Cygnus Enterprises

[h1]Sum-Up[/h1] [h3]In-depth analysis further down.[/h3] If you’re looking for some screenshots [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/tho545454/screenshots/?appid=1963520&sort=newestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=grid]click here[/url] to view all the ones I took for this game. [table] [tr] [th]🟩 [b]Pros[/b][/th] [th]🟥 [b]Cons[/b][/th] [/tr] [tr] [td] • Very good variety of unique weapons, equipment and skills, that open up to diverse builds. • Enjoyable combat system that feels dynamic and satisfying. • Action cutscenes are actually quite spectacular and cinematic. [/td] [td] • Devastating bugs that cripple basic gameplay functions or mission objectives. • Poor enemy variety, consisting mostly of recolors with little variation in the long run. • Messy interfaces and inventory systems, that lack better sorting options. • Weak story, dotted by generic characters and anonymous worldbuilding. • Annoying base building that is not only shallow, but also formulaic and dissatisfying. • Whacky balance, with many skills and entire trees being gimmicky, underpowered or useless. • The ‘revolutionary’ NPC AI integration ‘à la Chat GPT’ is a bludgeoned mess. But you can disable it! [/td] [/tr] [/table] [table] [tr] [th]🟨 [b]Bugs & Issues[/b][/th] [th]🔧 [b]Specs[/b][/th] [/tr] [tr] [td] • Frequent performance drops, regardless of settings, in crowded bases or specific areas. • Production queues often glitch and don’t work correctly anymore. • Base automation (resource collectors, etc.) can bug and stop working forever. • In some cases, enemies may go out of the map, forcing a mission restart if they’re an objective to kill. [/td] [td] • i5 11400H • 16GB RAM DDR4 • 512 GB SSD • RTX 3060 6GB • 1080p [/td] [/tr] [/table] [table] [tr] [td][b]Content & Replay Value:[/b][/td] [td]It took me 29 hours to finish Cygnus Enterprises, taking extra time to do secondary activities and fully explore areas when possible, other than developing a full base. The content is linear, respec cheap so that you can try different builds, and there are no branching choices; replay value is low.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Is it worth buying?[/b][/td] [td]No. Even if the price of 25€ is fair for this amount of content, its subpar quality, numerous issues and total lack of original ideas on the formula, pummel this ‘enterprise’ straight into gaming bankruptcy. Don’t waste your time on this one.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][h3]Verdict: Bad[/h3] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2548409603]Rating Chart Here[/url][/td] [td]A top-down ARPG / Management hybrid that not only has little to offer in terms of enjoyable gameplay or involving content, but also is crippled from bad optimization and devastating bugs.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [h1]In-Depth[/h1] [h3]Writing & Worldbuilding[/h3] As one of the countless goons employed by Cygnus, a terraforming galactic megacorp, you’ll be tasked with setting up an outpost on a remote, unexplored planet so that your masters may reap the benefits once it’s up and running. Of course, things don’t go exactly as planned: between scouting parties’ disappearances and anomalous fauna behavior, what seemed just like a run of the mill colonization effort turns into a xenobiologist’s wet dream. Or nightmare, in case you’re -actually- playing this game. The various characters, usually introduced after pivotal story events, that contour your role as de-facto colony overseer, will all be stereotypical caricatures, from the gung-ho military man keen on blowing up stuff, to the ‘tsundere’ mercenary pilot à la ‘Asuka from Evangelion’, just way less spicy. Outside of programmed dialogues, they won’t have any further backstories to delve into, nor quests or any evolution of their personality - hell, they barely have any at all to begin with. All of this is coated with a glaze of boredom, given by the clichèd, zero-originality, limp-wristed plot that follows the trite concept of “blah blah, ancient civilization on random planet, humans messed with stuff they can’t understand, corporate greed ensued, everything went to hell”. But at least the visuals are spectacular, right? Wrong! Because thanks to the rotten gutter that is Unity Engine, you can have the same graphics from ten years ago, with 400% LESS performance. What is this ‘Dee-el-ess-ess’ you’re talking about? We already used AI to pummel our NPCs into a fever-dream stupor; we can't do that for performance! [h3]Exploration & Secrets[/h3] All levels in Cygnus are instanced and standalone, meaning that whenever you’d like to leave your ‘base island’, which never gets attacked and has no enemies, you’ll have to fast travel to one of the many events present on the world map, be them story-related or randomly-generated secondary ones. There’s no ‘real’ open-world to speak of, as each area is separated by loading screens and is a finite, self-contained location with minimal side-areas or secrets, which at most contain chests that grant resources or, if you’re lucky, accessories and weapons you mostly won’t need. The handy objective markers and minimap make sure you won’t get lost. Each travel order consumes a day, after which base activities progress, resources get processed, food consumed and new events appear, while older ones vanish. Exploration feels meaningful at first in each ‘dungeon’, but soon you’ll realize that the rewards from random chests are simply not worth the hassle compared to your average gain from speedrunning the mission. [h3]Management & Base Building[/h3] You’ll be in charge of keeping your colonists housed, fed and happy, by building facilities such as canteens, shelters, dormitories and so forth, each with a specific influence radius that gives significant bonuses if placed near the structures of the same type. For instance, a dormitory will make guests much happier with many shops near it. They can be progressively hired from a terminal, and each will have randomly-generated proficiencies and abilities to choose from, so that you have the specialists to do all the tasks properly. They can’t die and won’t ask for more than basic human needs after hiring. All of this is done with a basic and rather clunky building system that, while serviceable, lacks many quality-of-life features and can be irritating if you’re trying to make an efficient layout, or God forbid, a base that doesn’t look like a mess. The big issue with all of this are the bugs: from production queues that stop working randomly, to people complaining about food and shelter when they have more than enough, your worst management nightmare is about to begin. You’ll eventually make money out of this, useful to buy materials from merchants in other outposts, or from the one arriving at your personal spaceport. [h3]Combat System & Bosses[/h3] The combat part plays out as a classic top–down shooter, with some light ARPG elements such as item-derived stats and attributes to give it some more depth. BAsed on your attribute choices, you’ll unlock more perks as you level up, and also will be able to equip better gear otherwise barred by stat requirements. The emphasis put on specializations in specific weapon categories is mostly useless, because the best ones are respectively Heavy for single targets and Launchers for crowds, everything else is simply outclassed or redundant. There’s some emphasis on dodging and healing at the right times, though not a core mechanic by any means. Most of the skills have terrible scaling, even with accessories boosting them, and are simply not worth using unless they’re healing or defensive ones. Enemies start out well enough, but soon become repetitive in nature and far too trivial even in great numbers. Bosses can be hard at first but in later-game your power creep becomes obscene, and except a specific fight removing your weapons, all other later bosses won’t be hard. The absence of a difficulty slider prevents any adjustment to be made to this issue.

