Probably the best of the CDLCs. Only downside is that it should have been a base game DLC so it would be automatically integrated like Apex and Contact. Lots of great stuff for mission making though.

It's relatively short (I took my time with it and got all the upgrades and quests done in 6 hours) but they have a blueprint they could really expand on if they wanted to. It plays solidly and can be pretty creepy at times, I just wish it was a little more performance-friendly but my hardware is almost 10 years old so take that as you will.

mechanically simple yet intense, aesthetically questionable yet visually coherent. the menu music is atmospheric breakcore and the menu looks straight out of 2002. fast paced but still somehow goofy.

Recommendation is a tentative yes; the core of the game is solid but could really benefit from some updates that expand it.

*Core gameplay loop is established by the end of about 2 hours in, not much progression skill-wise or equipment-wise from there (some of the experimental weapon types only show up by the time you're entering your 3rd or 4th province but that's not too far in). I'm contesting my 5th province right now and so far it seems that everything I've seen so far is how it'll be going forward in the game; compare this to XCOM, basically the genre's gold standard, where you're getting new equipment and facing new units even like 3/4s through the campaign.
*Melee is a bit wonky, every time I've tried to use it the attacking mech ends up bonking into its target and stunning them both like some sort of slapstick comedy bit.
*UI needs some work (scrapping from mech build screen, actually telling you what a mech's total heat cap is, telling you more info/better contextualized info about weapon heat generation, icons being stylish but not necessarily intuitive)
*Pre-mission screen should let you choose where your mechs start
*events in the strategic overlay don't actually seem to matter all that much (until you get 3 home guard training requests in a row while trying to do guerilla runs in occupied territory)

there's more misc gripes but I think there's potential here. (also there's already mods for it since it was built ground-up with mod support)

I'll say up front, I adore this game's looks, UI, world, etc. - it's like the SCP Foundation if conceptualized by a AAA studio. The dealbreaker for me is how buggy it is. I've updated my drivers and everything, but the damn thing never runs for more than 10-20 minutes at a time before crashing. If I open the pause menu at all, it crashes. If I die, it will probably crash. I've been powering through it for around 7 hours at this point and I'll probably keep playing it but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is it annoying.

The animations are janky, the UI isn't the best, and the AI are stupid as hell, but it's the most extensive combat simulation I've ever played

Top-down semi-roguelike game about one-man covert action in space with a surprising amount of persistence in its world. Not terribly difficult, but not easy either; the endgame "mistake" missions run the gamut from "I can do this with mid-game gear" to "I need green-tier stuff to not get annihilated". The gameplay loop is simple but enjoyable despite being a little repetitive, since the increased challenges keep it fresh.

I'm revising this review after having owned and played the game for a few years and eventually becoming unsatisfied with the state of development. I bought it back when it was little more than building blocks in space, and for a long time it seemed like it had a hell of a lot of promise.

Now, though, development is lethargic and lackluster. The last major update, where they added planets, was a few years ago, and since then we haven't gotten much in the way of meaningful progress. Maybe the oxygen system? They've added things like "space wolves" though and it honestly just seems like they're abandoning the game. It still suffers from terrible optimisation for the rendering, the oxygen system, the physics and quantization, and the netcode, meaning multiplayer is barely viable at times and if you have anything less than a modern medium-tier gaming rig then your experience is probably going to be significantly hampered.

What they *have* had time to implement, however, is something that comes off as an omen of bad things to come, a Steam Item system that looks like it's going to be the precursor to microtransactions. No f-ing thank you. Stay away until this ship's course has been corrected.