Yeah, this is pretty good... but needs heavy polishing. Is this a fun time? Yes. But it REALLY needs some balancing, and for there to be a higher troop limit. (I think I saw that's in the works.) Ah heck, I'll do a list of pros and cons. Pros: 1) This game is rather unique in it's sense of scale. The CEO builds the buildings, and you can roam freely through a massive base. And looking into space as a small soldier, seeing titanic ships flying overhead, battling to the death, while every bit of it is dynamic and not a cutscene, is truly one of the strongest points of the game. 2) Every ship, every soldier, tank, and mech, can be piloted. The overall gameplay is relatively simplistic in FPS mode, but again, the scale can get crazy. You can direct control with ease as the CEO any of your ships and troops, the Executron (FPS only mode who protects the CEO) has to go to the ships and board them (you'll find out how in the in-game guide), and otherwise manually do such things. 3) The three factions are varied and unique with almost all of their ships, troops, tech, and weaponry. The Industrial faction focuses on massive ships with equally large HP pools, missiles, kinetic weaponry, and dropships to send in absurd numbers of clone troops. The Science faction focuses on shielded ships, laser weaponry, and gates to send troops through. The Spy faction has the ability to deflect and redirect nearly all weapons till their energy runs out, serving a similar effect as the Science faction's shield. The Spy faction also focuses on camoflage, subterfuge, and overall being sneaky, and while the Science and Industrial factions can fight rather evenly, the Spy faction definitely is not built for head to head combat, as one would assume. 4) The way to win the game is to assassinate the enemy CEO. It can literally take just one bullet to kill the CEO (barring a personal shield which the Science CEO can obtain). There is something particularly adrenaline inducing at looking from above as the CEO, seeing enemy troops storm your base, and realizing that if even one reaches you, you can die. You can literally just leave as the CEO, but it's very easy to die even without enemy intervention. You can make a misstep and fall off a catwalk in a facility, you can crash the ship you're piloting. The Spy CEO has a teleporter to quickly flee to a command outpost from the HQ, making a wily Spy player potentially hard to pin down. Be advised, you cannot use RTS mode as the CEO without being in your chair at HQ (notably, the Spy CEO can use RTS mode from any command outpost), so don't spend long from the chair, as the situation can change QUICKLY. Cons: 1) The game is still clearly in need of yet more time in the oven, despite not being an Early Access title anymore in name. It still FEELS like an Early Access game. The loadout screen still missing certain items, for instance, there is literally no reason to use a sidearm unless you're the CEO with no other choice, and there's no sidearm upgrades, no leg upgrades, etc. 2) There are certain upgrades you can only get through the trader or through exploring derelict outposts and bases. These items could use a tooltip to tell the player whether they're upgrades or not, as it can be pretty hard to tell. 3) The factions need some heavy balancing. Overall the science faction feels the most powerful, which fits, though I think their shields, at the highest tech level, makes them overpowered. The Industrial faction manages to hold their own though... but the Spy faction feels like it needs tweaking. Their ships seem to lose at an equivalent level to either faction, especially Science of course. Their ability to teleport troops sounds powerful on paper, but the teleprobe has to get close to it's target to work, which is understandable... but ships are FLOATY when you tell them to go to a spot. They'll often overshoot badly, and this is REALLY bad for teleprobes, as it puts the thing in range of enemy defense more often than not. Spy gets a lot of benefits, but it feels like it gets so many nerfs that those benefits are heavily outnumbered. Spy feels like it can't get off the ground without working alongside another faction to take the heat off. And the AI REALLY cannot play Spy. Now, once Spy manages to get settled, once they have a few hidden command outposts, they can become a force to be reckoned with... but it takes a LOT to get the ball rolling. If Science likely has the strongest spike in early power, and Industrial has a steady growth, Spy only becomes powerful right near the end. Even the Spy's super ship, despite being visually intimidating, is way more difficult to use. Science's Monolith can fire it's super weapon and annihilate the target HQ, home asteroid and all, from the warp point. But the Spy super ship, has to sloooooowly move over the HQ, sustaining fire from the defenses if they weren't brought down, and then prep to fire. 4) The unit cap needs to be increased, because it feels like we can't properly defend our claimed territories. Too many things eat into the ship cap, I'm pretty sure even the cargo ships do. The defense platforms also do, and especially feel like a poor investment due to their limited range and the fact they seem to not be able to un-deploy, meaning wherever you deploy them, they STAY there, and you can't self-destruct them for whatever reason. A savvy player would just go around them and hit whatever the platform is trying to defend while staying out of reach. You'd also be stretching your ground troops far too thin if you tried to put a defense force on your most important facilities as well as your HQ, considering just how quickly they can get cut down. 5) The AI of your ships is rather dumb. The only time you should have your ships on "defend system" would be a handful of ships you've set to guard your HQ from the protestors and asteroids. In any other system, if there's actual enemy activity, your ships will pick the dumbest target to single out, like a cargo ship, and split up the fleet like a bunch of idiots. You want to set them to guard and micromanage them when in contested territory. There's a LOT of micromanagement needed as the CEO, while you can direct control any unit, with how crazy the skirmishes can get and how fast things can get out of hand, you likely won't get many opportunities to exit RTS mode. 6)Alerts. There's not enough of them. We get alerted when an unknown ship is warping into our home base, we get alerted by protestors and asteroids, and when a troop carrier is outright landing at your base. It doesn't say a single word when your ships, your mining outposts, and even your command posts, are being attacked. I'll see this tiny, TINY little red ping on the small map that shows the system nodes, but that gives little information of note. So I'll leave my ships on guard in a system, only to come back after setting a couple of defenses, and a couple of buildings up, to see that they got flanked by a second force from another waypoint, and already they're half dead. With not a single peep said about it by the alerts. CEO can get exhausting as a result, with you having to switch between each system node quickly to check on the situation every half minute, giving me Five Nights at Freddy's flashbacks. There's likely more things, but they're not coming to mind. I've not yet played multiplayer with anyone and honestly, I'd admittedly likely get owned. But, despite the longer list of cons, and the general lack of polish the game has, the game is still way more fun than not... I just wish it was a little more, well, done.
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