Heaven's Vault

The general concept and storyline are pretty good, however there are so many annoying things in here that really ruin the experience. On of the most infuriating one is that there is no way to fast travel or even just run. So you spend an unbelievable huge percentage of the game walking really really slowly somewhere, or driving somewhere with your ship. And god beware you accidentally take a wrong turn with the ship bc there is no way to simply turn around. No you gotta drive an entire loop around half the map again to get to your destination. Apart from that, the main aspect why I was even interested in this game, the language deciphering, is done pretty poorly imo. For certain words you can filter through your other text to find related words (even tho sometimes the words don’t look related at all to you bc they share NONE of the symbols) but somehow there is no way to quickly filter for texts that include that exact same symbol/word? instead you have to manually go thru all your texts again to find them? Also, unlike similar games i’ve seen before, you can’t fully figure out the translations by yourself. For each word you get 3 translation options from which you get to…

Amazing story, highly recommend this one!

masterpiece

This is a game I would love to see a remake of. The core idea of it is wonderful, discovering and learning about a long forgotten past. But, there are so many issues with it. While there are dialogue choices, often times the options are so awful. They range from all options being things I would never want to say to anyone, to no option being close to what I want to do, to ones where what I know and understand of the world and its history are just ignored. More than that, it seems to be actively hostile to what I would think is the man focus of the game, exploring and discovering hidden things. This comes in so many ways, but you'll land somewhere new and start exploring only to either find something that makes you immediately leave the place you just discovered or have to constantly tell your companion that you want to stay longer on the planet. I wouldn't mind being made to leave a location if you could return, but almost all places you cannot return to. This isn't ever made explicitly clear, and I had initially though it was just the game trying to force me to go to a specific location, but even if you navigate back to a place you want to explore again, you'll find the path to i…

The setting of this game is fascinating, and so are the characters. It still looks good, even on a newer computer. The only complaint I ever had about it was steering the ship, and it's a lot easier now, so the devs have probably fixed the controls in one of the updates.

I'm writing this thumbs-up review about a third into my third round of New Game+ and with 88% of achievements unlocked - and with some certainty I will not finish this round and not bother getting the remaining three achievements I'm still missing, after spending 52 hours on a game where you can feasibly get to the credits in under ten hours. So, it's a gem, but not a flawless one. It's also a game best played with as little information as possible the first time around and after that, you will know if you want to keep going blind or use guides - really depends on what you want out of the game, and both is quite valid.