The first thing you'll notice is how absolutely smooth the menus are. Incredibly smooth and polished. The gameplay is amazing - varied, fast paced, highly customizable. Some of the monsters are so cute that you'll feel bad about shooting them. The base-building element is highly addictive, with an interesting mechanic that benefits a logical organization of buildings. Overall, an exceptional experience. Vividly recommend it to anyone who enjoys top down gameplay, base builders, and shooting colourful aliens.

The devs just announced that the game is abandoned and pulled from the store and no longer be downloadable for paying customers.

Why can I equip the AI if I can't bring them on missions? Base building is pretty boring. There's no automation whatsoever, so the entire thing becomes an incredibly grating chore. You wanna do missions? Do your base chores first, and that includes manually running EVERYWHERE, queuing up everything yourself. After. Every. Single. Mission. Then harvest everything. Manually. Yourself. After a 3 minute mission. Every. Single. Time. You wanna make a big base? Good luck feeding it. And enjoy running around doing chores all day every day. Missions are insanely short and quick and genuinely not challenging. After 3 hours I'd yet to be stressed, or amused, even once. The movespeed is also glacially slow, so I'm just holding movement keys to run to an area, and mowing down the non-challenging threat, then holding the move key. It's not thrilling or engaging at any point whatsoever. This game desperately needs a ton more automation and more challenge. I can't recommend it for base builders because it's just so tedious and unfun, and I can't recommend it for extraction top down shooters because it's so boring and uninspired. Both halves are at odds with each other, and become a chore blocking the other. Neither one brings fun...so you're suffering the boring part to suffer the other boring part. The game also lies to you. Note that at 0:28 in the trailer that the player is fighting with a bunch of NPCs? Ha. Sucker. You can't bring them with you on missions, they're only on scripted missions. Despite having an entire interface with their skills and weapon loadouts. Hell, they don't even bring the loadout you gave them on said scripted missions-one of them even refuses to fight! And then joins your base and consumes food with literally 0 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skills and no way to level her up. Wat? Shady as hell.

Developers randomly (over a year after release, with a still-active, if small, userbase) decided to pull the plug on the game entirely, not only delisting it for sale, but also disabling downloads of it from users that have already purchased the game. Absolutely shameful display

Sucks this game is being shut down but DO NOT BUY IT. They are making it so you are gonna be unable to purchase which makes sense BUT if you buy it and uninstall it at any point you will not be able to re-download it...which is BS

Do not buy, the dev team was fired, an announced was made that the game was being discontinued, and the access for people that bought it was being revoked, dunno if they can, but I would not risk it, I'm still hoping the part about revoking access to everyone was just a typo (the announcement explicitly said they were removing access even to people that bought the game, and the only way to keep it is keep it in disk...).

Lots of good ideas here and there, the mixup between the management / basebuilding and the mission is decent. The base building need some big changes atm, you can only build in a specific area and only a limited amount of each building, you think you have some freedom early but realise pretty fast that you jsut build everything in 20-30 days and are left with not much building / managing. The RPG / leveling elements force you into a build which is a good thing, you can't wear and use all item / skills at the same time. Big + you can respec. Overall a cool concept but not enough content to justify the price tag and content takes ages to come, funny part is they talk about a "free DLC" like come on it's early access you just adding content and it is needed.