Recent reviews by Creative Cannibal

Pros:
-Extensive Character Customization

Cons:
-Poor matchmaking, vets vs day one players
-Only one server allows for customization
-Poor graphics for modern standards
-Only one hitbox, no critical locations
-Canned open world, split into 5 small servers

This is a time tested classic. It is the finale to the wizardry series and the conclusion of it's third story arc, The Dark Savant. In it you are both stranded and tasked with travelling across the planet Dominus in an attempt to reclaim a mystical artifact and ascend to godhood before the antagonist, the Dark Savant, can claim the title of Cosmic Lord and bend the galaxy to his will.

To achieve this goal you are presented with the ultimate RPG formula that seamlessly combines both GURPS and D&D character progression into a wild fantasy ride. Do you want a Wolf/Human hybird samurai who not only slices foes in two but can also send a fireball into the fray, or do you want a mythical Draconian human who's musically talent is only rivaled by his lethality with a crossbow? Good news, you can have both. From the beggining you are give the choice whether you want to take a singular soul or up to a party of six hardened adventurers all with their own voice acting, quirks, and fatal flaws.

For fans of this well established series this is a culmination of gameplay that has been honed over seven different games, each with its own flavor and storyline. For those entering the series for the first time this game is a representation of the mechanics developers only achieve after years of hard word and feedback. Whether the player is collecting the lore of this world or trying to powergame themselves towards the penultimate party there is something for everyone and quite a bit of replay value for those who enjoy not only rouge-likes but dungeon crawlers as well. This reviewer has personally put 100+ hours of gameplay into the steam release and many more on the traditional CD release by refining party composition and character development.

This adventure also does something lacking in modern games, saturated by twitch reflexes and meta gaming, by reminding old an young gamers alike that gameplay and concious decision making are the true hallmarks of replayability in any game even if it is two decades old.

First of all I have less than five hours game time and I'm two bottles of wine deep.

This game has a lot of potential and is undergoing regular updates. It's back under the leadership of the previous head developer but feels much less hamstrung. It's developed by the company Last Bastion who is mostly a comic book and collectable content creator which lends to it's comicy and high fantasy feel. Let me be clear, I do not enjoy the graphic feel of the game however gameplay itself follows a solid and logical model. It is done in standard survival fare: hit the tree, hit the rock, build and repeat. What it lacks for me in a cartoony feel and prefab building it makes up for in solid gameplay mechanics and regular updated material.

Short Version:
This is a rng timer based game with a gurps feel. It pairs well with another passive activity such as a movie or TV due to it's heavy grinding and low action gameplay.

Long Version:
This game is what is happening in the background of a D&D game. You are a villager, not a hero.

The sandbox world you are presented with gives "Unlimited" opportunites to terraform, build, explore, and tame. Skills are learned in a very straighforward manner; the more you swing a sword at things the better you are at swordplay.

The grind of the game is, in my opinion, an asset to the game as it follows what could be considered a hyper-literal pattern. You cut down the tree with an axe, split it into logs, use a saw to create wooden planks, mine iron to heat in a forge then create nails, and finally you can start building a stable structure. It is all laid our in a very logical format that feels like an actual day in the life of a villager.

Players can specialize in a wide range of skills much like they would in an actual 1600's village. Blacksmiths create neccesary tools, farmers tend to the fields and/or animals, and so on. A single player can and will try their hand at all the skills but a specialized craftsmen will always have more talent than a jack of all trades. However this game is meant to be a small group / singleplayer version of Wurm Online so a single player will eventually be forced to wear many hats as they go about their play time.

Combat is played out much as a D&D player would fight. "I target X, roll the dice based on my skill / weapon, and the outcome is decided" It is simplified and based on time spent training rather than a player's reactions.

The community is small but knowledgeable. With being able to create a custom server to form a community player's can quickly tailor their experience to being global, local, or solo. Two forums exist both on steam and the official website giving player's the opportunity to learn more about game mechanics from others who are well versed in the game rather than getting general info from the wiki.

