Recent reviews by Techhead7890

It just doesn't feel satisfying, like there's progression. The meals just keep getting harder and the customers just keep coming, but... I'm not really interested in the crypto rewards or the new recipes. It's also really confusing trying to change hotkeys because F1 is usually also a holding station key. I dunno, sorry, I probably won't be gyrating the pickle again.

Shut down in June 2022, RIP.

short game <15min, very linear, but good fun

It must be said that the Devs host the soundtrack on youtube as a playlist for free already. I think buying this is mostly to support the devs and the composer.

As a tip, you'll need to redownload these files (hit the "Download Album" button to the left of the track list in the library) as they can't be recognised by the Steam Music player by default, but you will get them in flac quality.

I played 21 hours in two days, yes I recommend it.

Edit: Although since making this review, I think Sophie 2 is not good for beginners because of the high variability of grinding for materials; if you want something more consistent I would recommend a different game like Ryza or Ayesha.

Jokes aside, it's very addictive and the crafting music is great. Crafting stuff in general is very addictive as you gather up new materials and links for new possibilities and thresholds (as I understand it, links are the Sophie-specific mechanic that reward clever adjacent placement). The tv-anime style cutscenes are fairly generic but the characters still seem to be interesting enough. I never played any of the other Ateliers so if turn-based is your thing (compared to Ryza's ATBs) then feel free to jump in!

Extremely addictive, on par with cracktorio levels of amazement. Strongly recommend if you have a whole day and a half (let's say 36 hours, because you probably won't be going to sleep) exploring your whole star system, optimising your production while listening to some sick beats blasting out of a chipper-sounding pipe band. There's a strong interconnected sense of scale from tiny farms to solar rocketry and logistics too.

I think a major upside to the game is the hex tile and adjacency system which gives it a major advantage over standard square-grid systems in older (predominantly german) titles or even free floating placement. Coming off a civ-6 kick with district placement it felt pretty natural. But BWL is great and forgiving because you get to move your buildings around without losing materials (you "spend" worker time but hey, there's cool animations to go with that!).

I have some minor gripes with the UI, some of the icons take some getting used to (Industry is some random crates instead of say, a steel bar and a cleaning chemical vial; but logistics and storage is also crates, so it's ambiguous what "crates" mean and that's not ideal for intuition), and on the UX side some of the transport stuff and planet-switching could be refined too. Specifically, you switching camera *out* to space view with a single tap, but then it's clumsy not being able to then zoom *down* to a particular planet without going through menus. But for upsides, the keybind system is fairly well customisable and two-thirds there of what I want. The other minor gripe is that you are going to run into setbacks even if the game isn't "violent" per se, but it's pretty easy to repair and rebuild, plus these setbacks sometimes have upsides too, so it still feels natural.

Overall: extremely worth it, I ought to have bought it earlier to be honest, but the Summer Sale pushed me to try it out sooner. This is the actual vision of scaling gameplay that I wanted from Spore all those years ago.

Good fun trying out the different factional strategies and optimising the economy.

I wanted to like it, it's very pretty, but the mouse controls were awfully confusing and the restricted view rotation was really annoying.

Technically adequate, but nothing exciting and some mild inconveniences. Interface feels rather dated for 2021 and slightly confusingly underspecified at times. Sometimes there's some graphical lag when dragging a piece like it's trying to snap to a grid. It randomly locks two puzzle pieces so you can't move them and you can't connect pieces together before you lock them to the grid. It's worth its price, but not worth the time. I was not particularly satisfied -- but the art and music are fine and good, and if that's what you are here for then by all means feel free to give it a go.

This isn't ready yet. It feels like it's barely past alpha and trying to sell itself as a paid product.

The economy is like SC2 but the combat is that weird quirky style of CNC3 -- which doesn't reward you for pumping out infantry because you can get AOE'd down very easily, so you start the game by twiddling your thumbs and workers around. And there's a lot of polish missing - broken UI and buttons in the campaign. That's not even getting to the unit unlock system which is a real hype killer and even if it isn't paid with money, generates fear of future MTX -- unit loadouts are fine, being forced to grind for them in a RTS setting is where you want strategy to be the determining factor; not unlocks, that barrier to entry gets in the way.

There's potential here but there's no way I'd pay this much for what is currently available.