Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Short impressions: Game is okay. It captures Robotech flavor / feel. And if it was JUST the rulebook, I would give it 4-stars. But the models have questionable design decisions, it is NOT new comer friendly, you are looking at hours and hours of work just to get it to the point you can play with everything in the box (that that doesn't include painting the figures) and frankly, support, communication, and the company’s ethics are horrible. An awful serious of poor decisions from a veteran game company and atrocious attention to making a game appealing to a wider audience, makes this a hard-to-recommend game except for die-hard miniature hobbyists and Robotech fans. And even then, you may never actually get enough of it assembled to play with it. Full disclosure here: I was an original backer that bought a Reckless backing through Kickstarter plus another $500 of add-ons, including the battle foam cases, and numerous items coming out in Wave 2. That means I have nearly or over $1000 invested in this game thus I have a strong interest in wanting it to succeed. Unfortunately, the product, and company doesn’t deserve backers like me, and this company doesn’t deserve your dollars. Now, if you want my detailed review on the issues proceed. Unfortunately I can't break out just the problems with the game and product without also talking about the poor decisions and ethics by the company that contributed to all the problems with this game. I get that stuff happens when a business venture goes way beyond your wildest dreams. Palladium Books had one of the best, if not best ever, kick starter successes and was able to get the game funded way beyond what was every expected. That led to delays as the scope expanded. Got it. Nearly two years and counting worth of delays now...the project wasn't THAT successful, and Palladium being a small company, with this sort of success, it should have considered either expanding a little or making the development of this game its number one priority. Obviously neither happened. However, to their credit, not being a miniatures game company PB brought in experts (Ninja Division [ND] with a great reputation, fantastic games and wonderfully designed miniatures) to help them, and either ND decided they didn't want a competitor with their own products and gave Palladium Books [PB] bad advice, or PB decided to take the ND advice and blow it out their ear. I speculate it was the latter. Product models: The packaging (or lack thereof) consists of loose plastic sprues with small items packaged in loose bags that roll around the too-large box. That results in numerous broken pieces upon arrival since it was shipped from China. Three of my four boxes of game had some damage to the plastic model parts. Now mine were also shipped to an APO, so that might have made a difference as well, but I expect yours will have breakage as well given 75% of what I have opened has. The models are poorly designed, very hard to build properly without specialized tools, and take a lot of care to build. No just snap clicking these bad-boys together. You better have some good sprue cutters, plastic glue, files, and putty if you want them to look okay. Frankly it would have been better for PB to go with the Wizards of the Coast model and just do pre-painted models despite the backlash from the die hard core miniature fans…if PB actually wanted someone to buy the game who was not a model hobbyist with nothing but hours free time on their hands to build the basic materials required to play the game. Most of us have schools, jobs, families, or all three. Gaming comes in somewhere distantly after that. Unlike what I would wager the majority of people associated with the Kickstarter, I have a plastics design degree from CalPoly San Luis Obispo. I am sure the information PB pushed to the backers on the design of the figures was told to them by the Chinese company they actually chose to make the models (you can check out the information by looking for Robtech Tactics Kickstarter Updates on your favorite search engine); but the models are horrible in terms of design and layout with questionable decisions everywhere. Very indicative of using a Chinese company that doesn't do this sort of model design regularly - likely some cheap small firm that produces junk toys for dollar stores. Some of the injection runner locations are in exactly the worst spots possible. There is totally lack of any sort of numbering or pairing system on sprue parts. Three are parts to different models on the same sprue. There are small, easily breakable parts when you are removing them, and a high piece counts. Very dense plastic that is difficult to cut without professional tools. Combine all these problems with a lack of any detailed assembly instructions for models that have multiple configurations and posing options and putting together the models is going to feel more like a 3D Puzzle than a game you are excited to play. (Incidentally, the lack of any part labeling or pairing on the sprue is the first time I have seen that oversight with a plastic model with this many parts and non-interchangeable parts to the same model, and I have been putting together plastic models since the mid-eighties). At one point PB suffered a needless delay in development because they had provided 3D renders of the models in the wrong format to the Chinese company doing the mold design. These are novice choice, not even what I would call high school level design decisions, let alone professional level decisions, which is what should have come out from a company as old as Palladium, especially since they had ND - they guys that do this regularly - doing it for them. That tells me at some point ND was overridden