Well, I did give this another whirl and I'd say it's not bad, but it's chock full of amateur game dev mistakes that are really unnecessary and will probably get more and more grating the longer you play.
Here are the negatives I gathered from playing a few hours again:
- No rebindable keys (in an RTS! What is this I don't even)
- Options menu in general will make you sad
- Can't pause the game without manually clicking the menu button
- Control groups are a thing, but not shown on the screen
- Dialog is only skippable entirely or not at all. You can't skip the current "paragraph" once you are done reading, you'll have to listen to the terrible-to-meh voice acting for it all or skip everything at once
- Voiceover can not be disabled (unless you want to disable all audio)
- The writing is fanfic level - not a catastrophe, but you won't get any peak writing here.
- Apparently, the entire game is written in JavaScript and delivered in a browser (press F12 to see the debug console like in Chrome
). This is not bad per se, but a very weird choice for game development, I have a feeling some of the issues relate to this as well.
- Something that many Scifi-themed RTS struggle with: Everything looks the same, you can't tell at a glance what unit/building is what
- The game does not capture your mouse. If you are on multi-monitor like me, forget moving the mouse to the borders in order to move the camera. It won't work, not in the direction your mouse can go to another monitor anyway. At least you can drag the camera around with middle mouse button...
- Only two difficulties, "story" and "hard" - very poor naming choices, for sure. Story is already pretty hard sometimes and "hard" will make sure you'll fail everything until you know exactly what will happen. At least that was true the first few missions I played
- Small units can fly over terrain. This is incredibly annoying and means you'll constantly have to micro your resource gatherers because they won't stop gathering under fire. Ugh. I hate it!
- Units cannot have their gathering point set to buildings. Which means you'll have to manually assign units coming out of factories to their target buildings (eg transporter units transporting resources from mines to your base)
- Unit hotkeys are a mess. All over the place, no proper grid-hotkeys, have fun trying to memorize the correct keys for each button in the UI...
- You cannot shift-construct multiple buildings at once
- There ARE auto-saves, but they seem few and far between. You better save manually when you think it's going well. Obviously, there is no quick save *sigh*
As I said, I don't think it's bad, I'm actually still having fun.
There is a lot of good about this game, too.
But I have a feeling I will not be completing the game this time around, either.
There's just too many QoL features missing for me. I have very little patience nowadays for games that waste a player's time with a lack of QoL features.