December 6th?! Wow. Thanks for the heads up.
It adds Techmarine class and Dreadnought along with other features.
33% off on the Steam sale - time to jump in.
I tried to determine if the complaints about the game had be fixed, but it’s still “mostly positive” on Steam. Reading through the reviews though, most seem positive and there was no clear complaint in the negative reviews.
Does not run well on the Steam Deck is a negative.
At release there was a lot of ire over Twitch drop. However at the first major patch, they unlocked everything from all the drops to everyone.
I bought this after the patch and played through most of the game. It’s fun, a pretty good example of the genre. I liked how the game encourages you to be aggressive and improvise.
Cons are similar to those for X-Com 2:
- The “enemy pod” game design is bad
- Your guys eventually become supermen that can reliably wipe out pods in one turn, so you can go multiple missions without the enemy ever firing a shot
- Filler missions are all very similar, and there’s a lot of them
It probably makes sense to bump up the difficulty.
WHAT
Ultimately what prevented me from finishing this game was the fact that on the strategic level the player was often made to make a choice without info as to the impact and it was possible to make a bad choice and screw yourself and there was no advanced info or auto save to prevent that. I hate that kind of thing. If you want me to make a choice, give me the info. If you are doing it for “story flavor” then the results need to be very very mild and not impact the game in a significant way. But I encountered stuff like being locked out of the armory for weeks, or losing major resources or losing important Knights for weeks or months, without knowing the pain before I chose.
They would need to fix that before I would go back. It’s a simple fix - just tell the player the impacts of the choices. It was a very weird and dissonant design choice given the clearly displayed and deterministic approach to the combat. The combat lacked the pain of XCOM’s “95% to hit” but the strategic layer had all that pain. Weird. What were they thinking?
On my last attempt at the game I did try using that Guide but it seemed incomplete. I cannot recall if that was before or after the last update to that guide.
DON’T FORCE PLAYERS TO CHOOSE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS IF THEY HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME!!!
Especially if you can’t change on the fly.
Is standard going to be OK or will it make most missions milk runs?
I guess another thing I didn’t like was that the higher level Knights you could recruit came with pre-chosen abilities, which meant the player might not be able to build the Knights the way the player wanted. Upgrading the armory to get higher level Knights was actually a negative. And there was a respec option but it required the soul of a dead Knight as a currency and that was both so hard to get and so against my “minimum losses” approach to play it was a non-option for me.
Again, as with the hidden info problem, this had easy solutions: just make the higher level Knights recruited have their points unassigned so the player could properly customize them. Also, the cost for the respecs needed to be something more viable like maybe a few days in rehab for each level the respecced Knight had. Taking a level 5 Knight offline for say 20 days to get a respec is a price, but it’s a very payable one, with decent planning. The current respec system is a sad joke.
It depends on whether you are a managed risk player (your goal is to figure out the strategies to bring the risk of loss to zero) or a high risk player (your goal is to have the game challenge present a real risk of losing a mission throughout the game). For a managed risk player, standard difficulty is fine. For the high risk players, I think many feel standard diff becomes a milk run as you get deeper into the games synergistic systems.
(This has become my standard answer to difficulty on many games - IMO it’s more about the player than the game, in many cases.)
YEEEEEEZZZZ! For the Emperor!
(That is also one of my favorite parts of one of my favorite cut scenes of all time)
My issues became that the systems and mechanics broke down at later stages because of gear and builds, so their solution was to effectively make them not work at all before you get that gear and progression. Which makes higher difficulties mostly painful experiences early on.
It’s one of those games where Normal quickly becomes too easy, but the next level up is probably too rough, because they mostly tried to cater to the “highest difficulty is too easy for me” crowd. Which, is fine to do in the context of the highest difficulty level. But they seemed to use that as their baseline.
Maybe it got better. I hope so, because I enjoyed it quite a bit for the most part, but it felt uneven after the first round of reworks.
When I played I got the overall sense that from a balance point of view, the Devs didn’t really understand how players play, particularly the more OCD min/max players and didn’t account for that in the character progression system and abilities.
However, there was a fairly straightforward solution that they chose not to use for reasons I don’t understand. One of the key complaints for those who feel they can break the game is that at later stages they can wipe out entire enemy pods within one round of spawning so the enemy basically never get a shot off. There is a pretty straightforward response to that: at higher difficulties, increase the hit points and/or defenses of the enemy, in a scaling fashion - more increase further in the game. That would slow the game down a lot but it does seem to be what the people who complain are complaining about.
Decided to play at the higher difficulty, quite a few my brothers are now in the apothacarinfirmium. For super soldiers with invulnerable armour they get banged up a lot.
Indeed! This is a missed opportunity, as this kind of play would make much more sense with Eldars.
That said, your knights become much better with improved gear and some levels.
The patch and DLC have made the difficult stage of the game last much longer.
I am playing Legendary/Grandmaster, and I still have catastrophic missions from time to time (2 knights dead, one critically wounded, and I survived only because one of the enemies proced Crazed and killed his team mate instead of finishing my last standing knight and the dreadnought).
The new missions are brutal, but also sometimes frustrating, because the maps are too cramped, which makes triggering multiple pods more common. I don’t think the system is really meant for that.
I switched to a ranged + grenades build for the dreadnought missions because of that. Being ranged makes triggering new pods much less likely.
The other issues with the DLC is that the techmarine is weak-ish, and the dreadnought is only available mid campaign (after the 1st major story mission), but the harder missions start appearing before.
You also cannot deploy the Dreadnoughts in most missions. It is somewhat lore accurate, but the main issue I have with it is that it includes the Reaper ones and the final battle, which is frustrating, and doesn’t make any sense lore wise.
However, he is a very coold addition, which helps break the routine of the other missions, so I think it is a good addition, but I would recommend only enabling it shortly before (or right after) you tackle said storyline mission craftworld.
Overall, I think the base game got much better:
The events are more balanced and less punishing, you can spend requisition te respec your knights instead of sacrificing rookies …
The DLC makes things a bit harder, but not that much if you wait to enable it, and it adds good content. I really liked some of the new missions (with or without Dreadnought).
This added a few balances issues that will probably get patched very slowly, but I would still recommend it.
These days 90% of my game time is spent on Factorio, but I’ve been making time for a mission of this on the steam deck before bed. I’m enjoying it! I haven’t played the new XCOM games or, much to Tom’s vicarious embarrassment, the originals (although thanks to the Android port of OXCE I am slowly rectifying this), but this game is a lot of fun. I giggled at the WRATH grenade in the tutorial fight and wish they all said that.
This one is tough! I haven’t lost a mission yet, but my guys are slowly all getting added to the wounded roster. Two critically so, which is going to be especially bad on the next go around because I’ve been leaning heavily on my melee terminator and he just went down and will be out for some time. No more “win with three knights” special conditions for me for a bit.
Aah, the special conditions. Possibly the best bit of design in the game. I hope they end up widely copied in the genre.