Reality Break

Multiple buggs for ~2months. Some examples: performance degradation up to couple frames a second, missiles not working as expected, labels for non-existing objects stuck on screen forever. These are pre-release bugs and still not fixed. And all this while already advertising DLCs. Looks like it's going to be content over quality slop. Unfortunate.

Games in this style have a balance between your character's strength being equipment based and skill based. Too skill based and the player has no upgrade path. Too equipment based and the game just feels like a grind. If 5 were balanced in the middle, this game would be an 8 or a 9 towards equipment based. There are too many enemy shots, and your dodge ability has a cooldown, so you can't dodge everything and aiming is mostly just putting the mouse near the enemy. There is skill, it just doesn't have anywhere near the impact of your equipment. So the game is grindy, but oddly the storyline forces you to reset your character and lose all equipment in order to progress farther. Another problem is the game doesn't explain very well what the stats and modifiers on equipment do. So my inventory would fill up fast but I wouldn't really know what was better or not and it was hard to tell what synergized or not. Just went by if it had a green indicator and if the price was higher. You can basically pay to upgrade gear, but again I don't know why I'd bother with that since my character will reset soon anyway. All in all after 2 hours I felt bored and annoyed and didn't want to play anymore.

Not a terrible game, but it could have benefited from having a game director with alot of experience in making a more engaging gameplay loop and progression. It just doesn't have that X factor that makes you want to come back for me. The movement system is kinda shallow, i don't have many thoughts that are positive, even though i don't hate this game. Mid.

I played the demo 3 years ago, seemed to enjoy it. Now I simply can't get into it. Missions just feel so repetitive.. Combat is fun at first but quickly just becomes a slog of ships getting all exploded and stuff. Not a fan of the whole reality break stuff either, and that's a core part of the game. The equipment based method of improving your ship coupled with the need to do a reality break means I'm doing a lot of the things I didn't enjoy the first time a second time.

It's like diablo in space, minus skill trees and build making and focused mostly on gear. The twist is that reality "breaks" at scripted points of the story, deleting your character and giving you the ability to repeat the thing by "changing reality" at that point next time you reach it (there is no puzzle there, it's literally a dialogue option saying "change reality"). Maybe it gets more interesting later, but the first 2 times you really are just killed without ceremony and forced to restart. Sure, doing this gives you the chance to get permanent upgrades by spending "reality points" and the story moves faster (you have some skip options) the second time, but it still undoes part of the grinder for no real reason. The game looks okay, not amazing. Performance suffers in busier levels. Ultimately, it's a numbers game. If you're underleveled, enemies are absolute sponges and melt you with unavoidable attacks; if you're overleveled, you melt them and are largely impervious to their attacks. Combat is generally fun and it's satisfying to see numbers go up, but... why? There's no real reason for me to play this, and the story so far has presented neither interest nor agency. It's just an excuse to shoot things. But it's not like Escape Velocity where trading and upgrading your ship is part of your thought process - instead, you just go on random missions and get random loot, replacing your equipment when RNG rewards you with something better. There has been no world building outside the very on-rails story, either. Maybe it opens up and gets better later on, but I don't really want to stick around to find out.

This game wants to be better than it is. Unfortunately it suffers from memory leaks, poor optimizations, and the in-game stated goal of "becoming overpowered" is hampered by the program itself being unable to handle pursuing that. The writing is good, which makes it ironic that it's the only easily skippable thing. The graphics are okay, too much bloom and LoD and the map is obnoxious to use regardless of settings. The grind to upgrade things is painful and slow, and it becomes a chore. My playtime is inflated from leaving the game running to preserve "mission flow combos" which are lost any time you close the program. I feel I eventually got my money's worth after wringing the towel bone dry, but I don't recommend picking this up new for anyone.

This game combines an ARPG with Roguelite permanent progression, and honestly, i wish i could only play the ARPG. The gameplay is plenty of fun, a space shmup does fantastic with all your ARPG gameplay staples. Loot galore with rarity filtering is a great touch. However, the game boils down to this: How many times can we block progression behind constantly looping back to the start to go through the same boring, soulless progression slowing dialogue (even when skipping), just so you have an opportunity to get the same loot, with minimal upgrades to go up against spongier and spongier enemies? all so you can do the same thing again. and mind you, you'll probably only get about 5-10 minutes forward in your progression before you need to start all over again. No variety in your gameplay and no justification for having to constantly loop back. having 1 little item that is pivotal to the story and holds the entirety of this mechanic together is one of the most laughable things i've ever witnessed in gaming. i don't see a good fix that satisfies this. obviously, this is what the game has been built around. this IS the vision. if that's the case, i recommend other ARPGS or roguelikes on their own instead of this failed amalgamation.

The roguelite aspect is a detriment to what could actually have been a really good and interesting game. I hate having to restart my build 4 times within 6 hours especially as your items dictate your build far more than the meta progression ever would.

Stupid bug: you can buy and sell chasis at station 6, and you'll be super rich. If a simple bug like this isn't fixed, then i have to believe that i'm not been treated seriously. And although it's a diablo-like game, you can't loot smoothly. You can't move to the next mission immediately after you finish one. There're always annoying enemies come out of nowhere continuously, so you can not use the warp skill.