Recent reviews by Faust

It looks beautiful, it has pleasant sound design, a nice relaxing soundtrack, and creating multilayered complex combos from the various modules at your disposal feels as satisfying as it should be. Many games of this kind tend to have trouble giving you enough content for unhinged synergies at the beginning, making earlygame feel slow and dull, but not this one. From the first few missions I already started getting parts that could drastically change my setup's behavior.

This is as it should be. This is competent design. It deserves acknowledgement.

As of right now - a begrudged recommendation, probably on sale.

The core systems are decent, the controls are surprisingly solid and smooth, the atmosphere is quite lovely, and I have it on reasonably good authority that the developers are very passionate about improving it and making it as good as they can as quickly as they can. But it currently falters in the "stuff to do" department. It's a nice looking place but furnished primarily with piles of scrap (some of those piles are vaguely outpost-shaped) and populated by randomly roaming enemies.

I don't regret my purchase. It'll get proper exploration eventually, and once it does - it will definitely be worth it, but right now I only recommend to buy it either if you have faith in the project's future or if the lack of wanderlust is compensated for by the pricetag being 10-15 dollars... Or, alternatively, if you're suffering through Fallen Earth withdrawal and badly need a fix. Boy does it fill me with hope seeing a potential singleplayer successor.

This game is twice as great as it is buggy, and it is very buggy.

There are a myriad of merited concerns about the stability of the game's code base. But for all these little visual glitches, translation mistakes, and UI errors it also offers metric tons of style, flair, action, fun, exploration, build depth, and variety of playstyles.

As a small personal anecdote, I'm not a big fan of the "It's the journey, not the destination" sentiment. I tend to shelve even my most beloved games after I complete everything I wanted in them. This game, meanwhile, I bought in EA, exhausted the available at the time content in 40 hours, and the remaining 260 hours you see at the time of this review being written is just me playing it over and over again for the hell of it.

A game being littered with bugs isn't something to be just hand-waved, but damn me to the abyss if the sheer quality of the content doesn't make up for it. Love this thing. Love it to death.

Very amateurish but very likeable. I like to call these "fingerpainting games". Their technique is unrefined, but they radiate earnest soul. I'm happy to have stumbled upon this one.

A fresh and extremely well executed concept with more than enough content for the price asked. It may sound overwhelming, having to keep track of two different characters at once, but it's nothing that a normal person can't do without a bit of practice. It's fun, it's cute, it's worthy of a lot more attention than what pathetically little it got.

This game works 60% of 20% of the time. Glitchy, buggy, unstable, with performance jumping all over the place... One could say "But it's in Early Access! That's par for the course!", and conventionally one would be correct, but not when the dev says s##t like, quote, "In the end it does not really make a big difference if you write a 1.0 at the start or not so I never found this to be super important as long as the updates are substancial"
(the typo in substantial was left in for authenticity's sake)

Speaking of the dev, he is so utterly german that I'm not even gonna capitalize the word. It's one thing to try and maintain the gayest and lamest moderation possible in your global chat as a man who owes 100% of his success to Sseth's audience, but it's an entirely different thing to issue autoshadowbans to people in the chats of their own PRIVATE multiplayer lobbies. Psychotic behavior. What other lame s##t are you gonna do next, Shrike? Lock the singleplayer out until the player enables the microphone and chants "Never forget the 6 trillion" three times?

Don't even get me started on the game still missing basic things from the first entry after all these years, like the ability to reduce the drop rates of undesirable items and weapons. Again, the dev claims to treat EA as just a label.

I'm probably still gonna occasionally play this hunk of sparking and smoking digital debris because the gameplay is more or less fine and I already paid my money for it, but I wouldn't have risked the purchase if I knew just how bad things really are under the surface.

The overall design is solid - Good artstyle, punchy combat, fun level design, and the chain gimmick is pretty fun to work around or with. Usually gimmicks like that are pretty tacky, but this one is very well integrated.

Oh, and don't let the store page fool you - it is entirely playable and a great time solo.

TL;DR: It's more than "Just Another One".

They started calling games of this kind "Friendslop" because most of them are lazily stitched together disjointed chimeras that you play with your friends for a couple evenings to simulate the feeling of watching a really bad horror movie with the lads, one that you won't even remember the plot of come next morning.

This one isn't like that. It boasts a consistent artstyle, a genuine atmosphere, a solid lighting system that greatly enhances said atmosphere, a complementing sound design, fairly thought out mechanics... It's a coherent and compelling experience that works to deliver a proper videogame to you rather than fodder that you just use as an excuse for a social gathering to prevent your friend group from drifting apart.

If I had a gun to my head and was told I'm only allowed one dedicated coop game in my library - it'd probably be this one.

This game deserved better.

It's clearly an FTL-like, but it does have sufficiently different core mechanics to make it feel distinctly different from FTL rather than like an HD reskin. It's rather janky at times, not very well balanced (and neither is FTL), but I found it a different enough experience to be worth playing instead of just replaying FTL again.

It even has a freeplay mode with a character creator, which is something I've dreamt of back when I played FTL. I just wish it had a better trait system, because you can't make your captain as good as some of the "unique" characters in the game.

On the topic of it being a different experience, ironically, most of the negative reviews appear to come from players who expected it to be a borderline carbon copy of FTL. You might've come across one of the quadrigorillion negative mentions of the food system, and it's mostly because those players never bothered to read the description of their life support system or to buy a cryosleep room and so they kvetch and wail in agony because they never figured out they are supposed to ration food instead of relying on battle rewards and purchases at the station. It could use some balance tweaks, but only when it comes to balance between races (the local equivalent of mantises have massive appetites but aren't quite worth their expenses, for example), but it's by no means unfair. Numerous individuals are just bad at videogames.

Oh, and I love the crap out of the OST. It's one of two games in my library I actually went out of my way to buy the OST for separately.

Sad to see it stew in Mixed. Again, it deserved better than this.

Cute style, very pleasant music, compelling gameplay mechanics, and seemingly apparent growth in game design skills from their previous game (None Shall Intrude, which, although still a great deckbuilder with beautiful visuals, did have some trouble introducing interesting deck mechanics in very early game, making for a bad first impression that didn't do justice to the full experience). Here mechanics and combinations start looking interesting and tricky right away. I'm very glad to see that.

I am looking forward to this thing's release.