Knightshade 最近的评测

MENACE is a turnbased strategy game made by people who clearly love the genre and have had the same gripes as I've had approaching other games in the genre.

To address the elephant in the room: Squad leader customization would not be able to generate the delightful little interactions between my units as they chatter back and forth during a mission.

Onto the positives:
* Mission variety is excellent. XCOM 2 often had a problem where you're supposed to be this resistance force doing raids, but the missions were mostly some variant of "Kill everyone and also press a button". MENACE missions have a great deal more variety, and there's gradient to success. Some missions do want you to kill a certain threshold of enemies (e.g. destroy enemy HQ), but others have no opinion (defend this outpost) or actively discourage you from fighting enemies (sabotage/assassinate).
* Intelligence + Supply limits + custom deployment change everything. Rather than trying to bring in a loadout designed to fight everything optimally, you can tune your loadout and deployment to fit the enemy force. There can still be curve balls, but it's *incredibly* satisfying to be able to have a sniper team sweep the flank of my main force and pick off enemy ATGM teams setting up in ambush.
* The Barter system makes trade interesting. The lack of money means that sometimes you're picking up items just for barter, but often you're trying to balance "useful now" with "trade later". No more just selling everything and accumulating a pile of money you'll spend on something, eventually. Now getting that cool missile system might require giving up a couple good rifles and an armor set I don't really want to part with.

The game is clearly EA. The map shows 5-ish planets (biomes) to go to, right now only 3 are implemented. Sometimes mission objectives can be a little unclear how to do them (e.g., poisoning alien nests requires an action from an infantry unit). Some trade goods don't have icons and instead just have a single "trade good" icon shared between them (though a large number of these just got artwork added.

Despite the occasional issues, MENACE is a breath of fresh air for the genre and I am 100% here for it.

One of the best RTS games out there, hands down.

Game crashed in the deep desert. Game took away all my fuel so I could lose everything to the worm.

12/10 game funcom, very fun way to lose all my ♥♥♥♥.

The game is mechanically good. The new stuff is cool. Multiplayer revamp is good (hotjoin my beloved!!!) There are a ton of QOL improvements from the first game.

The UI, overall, is kind of a crapshoot. The AI generated art is a problem though. It's unclear, it's bland, and it focuses on aesthetics while overlooking the importance of communicating stuff.

Thumbs down for that one reason.

This is a good game but the mechanic where if you don't play for a bit the game just nukes your progress is unforgivable and a transparent attempt to retain players.

The atmosphere is great. Downside, you can tell it's both EA and heavily influenced by artists. The game is beautiful, but performs horribly, you'll get caught on terrain, AI bugs out a lot, and it's not all as dynamic as you'd hope.

Still a good game, but it has a lot of issues, maybe hold off.

This game is a love letter to old school RTS. That much is clear. That said.

No mouse trapping, no rebinding controls, no real options. Fortunately this is saved by a boring plot of unlikeable characters, incredibly bland mission design, uncreative units, etc.

The UI doesn't give good feedback for a variety of reasons. Lots of the little things that make it clear what's happening on the screen just aren't there. Units don't show their damage level unless you have them selected which results in information being concealed. Lots of things have hotkeys, but to reveal the hotkey you have to *mouse over the button*.

The decision not to have multiplayer feels less like a choice to focus on the design team's strengths and more that the devs recognized it wasn't going to happen.

The game is a love letter to old school RTS, and old school RTS games had a lot of flaws too. Five Nations embraces it all uncritically.

NEW EDIT: I just launched the game and it crashed so hard it took down my entire PC with it. Kernel level anti-cheat is freaking stupid, but if you're going to have it, remove the bugs.

Listen, this is Helldivers 2, you know exactly what this is.

The game itself deserves all the kudos, but unfortunately the anti-cheat is extremely invasive (kernel level nonsense) that the devs insist on standing behind and trying to justify.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the anti-cheat *really* doesn't like my PC and the game will sometimes just randomly refuse to launch, and it forces the game into always online mode even when my internet is on the fritz.

I really like helldivers 2, but this is something to consider going in.

EDIT: About the time Sony pulled their ♥♥♥♥ I was considering flipping this to positive.

Leaving this review negative to remind studio executives that pushing stupid ideas isn't free.

Okay so... I like this game. I really, really do. I would *love* to be able to recommend this game. However, my policy is to judge a game not based on its potential but if I think, as it is, the game is worth it.

I also ran into a bug during the tutorial that forced me to delete my character and start over after like 30 minutes in the character creator. This bug has not yet been patched.

