Recent reviews by nerdcommando.gamestudios

Current 66% approval is total bull. Sure, the interface is a bit wonky and tutorial could've been better, but there's a solid 15 or so hours of entertainment in this one at the moment and it's all decent enough. I'm not sure if the entire "board game" is a decent comparison because I'd rather match it with Darkest Dungeon and its likes - despite having a board, it feels much closer to that. Lethal party combat, constant risk & such.

The biggest distinction is that the combat isn't even that much rng-based - non-combat stuff is far more random than it. Which is probably my only complaint here as rerolls don't give as much but are very rare at the same time and your key character getting snatched away before the crucial battle might cost you the game. But that's nothing that can be ironed out, really.

Absolutely gorgeous art, btw.

С какой стати русский разраб, который бродит по ру коммути в поисках поддержки, продает свое клонированное поделие за 1500р?

My only explanation for this game's existence is the entire Abbey Games squad being replaced with doppelgangers. The only logical one I have, at the very least.

Like, seriously, their previus game, RE:IS, was an amazing one and it was good for:

- Great strategical choices with plenty of ways of going through the content.
- Excellent character design.
- Minimalistic yet fair and tactical combat.
- Witty writing.

None of these elements are present in the game. The game is extremely linear and mostly plays itself. While you're supposed to be influencing people as a god, in reality you're commanding them rather directly (except for combat). Yes, if their happiness is low, they might disobey. But, right now, you have to try hard for them to get unhappy so, well...

At the same time, there's almost nothing to manage - you do build a village but it's mostly for the show, the build-up is always almost the same and you can change nothing significant in it. You're performing lots of chores - just sending the same 3 guys to get the same resources over and over and over again. And those chores feel extremely annoying as the interface is not helpful at all.

Theoretically, you do manage your fighting crew - you can train them and assemble them in a variety of fashions. Practically, however, this one is ruined by Totem system. Yes, you can train your character as any class. But Totem absolutely defines which class your character is good at so, instead of choosing yourself, you just do what totem tells you.

Same for the party composition - theoretically, you have lots of choices. Practically, totem also dictates in what parties the character will be working. So, once again, you just do whatever you're told with minimal space for maneuvering.

You're also having a rather small amount of recruits so, while you're supposed to be countering enemy parties with different setups, you just don't have enough manpower to do that. Instead you just follow the Totems, assemble the mega-killer squad and just alpha-strike them no matter what.

Combat, btw, is all about having a character with high Cunning (so you always go first) and two glass cannons so you obliterate enemies before they're able to blink. You have no control over it but it doesn't matter because it's simple numbers comparison - just have a team with good and matching totems and that's it. Combat is also pretty slow and repetitive - I was mostly alt+tabbing through it.

Basically, there's no gameplay atm. And what there is is so deeply flawed that it doesn't need to be fixed - it needs to be sent to trash and rewritten from scratch. The totem system (have I mentioned totems enough?) for sure. And the game needs to be made an actual god sim instead of a clicker that it is right now.

Character design is random and thus utterly forgettable. Which is a stark contrast with the designs of a previous part where everyone was ultra-memorable. Writing is very sparse - the writing team feels to be the same but there's just nothing for them to do, tbh.

Music is mild and forgettable but then, I wasn't the fun of RE:IS music either so that's, like, whatever. I have my own playlist .

Basically, this "product" is in the most awful of shapes right now. I dunno, if not for the goodwill from their core fanbase, it would've been deservedly in the "mostly negative" zone right now. And I have no idea to whom it's supposed to appeal.

I won't even buy an "it's just EA" premise because the foundation here is so flimsy that I don't see anything decent being built upon it.

Finally! An X-Com clone for people who loved the deep story of X-Com and hated its awful combat. We all did that, right?

The most important thing about TLJH is that, despite all the proud words, it's not a game at all. It's just a shallow puddle of content that's obfuscated by the endless stream of pointless chores (which try to pose as min-games). And chores are not fun.

Let's see:

1. Planet-to-planet travel is a chore by a whole slew of reasons. First, it's too slow and thus takes too much time - and you can't accelerate it as fuel is rather precious and you'll need to spend it both to accelerate and decelerate afterwards. The game pretty much forces you into maneuvering as little as possible (ideally) so travel takes a lot of time. Second, there's no actual map - only the mini-map so you can't plot your course precisely. However, your movement needs to be rather precise else you're forced waste fuel. There's also no pause to adjust your movements so, want it or not, you will be making maneuvering mistakes - the game is just set up in this way, it pretty much asks us to carry water in a sieve without spilling any. Fourth, because of the planetary dangers, you can't explore, like, a half of planets in this game. However, the mini-map doesn't tell you anything about the planet's condition. So you first need to waste time on reaching it only to discover that you can't do anything with it anyways. So much fun.

