Recent reviews by FENTDETTA

Was a fun game, but now minor powers are unplayable. Avoid until they fix this. Casualties mount too fast now to make any minor country viable to play. Equipment reliability has gotten buried six feet under and you can lose an entire stockpile in the span of a month. RIP HoI4

TL;DR: I'd rate this game a solid 7/10. It has amazing potential and the devs are still currently developing the game, so dont worry about it becoming an abandoned project. I would recommend buying if you like any of the X series games (X3 or X4)

Pros: Massive weapon variety and total freedom to build your ships as you see fit. Well thought out 'Computing' system and variety of subsystems to make every ship unique. Combat is fun and the world feels like it's constantly moving (For the most part)

Cons: There is an extremely rudimentary automated trading system for your ships. It 'works' but you're going to give yourself a headache once you start managing multiple stations or a fleet of trading vessels. The need to constantly find the next resource in order to build bigger ships can feel very limiting, and the encounters with the Swoks can feel very artificial like they're not an actual ingame entity, just a boss stage with a random chance of spawning. The buy in for stations feels absurdly expensive. Station production mechanics not grounded on buildable equipment or blocks, just a money hole you pay to arbitrarily increase production. You cannot build a decent fleet of ships without needing to collect the next tier of material which just feels like a scummy cop-out to force players into the game's progression. Many missions feel severely underwhelming in reward. Severely lacking crafting system for weapons and subsystems.

I know the Cons list seems way longer than it should be for a 7/10 but I explain more in-depth down below. Im hoping the developers see this because I really do care about this game and only want it to get better.

So, point by point I'll elaborate on the mentioned cons above.

I describe the automated trading system as incredibly rudimentary because there is no means of chaining 'Repeat' orders or missions to your ships. Or establishing a chain of commands and ordering them to repeat the chain link until otherwise ordered like other games have done (X3: Rebirth and X4: Foundations). Example: Energy station A isnt moving as much product as I'd like, luckily I have 2 massive transports ready to alleviate this trouble. I cannot order them to trade with my specific station, I must take control of the both individually, and initiate the trade, then after Ive done that, then I must either A, order a sell mission for a small select region and rely on the profit estimate (This mission takes 20-30 real-life minutes btw). or B, I can fly them individually to a nearby Food producing station I know needs energy. There are some limited options for automation to tell them to travel there themselves, but after that Ill still need to switch to them and trade with the station manually. Please add a more in-depth auto trade system, that alone could easily set this game up to an 8 or 9/10 in my opinion.

There are many resources in the game, all with their various benefits but all with the common limitation of being further towards the center of the galaxy. It acts as a reasonable way of trying to force the player out of their comfort zone and as a form of progression. All is well and good except when you cant build larger ships without discovering the crafting methods of the next material. I see how this helps play into pushing player progression and having something to strive towards, but I really think there should instead be an increased computing power requirement for every excessive level rather than a hard block. There are few things more frustrating than pouring time into designing an awesome ship, only to lose track of the power score and get hit with a hard limit. More importantly you cannot build more ships without the next level of material. There are no workarounds for this other than with mods. in order to have a fleet of 7 ships you will need to travel further to the center of the galaxy and fight bosses or do an ungodly number of missions to get the craft knowledge for it.

The Swoks are unbelievably annoying and now I just farm them when I get the chance for subsystems and components. An entity like the Swoks could be an actual threat if they regularly raided AI sectors, necessitating player response or AI military fleet response to protect stations and trade, but instead all they are is a coin flip boss fight event when travelling the uncivilized sectors, which is pretty much anywhere without a station or gate. Swoks need more continuity, and I fee like after killing them should have some sort of demonstrable effect, like causing them to target local trade stations more often instead of you, or just wiping them out entirely.

Stations are very expensive to build, and its going to take my stations an extremely long time to finally turn a profit and pay for themselves. Buy in should be reduced to a system like the ship building system on a per-block basis.Additionally, there ABSOLUTELY NEED TO BE DEDICATED PRODUCTION BLOCKS! Its totally possible to do because the assembly line block already exists, but for some reason with stations it just goes out the window and you must now rely on the BLUE BAR OF PRODUCTIVITY! which you can throw millions of currency at to increase number of lines... Dedicated production blocks should be implemented and their size should influence their effectiveness on the station, very similarly to how cargo blocks already interact with stations and ships.

Missions provide a tiny boost to your funds, but they never really feel like they're worth doing for the money, its almost always about increasing faction reputation.

There really needs to be a more DIY means of producing weapons and subsystems. Obviously it shouldnt be as effective as producing them at dedicated stations and facilities but I just really do not like having to make these massive treks for building guns and subsystems that I feel like I should be able to produce in some way by myself.

got 2 games in a row where, some how, some way, my team and the enemy team was full of cheaters, happened over night after genuinely enjoying the game for a few years, now all I can get are hacker lobbies, and talking with the ones on your own team is literally just talking with a brain dead troll. Can't believe the anti-cheat system, after so many years of having people gradually tweak it with human input for the AI learning system, is still this unbelievably screwed. Just don't play it. There's no true repercussion for hackers and looking into their behavior will give you a pretty grim view on human nature.

So, in the game's current state I would say that it's a perfectly playable and enjoyable game for a specific kind of person. While this statement is essentially true for just about every game on the market I caution everyone with the wording "Specific kind of person" for a reason, that reason being that this game definitely has a little ways to go in terms of bug fixing and content. I'll try my best to methodically organize and list this review however I must beg your forgiveness as I am writing this at a very early hour in the morning.