It is also always online. This causes further issues I'll get into later.

In short, the game doesn't have enough content for what it is. Only three major biomes (Desert, Swamp, Forest, swamp and forest being very similar) with difficulty modifiers means that while yes, every zone can be different, they start to feel the same.

Various points of interest on the map don't have nearly enough variety. Depth of content is vital for a game like this. I'm not asking for every new POI to be new to me, but I also shouldn't be going "ah, this one again". There are maybe 4 defense POI layouts. Maybe 3-4 agility POI layouts. The same applies to most POIs.

Combat also tends to be wonky. Everything is server side, which means I had enemies hitting me through my block because the server registered the hit before it registered me blocking. Enemies tend to be very jerky and hard to hit, and not in a skilled way, but in a "these hippos are charging through me at mach 1, going straight up this sheer cliff, and then charging me again.

The biggest issue, though, is probably the loading times. Building in a zone is limited. Each zone can only have one minor card (basically a zone modifier) applied to it at a time. If you want to, say, stack both the card for more ammo and metal production with the farming card, you can get lost because those will be different realms. The process of moving between realms is that of waiting several minutes while the gate charges up and then opens (I believe this is the server assembling the zone), then waiting several *more* minutes in a loading screen to actually get to the zone, where you will then need to spend considerable time walking to the Fae Tower to clear it and get the POIs added to your map. Deserts in particular can be bad because terrain there is either sheer, nightmarishly difficult cliff to climb or flat open sands with nothing of interest.

Items are also buggy. Sometimes putting something in your inventory will cause it to vanish. Sometimes mission critical interactables at POIs won't render.

The hotbar has room for 5 "main" items and 5 offhand items, but you have more than 5 main items you'll need regularly, which means a lot of shuffling items around.

The game is neat. There's a lot of potential here. I'm probably going to continue playing it, but that doesn't mean I *recommend* it. The current product is woefully unfinished and unpolished, however.

Come back in six months to a year and it might be great. If it doesn't get abandoned by the devs, it has real potential.

EDIT: Coming back to say my opinion hasn't changed, and additionally the devs annoy me because the only communication I've seen was a youtube video.

I can't CTL-F a youtube video. I can't quickly reference a video. I can't skim through the whole thing to get an idea if they're saying anything relevant, where that is, etc. Always online issues still haven't been fixed either, and I suspect they're going to keep neglecting that hoping the review rating recovers.

Overall a good game. The stagger system, while currently overtuned, creates an interesting counterbalance to the players own stagger and energy meter- promoting aggression over passive play.

The game is fast paced, especially later on. Bosses can be extremely difficult, but in my playthroughs I came to appreciate the lessons each one taught more and more- they are challenging, yes, but *fair*, and once you "get good" you'll find yourself with mastery even in new situations.

The soundtrack has one of those stupid programs you have to run to access it, but you can export that so it's not complete cancer.

Overall, it's all the things I loved about Fromsoft games (the difficulty, the setting and atmosphere, the writing generally, the complex combat, the interesting level design) with none of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (disrespect of player time, artificial difficulty, bad hitboxes, etc.)

Generally, if this game seems like it might be your thing, get it. It does what it sets out to do fantastically. If you *don't* understand the appeal of this game, you aren't going to find it by playing it.

It knows it's audience.

Okay so the first thing to note is that this is one of those games that when they say "Early Access", they *mean* early access. This game is in alpha- features are still being developed and tested, pipelines built, etc.

All that aside- this game has some of the best potential of any RTS I've played in a while. The way it casually overloads you with problems is great. The inspiration from World in Conflict and Company of Heroes are both stark and *extremely* satisfying. Cepheus Protocol expects you to go out on the map and actually get ♥♥♥♥ done in order to play the game. It rewards pro-active play, rather than immediately dumpstering you because you had the gall to move out onto the map without a maxed out army. Deathballs are discouraged by the fact that you need to be in many places at once.

It has it's flaws. It can be a bit micro intensive. Performance lategame kinda sucks (though they're working on that). However, the devs are *extremely* engaged with the community and they have their head in the right place.

Also this game is probably the first I've seen that has the potential to ever make that "play a shooter in an RTS"-thing work (though it's still *extremely* WIP at the moment).

**TLDR:** A work in progress, and *definitely* an alpha, but for the price point I'd say it does enough new things to be worth it, and the outlook is excellent.

Oh, and the tutorial is garbage. That said, enough is still up in the air that I'm willing to forgive it. The devs are engaged and changing things as the playerbase brings up ideas.