Sword of the Stars: The Pit 2 Reviews

Updated 16/03/2022 I'd recommend this game now. It's reached a point where it's just as fun as the original and actually feels like it flows better. I'm not sure if it's intentional, but by holding down the SHIFT key, you can strafe around and aim while you're moving to get a good feel of everything around you. It seems to make the game move more fluidly than the original. If the devs cold go ahead and make this a toggle function, yeah that'd be great. And speaking of movement, at this point, getting away from grid-based movement for the player would be a real benefit too. It's seems to just make the movement feel a little jerky when your trying to move nimbly. There are a few little bugs here and there like progress bars not showing sometimes, and some empty tool-tips but all in all it stands up against the original Pit now. Oh, and and inventory sort button would be a great addition too. ------------------------- [original review 2021] At this point the devs are just catching up with the features from the original 2D Pit so there's no value added here at present. Stay tuned I guess? Some say the 3D graphics are an improvement but I feel like the original pixel art had more soul. Plus currently what we're seeing here currently are just lifted assets from their Pit 3D (FPS) and they're not that wonderful (e.g. character models). (I'll change the recommendation if I see value added over the original Pit... which I love... go play that while you wait)

Seems to become a very faithful but improved second implementation of the first game. They removed tedious things from the first game, greatly improved graphics and made several other changes that are great. Everyone who likes rouge like games/dungeon crawlers should for sure keep their eye on this title.

Played Pit One A LOT. Beat it on Seriously?! with several characters. So, you could say I'm the target audience for turn-based Pit Roguelike gameplay. And the Lore. This is Early Access in the original sense of the word-- get in early, have the opportunity to weigh in with feedback to help shape the game. Early Days yet. Good foundation, very interested to see where it goes from here.

Big fan of the " The Pit" series.Got it early as I wanted to support the devs. Will jump in for a moment or two to check the progress and it's looking better and better. High hopes it will live up to the original. Usually don't have time to test betas/EA (+I'm an achievement whore) but can't wait for the full release and to go all in!

[b]Updated Review.[/b] Please see below for the old review. [u]TL;DR, it's getting good.[/u] I'm pretty happy to say this game is coming along and looking a lot more finished than it was before. It's certainly a lot less buggy and DEFINITELY looks less 2013-asset-flip than the last time I gave it a shot, and I'm having a much better time actually playing it than the sorry mess I'd once delved into. Everything feels much snappier, target selection is much clearer, information is conveyed in much simpler/easier to identify ways in a lot of cases ([i]the addition of remaining attempt numbers and max stack sizes are nice[/i]), and I can definitely see why some decisions were made in the ways they were made ([i]like having items only load their visuals once viewed in the Sotsdex/Sotsdex loot pool/in the inventory, to decrease level load times[/i]). This game feels quite decent now, with only some elements of handholding there are to ensure that information can be properly conveyed, so I'm glad it's not straying too far from the decently-tough difficulty the original game thrived on. Not difficulty for difficulty's sake, but a genuine challenge to overcome. And the difficulty options are always there for if you want to tone that up or down. It could surely use a bit more ironing, like not having some of the voice lines overlap when triggering simultaneously, some of the floor textures don't light up correctly, and some other not-too-noticeable somewhat-buggy things, but this game is becoming one to keep your eye on, so long as you liked the original. Other than that, though, for the moment, it's staying on [i]not[/i] recommended, because I do think the other holes need to be patched before this ship will sail. What's here and likeable should've been how it was put into early access, because this game is - at least to me - clearly not [b]done.[/b] A lot of what's left is sure to be tweaking and tinkering, while MAJOR updates are undoubtedly going to be much fewer from this stage forwards by my reckoning, but it does still lean more towards needing something than being what should be the full release, and so my review leans more towards 'give it time' than 'leap on this straight away.' If you feel like that general sense wouldn't dissuade you, [b]do pick this one up.[/b] It's fun as-is and a lot of that Pit madness is here to stay. Final thoughts, I don't think there's enough here to justify this game having been pushed into "full" release as soon as it was, especially considering the state the early-access content was released in. Early access should be a representation of your game, sort of like how Demos used to work, instead of a cheap gimmicky way to push your numbers - although ironically, this seems to backfire a lot, since so many devs fall into the same trap as not realizing they could hurt their launch numbers by using early access when the game isn't nearly polished enough to show off, damaging the trust in the developer - and this one came out of the pot a few updates and rounds of polish too early. Plus, if you've poked around with this particular dev, you'll see a somewhat-split community, and some of the practices the development team has gotten into are a bit questionable. Even so, I like the direction this game is headed, and it's clearly being handled better than before, so I'm interested to see if the general expectations of this series' fans can be upheld! It's looking like a 'yes, but give it more time,' sort of deal, so I'm going to do exactly that. Not giving up on this project and hoping for the best. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- This was the [b]old[/b] review, so the comments make sense. [strike]Not even through my first entire hour, and my initial impression is quite poor. As it stands, I don't recommend picking this game up until it's had a few sweeps of polish, bug fixes, balance changes, and some more content added into the mix. To be clear, I've played the other game, and had a tremendous amount of fun with how it played. This one, though? There's a lot of very glaring problems with the game right off the bat, like weird movement quirks, not being able to hit the target you're pointing at and instead shooting at enemies you can't even see, coming up against impossible circumstances repeatedly on the first and second floors/dying extremely fast and being unable to progress (such as by catching Disease and being unable to do anything about it, or getting poisoned to death and being unable to do anything about it), a lack of visual range representation for explosives and the inability to throw them at unoccupied squares, any number of enemies can occupy the same tile which leads to both balance and targeting issues, the hit chance on every starting weapon is astonishingly low, it's often unclear what tiles you can and can't move through or what is and isn't a hazardous obstacle, trying to use the 'interact' button to open a door while standing on an elevator you just came down makes you use the elevator again instead of opening the door, instead of making obstacles that block the player from seeing their character transparent they've just given really clunky camera controls (already a fixed problem in the first game), enemies can be placed in spots where it's not possible to see them until they've already attacked you (already a fixed problem in the first game), I could keep going on... and that wasn't even one full hour of play. Give it some time, see if they can't sort this mess out. Don't buy until they do. Go back and play the first game, it's just better in every way, as is.[/strike]

For those who are familiar with the franchise, The game has a good foundation. I enjoy the graphics and am excited to see were this game is going to go. Newcomers I would recommend play the original pit at this time. This game is great but if you have no idea what you are doing you will have a rough time. Plus the original game is still great.

Exactly what it claims to be. A chunky 3D roguelike with aliens. It;s hard to compare it to the first game when the first game is finished and had a lot of post-launch support and this is in EA. It's a solid foundation and already playable and polished. If it gets the same kind of attention the first did, this will be a no-brainer

This is a big downgrade from the original game. The 3D adds nothing to the experience. Information is hard to find, the GUI is not clean. The "darkness," while it adds to the vibe, just makes it really hard to see what's on the screen and is a net negative. I have over 1000 hours in the original game, and this one ain't it, chief.

While the game is perfectly serviceable, it's a downgrade from part one. The move to 3d was a mistake, the game now looks worse and is harder to play as the camera keeps obscuring what you need to see. If the first game did not exist this would have been fine, as it is - get part one.

I was very close to leaving a negative review but I don't want the game to suffer early on. The move to 3D adds very little to the gameplay so all that this game currently offers is a clunky version of the original that lacks content. I can see the content being added in the future, but will it end up as a decent game? I would like the answer to be yes but I can see this flopping unless it brings some radically new progression features or new gameplay. I really want this to work.