Cosmonautica

Simply isnt done in the sense it needs to be polished. Randomizing isnt that well. (had to restart game 8 times till i got decent crew) Missions dont align with where you are.. it means you'll be fined up the but or have recheck everything every time.. big research gaps.. Realy wished these things would be done correctly than it would had a good flow.. Yeah and i only cam to write the review because it crashed. Did buy on sale though.. :D

I bought the game yesterday and until now, I really like. It has a very lovely made look and feel. There are little eastereggs everywhere (at least in the german version). I also like the micromanagement of the crew and the trading system, which works very well. But it got a few bugs. For example: - If I rank up my hacker, hes not a hacker anymore. At least no hacking functions work anymore. If I restart the game, it works again. - In the middle of a fight my shield officer takes a crap, then showers and then.....returns to his station...and sleeps. Yes, hes really relaxed. But all in all its a fun game. And after the bugs get fixed, it will be even better. Everyone, who likes this kind of game, should try it. Its a bargain.

Has basic combat / trade / crew management gameplay. Lacks tooltips for some parts of the game. Crew relationship seems very basic, if they have same interest they get along otherwise they hate each other. Crew management doesn't seem to matter much unless you do not provide enough room for all 8 crew members. Even then the crew can still limp along. UI is pretty bad for PC. On full screen and 1920 1080 a bit of some text is cut off on the right side. A lot of swiping and dragging which makes sense for a tablet game but not if you use a mouse. Can't really zoom out well enough. Tech tree / research is linear in the sense that there is no reason to not research everything. Not much customization available to crew/ships. No many ships to choose from. Traveling between solar systems is a painful experience because you're put in a travel screen until 2 in game day passes where you cannot even navigate menus. No reason to do a repeat run. Portraits fail to load 10% of the time. Game crashes quite frequently (In 7 hours play I crashed between 6 to 10 times).

Look it's basically mobile device game ported for PC. If mobile ports bother you, it is probably not a game for you right of the bat. Cosmonautica has casual and slow gameplay, rather typical for mobile games. If you take this as relaxing casual game you might have fun, just don't go in expecting complex challenging gameplay, space sim or management as Cosmonautica has neither of that. The systems it has in place are entertaining - for a while, but they just don't lead to anything more complex. For example you need to research more advanced facilities for your ship and upgrades for them. You do it by assigning your scientists to research certain elements. Some research require more than one element to unlock and elements have different tiers (4 or 5 iirc), where higher ones require more time to research. Seems like pretty complex research tree, right? Well until you realise you (clearly) just should research all tier I elements, than tier II, III and so on. That way you get reasonably fast stream of unlocks and upgrades going while your scientists level up to research higher tiers faster. So in reality you have clearly linear progression which is masquerading as complex tree . And so on with other game mechanics (your crew 'management' basically boils down to assigning their shifts and levelling them once in a while). I can see Cosmonautica as ok CASUAL game on tablet to play during commuting to work (or playing at work instead you know.. work) but on PC I think it is sub-par. It's slow gameplay and lack of depth really putting it down in my eyes, although if you are looking for casual game like this and are not bothered by some mobile game-esque design features, you can easily add one star to my rating (and maybe another one for the absence of freemium crap). For me on PC it firm 2* . P.S.: Imho it's really not fair to compare this game to likes of FTL as it's clearly not what the game is trying to do.

As many people mentioned before this game is a mix out of several genres. It's a combination of FTL, trading sim and a SIM'S game. The game is in the beginning realy enjoyable but when you proceed a bit there are three major flaws to the game: 1. It needs really a patch to fix the bugs. Game crashes from time to time and some of the controls are influenced by bugs, that means scrolling wont work properly or other little control flaws like repairing your ship wont work untli you bought another item at the shipyard. 2. The variaty of ships you kan buy gives an ilusion of possibilitis. You can buy 10 different ships but with no joke there are only 3 ships that reallly make sense and these don't change with the way you play the game. IF you are a space trade or an galactic headhunter, doesn't matter. THe ships that are usefull stay the same. The rest of the ships are playable but you will soon understand what i mean by there are actually only three ships. 3. Headhunter missions glitches the game smallest bounty gives the most reward. IF you are looking for money through out the game you may think that the easyest way to earn money is by trading. But here you are wrong. The easyest way is to hunt down the targets with the lowest bounty, and every time you do that your target will surrender with an offer to give you several tenthousend credits. THere is no other way that makes it possible to earn that much money in that short amount of time. Really pissed me off becaus after an hour of headhunting i had so much money that it did'nt bother me anymore through out the game Except of these big flaws the game is really enjoyable and kan keep you playing for hours. Campaign as well as sandboxmode are fun to play. I like this game also it has these 3 Flaws i mentioned before. So with a little bugfixing and maybe (that would be really nice) a content patch, this game would always be rated 5 stars, but as it is now its only 3 stars worth and thats kind of a nice gesture.