LiquidShadow

Definitely one of my favorite games. You need at least a small group for it. (I recommend 3 people as bare minimum) I can mostly comment on the campaign part of the game, since that is what I had played. You can play the game with friends or solo, and both has their good and bad parts. Let's get solo out of the way. Here, you'll have bots as your crew that manage the systems for you, and maintain the submarine. You can give them orders what to do, and they will try their best to complete it. At the time of this review, AI is quite good as long as bots are inside the submarine. Fixing leaks, broken devices; using turrets, reloading weapons, cleaning up items from the floor and even healing crew can be done by bots quite efficiently. Recharging electrical equipment and oxygen tanks is weirder, since they will take the batteries and O2 tanks to the refilling place, they won't put it back into the item they took it from, and that can be a problem during an emergency. And you will have a lot of emergencies, in which, bots do not excel. Once an enemy gets into the sub, the bots can quite easily shoot at each other. You also have a lot of missions outside of the submarine, and there, bots are either dead weight, or straight up worse than the enemy. (Have been shot in the back many times) I need to note that a bot can only queue up 3 orders at max, and keep doing that 3 orders as long as they can, which means, you either have to constantly reorder stuff, or have many-many bots so you can queue up more commands and forget about it. Multiplayer is the complete opposite, since your actions are not limited by orders, one player can easily do the work of 3 bots. A lot easier to have missions outside the sub, since they can all make their own calls, so you only get shot in the back if they so wish to. The downside is, unlike bots, players don't magically know which item needs repair, so they constantly need to check. So bots are great to maintain the sub, while players are better at emergencies and outside missions. The game comes with a large enemy and submarine variation already. (and is being updated constantly) But you can also build your own ships and characters. Which, the modding community hopped on quite hard. So if the base game doesn't satisfy, there are a lot of mods already to choose from. Missions can become a bit boring, since there are only so few of them, but since you don't know what lurks in that wreck or alien ruin, you don't know what you can get. (sometimes you encounter no enemies, and sometimes, a virus kills anyone on board and even takes over your sub) UI and movement are a bit wonky, but once you get used to them, it fits the game quite well. The theme of the game is really good also, but what adds more flavor to it, is the bonus content you can buy. The developers made magazines from the game universe, and it can show you what a common person's life is on Europa (Jupiter's watery moon, where the game takes place). All in all, great game to play with friend, but a gigantic time eater. (200 hours, and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of the game)

This one definitely feels like just another FTL copy just by looking at it, but it's certainly something else. They tried to give the player more control over how they build the spaceship. (in FTL, rng is a big part of the game) I think it was a great idea, as this way, you cannot blame the game for being bad, most of the mistakes are on your part. They have a unique feature over FTL too, and that is, combat inside the spaceship. Enemies will usually try to board your ship and kill you that way. Because of this, crew management needs a lot of action, and it doesn't help that you can have a lot of crew, and some ships can be hard to navigate around. The space exploration part is not the best part of the game, but quite okay nonetheless. Ship to ship combat has some nice twist to it, as you can fully customize your weaponry, thus you can approach the fights in your own way. However, the ability to freely build your ship's weaponry is the biggest downfall of the game too. Once you figure out a working strategy, every run becomes the same. For me, once I realized that while energy weapons have lower dmg compared to other types, them not using ammunition (which is a resource you'd constantly buy on space stations otherwise) is so much more cost efficient, I just started deconstructing every turret, and rebuilding them as energy weapons. Now, yes, there are different ship types with differing amount of weapon slots, rocket tubes and other building spots. And the aforementioned energy weapon build might not work on smaller ships since the space limitations. But the problem is, almost every new ship you unlock, is larger than the previous, so I started forgetting about space management, and went to cost efficiency quite quickly. General encounters are, well,, quite general, you get a few choices, if you pick the right one, you get loot, maybe rng is involved a bit. The last thing this game has is metaprogression. You can unlock starting buffs, that you can spend points on for every run. (I forgot how those points work, but you get them for achievements, or something like that) These buffs can be something so simple as just a few resources or a new crew member, but there are some that take away stuff from you, in exchange for something big. All in all, I think it's a great game for the 30 hours or so, but after you have unlocked enough ships and buffs, the game just becomes boring. Unless of course, you start hunting for achievements, as there are quite a lot of them on steam. (This review does not contain information about the DLC, and it might be a bit out of date, since I played the game mostly after launch, and haven't touched it since, but a quick look at the update notes don't suggest any drastic changes.)