I recommend this game because it is an actively evolving and living game. The developer is very involved, releases regular updates, and has a road map to show progress and be kept accountable. Not all features are fully implemented or polished but the skeleton and frame of the game are robust and offer plenty of room for expansion.

In short: Yes, the game has a solid core, and is evolving weekly with updates that allow you to update playstyle and character focus. However, it falls short in terms of content perhaps leaving early access prematurely.

Gameplay:
Gameplay centers around your captain and his merry band of misfits as you roam the galaxy in a fireflyesque mindset. You will find yourself managing payroll, cargo, ship maintenance and relations with various factions all in an attempt to carve out your own small fortune. The game offers an extensive open-world as well as a variety of classes, skills, weapons, and ships to fine-tune your preffered playstyle. You will find yourself traversing quadrants filled with pirates, smugglers, hostile aliens, and various faction representatives. You will be given multiple ways to deal with the games various scenarios, will you solve all problems by blasting away at them? Will you attempt to forge credentials to fool the military official intent on searching your cargo? Maybe you'll avoid all of this by keeping withing the confines of the law and peacefully trading needed goods between worlds? The game offers you a wide selection of moral choices to test your own ethics. Contracts often lead to unexpected twists that make you decide between moral highroads or contract loyalty. Overall it creates a vast and at times overwhelming galaxy that bristles with limitless risk-reward scenarios.

Visuals:
The best way I can describe this games visually is in terms of board games. European board games tend to have a very large focus on the core of the game, while letting the pieces be rather utilitarian (think Catan). That's how this game is. The models themselves are detailed and provide a large amount of interest however the animations leave a lot to be desired. It's enjoyable for the first few hours to watch how a large portion of actions have their own animation however past that the charm wears off as they quickly become repetitive. A large portion of this game is the ability to customize you ship as you see fit with dozens of available components and weapons, however most of these items share the same visuals which takes away from how customized the ship actually feels. The developers have published a roadmap that includes increasing the available character and ship models as well as expanding the available components for ship customization.

Game's Verbosity:
Other than the core of the game there is little to be found in terms of distractions and diversions. There's a minigame that is used in all of the games various exploration and salvage branches. While it's a gargantuan step forward from their previous mobile game (This game is a sequal to the mobile game Star Traders) it doesn't feel like quite enough to keep my interest as all the different skill options that affect this mini game feel like copies of each other, with a small change depending on the overall goal. My best explanaton is that it's a buffet, but all the items are versions of the same chicken dish.

Personal Grievances:
I find the game to quickly become a repetitive slog. I can become fully engrosed for easily a play session of hours before i find myself choosing the same options again and again, missions stop feeling like they have any actual depth to them. Battles start to feel like filling out paperwork as your team becomes capable of handling any and all threats with the same 3-4 actions per encounter. Admittedly this is due to being set in a particular playstyle and by having chosen the "normal" difficulty rather than the perma-death mode that this game is built for. My only other legitimate issue is that there's a distinct lack of consequence from your actions. I've had the community and developers themselves explain to me why it is that the game map will never change however with the ability to assasinatee royalty, cripple economies, blockade entire planets, and annihalate even the largest foe the map; it's contents will never, ever change. Learning the game's lore and it's neo-feudalistic system explains why this is but it leaves me feeling as though nothing I truly do in the game matters and playing the game feels mute after an extended play session. (For example I once let a lethal plague spread across the galaxy and did my best to spread it to every single planet. The planets are all still alive and healthy with no noticeable impact to their economies or population.) For me it's something I can't let go as it breaks any sense of immersion and leaves me feeling as if my character is a NPC in the developer's world rather than the main character of my space adventures. For me, this leaves the only fun in the game to be developing and refining various character/ship/crew builds with no actual use other than a joyride or two around the block before I'm bored with them.

