Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

你尊重中国市场，我也尊重你的游戏，虽然现阶段优化有点差了，养养再品

So i bought this game shortly after it came out of Early Access. at the time i was on a different operating system (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and had severe stuttering issues that to my understanding have since been fixed for other users. the developer very kindly helped troubleshoot my issue, and when it appeared like it wasn't something fixable, recommended using the steam refund feature, which i did. now i'd had other issues with different steam games that stopped when i switched to Bazzite, which i'm using now, and so i decided to buy this game again, and see if that solved the issue. It very much did and i have never been so pleased with a tactics game. The best way i can describe this game is by making two comparisons; first, it's got the vibe of the Harebrained Shadowrun games, but instead of magic and fantastic creatures, it's nanotech and quantum technobabble, in the best ways; seriously, none of it feels hamfisted, just characters talking about the reality of the really messed up setting they exist in. As far as gameplay goes, it feels like the insurgency gameplay that the prerelease marketing material for Firaxis' XCOM 2 was implying was going to exist, but here it's actually executed in the way the marketing made you imagine you'd be able to do in that- you can stealth through a level, never coming in contact with the enemies on the map, you can do stealthy takedowns and clean up the bodies with disposal talents and consumables, leaving the facility's security AI none the wiser to what happened, you can deliberately get one of your mercs caught on a camera or trip a single security device, leading the remaining guards and any reinforcements to a spot in the opposite corner of the map that you left 5 turns ago, while you clear out the rest of the loot and extract. and you can have high stakes firefights where you clear out an entire map's worth of enemies which keep coming as you hold an objective, and then make a run for the exit. there's plenty of content and more just *keeps getting added,* for free mind you. There's been 97 free content updates since release last year, and there's literally another being prepped for sending out as I write this. the content is solid, and the main serious complaint i'm seeing is mostly that the mobile compatibility is mostly limited to very high-end and large screen phones, as well as the more powerful tablets, and that for best implementation you're going to want to be streaming it from your desktop over your WiFi if you're on a mobile/tablet. if you want to *actually* have mobile gaming and play this, it runs *very* well on steam deck, natively, and is what this game requires for on-the-go gameplay that approaches what it's like on desktop. Now i mentioned Shadowrun and XCOM 2 earlier, and that this is very much in the vein of both. this has most of the customization features of both, aesthetic and gameplay, but outdoes them significantly. the main thing that shadowrun has over this is the freeform character build system, but that's just outside the scope of what Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is trying to offer. instead you have a customizable main Cyber Knight main character, and bespoke merc characters with preset classes and starting stats and traits (and in some cases cyberware!) which you can specialize in multiple directions by going deep into one of the things their class does very well, picking from what you find useful, multiclassing a single other class (though some are mutually exclusive due to where a required cyberware slots in), and picking if you go for that class for a dip or truly merging specialties. the combat and base management can also be as difficult or as forgiving as you want it, there's just *that much freedom* with the difficulty. sliders and options for pretty much every aspect you could want, and it means that the people who just want to chill after work with a fun game can get what they're looking for, while the real chrome-heads who want to prove they can handle the worst the megacorps can throw at them can also get all the challenge they want out of this game. For those of you who might be inclined to skip past tutorials and dialog, this is not the game to do that with however. It has many moving parts and until you have a solid grasp of them, skipping those things will be likely to leave you wondering what to do and what button to press and how to go about doing this, that, or the other thing. luckily there are many very quality guides for how to do various things, and an extremely helpful discord, as well as a wiki which is, admittedly, not the easiest to find stuff in right now, though it's better than it was, and is still actively being improved and updated as more content is added (we're likely going to get much better detail in the wiki once the mod tools get rolled out to the people beta testing that, as that'll allow more access to and understanding of, the various internal code aspects of the game which are currently very opaque). All in all, between the high amount of replayability which just keeps increasing as new content is added, the difficulty customization, the fashion options, (oh gosh the fashion options), the sheer number of ways you can build your team, the way one run can be massively different from the last just on what kind of loot ends up dropping, even if you picked the exact same team and skill sets, this is one of the best games on steam i have ever purchased. full 10/10, no notes