I'll admit I was put off by this game based on the trailers, but now I understand why. There's so much to this game that it only clicked for me after a few hours to truly understand.

- Graphics get crazy useful when so much is happening on the screen, so now I appreciate it's minimal design.
- Music is perfectly suited for the cyberpunk setting, and gets more intense during battles
- Gameplay is confusing I'll admit, so making use of the guide is extremely useful

Take your time with HotM, there's no rush, and don't feel bad for not understanding the first few hours. Once it clicks, it gets that "just one more turn" addiction from games like Civ and XCOM.

I try to stay impartial and just factually describe a game in a review, but I REALLY enjoy this game. I've owned it for 60 hours and I've got 43 hours of play time. So uh... Yeesh. Honestly that by itself is the best recommendation I can give it. There was just a moment when I was hacked into entering a forever war with cultists and slumlords while aliens carpetbombed the region and my units were ambushed by the remnants of all those genetically engineered super velociraptors that we accidentally flooded the city with earlier that I thought, "You know, I like this game." Then I made a ball of liquid metal morph into a dragon and wipe out a mech. Standard stuff, really.

It IS a bit daunting to get in to. It tries to combine several different pretty distinct genres and it means that there are mechanics from a lot of different genres. The "tutorial" of the game lasts a solid 10 hours. But it isn't really a tutorial. It's just the normal flow of the game but occasionally you unlock some new ability or facet of it and the ways you can interact with the world expands a bit. Which is honestly how most games work, though this one does do it a bit more.

I don't wanna spoil anything. But the game unfolds in a fun way and just when you think you know what's going on, some weird things happen and no actually there is still more to this. What's going on with the city? The world? The galaxy? Even further beyond? What is the clock counting down to? The End? What is that? OH. That's what that is. But that's not the end. There's still more to do and discover.

Uhhhh... scrolling real quick, biggest complaint I see is people complaining about not being able to find things in the city. There's a tab for that. List all the things in the city and every mission or interactible and you click on it and it takes you there immediately. So. I didn't have any trouble with that. But you know, there is a LOT thrown at you in the game so I can see how people would miss it. Maybe it should be made more explicit? I don't know. It IS early access.

TL;DR: Needs more time in the oven, doesn't yet deliver on a lot of the promises and concepts offered on the store page and has too many frustrations to be enjoyable just yet, at least for me. I do think the developer can iron out the issues though but for the moment I find the game too frustrating to justify a positive review.

I'm going to try to keep this spoiler free but I'll happily elaborate on any of the points, I'm really rooting for Arcen with this one.

Issues
1. Moving androids is incredibly clunky. Most missions and combats require either more than one android to beat or they require advance knowledge of what you're up against so you can position yourself favourably and apply buffs to your units ready for certain types of enemy. The combination of these two aspects of the game make it really not feel great to actually move around the city and do your missions, you'll either be reloading a lot or clicking 20 times and skipping a bunch of turns just to get more androids to distant missions. You could either address this by adding a button that lets you revert up to 2-3 turns without needing to reload or by letting you set a vehicle to automatically transport androids long distances in such a way as to allow you to move a team in one go without excessive micromanagement, there's a lot of ways to fix it, it just doesn't feel good currently.

2. Combat isn't fun or engaging. Enemies spawn out of thin air directly on top of you all the time, positioning barely matters, you can't set up in a favourable position and take out enemies as they arrive because they teleport in and fire all at once so it quickly becomes a game of kill-or-be-killed so anything less than perfectly killing at least most enemies in the opening turn results in a lot more micromanagement of androids. It almost always feels like you either have the damage to kill everyone in one turn or you've already lost the fight, and in either two scenarios you barely feel like you're fighting at all, victory feels like data entry where you're just clicking boxes.