In Summary:
This is quite the ambitious game. It has a plethora of avenues open for growth and development and I'm rather happy with my purchase. I've sank quite a number of hours into it and as with all purchases I've made from the Trese Brothers I feel that I got more than my money's worth. It's not a complete game however, as no true progress is ever made and a lack of variety takes away from replayability. Even if you don't purchase this game today it is a strong suggetion to keep it on your watchlist as this game is evolving and expanding weekly, polishing itself more and more each time.

1/23/2019: Edit for spelling and grammer

Dungeon Crawler with Rough Edges

TL:DR
Highly accessible, lack of content, average execution, large room for growth. Keep an eye on this one.

The graphics for this game are on point for me. It nails that indie feel. The interiors make you feel that while they're in oddly good shape compared to the apocalyptic interior they're hiding something. I enjoy that you must wait for your crosshairs to focus up and that with the right skills you theoretically could become a snapshot master or the next Charlemagne with a melee weapon.

However this game still has a long way to go in terms of content and sanding rough edges. My biggest complaint, the marketplace, will solve itself and stabilize in about a month which brings me to my second complaint. This does not feel like an RPG to me in the way I understand them. There's character advancement but no character progression. If we're being honest this is a dungeon crawler with a zombie flavoring. I'm okay with that, Sirtek made one of my favorite games to this day Dungeon Hack. But the game is lacking too much content, all melee weapons have one of two animation sets, all the interiors are the same labyrinthine textures (though I'm rather partial to the hospital), lootable objects feel like an after thought and unnatural, when you find a lootable object it's less of a feeling of excitement and more of a slot machine you paid for in blood (whether yours or the dead's), the combat needed to get to the lootable objects is satisfying after you get the hang of its clunky system but I'm certain all players will understand the basic hit and run needed to survive after their first hour or so of excruciating grind. Finally health and vitals are broken to an unacceptable extent, when you inevitably perish coming back at roughly 25% health is odd when you're only chances of recovering are grinding loot, you do have one free chance to buy meds from another player but if your slot machine comes up empty and you perish again you're now stuck in a loop of death by failure to grasp the mechanics quickly enough.

This game may not offer much in the way of originality but it offers a high accessibility and being free to play will hopefully give it the player base it needs to develop from its rough block into a decent carving.

I played this game for an hour and immediately requested a refund. After installing their anti-cheat software so I could try multiplayer the game promptly broke itself and refused to launch afterwards. I tried verifying the cache, uninstall/reinstalling and even sacrificing a virgin. From what I did get to experience in the game there isn't anything terribly unique or original about this game. It feels like a watered down version of space engineers that was cut with a healthy dose of half-arsed RPG elements. My advice to the developers would be to choose one aspect of the game and actually make it decent or stand out rather than spewing content into a game and hoping it all works.

I bought this game while it was on sale thinking it'd be a fun time waster and that since it was only Early Access it would get better with time. Unfortunatley the dev's (when they are seen) only tend to make the game worse. It incorporates the graphic of a PS2, the microtransactions of a phone app, and the cheating of a politician. Items bought in their market are only available on a "as long as you don't actually take it anywhere" basis as they are lost anytime your character is killed by the hackers who plague the servers unchecked or suffer the occasional brain aneurysm from lagging out in front of the occasional, poorly placed zombie horde.

THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART:
They are practically abandoning this game all together in fact their new game Aftermath's website even states that it is the spiritual successor to this one. Buying this is not only a waste of your money but your time, sanity, and a small piece of your self respect.

Also, they've been involved in quite the controversy over practically every part of their game being stolen from other games / popular media. Please heed my warning and steer clear of this one.

Absolutley delightful!

This game takes an everyday activity and makes it into one of the most rewardingly frustrating games I've ever played. If you've ever played the Surgeon Simulator games, or even QWOP then you'll know the feeling you get from finally finishing a simple task.

I've only ever had a few small graphic issues and I fixed those by deleting the local content and re-installing the game. However I will warn you that this game will make your systme run HOT. And I mean ridiculously hot. So definetly make sure that your system is adequatley cooled and maybe even then some!