- Initially fun, engaging city-builder with combat.
- Strong cyberpunk aesthetic and audio design.
- Rewards patient scaling and optimization.
- Feels unfinished and shallow overall.
- Tedious grind and micro-management heavy.
- Repetitive gameplay loops, lacks content.
Verdict
Mostly negative
Summary
Positive 33% · Negative 67%. Score: 67 / 100
Positives:
- The game is initially fun and engaging, with addictive gameplay and a good sense of progression. Players praise its core mechanics, but this enjoyment may diminish over time as issues arise. The game also features polished voice acting and background elements.
- The game excels in its artistic and atmospheric presentation, featuring a strong dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic, appealing visuals, and a well-crafted soundtrack. Reviewers appreciate the unique sci-fi style and immersive world-building, enhanced by surreal and entertaining audio elements.
- The game blends grand strategy with city building, automation, and resource production, incorporating RTS combat elements and ship-to-ship combat. Players can customize building and ship layouts, adding a novel 'tetris' style mechanic within buildings and factories.
- The game features a well-designed tutorial that effectively teaches players the mechanics without being overly restrictive. The interface is intuitive, and the game balances mechanical simplicity with sufficient depth, making it accessible for beginners.
- The game explores a corporate dystopia on Titan, portraying people as resources and delving into darker aspects of capitalism. The handling of human resources and the concept of monetization are clever and fit the setting well.
Negatives:
- The game feels unfinished and lacks depth, with underdeveloped mechanics, repetitive gameplay, and a lack of meaningful progression or endgame content. Many reviewers feel that the game's potential was not realized, and some suggest that development was prematurely abandoned, leaving key features incomplete or missing.
- The game suffers from excessive grinding and tedious micro-management, with repetitive tasks and a lack of engaging challenges. Victory objectives feel artificial and lead to uninspired building spam, diminishing the overall player experience.
- Ship combat is underwhelming and lacks strategic depth, with limited customization options and repetitive engagements. Ship design feels restrictive, and fleet management is cumbersome due to the lack of essential quality-of-life features.
- Core gameplay loops, such as factory building and resource management, become repetitive and lack strategic depth. The game lacks meaningful production chains and the economy feels underdeveloped, with limited options for resource utilization and trade.
- Building customization is superficial, and the game lacks building diversity, leading to repetitive layouts. The 'buildings in buildings' feature loses importance as the game progresses, and the economic goals feel arbitrary.
Gameplay:
- The game features building interiors with module customization, but this mechanic feels underdeveloped. Early buildings with interiors are later replaced by superior buildings without them, making the interior customization obsolete. The building system involves two layers: city-level building placement and interior module arrangement.
- Rebel attacks pose little threat once defenses are established, and rival corporations are easily eliminated. The game can be cleared by destroying all enemy camps, and enemy structures can be captured without a fight. This makes the combat and strategic elements feel less impactful.
- Logistics are simplified, with roads connecting buildings, but the system could be improved. Players suggest more diverse connection methods and faster transportation options like railways.
- Exploring ruins is a feature, but it's not as engaging as similar mechanics in other games. Players must choose between extracting raw materials or artifacts from ruins, limiting exploration options. The reviewer quickly experienced all available content.
- The game features a randomly generated technology tree, adding an element of unpredictability to progression.
Performance:
- Performance varies significantly. Some players report smooth gameplay even on older hardware, while others experience severe FPS drops, especially in later game stages or after specific updates. This inconsistency suggests optimization issues that need addressing.
- Some players have trouble launching the game via Steam and must resort to directly executing the .EXE file. This is a minor inconvenience but should be addressed for a smoother user experience.
- The game's full-screen mode renders partially in borderless mode. This is a minor graphical issue that may affect immersion or performance for some players.
- The game engine has issues that cause it to confuse itself. This is vague and lacks specific details, making it difficult to assess the severity or impact of the problem.
Recommendations:
- Many reviewers do not recommend the game in its current state, citing that it feels unfinished, lacks content and depth, and doesn't justify its price. Some consider it abandonware or advise against supporting the project financially, with some reviewers explicitly recommending alternative games.
- Some reviewers suggest the game might be worth considering only on sale due to its potential or enjoyment of specific aspects like base building. They recommend waiting for significant discounts or comparing it to other games in the genre before purchasing.
- The game doesn't fully deliver on its cyberpunk city builder promise and reviewers suggest focusing on enriching the city-building aspects. They suggest more resource and building types to make landscaping and building wonders more interesting.
- This cluster contains mixed and vague sentiments, including emotional language and unhelpful comparisons (fried chicken). Due to the lack of specific details and constructiveness, the importance score is reduced.
- Reviewers suggest that ships need more diverse weapons to enhance combat. Additionally, the lack of ship template saving makes building them one by one too cumbersome, hindering the player experience.
Miscellaneous:
- The game's campaign length varies significantly, with individual levels potentially taking many hours. However, some reviewers find the gameplay becomes repetitive and boring after a relatively short time, diminishing long-term engagement.
- The game's configuration files are stored in XML format and can be modified by players using UnrealPakTool. This allows players to customize building, device, and module settings, offering a degree of modding capability despite the lack of official support.
- Some players express that they have mastered the game's building mechanics and no longer find it challenging. This suggests a need for increased difficulty options or more complex building challenges to maintain player engagement.
- Advisors guide the player by providing objectives that drive progression. This system helps players understand what they need to do and how to advance in the game.