or taken out of the process, also indicative of a firm that doesn't value outside input from experts, a fact that reflects throughout the product and their way of doing business. For a game that uses multiple similar looking figures, there is no method identified or provided to label what figure goes to what force card, and no built-in labeling on the bases, so on again, you are left on your own to figure out 1) how to label each identical model, and two, get that label associated on and to the force card that you track upgrades and ammunition on. Once you get the pieces together (for most people I estimate that will be about 10-15 hours for assembly depending on your skill and patience) they are well detailed and look very nice. However, they will still need painting unless you just want to play with unpainted figures. Desperate as you are to just play this point, you might. Quality control on the plastic was lacking. The blast templates were supposed to be transparent blue, with the lettering painted white, but apparently they didn’t get painted. Why PB didn’t send them back to the company and have them redone, or have the company redo them for free and send the fixed ones out is beyond me – unless PB forgot to tell the company making them they were supposed to have the white highlights. I can’t believe PB would allow a company to produce something that was not what they ordered, unless PB ordered it wrong to start with. Without the white writing where the information is molded into the template, it makes reading the blast template difficult. Also, the special faction dice have serious issues with the pips and figures being mis-or-over painted. Some of dice are more random than others. In particular the Zentradi dice like to role the same number over-and-over again in a 100 roll unscientific test I did. Rulebook: The rulebook looks very pretty. That is about the best I can say about it. The layout scatters a lot of the information you need throughout the work, and there is no consolidated lists of modifiers or summary of rules, so that makes getting your arms around the particulars a bit hard, especially when you KNOW there is a rule that covers your situation, or modifier, and you can’t find it in the blocks of text. The rules themselves are just okay. Not bad, not great. The rules are fairly traditional and straight forward. My 12 year-old had no problems figuring out how to play once I showed her. There are no surprise mechanics or awesome new ideas. Just tried-and-true solid game design choices. Uninspiring, but hard to screw up. Nothing to get real excited about, but nothing to really criticize as well, except the amount of record keeping required to keep track of missile ammunition on cards that are not well laminated (they are really just normal glossy stock and not “upgraded to laminated cards” that backers were promised. The force cards are way-way too small for us older folk to use comfortably. I have scanned them all in and made them much larger, and I am debating just redesigning the record keeping cards completely to make them easier to use. This is something play testers should have noticed. Of course we don’t know what the play testers did and did not notice because PB never shared that information with the backers to let them weigh in on it, not that they cared what the backer’s said anyway, if you read the comments in the updates. Where the rules completely fail is they have the worst Army building system rules ever not published in a book (please tell me how you put together an Army without values published in the rulebook? Where are the instructions on how to use the cards included with the game and instructions on what all those little blank colored space are for on the force cards, and how the information on the force cards are laid out. Heck only reason I knew there were special rules for each faction is because I read the draft of the rules which originally had all that information, instead of printed in 7 point font on one card each in the pile of force cards). If you lose a card that has the point values and possible upgrades for each mecha, or that card is destroyed by pizza, soda, or the family dog, good luck, because that information is nowhere else in the rules. Worse, some of the figures you can make from the parts in the box don’t even have point values associated with them or cards to go with them, so you can’t actually field them in an army. Unforgivable. Heck, design 101: PB could have put in a glossary in the rule book. In zero places in the rules does it define or even talk about what two key terms that show up in the game are: "MD" and "MDC". Those abbreviations are Mega-damage and Mega-damage Capacity respectively. You all know that, right? No? Oh. I thought you might not. I only knew that because I played PB games in the late 80's and early 90's in high school and PB draws heavily on those roleplaying games for Robotech Tactics, where those terms are originally found. Imagine the frustration a new comer is going to feel looking for the meaning of terms not even defined anywhere but are critical for playing the game. The balancing issues for the forces (once you figure out how to build an Army) are atrocious based on the current point system. How this made it through play testing, I know not. PB dosen’t even provide sample armies in the book. Helpfully they do provide a couple of scenarios to get started, but having played all those multiple times now, those appear to have balance issues as well… There are typos all through the book. Typos. Really? Not one or two, but large numbers of annoying typos. This is Palladium 2014, not Kevin Siembieda (founder and president of PB) working with a type writer out of his garage in the 1980s. PBs list of play testers