Recent reviews by namidim

It's an interesting idea, but the puzzles are not very hard and the game is not very long (beat it in 7 hours). There are effectively.. two puzzles: 1. given a description of a plant, look at all the plants you have until you find the one described. Not hard. 2. given some instructions find a location on a map. The complex versions of the puzzle are just somewhat more tedious. Maybe someone gives you the scientific name for a plant, but the table of contents in your book is the common name so now you have to read every entry until you find the right one.

So cool atmosphere, not very deep game.

If you are an adult with a life, a game that 1) eats CPU like pringles when paused 2) takes a few hours for a run and 3) has 0 way to save a run and come back is going to be a problem. If you are a child or a child-like adult with no responsibilities you will get in discussion board arguments about how this is the point. Dunno what the developer excuse is.

Otherwise fun game.

Solid tower defense. Fun banter. Nicely rendered and distinct units and towers. Lots of levels.

Feels like a hasty follow up to the first one. On the plus side it's not exactly the same thing. They added some new mechanisms to let you pick different improvements to different towers and pick an AI that gives you a special power. Some of the levels have a dynamic element that changes mid-progress... the problem is none of it matters much. There are fewer, less prettily rendered, and less creative levels. I was much less aware of the different unit types or being particularly strategic about the towers I needed to kill them (where even are the arial units? I have an anti-aircraft tower...). None of it was particularly challenging.

Meh. Not anywhere as engaging/fun as the older ones. Or at least not enough to get me to spend more than a couple hours trying it out.

Given how popular this is and the price ($20-$10 depending on sales), the quality of the program is a lot worse than I expected. "undo" is inconsistent in what it undoes. It pegs my CPU no matter what the settings on the game. Where it supports bringing in external assets it's clunky and tedious to use. The UI is consistently awkward in everything from setting up to saving to restoring a game.

I guess it delivers on the core promise of functionality more or less, but this is not a polished, professional product.

There is a lot to like in this game and I've plaid a fair amount of it. If you like random RPG battles there are plenty involving characters and a similar but different mechanism for ships both of which work more or less how you'd expect. It's not excessively RNG heavy although it has those elements.

It also has a pretty good amount of storyline woven into the universe rather than having you just do go-fetch quests without any context.

Fundamentally though many of the core mechanics are literally a slot machine: five cards are visible, all but one vanish, you need a specific card. pull the lever until you get the card. Wait 10 minutes because you need to get more health to pull the lever. etc.
And Those are built into the missions. You need intelligence? pull the lever. You need to catch the person? pull that lever. Need to find a ship? Pull the lever. At some point a lever will be between you and your goal and you are going to sit there for.. a long time pulling levers trying to get a jackpot.

If that doesn't bother you and the rest sounds good, give it a go.

Contrary to many comments this game definitely holds your hand and tells you what to do. The people in the game tell you and it keeps a log of all the things you are supposed to do.
It's also not very deep and it's very grindy. Some interstellar travel is immediate, but lots of it is watching a lonely triangle slowly crawl across the screen.
The aliens are not very interesting and your interactions with them don't seem particularly complex or interesting.
You can build your ship up and that's fine but similarly not super deep.
Anyway I'm confused why people think this is well executed.

If you liked doom/hexen/etc back in the day you will enjoy this as well.

Fun or just addictive? I think just addictive. This is the game equivalent of how dragon ball z was mostly loop animation of rocks floating except imagine every time they did that the scene got exponentially longer and asked if you wanted to pay some money to get to the good part. and the good part was a text message saying "fighting.......insert coin to continue fight"