Recent reviews by Mindestens

Oh look, it's another already released game patched a little bit with new text painted over old title and put on window display with shiny price as if it was a brand new thing because developer desperately wants to get on that front page again. Don't you just love this exiting new era of constant indefinitive editions, [payments] extended [due to content] cuts and more and more games feeling like they are all published under Valve's Too Early Access forever, someone just 'forgets' to mark them from time to time as such, kinda like with Towns before it all began?

Well, Planetary Annihilation actually was in Early Access. And like many others there, on it's release date it was just incomplete mess. Mess that no amount of half-asssed insincere attempts of fixing it could change dramatically, because the game not only turned out to be unfinished (do backers and early adopters remember that YT video thrown into main menu playing over intro? Apart everything else that was wrong, how do you miss bugs in release-candidate build that hit you right off?), it was built on flawed fundaments. You can't fix randomly generated soulless skirmish battles mashed together faking single player campaign unless you throw it all away to start over with proper campaign, which they didn't in Titans. Adding some flavour text here and there doesn't give it any more meaning. To some like me the whole basic concept of fighting on planets and even multiple ones at time turned out to be just a distracting, tiring gimmick in practice, no matter how awesome it looked on paper. At least they stopped pretense of using John Patrick Lowrie's voice, he's not even in intro with lines from Kickstarter campaign like the last time, what a lie that all was...

No wonder Uber tried to release it again under slightly different name to get rid of all deserved negative reviews from buyers and media... What? 'Mindestens, you crazy git, this couldn't be one of factors!' Well, they're panning some negative feedback on forums about Titans already because they don't like customers who are not writing paeans. Pointing out all the shady things doesn't help pushing more copies of the same product it was last year, it seems. But now it has a couple more units! Ugh. You couldn't even save during mission for months after release or run it offline, or use features/units promised. Pathfinding is still shaky. Ordering building construction doesn't create it's unfinished skeleton until worker/commander actually gets there and starts making the thing so you can't add idle units to construction of queued buildings ahead in the meantime. I wouldn't mind having some sort of indicator where I ordered units to gather after construction. Interface is still lacking. Tutorials are a joke (but earlier there wasn't any). To think this patch deserves any money is just bonkers or symptome of Stokholm syndrome.

People were screwed over by Uber and their pals Nordic Games back then, some even realised that - of course they're angry. And now they are screwed over again because unless you were <strike>dumb enough like me to trust these hacks over three years ago with money</strike> Kickstarter backer, you ain't gonna get this glorified patch! But if you got their unfinished borked product earlier, you get 66% discount on your patch. Off you go, sucker!

And all that not even a year after initial release. Hope all those who sticked for multiplayer defending game like it was land of their fathers enjoy sudden fragmentation of community and extra payment to keep playing it when most people inevitably switch over.

Cult of the Wind spent two months in Early Access - didn't change much during that time. Nor did it after release back in June 2014. Thanks to developer's incompetence at both building the game (clearly unfinished and lacking polish, I'd even say features necessary for such title) and any interest around it, it was dead on arrival as multiplayer-only game. Alex Allen (North of Earth) didn't bother trying to resurrect it.

Also, it seems fishy when someone friends with the dev who has only games of that particular developer writes positive review right after game is released on Early Access:

http://imgur.com/SreIWDx