was so extensive; at least a couple of them probably could have been tapped into to read a couple sections each for errors, unless the play testers were all junior high school kids, which would make sense given the atrocious amateur decisions made throughout the design and production of this game. The book contains a nifty full-color painting guide with references to the actual standardized color value for each model’s paint job. But, does it tell newcomers what those random strings of numbers next to the figures in the back are for (the paint codes) and do all those paint codes actually correspond to real paints produced by real miniature paint companies? No. Many of the numeric color codes they reference correspond to no commercially manufactured miniature’s color that I can find, and I have been making and painting fantasy and sci-fi miniatures since 1990. I mean, I don't even know what to say about that oversight, except sloppy, very sloppy. A good critical proofread would have fixed these sort of issues. That completes my review of the physical product. Can all the flaws be overcome? Yes. Can the models be built and look great? Yes. Should a newcomer buy this. No. No. And NO. Does this company deserve your dollars. Absolutely not. I will never back or buy another Palladium project or product again. I also believe however, that when you buy something, you are not just buying that product, your dollars are supporting a company and the people that run it and make decisions, and what for that I feel I need to review the company’s approach to this product, so you as a potential consumer can decide if this is the type of company you want to support with your money. No review of a product so horribly mismanaged as this one can be complete without some comments on the manufacturer’s development. There are numerous times throughout the kickstarter PB revised what backers were told or played games "like the GenCon vote" that appeared rigged for them to get the result they wanted (a missing vote counts as a yes???...I would like to see THAT at the American polls [breaking news tongiht: All registered voters affiliated with a party that didn't show up to vote automatically counts as a vote toward that party's ticket). Again, maybe that is not what it was, but that is how it APPEARED. More missteps. They admitted to using VOLUNTEERS to ship the product. What is this, a small non-profit charity organization pushing out meals to the homeless? PB couldn't even forecast that it was going to have to hire some temp help to ship this stuff? Who is making these business decisions (actually it was great – why pay for what free labor will do – it works for sweat shops to.) If I was a volunteer, I would be wondering why I am volunteering to ship something for a company that DOES mail order for a living???!!! I bet you THOSE volunteers got some compensation. It would be hilariously ironic if one of them didn't even back the project but got a boxed set as "thanks" before the majority of Robotech Tactics own backers did. Any my biggest complaint is 2/3d's or more of these issues could have been resolved with better communication from Palladium and by them making better choices (like going with a company that makes these sorts of models all the time - like the one Ninja Division uses, whose models are generally designed excellent) and keeping their promises first and foremost. For those of you who don’t know, only about half of the game is finished. Being such a big project, much bigger than PB expected, they finally somewhere along the way, figured out they were going to have to split the development up. So, where are ANY recent Wave 2 updates? It has been nearly a month now since any information at of any substance from PB on anything Robotech Tactics related at all. Going a month between updates is frankly unprofessional. Trolling the old updates, where is the Mirya Queadluun-Rau with removable cockpit at in the design process (Update 62, 14 May 2013) or status on the SDF-1 exclusive that should be over 70mm tall (Update 84, 20 May 2013) or the SDF-1 special bases we unlocked (same update)? PB seems to gone very silent on any progress, and Chinese company's don't celebrate Christmas, so they can't really use that as an excuse, unlike the Chinese New Year delay they used last year. There are numerous reasons WHY PB may not have been able to be as transparent as it should have been (mostly related to what they can/can not disclose prior to approval by Harmony Gold who controls the license). However, PB COULD have told us about THOSE restrictions. I could go on, but the point is made. And while these may seem like small gripes, together they are indicative of a company that doesn't care about its base and doesn't have enough professionalism to do things correctly, a company that takes shortcuts. It is evident in this product. The game does nothing to promote entry by newer audiences and in fact with all the required model building and painting, frankly turns them away. Since the game isn't designed to be played competitively under the current rules, I see this set going about as far as the game is going to go. At the price point for the box set, and unfriendliness of the models and rule book, I don't see it selling well, and I don't see the cycle continuing. And that is too bad, because I was looking forward to a Southern Cross and Invid Invasion set (which at this scale, I am not even sure how you could do Invid Invasion with models like these as most of the mecha will be about 20-25mm tall). Does the game get some things right? Yes. Is it playable? Yes. Is the book beautiful? Yes. Does this game do anything to sustain itself? No. Like Battleship Galaxies, it will likely be a great concept that dies with no support.