2. Lunar Lander is a chore. It's fundamentally boring gameplay mechanic which is further worsened by the fact that you need to do everything uber-carefully in the game, else your equipment breaks, your crew gets wounded and whatever profit you wished to scavenge from this planet goes into the red zone. And, well, it is quite possible to pilot this thing carefully, however it also means doing this slowly. So you're forced to waste unreasonable amount of time on earning some spare change (and RNG can still hate you so it'll turn into a net loss or tie) - sure, that's fun.

3. Asteroid mining also is very simplistic and slow. Everything is slow in this game. In this mode, you have no backward thrust so you need to move around very carefully - if you accelerate too much, you're just crushing into asteroids, potentially taking some serious damage. Also, asteroid fields are unreasonably big. I was doing the russian video-review of this game and it took me 5 minutes to go through just one, with 3 minutes or so being wasted on just flying in one and the same direction (at maximum speed). All for the most pathetic profits. People compare this game to FTL - yeah, because you totally walk there for 5 minutes without doing anything.

4. Combat is awful. It's incredibly simplistic, it's prone to exploits and it has no fun that the SC combat had.

5. Story is ridiculous in a sense that, well, after an hour of chores, you finally reach those quirky, zany aliens. With fluff and lots of topics to talk. That's cool, right, that's the essence of the game, right, that's the payoff? Only screw you - they'll answer the 3 questions max and then refuse to talk more. That's your payoff right there. And, since you need to survive, you can't even afford to as any of the interesting questions - you need to dedicate it all to the economical ones. I dunno, the game designer who invented this crap just needs to get barred from the industry. Because that's as anti-fun as it can possibly be.

6. Despite the almost-AAA price tag, the craftsmanship of the game is shoddy. There are lots of filters applied, but behind them are real cheap models and effects. The shields, for example, are something that you can buy from the unity asset store (or, rather, they've probably been bought there). Aliens also arent' that cool because they're also cheaply done and so they're always drowning in lighting or effects, meant to hide the cheapness of the models.

7. The amount of the story-content is rather minimalistic. And all that stuff above is the ungodly amount of filler that's supposed to mask this fact.

8. Oh, and there's no real choice in the game - the game balance is godawful so there are only god-tier and crap-tier ships & crewmembers and most quests don't provide varying outcomes so it's all about memorising them and knowing which ones to do (as they pay off) and which ones to avoid (as they don't). Don't expect to be questing too much, though - most of the time you'll be spending in chores. Or, rather, I hope you won't be spending any time on this wreck as it's just not a game.

This game is actually (and rather surprisingly) good. The only bad part is the writing - it's full of memes & pop-culture references & lolrandom stuff, so it comes out as rather tryhard-ish. But visuals, on the other hand, are pretty good (even the memes - lots of art is based on them) so, as long as you skip the text, it's not very annoying. I'll stress on this - the lead artist of this game is really talented and it's joyful to look on his works.

But the most important part is that the core gameplay is rock solid. Yeah, you draw cards, sure, you roll dice, but the game is anything but random - all the abilities, deckbuilding, equip system (that one is badly explained in-game - basically, you pay points for the card now so later you can cast this card with a discount; great in early game and for expensive combos which are impossible otherwise; like, say, Juggernaut + Here's Johnny = whipe all minions on the board) and just the right plays allow you to prevail literally no matter what. The game is not very hardcore, but also isn't too easy - I say that the difficulty is just about right.

Each class has its own cardpool (4 classes and ~170-ish cards in total) plus there's a bunch of common cards, shared between everyone. I wouldn't say that the possibilities are endless, but it's more than enough to have a fun run through main campaign (which is about 6-7 hours). Maybe with a bit of experimentation too - you can recruit several sidekicks and they have slightly different abilities from the player's version of the classes and, surprisingly, that changes their tactics a lot. So, considering there are four classes, one can expect something like 30 hours or so of rather fresh gameplay. Which, for 15 bucks, seems to be pretty good.

Anyways, it's a pretty nice one, dunno why there seems to be zero attention to it.

Baby's first 4x game.