3. The game overuses endlessly spawning enemies as a transparent attempt to speed you along but when you don't know what you're supposed to be doing this rapidly gets old and when you do, it still gets old because the combat just isn't fun. Bulk units set up as stationary defenses sound like they solve this problem but in practice they fire at the same time as the enemies so you end up just endlessly having to replace them instead of your androids. This leads neatly into my next point:

4. I don't appreciate just how often the game tries to railroad you, it sells itself as a game where "You're the AI, make your own choices" and yet every objective leads directly into the next and if you're not speedrunning it then it becomes a slog. There's rarely more than one way to achieve a specific objective so all you're really choosing is which linear path to focus on and most objectives require you to also progress other linear paths so you just end up doing them all anyway. The game just feels like a race to do what the developer thinks you want to do but you're also not allowed to do it at your own pace. A solid example of this would be one particular circumstance where a building has a "Protection" metric based on your nearby units but then has a condition where the game specifically says no matter what your protection metric is you're gonna have endlessly respawning enemies regardless. This sucked to deal with and the majority of missions are just "Run around the city clicking things while enemies endlessly respawn". The game needs more than just endlessly respawning enemies railroading you down a pre-ordained tree of actions. Another example of railroading would be a sudden brick wall where you require 400 engineering skill to progress. This is bad because it blocked off the main objective I went into the game looking to achieve, I did end up acquiring that but only after an hour of grinding before finally discovering to get the last 60 skill I had to complete a totally unrelated questline. What's the point of these narrative concepts if I just end up having to do them all anyway? What's the point of upgrading androids the way you want to upgrade them if you can be hit by a brick wall preventing you from progressing because of choices you made hours ago? The game is let down by just how linear it is narratively and mechanically because this forces it to force you to do things a certain way. Instead of static, unchangeable upgrades to androids it should reward you with generic "capacity" or similar for upgrades on androids that you can then re-allocate in the future as necessary, an android is just a robot body, surely being able to swap parts is part and parcel of that, even if it takes a few turns to take effect.

5. There is little to no automation of repetitive tasks. Every dead unit needs to be manually replaced and moved back into position, every android needs to be manually moved across the map, both of these can take at least one full turn to do so the loop of "move one unit, skip turn, move another unit" is a familiar one and even with vehicles it takes a click and a mental energy per unit to load it into the vehicle and then another click to unload them at the other end, there's just so many steps to do the minutiae that I quickly start to dread having to do them again if I fail. This could be solved at least partially by allowing bulk units to replace themselves if destroyed, could be as simple as a checkbox that when checked means that unit is automatically reconstructed when it dies and in the case of bulk units would return to its original location and androids should be allowed to automatically move towards a location each turn instead of having to be manually moved part way, skip turn, move the rest. This would at least let me use my industrial capacity to fight what amounts to an endless war of attrition rather than the primary resource being my attention and enthusiasm, they are far more finite than elemental slurry, I'm not really an AI after all.

6. The game is too simple. It seems to think it's a very complicated game, but it isn't, it just comes down to I need X, I'll place Y. I need Z I'll right click an android on it and either fight something or wait a few turns until something completes, the rest is noise. There really aren't any cool hidden dynamic changes, there's no difference between one chunk of city block or another, you can and will build anything and everything anywhere and everywhere. There are no locations worth fortifying over any other, enemies just teleport in regardless, there are no loyalist humans parading the streets celebrating their new AI overlord in your new cybercratic utopia or wailing people people running from your death squads in dissident districts. There are no real benefits or consequences to anything you do outside of endlessly respawning enemies, everything seems to point to the Chapter 4 spoilerific mechanic which despite being apparently the answer to everyone's questions, isn't actually referenced on the steam page at all.

7. The game tells me what I'm "supposed" to do and there are no real mysteries, presumably because otherwise the player would get lost amongst all the noise, none of which actually matters. All your goals are laid out and spoiled for you in a neat little chart and you're told you're supposed to enjoy them. One option says "This is the most epic way to enter Chapter Four" or something, shouldn't I get to decide that? The impact of anything is mitigated by someone telling you you're "supposed" to like it, the details are hidden from you but you're still told "You're gonna like it, swearsies".

Despite all this, there are the bones for something really unique here, I love the concept, I love a lot of the ideas on display and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing where the game goes, but right now it's just too tedious and linear for me to enjoy.