Chaos Sector 混沌宙域

Since there’s no "neutral" review option, I’ll ultimately have to give this a thumbs down but I’m genuinely torn here. As a huge Super Robot Wars and 4X fan, this was a pleasant surprise, and I wanted to love it. The retro aesthetic and premise have so much charm, but a few glaring issues ultimately kept me from properly enjoying it. The biggest culprit is the combat RNG. The hit percentages feel completely off, 75%+ shots miss far more than they should, and you can surround an enemy flagship with multiple units only to watch practically everyone miss an entire turn. On top of that, dealing with alien debuffs and damage-over-time is just miserable when the game doesn't give you reliable, accessible ways to heal or cleanse them, you always suffer and lose at least precious HP once and it’s even worse when they can debuff your entire army and you usually only have one or two repair ships around, and the rot/poison stacks! My other major(Personal, I know) issue is the lack of gamepad support. It has the visual DNA of a classic GBA/tactics game, but you're locked to mouse controls. With the Steam Deck being my main platform now, not having native controller inputs really soured the e…

Indie games are labours of love. This is quite apparent within Chaos Sector, which homages the classic turn based strategy genre in beautiful pixel art style. The game is light on story, but rich in setting and mechanically solid. As the first in a series and basically a solo job by its developer, the game runs fine with a few flaws but has a brutal difficulty curve and no formal tutorial. Once you get the hang on what you're doing though, (battle tool tips and taking manual command via "make my own decisions" during the council phases 80% of the time) it becomes a gritty tactical matchup that's surprisingly well balanced. I'll list flaws first as to end on a positive: 1 - limited battle maps. I struggled to tell exactly how many were in the game, because you play the same map(s?) in different positions rather than having smaller/dedicated maps per planet/node. This is generally not a glaring problem, other than how a lot of early turns can very much be "find the enemy" which can be quite frustrating combined with my second critique. 2 - the game homages classic fog of war TOO well in that the enemy knows where you are, you just have to find them. Surprisingly, this isn't an issue…

Definitely recommended for fans of turn-based tactics, space, sci-fi, and strategy. Feels similar to a space XCOM. +Art style +Music +Battle animations, character portraits +Manual and auto-saving +Positioning matters +Characters/commanders +Upgrades/levels for units and commanders +Turn-based tactical space battles +Variety of different ships +3 factions +Weekly report decisions, commander suggestions +Strategy layer, planet development -Barebones options -No key shortcuts; mouse only -No rebinding -No voice -Only 1 faction at start -Low res/ pixelated -Lacking tutorial -Some unclear info, lacking tooltips -Edge pan camera only -Awkward dialogue/translation -No auto-end turn -Clunky UI -Only 1 action per week -Explorations are often a waste -Some balance issues -No choices on level up

Chaos Sector is a solo indie developed turn based tactics game that released October 8th of 2018 by Hong Kong based Han Zhiyu. I believe this is his first project? The game explains itself as a retro-1995-2005-style strategy experience with your faction choice of the Northsky Fleet or the Emishi Pirates as you use an intergalactic chessboard to battle eachother or a horde of aliens with warships and space robots. This is a neatly packaged product with cool tunes, nicely drawn pixel art, multiple commanders, units and even endings. When you first start up the game you'll only have the Northsky Fleet faction unlocked though on subsequent play throughs you'll have the option of choosing the Emishi Pirates led by Botenmaru. So, we'll get a quick little introduction tutorial in which the Fleet as led by Chengsong has the pirates surrounded and outnumbered for victory until... a bunch of aliens come up and destroy out fleet, letting the pirates escape which leads to a sector of space put into chaos. If you want to go a bit deeper than that we also get this star wars-esque scrolling text of history upon starting up a new game. From here its a bit of choose your own adventure as far as t…

Left a positive review for the third game in the series, on a whim going back and leaving some for the previous entries. As the first obviously doesn't benefit from the experience and polish of the later works, but as the entry point it holds fond memories and was interesting on its own merits & as almost the 'proof of concept' of what was to come.

Classic indie SRPG series. It is very much like advanced wars, but in space, with an overworld campaign type thing. This one is simpler. It has a lot of interesting balance choices. If you take the time to figure them out, the game should be pretty easy. First one holds up, but the animations are slow. Even the on map animations and UI elements are slow, but this is his first game.