Space Haven

If you are looking for a more user friendly DF or Rimworld experiance with a wonderfull 1970's-80's retro-futuristic aesthetic then here you go. To be a bit more detailed, the premise of the game is earth is on her last leg a couple centurys from now. you are leading a small band of people thrown together in a masssive and not really suported exodus. You start with a handfull of people and reasources, and build a ship from scratch, haveing to build (AND maintain mind you) atmostpherics, power systems, engines, and of corse rooms for the comfort and basic needs of your crew. mineing asteroids and salvaging wrecks you come across as you go from jump point to jump point on your serch for a new home. You might come across people willing to trade, you might come across people willing to shoot you and take your food and supplies. While salvaging you can come across more then just cargo and tech and scrap. there are many reasons a ship might be floating in space, and many stories to find, and well.....In space no one can hear you scream eh? You crew will all have Jobs they had and skills. And traits that they discovered of themselfs after the collapse. And they wont always get along with each other. you can just change the times of day they are active to eliviate that though, as this game has all the systems that Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld does for making shifts of workers or designating who does what and so on. Overall I love this game so far, and its right up my alley. if you liked what you read here then It might just be your thing as well. I MIGHT have added the 5th star simply because of aesthetics. They just nail it. beyond being a style I very much love with both pixle art and as said before that 70's to 80's retro-lived in future, the details they have are wonderfull, Rretrothrusters firing as a ship manuefers. walls gaining ice cyrstals as the temps fall. blood painting said walls as you fight off the nightmares in the dark. Happy Surviving!

Small indie studio doing a nice job expanding on the ideas found in Rimworld, Oxygen not included and the likes. Currently two types of scenario's are available: Basic Platform and Abandoned Mining Station, the first serving as a tutorial the latter giving the player more freedom. There are four difficulties to choose from. You start with a crew, each member having it's own quirks, on a mining station near an asteroid. Your goal is to construct a spaceship with which you can travel the universe. It's up to the player to freely design a spaceship or use a pre-designed building plan. Like Rimworld and Oxygen you need to take care of your crew, you assign jobs, priorities. All of this is subject of change since this is an EA entry (and the GoG review system doesn't allow for review updates), so pro's and con's are a bit arbitrary right now. The UI can be confusing and occupies too much of the screen, although it has been improved. I do hope ambient sounds and the music get separated, since musical taste is so very personal. Right now silencing the music also silences ship sounds, with exception of the menu sounds, which I feel is a little inconvenient. It lacks a little bit in the area of 'personality', which is such a strong part of the Rimworld and Oxygen not Included experience, but it is not a finished title yet. Nevertheless, I am carefully tilting towards a positive view on this one.

The basics are there, it's a suitably complex resource and layout problem. Took me about 4 (short) attempts at playing it to figure out which resources / environmental problems are crucial to keep an eye on, and I enjoyed the process of finding out. But it's once you've got the basics that the limitations become apparent. You're constantly using fuel, so the game forces you to keep moving and exploring, which meant I found "Eden" before I'd completed even 1/5th of the tech tree. Research is slow, which again is fine in a game like this, but it needs the game curve to remain interesting as you progress, and the tech tree needs to be relevant to the game. Rimworld went to some pains to match your abilities against the challenges it throws at you. Space Haven feels more like a "Rogue-a-like", randomly throwing devastating situations at you before you have any ability to counter them. Add in the fact you can "finish" the game after a few hours if you stumble across the right planet, and the whole tech-tree / advancement motivation becomes "meh". Some resources currently also seem pointless. I never found a use for fibre for example, yet I could spend hours researching it on the tech tree if I wanted to. I could only find one method to make compost, but even with 2 machines working flat out, I still ran out of compost and almost nobody trades it. Audio is almost non existent. If you turn off the music you'll realise that the game itself is virtually silent with just a few bleeps as audio feedback. Unsurprising perhaps given the size of the game download. It's an interesting game. The basics of what could be a great game are in there, but at the moment it's in need of a lot of balancing and tweaking to give it replay value and maintain interest. I can't see me playing it again after my first few attempts until some major updates are released. For all these reasons I can't really justify the high price tag on it until it gets closer to a finished product.

You can start new game ether with a basic ship or start on mining platform and make your own from scratch. The building ship mechanics reminds me of old manager games like Theme Hospital and the combat is similar to X-COM: Apocalypse real time system when you can adjust the game speed or pause wile you give orders to your squad or ships. I have played this around +60 and did finished one of my playthrough on medium difficulty. When you have successfully build a good ship with decent size crew then you pretty much done. You can explore but there was no ending in the version I played before the early access on GOG and Steam. Overall really good early access title and looking forward to see what the developers will add in the future. Highly recommended