To start with I'll list off the bugs that appear most prevalent to me in all of my time playing this game. There should be some sort of "Hours Played" counter attached to this review but just in case it doesn't I've currently played 136 hours in this game, 112 of which have been in the last 2 weeks. This should give you a decent idea of what you may encounter in that time.

-Blinding texture glitches that require a game restart to fix
-Slightly less severe texture glitches that distort the map and HUD
-Elements of HUD disappearing (Map, Information panel, Guidance, etc)

One more thing that I didn't think was fair to put into the list since it has only happened once and I haven't been able to repeat since, but my computer has crashed before while alt-tabbing out of the game in a loading screen. Requiring me to reboot my system.

One thing this game does that really caught my attention was a first person setting for station and ship roaming. I was very excited to try this new mechanic out seeing as no other X series game had attempted it, however, to temper your expectations before they get too high I will warn you that it is very rudimentary. You CANNOT roam around an entire station, granted you can roam the whole dock and board other ships that land and stowaway on them, but beyond a few very specific rooms for missions or trading/docking, there isn't much to the system. Buying your first capital ship and roaming the bridge is still an experience worth having though.

Another thing that really caught my attention about this game was the amount of creative freedom they gave the player for designing stations. In the run I've dedicated myself to I have 2 stations, one that I got from a secret mission of sorts and a defense platform I built as a little smuggling hideout for the ships I steal and their resources, repairing them and eventually selling them off for a pretty penny. The system for building can be really finicky at times but it only took me about 30 minutes to figure things out and eventually I was building my station modules like a pro.

The UI and HUD are both extremely painful to learn at first and I wouldn't blame you for looking at it and putting down the game for a while, maybe even considering a refund, I considered it myself but decided to take the time to learn piece by piece (I never did ANY of the tutorials, so I learned everything hands on, save for the occasional google search if I literally just could not figure it out). Once you start to get used the the UI though you'll warm up to it, although it is hard to use it is extremely technical and detailed, giving you all the information you may or may not need in a single click.

Unlike X3: Terran Conflict, large ships and even small ships now have a use for crew! HUZZAH! not only do crew serve an actual purpose (Repairs and boarding) but you can also see them walking about your ship if it's big enough. It's a minor detail but nifty nonetheless.

Capturing ships in this game is so much easier now aswell. compared to what you used to have to do it's a breeze now. From literally any size ship, if you have a marine on board, you can fire a boarding pod at any ship and have them automatically take control of it for you and have them fly it wherever you need it FOR YOU! Now, actually getting the enemy to abandon the ship is a totally different story, it seems that the process has become MORE complicated but once you learn the tricks necessary you can almost guarantee a ship capture.

Overall, I think this game is very good. It is capable of standing on its own as a worthwhile game without the need for a defense such as, "It's in alpha, just give the devs some time.". That being said, I certainly think this game has work to do ESPECIALLY in the area of UI simplification and increased ship diversity because it is sorely lacking in those two fields, but beyond that it's a solid game worth giving a try.

I'm genuinely disgusted with the direction this game has gone. A year ago this game seemed to have genuine direction and had me convinced that the game was only going uphill, but now that they've released DLC's that go over 30 dollars ESPECIALLY for a game that already costs a fortune proves that they're milking this cash cow for what they can and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all over the community that made Naval Action what it was. I have never felt so betrayed by a game studio. The devs of this game can all go have sexual congress with themselves and the forum admins should be ashamed. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. All we can do now is watch this ship sink. I'll dearly remember what this game used to be.

Great Indie horror game, this game is definitely leading the charge on the Indie-Horror front. Although there are a lot of things that could be done to add replayability, eviornment interactibility and so on, this game does a very good job in areas where many others fail. You have much more control over your enviornment to either work with you, or against you. depending on your skill and creativity you can make the monster (Depending on which one you get) bend to your every will. using several items such as but not limited to... Telephones, Egg timers, Radios, etc. Over the course of playing the game though you'll begin to run into inadequacies, these arn't huge problems with the game, just errors in logic. and the AI could use some fixing, because in a cat and mouse game the mouse shouldn't be able to speedrun the entire ship in 5 minutes. I think the AI should be a bit more powerful than it is at the moment, more vulnerabilities in the enviornement like more traps or locked doors on the bridge/security/cargo deck. because a ship with the tech that this one has i think would have heard of a lock. so even though there are a lot of logical holes and other aspects that need fixing (IE Lighting going through walls, lighting suddenly becoming brighter in corners, and other small things) I think that this game is a bit over priced for it's grade but is worth it due to the replayability it has.

This game truly brings out the strategy in it, the graphics are great, combat is great, and the realism of the cannons, rockets, bullets, etc are all together great considering that this is such an under-rated game is a shame when so many are missing out on the fun, the only annoyance of the game is the "kill Moves" when 2 are engaged in hand-to-hand combat they stand there fighting as the mass of 80 (for example) watches as the 2 men fight to the death and theres only that 1 enemy standing to fight, and the occasional glitch on troop placement is another but other than these 2 slight glitches i recommend this game to EVERYONE thats interested in TOTAL WAR and GLOBAL DOMINANCE.

Now THIS is indeed the biggest stride in strategy, war, and nationalism i've ever seen using AI that are a worthy foe, making it not only shifting troops around and battling but diplomacy, tax, rebellion, morale, this definatly beats their other games in my book, the only thing that disapointed me about this game is the fact that there was no north south america, mexico or anything to the west, but it is only a minor scratch, because you can't tell me you see a game like this everyday, now can you?