Cosmonautica

If measured, management and trade are your thing, this will be fun for you. There are a few gotchas: * Don't try to open the solar-system view with an unconfirmed room build pending (will hang). * There's at least one crash-bug lurking in there - but no manual saving. * The English really needs some work. Most of it is ... okay. Some of it is quite poor. In a couple of places the English translation becomes somewhat incomprehensible. That said, I've cheerfully burned some hours on this and am looking forward to burning more.

This game has elements of trading, life simulation and combat in it. Its cartoony graphics, fairly detailed animations and humorous touch makes it a pretty charming game, but the gameplay is not that deep. If you're expecting gameplay on par with The Sims or FTL, you'll be very disappointed. Trading is where you'll be making most of your money early game. The economy is dynamic, with rates of production and consumption dependent on how well-supplied planets are. Each planet has a cap of how much goods it can hold, so profitable trade routes can get saturated. However, the caps are same across all planets and there just isn't enough info provided to make it a deep trading experience. It's nice for a low-stress evening of fun, where you try to fill an unmet demand, rinse and repeat. What keeps the sometimes monotonous trading entertaining is watching your crew in flight. Note that I said watching, not managing - once you've hired a somewhat compatible crew and set their schedules, it's really just watching them. You can't control them directly like The Sims, so you often find everyone waiting at the bathroom when they can be doing something else. The art is nice, so it can be fun to watch your crew. I have also found a few different approaches that work for keeping your crew happy, so there's some strategy. Combat is slow, and you can use the same working formula every time unlike FTL. I have found multiple working combos though, even a lowly trade ship can be used for combat if you have a good setup, and you can trade in old ships for full value, so you can experiment as much as you like once you have the money. Overall, for a nice casual game, I would have given it 4 stars, but for the crashes! The game does not allow manual save (it saves every time you enter and exit planets I think) and it crashes fairly often, so it can get frustrating. Otherwise, it's a pretty fun low-stress game.

If you're looking for this as a game, I suggest you avoid it. It has a myriad of issues: models stretching into nightmare fuel when they take showers, random crashes while trying to display story dialogue, poor implementation of a barely functional active economy, crew needs that cannot be met because the crew obsess over a vending machine when there's a fully functional canteen that is staffed around the clock, instant homing pirates where literally the entire sector targets just your ship because you decide to haul cargo forcing you to pay them all off at once, etc. etc. etc. – Seriously, the issues go on and on. Sometimes a pirate will catch you just before you reach a planet and then you get pulled into combat, but even if you immediately pay off the pirate, you'll over shoot the planet and have to wait until you're in alignment AGAIN sometimes doubling or tripling your travel time. The crew interactions are nonexistent. It's nothing more than paying the hiring agency over and over again to ensure everyone has a matching symbol. As crew level up from doing their jobs, they will randomly gain negative traits and increased needs. The game does not explain this to the player very well which leads to having too high leveled crew and no rooms that can satisfy them. You can only remedy this by forcibly doing “research” to unlock things. It's literally just padding for the basic requirements to even play the game. The final nail in the coffin for me was trying to upgrade my ship. It doesn't display any of the important information such as speed, hull points, or firing arcs. Nothing. It's all guess work. The insult to injury is you cannot even TRADE IN your current ship until you sell it. Combine all of this with a save system where it auto-saves constantly and doesn't let you reload to specific points or and you're left with a recipe for irritation and disappointment.

The game idea of Cosmonautica is great. Trade, fight and take care of the crew. Unfortunately, this game meet these criteria are only minimally. After 10 hours, it is boring. Tasks: There are 4 felt tasks. These are repeated again and again and use up quickly. Trade: Simpel transport goods from A to B. This is even fun at the beginning, but once you fly to the planet that need the goods and these may not be sold... it is very fast frustrating. Fighting: This make me really fun! No joke. This is indeed Simple, yet very entertaining. Crew: Let's put it this way, you have to pay attention to nothing. Select profession, hope the good others profession come, otherwise fire. I'll finish the campaign and then delete the game. 3/5 stars