CHAOTIC ERA

seems cool but the game doesn't work

This is may be one of the worst RTS games I've ever played. It looks great and incredibly unique, but the gameplay is awful. I struggle to even select units sometimes because they are so small, half the time they don't move when ordered. The energy system is ridiculous, why do I have to research a tech so I can even have my units function? And why do they not automatically siphon until you research a later tech? The missions are so poorly thought out. On Mutiny you can't produce resources so your units will scavenge for them instead, usually trying to retrieve them from the enemy, who then proceed to kill your workers. The AI also develops significantly faster than you, surrounding your base with structures and large turrets until you either give up or you are defeated. Next I tried to play a match against bots to see if it was better than the missions. Half my workers were dead within two minutes and my base was being attacked. Simply not enjoyable in anyway possible. The fact this game hasn't been updated since 2025 is also a bad sign of abandonware, unfortunate for such a cool looking game.

Visually interesting, but the description doesn't lie, it's a nightmare of an RTS, units will not listen, mechanics are unclear and hard to understand and the controls are pretty rough. i gotta figure this is one of the better gamebreaking issues to have as getting your units to follow your orders can't be that hard to fix compared to problems other games usually have at this severity.

Tried again, bounced off. I feel dumb, but digging deeper just leaves me a little dumber. The vision is there, but the execution is, missplaced? It's like there's this idea of a slick RTS but it's buried under a plethora basic things I might be taking for granted in other RTS/RTT's. Rereading my review I'm now only just noticing the 4X tag. What? I thought this game presents itself as an RTS, not a grand strategy. Unit logic is absolutely dumb. No hivemind, no real self preservation, can't even deathblob to save their lives. They [i] might [/i] decide to scout, maybe give the attacking enemy a poke. They [b] will [/b] charge headfirst into an enemy line, with or without their buddies. It's up to you to try and claw them back to either upgrade them or try to replenish their energy supply. I feel like the game is trying to play more like an auto battler of sorts where you're more concerned about running the base and maintaining your units than actually managing unit positioning and controlling battleflow. There's no meaningful hotkeying that I could identify outside of basic build orders, so I'm stuck staring at the bottom left corner watching all the sleds blink as they ask if they can recharge their batteries. Speaking of the UI, or UX in this case, I feel like it it went way past cool right into horrid. Style over substance, at the cost of giving the player Submenus and info panes are somehow both cluttered and don't give enough information to meaningfully glean off of. An energy bar does not need to take as much space as the entire build window. If a minimap is not a feature, then why doesn't the camera zoomout into a real tacmap instead of introducing more fog-of-war. Why is there even a fog of war in my simulated vector image? Double clicking units to inspect hotspots is not a feature, so you're going to have to trust that they can probably take care of it. God forbid they're actually in trouble and you can't reroute help to them in time. If the codex and research are so important, why doesn't the game pause. The codex is so dense with entries with a litany of quirks of what thing gives what resource, the player ought to take moment and explore what all the icons mean. Nope! You're under attack so you got better things to look at. While I understand upgrade [b] levels[/b] there's no way to enqueue research ahead of time. The game doesn't bump notifications well other than a "ding!" that blends in with the rest of the high pitched sounds. And why aren't the codex and research screens a toggle, instead you have to explicitly push Escape. This is already tiresome on top of constantly blipping in and out of those 2 screens. The cursor and highlighting elements can't keep up with the actual cursor speed. Not the biggest deal, until you feel like you're fat fingering UI elements half of the time. The selection window leaves something to be desired. It's locked to the grid but units are free flowing, so if the view diagonal to the grid you're never going to select vertically or horizontally properlly, as the game assumes you actually wanted to select a large area. At least you can mass select hidden grids and search them. Which leads me into the scouting and vision mechanic. It feels such like a massive nothing burger. You can't search [i] deep [/i], so you have to search [i] wide [/i]. The AI can do the actual deep search for you, but if upgrading vision is nothing more than a multiplier then what's the point of manually scouting? The early game basically becomes select whole screen>press G> spend research. That bug I encountered last time is still there. You can and will get stuck transitioning from the first level into the second level because it's trying to connect to a server, but at least I can manually select the second level and play now. I think there's more things to cover but I don't think I care enough to keep writing. [b]The game looks cool, that's about all I can really say for it[/b]. And maybe the dev is trying, but I'm not vibing. ----------------------------- Gave it a chance, spent more time waiting for the game to apparently connect to a server in a single player session. Even after completing a level the game gets stuck trying to load the next level

Bad game performance even on a pretty high end system with huge memory leaks. Also scenarios seem unbeatable in random situations. Want to like it, but the game hasn't received any fixes for a while now.