I’ve been looking forwards to this game for so long and there is soooo much that can be great about it. But, its just half baked at the moment.
The basic game is fine. Mechanics I like, skills are generally ok, bugs are not game ruining (in general). HOWEVER the whole gameplay just needs a lot more play testing done on it. Never ending spawns of enemies is never a good thing and missions can sometimes be seriously too hard for the level your teams are at. Don’t even get me started on the point where there are so many incursion missions popping up that you can’t possibly get all over the globe to stop them and even if you do, there is no perceivable incentive for bothering other than it can help you in the long run.
I really want this game to be great, and it can be, but I think its going to take at least another 5-6 months of balancing and play testing by the Devs. It has a great foundation but has been released too early.
Yea, balancing is horrible! And remember, they pushed back the release already at least 6 months ! I wonder if anyone playtested the balancing issue…what did the bakers with early access do ? A bad job at least…
Actually the backers didn’t have consistently updated access to the state of the game, there was a extended period where the last backer build was half a year or more old and had nothing but some looped mission generation and a crude mock-up of the Geoscope with your transport, no base component, no research, no real faction interaction etc.
The functional aspects to the geoscope were only released around September and even then only because of the additional release delay, and the functionality in those backer builds is still somewhat different to what was then included in the final game. And if it wasn’t for the additional release delay backers probably wouldn’t ever have seen anything from that side of the game until the game released.
Between the earlier combat-only builds late last year and early this year and the backer build that followed a few months ago, Snapshot overhauled a significant amount of the combat side of the game including revamping the UI (Which got a fair amount of critical feedback over), changing several visual elements tot he game (Which again, got a fair amount of critical feedback), and when the latest backer builds released it quickly spawned a series of threads being rather up-front about the feel of the game that had emerged between the long development gap between the backer-builds.
Well, at least there’s a little more explanations for why they ignored good player feedback and made things awful. Rather, they were always awful, and they couldn’t be bothered changing them.
On this, there are more transport types than just the Manticore if the last backer build is anything to go by. There are/were factional transport types at the very least which offer larger capacity which also means you can bring more troops with you.
Edit: If anyone is curious to see what kind of things backers were discussing as the forums still remain as they were two good examples can be found here:
Warning, Yokes really went to town on their feedback on that 2nd one and it is a lot of reading.