SecretAgentCow 最近的评测

This game is actually somewhat challenging for me to recommend to many people. I think this game has something a lot of people have trouble with (as evidenced by some other reviews, which I think are people correctly identifying that this game does not work for them) so I just want to frontload this with some caution for anyone potentially interested in this game. Still, if the idea of this game sounds interesting to you and you have the grit needed to stomach making frequent mistakes or a willingness to start fresh a few times there is no other game like this that I have played. If you are comfortable with grand strategy games like Europa Universalis and also comfortable with losing is fun games like dwarf fortress this game is in your strike zone.

This is quite a long game, as it stands less than 10% of owners have beaten it, and I suspect that number will probably stay pretty true throughout this game' existence. Still, it is also deceptively forgiving on the regular difficulties, and it takes far more than many realize to reach a true failure state which is unfortunately something that is not evident until you get a lot more experience with the game. There is even an achievement for winning as the resistance after an alien-aligned faction achieves their victory condition.

It is also a very complex game. There are two main layers to the game: earth and space. Both have different intricacies and importance depending on how far into a campaign you are. Each layer contains a huge amount of information that at first feels like trying to memorize a textbook in your head. As you play more, you will probably have many "So THAT is why that is useful!" moments as you go through. This is a game that throws many different tools at you at once. You have to learn which wrench used is for certain bolts and which hammer is best for certain alien heads. When you get to space it throws a second different toolbox at you for good measure. I restarted my games several times when I realized how some things work. Even then I could have probably still played through and won just with some added difficulty and time.

It truly feels like a game where you start as a hopelessly outmatched rag-tag group trying their best against an advanced alien race and their lackies. At game start you are hopelessly outmatched. The aliens have technology that far out classes your own, and to make matters worse you have at least two human factions that also want to work with the aliens.

At game start you have no idea what you are up against. You represent an illuminati-like faction whose objective is to (if playing as the recommended start faction resistance) understand and fight back against an unknown alien threat. You may start off looking at all the nations of the world and grab a whole bunch of European countries. UK and Germany have decent tech and military and are fairly easy to grab and are under your control point cap with some flexibility for other nations in the world. You try to unify them into a federalized European Union (after de-brexiting the UK) but find out actually only the union leader France can do that. Unfortunately, a different faction has control of France and it is going to be a pain to knock them out. Oh well, you continue onwards, or maybe if you are like me restart.

After a year of work and a new space station in orbit you finally have enough resources to try to take out the single ship in orbit conducting surveillance. You are warned that this is very bad and you should probably try to stop it. You send 6 ships after a single alien ship conducting surveillance. Of your six ships, three burn like paper to the lasers of the alien ship. The three remaining ships that got close found out that your navy battleship sized cannons actually don't do much damage to the ship, if they even reach it at all. Turns out chemically propelled chunks of metal aren't fast enough to hit something hundreds of kilometers away in space easily. Worse, it turns out the shots that do hit don't hit hard enough to penetrate its armor.

Now you learn about the importance of armor. At first you might try to armor everything, only to find out wow, turns out armoring an entire ship is expensive. You used most of your space boost to build your ships that took mere moments to disintegrate. And armor adds more weight, and thus more boost to create your ship. You now learn the importance of having a space economy. Turns out you don't need boost if you build it with resources mined in space, and maybe it would have been better to have saved your boost for the first moon and Martian bases. You could have gotten resources there and saved so much boost in building your ships. Maybe here you might restart and try again with this knowledge on a fresh run, although if you don't you can definitely still pull off a win I promise. Some may feel this is 4-5 hours wasted, but if you are the type that likes continual refinement against a challenging enemy it's quite fun.

It's 2030 again and this time you have a decent space economy. The ships you make this time are still pretty cheap, but instead of the naval guns you built two types of ships. One loaded with torpedoes and one loaded with several 40mm intending to saturate the alien ship with enough garbage that eventually some of it gets through. You learn that actually you didn't need to armor the ships that much. Most of the time your ships nose is the only thing that gets hit since it is pointed towards the enemy anyway. Your 6 layers of boron carbide nose armor managed to save 4 of your six ships and you finally blew up that alien ship.

Only to learn that what you took out was the alien equivalent of a national geographic crew when they send two actual combat ships your way and dust your four remaining ships and space station a few months. Strangely you notice they left your lunar and mars bases untouched.

Here is where you start to realize your advantages going forward. Those alien ships actually took a pretty long time to retaliate; they had to fly all the way from past Neptune which took months of game time. While those ships were flying maybe you could have built some newer ships with the new lasers you just researched to take out their missiles. They left your mining bases untouched and maybe are underestimating you. Maybe next time they send two ships you will instead have 8 more waiting for them. And on and on it goes until you finally outmatch them, first with sheer quantity, then later with technology.

If this kind of strategy and in-game story generation interest you, this game is unlike any I have played and I highly recommend it. If you are averse to having to restart or frequently start fresh with alien-bombarded scratch I would caution you that you may not enjoy this.

I also think the actual story in the game is quite good. The writing and characterization of the factions is told mostly through the global technologies you unlock. Each faction has a unique story identity that is actually pretty believable for how people might react to an alien invasion. My favorite being Hanse Castillo and their voice actor portraying an anti-alien insurgent who is determined to win by any means necessary. The Academy is also surprisingly crazy in their goal to achieve mutual recognition with the aliens.

There are some other nitpicks. I wish there was more hinting with technologies, especially ship drives, are recommended for. I think categorizing them by intended role might help. The very end game is also a little slow due to distances your fleets travel for solar system cleanup.

Overall, though, this is a game built around attaining gradual mastery. Even if you end up at a dead end you can still recover by taking a different route. I have almost 400 hours in this game since its early access and still learn so much each game I play. I hope very much that Pavonis continues to develop this, or other games like this in the future.

Punches above its weight class for a ~10$ game mostly made by one person. Fun rts/tower defense/ movement game combination. Kinda has nier vibes throughout the game, including a similar made up language. Does not outstay its welcome and is satisfying for the price.

Despite how it looks this game is very compelling. It feels almost like a reverse xcom game where you are the big bad taking out the resistance. It does have a pretty high learning curve, and the UI is not great, but the game has me thinking about strategies and moves I could make hours after playing. I believe development of these type of games came from the dev being disappointed in the old failed kickstarter That Which Sleeps and it certainly lives up the promise of being an elder god taking over the world with much the same of the concepts. I hope the dev considers making a sequel at some point with glossed up UI as this is really fun.