Interstellaria

Though it's an achievement for one man to have made, Interstellaria is plagued by cumbersome UI design that makes a chore out of micromanagement and a cryptic crossword of the quest log. Compounding the problem is a swarm of bugs, including infinite loading screens and missing quest NPCs, and a main story which is little beyond a fragmented chain of fetch quests. Enemies can be run straight by, while space combat is largely skipable. Full review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHS9iYHI3kY

Disclaimer: I am writing my review on the initial Interstellaria on GOG. Interstellaria is an interesting game, similar to other space sims with a trade component. You fly around with a crew, do quests, and ultimately save the world (not unlike a lot of other games!). Space combat is fairly simple and almost too easy -- I beat most battles using my initial equipment set, and only upgraded because I wanted to beat other ships even *faster*. Ground combat and crew management, on the other hand, was lackluster. Selecting and moving units was a chore, and the auto-functions usually resulted in crew members stopping for no reason at all. There's a whole bunch of other bugs, with the most serious being crew members getting stuck on the spaceship, walls, or even falling through the geometry. Did I feel like I got my money's worth? Yes. Does it a substantial amount of polish? Definitely.

The UI is absolutely abysmal. Map scrolling feels laggy, game ignores key inputs or just refuses to work if you have the wrong side panel open. Very limited options, you can't disable the screen shaking that happens every time you land/lift off a location with your ship. Crew equipment is completely lost on their death. Crew AI is almost non-existent, they will happily burn to death if they stand in or next to a fire, they don't fix anything by themselves. Crew don't always follow orders, sometimes you can order them to attack and they'll run up the the enemy but won't start to attack and just stand there taking damage. Because of this on-site combat can be horribly frustrating, especially with small flying enemies. Loot pickup after combat is a pain, you have to move your ship over every little piece of debris to get anything. Looting on landing sites is even worse, you select your crew and push a loot button and then you wait forever as your crew has to make a back and forth trip for every single piece of loot (and harvest time) on the site, even with the fast movement enabled. Inventory management is terrible, you find way too much useless stuff and have too little space while having 4 different kinds of inventory one kind being the multiple crew member which also have their own item spaces. Another problem is you can't just switch inventory items around, you have to drag an item to a empty slot. The tutorial is unskippable and has to be played on every new game. The characters speech texts can't be skipped nor sped up, dialog is horribly slow because you have to backtrack with every question you ask which at a minimum doubles the amount of time you have to spent talking to people, its horrible. You can't create your own character. Health packs can be used to regain ship armor? The fuck?! Dropped one on my ship to see if it was a placeable item but instead got consumed and the ship got its armor back. This game is playable but it's just a fucking mess.

hey all! my first review here, hope it helps. Interstellaria is a game that i picked up on a whim and a very old promise, one i made to the maker that if he added walruses id play. and damn have i played in the last few days. i have travelled the stars in a rust bucket, collecting people and ships and just messing around. every so often ill bump into story stuff, and ill head in that direction. the story itself is fairly open, with little to no real directions or coordinates as to where to head, only vague little hints. this is very well done, as you dont feel a need to constantly hunt down main quests. i myself have explored suna, human, and whatever that red space is, and i can honestly say i have had my fair share of battles. battles themselves are intense and well varied, with battles ranging from you stomping on the measly ants that the enemy pirate fighters are to cowering in terror as two frigates engage your two corvettes and rip them to shreds. from what ive just said, it must sound good, but the races are where it REALLY shines. the races are diverse and interesting to talk to, from squid men, to tree men, to humans, to freaking robots. its hugely diverse. with all the good there, there is also bad. A LOT OF BAD. bugs are literally everywhere, and one of the first bugs i encountered seriously took away from the experience, literally. i tried equipping a gun onto my first ship and it completely vanished and never returned, same thing with many of my facilities. i had to do 4 new games to get it right fully. it sucked. ive also found some exploits that arent too cheaty, but still do some damage. i wont mention those. Overall interstellaria is a great game with a few major flaws. i highly suggest you pick it up, even with aforementioned flaws, as the developer is working hard at fixing all these bugs day in and day out. thanks.