supposed to be fun in itself. For this game, the early game is really fun and there's a lot to do in different phases, so at this point I'm not too worried. I'll come back here and update the review if I'm proven wrong :)

And to be clear: I'm not saying the negative reviews are wrong or anything. I'm glad those guys wrote it up and I could see what I was getting into. I think their complaints are reasonable and I can see where they're coming from. Some of the issues have been fixed in the time since, others, for me personally, are not a big obstacle to fun gameplay (hope dev keeps improving them, though!). I encourage you to read the negative reviews and make up your own mind. Also the genre is obviously not for everyone. If you like grand strat you may think the game is great or you may think it's okay, but I doubt you'd feel like it's a waste of $40.

Perun gaming on Youtube has some playthroughs of the game, I recommend you watch some to get an idea of what it's like. He explains some of the meta which is nice. He also says there's a demo somewhere, which I couldn't find, but if you feel like tracking it down it should give you a good feel for the game.

Man, wish I read the negative reviews before buying. They are 100% correct. Wish I didn't ignore the fact that the game was 60-70% off for months, and instead ask why. I bought mainly as a comfy game to play on the Steam Deck and it's been mediocre.

The game is pretty tedious. Lots of collecting resources over and over. Character walks slowly and there's obstructions everywhere for no reason. For example, you often go back and forth between graveyard and morgue, but annoyingly there is a long fence with no convenient doorway. You have to always go around it which almost doubles your trip. Same for vineyard, the cliff blocking it and your gardening area.

Hardly any QoL. Click click click. Some recipes let you pick ingredient quality, which means you have to make them one by one. Even more clicking. The crafting UI is not good btw.

There is lots of production chain spam. For example, there's like 10-15 types of wood like wood planks, rough planks, stumps, wedges, etc... It doesn't really matter, it's all just fodder for recipes. But the problem is that each one is made specifically at one of the ~5 woodworking stations. So you have to keep running between the stations trying to find which one has the recipe you want.

The building system is very restrictive. Forces you to just make a messy jumble of craft stations. Always gives you a few tiny islands of buildable areas, and what you can build is highly location specific. The vineyard for example doesn't let you build a box so you can keep fertilizer and seeds in it. So you have to keep running back and forth to the garden area which does. Can't move buildings either and deconstructing wastes a lot of resources. The cellar, which apparently is basically only good for wine barrels, gives you 9x4 buildable areas when wine barrels are 4x4. UGH. Trolling people's OCD in this type of game, it's like, a cardinal sin of the genre.

No recipe book, no proper quest log, no useful tooltips on items, no explanation on the tech tree. There are HUNDREDS of crafting recipes and you have to look each one up on the wiki. How do you make a crafting game without a builtin recipe index? Come on.

Overall, the game is extremely grindy and slow. You always have to work on multiple things because everything is locked behind artificial waits. It's easy to lose track of what you're doing.

Performance is crap. I don't know how you manage that with a pixel game, but there it is. On the Deck with SteamOS, you get max 1280p resolution. You can barely see the whole UI with that. For the bottom of the tech tree, the tooltips get cut off. Lol! It's also a huge pain to even change the resolution, it glitches out a lot and you have to find a very specific way to do it by trial and error. If you switch to desktop mode you can use whatever resolution you want, but now there's weird stutters and tearing issues, and you start getting 30-40 fps. Yes, in a 2D game! I get better performance in Elden Ring FFS.

Basically, the vanilla game is bad and even at $10 it will feel like a letdown. With all the DLCs (I hear), you actually have like 80% of a real game, although still with flaws (DLC isn't going to fix the crappy graphics code). But now you've paid like $60 for a $15 experience. And still there will be stuff left in the game that's incomplete. Sounds like 1/3 of the issues the game had in 2018 are still not fixed 5 years later. Don't bother buying this, it's an exercise in frustration. Crafting games are a dime a dozen, just go play something better.

This is a great game, it should be used as an example of how to make games in many areas: Gameplay mechanics design, art direction, execution...

The game is about making potions. Potions can have different effects based on the ingredients and exact recipe (obviously). There are many ways to obtain the same effect with different ingredients. Effects can be higher quality if you are particularly precise with the steps. You can save recipes you like so that you don't have to do steps manually every time, but the game limits the number of slots you have (you buy more slots as you make money).

Of course, there is a variety of ingredients and not all of them are good for every type of potion. You can get ingredients from different sources, but not all sources are equal. For instance mushroom man only sells mushrooms (not always the same ones), and you have to wait for him to show up. This means you have to tailor your recipes to available ingredients, and you have to maintain a selection of ingredients to cover different types of potions customer might ask for. I think this is a pretty fun aspect of the game. Ingredient scarcity gives you some pressure to think about efficiency, but also it's usually pretty easy to find ingredients if you really need it, so it's not a source of much stress.

The coolest thing by far is *how* the potions are brewed. It's not just a checklist of add this much of this, that much of that... There's a map, and every potion effect is a location on it. Every ingredient moves you in a certain predefined way. So it's about figuring out which sequence of ingredients will get you close enough, and also is something you can repeat multiple times with the ingredients you have. But there are various tools in the game that can modify the path of an ingredient, and there's a huge number of ingredients as well as multiple alternate maps, so you really get to explore a huge space of possible ways to make potions. The map is not revealed at the beginning, so there's an exploration aspect as well.

