Recent reviews by TFTCoelacanth415

It's Sins of a Solar Empire. But better, and still could be better. A great game and the first RTS sequel in a long time that is actually good. It just needs some kinks ironed out.

It has polish, Quality of Life features, better performance, visually fantastic*, and roughly feature parity with Rebellion. If you're new to the series you get this. If you're a fan of the first you get this (for the performance if nothing else). No need to reinvent the wheel when you can just take the wheel you have and make it better. There's only up in terms of future content expansion/post launch support. Ship and sound design are great too. There were concerns about TEC ships looking too clean, but they're now sufficiently greebled and if you don't want them looking bright and obnoxious you can tone their paint scheme down to mostly bare metal.

Some things have been removed from Rebellion, but it's stuff that didn't really work out in the first like the trade/refinery placement minigame, or ships that were just never used or awkward like the envoy and command cruisers, or the TEC boarding capital (Corsev). Some mechanics have been folded into individual factions to further make them unique. The roaming outlaw ships were folded into TEC Enclave (Loyalists) as garrisons. The Novalith cannon was made exclusive to the TEC Primacy (Rebels),

The bigger changes come with the combat and changing landscape. Missiles are now a distinct threat meaning those once useless flak frigates get an important niche for covering your capitals from torp and bomber spam. Likewise turrets being physical means there's more emphasis on where your ships are and how to get the most of their weapons. I really like what they did with Titans and capital ships requiring special resources which can be salvaged from destroyed enemy capitals. This with the items system lets you fine tune each ship and adding rare artifacts makes them into proper murder if you get good synergy. The orbiting planets are also huge, chokepoints and lanes can change. A player who pays attention can take advantage of these changes. A new backdoor into a now vulnerable planet can bypass a TEC player's unbreakable wall of guns and starbases. In a long game this can break a stalemate.

The UI is great*, it's fairly intuitive and the QoL features makes research and outfitting ships and planets easy. Fleet management is so much easier and reinforcing them is a breeze. There is information readily available to be seen. Clicking on the desired ship queues up research to be done automatically. Though there's room for improvement in the QoL I think. Scouts die very easily and queuing up another dozen over and over made me wish I could just ensure there was always X amount of scouts. If one died an idle factory somewhere could pop out another. Fleets could work the same way, if I have a specific composition I'd like to keep I'd rather my factories kept up so I'm not over producing in any one fleet when at supply cap. Ditto with Refineries. When I have the resources to spare I would like it if they could automatically produce to top off my stockpile. It's like queuing up farm reseeding in OG Age of Empire's 2 and going back to requeue only when you get the notification you're bone dry, it's a bit of a chore. I also wish there was a way to decide whether to reinforce from the closest factory or prioritize speed (if there is I'm not seeing it), if I have a system filled with factories I'd like to be using that one instead of getting them one at a time from a slightly closer system. One thing that is VERY annoying is scouts jumping into systems with inhibitors and getting spammed with the voiceline/notification even if I have the tech for them to ignore the inhibitor field.

The UI presentation is not so great. Here is where I rant.
The AI art makes it feel very cheap and while you get used to it and tune it out it can take you out of the otherwise great game when it rears its misshapen head. When Pirates come attack a colony I don't want to see green ghost rider in the notification. The research menu is the worst of it. Nearly every icon and image is AI art, it's white noise that blends together. Take a look at the icons from Sins 1, there is a very distinct progression and theme. Sure they're simplistic but you implicitly understand that brighter laser and bigger missile are upgrades from dimmer laser and smaller missile. You understand that the little flag on a planet means it's a colonization tech. Things that had the metal graphic in it improved metal production, likewise for crystal.
It feels as there was very little thought put into it and slapped in last minute. All the images of people, weapons, technology, cities etc. don't mean anything and doesn't tell us anything about the setting. It's not an Advent weapon tech, it's glowing scifi thing. It's not a Vasari starship engine, it's glowing scifi thing. It's not a TEC factory, it's glowing scifi thing and the guy is welding with his bare hands. When you have actual icons side by side to the AI stuff, it's night and day like the icons unique to the starbases or titans. Even more jarring are the few attempts I noticed to edit them, there's one from a cockpit view and there's a Cobalt photoshopped in that looks out of place.

Then there's the portraits. Like cool, you got several dozen Vasari portraits, but all of them are this samey swooped metal dude, maybe they have something resembling a horn if they're daring. You look at one and not once do you recognize any distinct portrait as "oh it's the scrunchy bug face guy with the staff" or "the red one with the really big crest helmet". None of the Advent portraits stand out like the one resembling the Pathologic Tragedian with the blank white mask or big religious headdress lady, they're all the same plastic blue glowing person in a white robe + 2 scifi robots. None of the TEC portraits stand out like arrogant looking woman in front of a flag or that shady looking ♥♥♥♥♥♥, just a bunch of people in vaguely scifi clothing.

