So I've been interested in this game after seeing it mentioned here once or twice. It holds the dubious distinction of being the game I said "What the hell is the name of that game?" whenever I forgot it, and then I'm usually lucky enough to see the thread already here bumped or someone else mention it in passing. The *ah-ha* moment is never far off.

If anyone doesn't know, it's sort of like FTL, where you traverse "sectors" in a giant upgradeable Jawa-like sandcrawler. BUT it also has a turnbased tactical battle component, where you pick a team from the little guys in your sandcrawler and send them out to fight. The usual fare: they level up, they die, they have classes and you get more / better versions of them until you win or die horribly.

SO... why the thread? Well, I want the game and I want it here. For the life of me I can't find email on their website, but they do have twitter and social media and whatnot. I'm hoping anyone here with an "in" with them, or a said social media account can bug them to sell their game here.

If I remember correctly, I saw it mentioned that they WERE a bit ambivalent about DRM free during their Kickstarter. If I ALSO remember correctly it's been like a year plus that the game's been out and I'm pretty sure I even saw someone here mention the game was given away at one point. So hopefully with a little bit of prodding they might want to show up on GOG finally.

So, what do you say? I want a new game, I want it to be this one and I need your help! Cheers! ;)

This is pretty high on my interest list as well and I'd love to see it here, of course.

Daytime / Early Euro Evening Bump!

Didn't the game had a bad reception by the gamers? I remember everyone was interested (including me) but looking at the steam reviews:

55% positive
45% negative

Wow I'm actually surprised - I haven't read any reviews of it but I had watched a few Let's Play type videos (mostly of the combat) and it looked fine / right up my alley.

I'm... *fairly* forgiving when it comes to bugs / crashes as long as the game isn't totally broken or a crashfest. It's not going to change my desire to see the game here, but do you mind listing a few of the main gripes with the game just so I can be prepared *fingers crossed* if (when?) I play it?

I was figuring it would have been fixed by now, is it not?

and I generally don't pay attention to ratings because I often enough disagree.

It was never broken to begin with, it's just... Not that great. What I was mostly disappointed with was a very limited supply of random events which just became very repetitive and the events themselves felt very limited - while most of them are mostly text-based, majority only seems to offer a single outcome, not really giving player too many choices to make. And then combat felt pointlessly frustrating, but that might be just me being bad at it. Art style is gorgeous tho.

Looking through some reviews, sounds like two main gripes:

The combat system being bad. Each side gets two actions which means most of your team doesn't even act. And weird gameplay mechanics such as snipers only being about to attack at exactly 7 spaces away, not 6 or 8.

Second, the randomness and the generator. For example encountering a locked bunker in one random event, then finding a key for it in the next and not being able to go back to it.

Argh, laptop restarted while i was writting... I'm not the best person because i don't own the game but from i can understand they removed some content that was available on the early acess, promised some features but never fulfil it and the game has some balacing problems. For me it depends of how many reviews are there, 100 or less it could lead to a biased opinion (sheep mentality) but in this case were talking of 516.

looking more at it...

It seems there's great potential here but they gave up on trying to reach that potential? disappointing

but maybe not hopeless?

It's funny, this was actually a DRAW for me. Watching the videos, I thought it was very interesting that you had a "global" two actions that you had to distribute as you saw fit. It seemed like a balancing act.

Looking at their website last night (I was hunting for an email) I saw they added in a "Tactics" combat - initially I was bummed as it seemed like the more standard set of actions per unit. Not that I don't like this - I love TBS games and this is the norm in most. But I do have to admit that this game did something different was a big part of its draw for me.

Digging a little deeper, it SEEMS like it's actually an option. The player can choose to use either the Tactics or original "2 Action" combat. If they stripped the two action (which is what I saw in all the videos I watched about six months ago) I'm not sure I would have been as interested still.

I haven't played it, but the problem many had was that it made most units useless. They are just there to soak damage and you use your 2 actions on the same units every time.

Ah gotcha - I do remember in a few of the videos it looked like the melee units especially were there just to die (I think they had big shields and a "hit radius" of the four cardinal directions around them). And the players did seem to have a few "uber" units that handled a lot of the damage dealing.

For me to like it they'd need to add a lot more branches to their events and completely overhaul the combat. Buut - the game is still being improved. Recently, they significantly changed how the combat system works for example, but not really in ways I would find important - devs do seem to care about their game tho. FTL is a far better game. Combat is way more complex and interesting, there are more varied encounters and more interesting quests, I could go on. That being said I don't like FTL too much - it felt far too random and unfair to me. But... Well, that is probably just me.