Posted on: June 2, 2024
shopt
Verified ownerGames: 312 Reviews: 5
Intersting core, infuriating QoL
If I had to describe this game in one senctence, it would be a puzzle/adventure game disguised as a survival city-builder. The core premise of the game is interesting, but there's a lot to dislike about it. To start with the good, it's a great resource management game. It costs resources just to survive and move around. You have to balance physical resources, workforce, space, and time. Opening sectors too soon can doom you. Growing population too fast can doom you. Growing population too slow can doom you. There are lots of ways to fail, some predictable, and some surprising, and I mean surprising in a bad way. This game is very prone to death spirals, where you get into some problem and there's no way out without loading an earlier save. There's a heap of things to dislike: * The exploration choices are the same every time, and in game it doesn't tell you the outcome. So either save scum, look up the outcomes on the internet, or just live with "surprise, you picked wrong!". The game should either have some RNG or just tell you what each choice does. * Not great QoL. You will constantly have to micromonage your little ships, your resource thresholds, and waste management. * In game information is stingy. You don't get hard numbers about the stats of many buildings. * Lots of undocumented behaviour quirks on buildings. * Many stat screens you expect from a city builder in the 2020s are missing. No production surplus/deficit summary. No workforce allocation screen. * For a game about resource scarcity, it's a bit too easy to create a resource positive feedback loop, removing most of the time pressure. * Generally it seems to throw surprises at you that you should have been doing something about a few hours ago. Overall I was invested enough to finish the game, but was getting annoyed with the busywork distracting from the meaningful gameplay choices. This game made me want to go play Frostpunk or Factorio instead.
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