I think this map idea is brilliant. In real world chemical research there's a lot of efforts to summarize the essential properties of millions of possible chemical compounds, and then use that to automatically discover new reactions. One of the solutions to this, which I find really neat, is to calculate the similarity of all compounds (using the full list of their many chemical characteristics) and use machine learning and/or some fancy statistics to map this to 2D or 3D space so that similar things end up close together. Human brains are very good at comprehending physical space, but not good at comprehending tables of numbers, so this is a great way of leveraging that innate ability to make it easy for you to navigate a non-spatial thing (chemistry). This game is basically a gamified version of this approach. They've gotten the details right so it feels smooth, and it's very immersive to imagine yourself as a medieval alchemist who doesn't really know these modern statistical approaches, but is arriving at them intuitively through trial and error.

It's worth saying that the interface of this game, graphics, music etc. are really beautiful. They're all very polished and animations work smoothly. The controls are pretty good with a gamepad - the only issue is that you can't give a custom name to your recipes without a keyboard. The game is basically "find the recipe" (aka combinatorics, if you like math), but with the 2D map abstraction I described. You find the recipe over and over. This would suck if the UI wasn't slick, and in this game it's really slick. It doesn't really get old.

I found that it's a fun game to play with someone as well, taking turns every hour or so. You can play at a slower pace and have a conversation as you play, whether about the game or something unrelated. Most of your brainpower goes to planning and thinking, not fiddling with controls, so the person watching can meaningfully participate. A lot of winning tactics are circumstantial and subjective, so it's not a case of you figure out the solution and there's nothing more to discuss. You can always go back to old recipes or strategies and re-examine them.

Incidentally, pacing is another great aspect of this game. In most things you do, you can choose whether you want to do it with high stakes and more intensity, or lower stakes and more laid back. For example the haggling minigame is about reaction time. If you don't have fast reactions, or maybe you do but don't feel like making the effort that day, you can just choose the smaller haggle margin and get a slower minigame. If you're trying to make some amount of money, it takes you a bit longer, but it's not like the game becomes so slow that it's boring. Or you can go hard with higher stakes and advance faster. This isn't done by going to the game settings and fiddling with a "difficulty" slider - it's all part of the game to keep adjusting what intensity you want for each bit.

I'd recommend using a good gamepad for this. Something you do a lot is "grind" and "stir". Both are done by actually moving your cursor in a circle. I started with a cheap knock off Xbox controller (and also a knock off PS4 controller), and circling with the stick was not very pleasant (still playable). This was one of two games (other one was Sekiro) that convinced to fork over $60 for a real PS4 controller. It was a huge improvement because the coating and spring on the real PS4 analog stick is much higher quality and feels much more ergonomic. I never played with the mouse much - it seems playable, but I get shoulder pain from too much mousing so for me a gamepad is mandatory.

I feel like the game is pretty much perfect for what it is - a puzzle game with an original mechanic that is explored pretty in depth. Because the interface, graphics, audio, controls and other "minor" technical aspects are well done, the game feels very smooth and brewing potions for hours is relaxing rather than tedious. It's one of those games that you don't really care about completing, you just want to keep going back to the meditative experience. There is however a generous amount of progression when you want it - the game doesn't force you to progress if you feel like just staying at one level for a while.

I just wish they added voiceovers :)

This is a city builder where you speedrun economic objectives hundreds of times. At $20, I'd say the game has flaws but the value is there. There's been steady improvements from devs which is promising. It is currently on sale for $15, at that price it is a good buy. I hear devs are planning to hike the price to $30 - I'm not sure about that one.

Missions are under heavy time pressure. There's an explicit timer (with variable rate and can be reduced with events) as well as accumulating maluses over time. You are also often limited by non-renewable resources.

The main challenge comes from RNG. In each mission you unlock buildings, objectives, resources, perks based on random choices, it's similar to card games with deck building without actual cards. The city building itself is fairly shallow so that you can mitigate unlucky RNG, and I think the gameplay would be boring without the RNG.

The game has a lot of polish. QoL, performance, core mechanics, the buildings and resources are all there. Bugs are few. Even for a non-EA game it would be impressive. Devs continue to improve things in this regard.

I really like the creative lore behind races and resources. There's a pretty good number of them as well. However, the production chains are pretty similar to each other. Either they're a "factory building" that you plop down somewhere (may be restricted to being "on a deposit") and resources come out, or it's a "camp" where workers travel back and forth to some resource node. This was surprising to me because for example mining stones and catching insects works exactly the same: There's an "insect nest" block that workers basically mine. There's no hunters chasing actual wild animals around for example.

The biggest negative for me is the lack of map variety. All maps are "swiss cheese forest" where you carefully expand into glades, which can contain bad things like "-5 happiness until you spend 10 tool resources to remove this object". Your city layout ends up being broadly the same every time. It feels like practicing a build order in Starcraft.

Meanwhile the game seems set up so that you play hundreds of missions. You can buy upgrades between missions with "food" etc resources you get from winning missions. The way it's set up, you need to win hundreds to buy the whole upgrade tree. At higher difficulties you get 2x-3x more resources, but now the game is harder, so it takes longer to win. You also have to micro more, so you pause more. So maybe instead of taking 45 min to beat a map, you take 2 hours... Which means the upgrades aren't really coming in much faster. And without at least a third of the upgrade tree unlocked, the game is pretty tedious to play normally - only fun as you are still learning the mechnics. On the bright side, at least it's easy to edit the save files to add resources and skip that busywork.

So this is a game where you build *a lot* of small cities quickly, rather than putting many hours into one big city. But there's not a lot of variety in the kind of city you build. This is the main problem keeping me from playing more. The game itself is pretty fun and smooth, so I keep coming back every few weeks, but get bored again from doing the same forest with glades but this time instead of building bakery to make biscuits and pies maybe I'll make biscuits and skewers in the cookhouse.

Don't listen to haters- if you want to play a roguelike that isn't ASCII, this is great.