It's just a visual mess, and I'm not even one of those people who think AI is electronic satan. AI art has its merits, just not as a final product you're selling people. I hope they get it replaced with actual art—with thought put into it—as development moves on.
It doesn't impact the stellar gameplay at all. Sins 2 as a game is very good like its predecessor, it just sticks out like a sore thumb when the rest of the game is polished and well put together and make me ask "why?".

Like Total War in the sense of building armies and combat. Like Dungeon Keeper in the sense of building rooms, attracting specific creatures, keeping them happy. But this game is most like Pharaoh. You maintain a painful cycle of population growth whereby you grow your workforce and dedicate most of that workforce to support the new size. More and more industries are added to satisfy plebeian demands: taverns, stages, law, fight pits, hospitals, markets; it never ends and it all needs more workers. Growing carelessly leads to starvation, work gets paralyzed, and the plebs become ungrateful. Careful planning is needed to build larger and growing to a city of over 10k is an achievement. To help you decide what to build next you can click on any plebeian and see their needs and wants. Manage trade and the importation and exportation of goods where trade caravans and armies are physicalized on the world map and diplomacy and the exploitation of surrounding kingdoms is necessary to grow further. Finally, you can make a tax prison in the shape of a city.

A hidden gem of a game that won't overheat your CPU for making a big city. The developer embraced the idea of "trying before buying" with the demo version of the game being the full game a few versions back. The tutorial sucks, but this is known and you'll figure things out and find out if this game is for you or not. This game is bad at telling you things and sometimes you'll be left scratching your head wondering why rooms in natural caverns are degrading and eat up upkeep, why some rooms have different isolation values while identical rooms are fine, how access for services works, why people are homeless despite having empty houses, why buildings aren't being built, etc. You will find solutions for some of these, but some are just strange. I would not recommend this if you're just looking for a casual city builder, this is for people who think Banished is too shallow.

I like this game, or rather, I want to like this game. If only there was a mixed recommendation option.
It's a tech demo for another game that Bare Mettle is developing, which at the rate things are going, Star Citizen will be done before Exanima and Sui Generis is; small family dev team, please understand. It has a rough combat system that takes getting used to, and it becomes fun when you get proficient with it. The problem with this game is ultimately the jank; with a frustrating camera and poor control feedback which leaves you no choice but to "get used to it". Modding is something this game could really use in between the yearly updates, but you're SOL for unless you dive into discords.
The game features two modes: the dungeon roguelike, and arena mode. The dungeon mode *is* the game. You go through several levels, collecting loot, and learning skills and brain magic until you either die or run out of content. The Arena mode is a gladiator team management sim where you pit your dudes in several types of fights to earn money to gear up, this continues until you get bored of it.
There's alot of odd things that may turn you away, and I guarantee you much of your time is going to be spend "gitting gud" over playing the game and reaching the current end of content. You're going to run out of things to do as there is next to no replayability in the vanilla game, however, for $15 it's worth the price and I enjoyed my time with it. It's unpolished, but bug free. The pricepoint alone is why I would recommend this game and give it a try.

There is potential for a great game, but you can't play a game that doesn't exist. We finally have the full release of Bannerlord, now out of early access; yet this game is still unfinished and TaleWorlds hasn't changed this fact in the eight years of development, two and a half years of early access, and a launch. While it could have gone another year in EA development, I don't think it would've made a difference considering the total dev time.
There are some positives. The combat is enjoyable—if a bit slow—and feels better to play over Warband, but the sandbox outside of that is a drag, and it will only get worse in the late game. The Clan system is contentious but has some nice ideas. Mod support is also much improved over Warband, whether Bannerlord retains modders is another story. This game needs a lot of work and mods will be broken with every patch: if you can stick it through to the end in however many years, you have my respect. And I guess if you want true equality, then you'll find that no one bats an eye at race, social class, ethnicity, or sex; in a game heavily based on the medieval period.

As it stands now, Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is not worth the asking price. Do not go into this expecting a feature complete game. Buy the game at a heavy discount if you can.

A factory and automation building game that can be taken at any pace and can be as relaxing or as stress inducing as you like. Factorio is a great game made by passionate devs. While it is not for everyone I recommend that you give it a try, there's a free demo or pirate it since its DRM free, just be aware that you're SOL for support, multiplayer, mods, and a dangerous risk of buying it in the end like I and many others have. If moneys tight go ahead and pirate and see if the game is your jam, if you find that you're putting in over 20 hours go and support the devs.

There's not much for story other than your an engineer stranded on a hostile world. There's also no right way to play Factorio. Sure you can make a main bus that carries all your materials or make rows and blocks of carefully designed modules that can support endless expansions-- Or you can just embrace the spaghetti and learn as you go. You can make a megabase that produces unfathomable quantities of parts and consumes a small countries worth of power. Or build conservatively and hardly leave the starting zone. But like I said earlier its not for everyone. By the nature of the game it requires a mind for problem and puzzle solving and no small amount of patience and trial and error.
Two tips: Leave plenty of space for improvement and keep on top of your supply of iron.

Wholeheartedly Recommend.