I didn't mind it. Hammers home the feeling that space is ultimately vast, mired only in small differences and regardless of what romantic notions you have of it, it is destined to become tedious and lonely. Now if they marketed the game around inspiring that existential dread where it is only you trying to find meaning and failing as we all do despite the minutiae of things to see and work out, it would have been phenomenal 8/10 material.
Then again, I like games like the Close Combat series where 50% of the game is you deploying, assigning teams and resources, planning out an assault or defence, commit yourself to a gameplan that is nigh on impossible to change midfight, and suddenly start progresssively losing control as the battle wages to the point where you'rewatching your dreams come true, or being utterly curb stomped with the desperate pleas and screams of your soldiers.
As if to the tides of war, your control diminishes to largely nothing as soldiers get suppressed or panic, get massacred, or run out of bullets. Where you make it 70% across an open field with a Bren team, an arduous ten minutes of watching your soldiers scrawl on their bellies to achieve a whole 110M advance to the next series of hardcover on the map to prepare a line breaking ambush, only to be killed by sniper-like mortar fire with only three explosive charges.
I fucking hate mortars ...
Anyways I like games that go out of the way to create an atmospheric futility, sometimes.
Then again, I like games like the Close Combat series where 50% of the game is you deploying, assigning teams and resources, planning out an assault or defence, commit yourself to a gameplan that is nigh on impossible to change midfight, and suddenly start progresssively losing control as the battle wages to the point where you'rewatching your dreams come true, or being utterly curb stomped with the desperate pleas and screams of your soldiers.
As if to the tides of war, your control diminishes to largely nothing as soldiers get suppressed or panic, get massacred, or run out of bullets. Where you make it 70% across an open field with a Bren team, an arduous ten minutes of watching your soldiers scrawl on their bellies to achieve a whole 110M advance to the next series of hardcover on the map to prepare a line breaking ambush, only to be killed by sniper-like mortar fire with only three explosive charges.
I fucking hate mortars ...
Anyways I like games that go out of the way to create an atmospheric futility, sometimes.