Admittedly, I never finished this. I played about 60 hours of it and got pretty burnt out when I just wanted to fly around to different space stations and the game started shouting at me that I wasn't a high enough level to go in any more new systems. I tried to do another quest to level up but it had such a stupid forced moral "dilemma" that I gave up soon after.

Most people have called this "more of the same" of Bethesda's stuff, but that honestly is the opposite of what I felt and if anything it's the biggest indictment of this game that I couldn't even get past that 60 hour mark. I've played thousands of hours of Skyrim and Fallout 4, and I wouldn't really call those games I love or even games that I like maybe lol. I don't really measure my appreciation of something by time spent with it but I can respect the fact that these games got me playing for so long. Skyrim had a wonderful atmosphere, a beautiful landscape and score that I don't think many games have recreated. Fallout 4 has a fairly addictive (if lame) core gameplay loop and also some decent atmosphere as well.

The commonality here is that both of these games let me walk in a straight line for 5 hours and find a lot of very okay stuff to do. I totally understand why people think this stuff sucks but I think everyone can agree on what they are. It's why I'm so surprised seeing people call Starfield "too much Bethesda". You can't do that at all in this game! Once you get through the bland space travel, endless loading screens, hours of walking over nothing, there is quite literally nothing to do for most of the game.

Only about 10 hours in I found some kind of shipyard facility. I hoped to get some kind of unique ship or gun or something but it was about 20 enemies guarding useless crap and some flavor text about what happened. Whatever I guess, maybe I'll find something better. 5 hours later I went to another planet and immediately found another one of those locations. It had the same layout. The same enemies. The same loot. Wait what the flavor text is the fucking same too?

No matter how far I walked in this game I could not find anything interesting on these planets, and surveying them is extremely unrewarding too. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I kept looking for space stations. I would have done anything to find an environment that at least looked cool.

I guess most of the interesting stuff is supposed to be condensed to major cities and planets but I cannot think of a man less up to the task than Emil Pagliacci. This guy is like "alright this is a city with sex, drugs and crime" and then that's it. There is nothing else to it. His writing is literally just trying to elicit a mild :O reaction then you realize there is nothing else to it.

Obsidian could make this bet-

2011 Obsidian could make this better.

I wish we got another.

Universe at War: Earth Assault was planned to be the first of a series that came to life. It featured an interesting story, where humanity was quickly shown to be underpowered against the main alien force - the Hierarchy. As such you don't spend your time playing as the humans, as they are spread thin and play as the Hierarchy, Novus ( A robot civilization) and lastly the Masari (ancient human-like aliens that have technology far more advanced than the other factions)

In terms of RTS, this game didn't really do anything that made itself stand out from the crowd in terms of gameplay mechanics but it just honed in on its aesthetic. It would have been great to see the universe get expanded more by seeing how far the Hierarchy spans while also finding its own identity as a strategy game.

I think I finally understand why people like Cruelty Squad now.

It's bad enough that this shitpost of a game is actually a good retro shooter and better than most games genuinely trying to replicate that era of shooters, but the length to which the game keeps committed to the bit; that bit being this game was made by a sad loser who never went anywhere in his life and dug out this old high school project as a hail mary attempt to make it big and leave his job at the dollar store run by his step-father.
Not only does it have the layer of a cringe edge lord high school project that's amateur at best, but it also has that hidden layer of sadness when you start realizing all of the maps in the game are just places from the main programmers life in Ohio which range from a dollar store and a fast food place. AND ON TOP OF THAT you have the meta context where it's replicating how kids and teens in the 90's and 2000's would get into Doom map making by primarily recreating their homes or other buildings in Doom.

For a game that has this stupid shitpost veneer this had so much more going on under the hood and I kinda admire it.