Space Haven

Highly playable and enjoyable game so far, however... controls are horrible; highlighting and selecting objects can be a pain. At this time you cannot rotate the view which makes it nearly impossible to do simple tasks. Good luck if you want to select a character where one is unconscious, and one is idle on the same tile. Anyway, the game is in alpha for a long time now, lots of work needs to be done under the hood, let's be patient and hopefully the devs can deliver.

I find the game very hard to put down once you start. Some say it's too confusing without a tutorial, I had no problem figuring it out, it's half the fun actually. The little people that make up your crew have the most unique personalities. I had a character in one game that just made me laugh the whole time. He was accident prone, set fires as he worked sometimes, but he did not work very hard compared to his shipmates. He would stay up late at night and eat two meals instead of one. The crew members have relations with each other. In one game two of my best hated each other, eventually a fight broke out, a real bloody brawl. That was a very promising game as I had made good progress but I ended up losing that one when a fire destroyed practically everything. I now know to open the airlock before the fire consumes the whole ship. So you may have to do a couple of run thru's before you figure out everything. And anything can happen. I lost my shuttle more than once. A pirate ship and a friendly jumped in, I was too weak to fight so I payed. When my shuttle went over to the pirate ship with my payment the friendly ship boarded the pirate ship and killed them all. The pirate ship became a derelict, but my shuttle was stuck over there and I had no way to retrieve it, game over. I also lost the shuttle trying to jump before the pirate ship jumped in, but the damm shuttle would not stay in its bay. Its supposed to lock when you prepare to jump, so that may be a bug. So the game is still in development, I've seen some good updates since I bought it, but it is already very playable and fun as it stands now. Oh, and I had almost forgotten how good pixel art can look. The art style is very nice in this one.

If you like building space ships and managing your crew, Space Haven got you covered. I played around 20h with the alpha 10 version and while it is still in early development, there is already enough content to last you several hours or even more if your creativity allows for it. Honorable mention to the soundtrack which fits the game extremely well. Perhaps it is not a five star game yet considering its development stage, but it definetely has the potential and I didn't want to give 4 stars because I had a lot of fun even with the early version and I will look forward to new updates.

While there's still a lot to do, this is one of the best space exploration games I've ever had the pleasure of playing (and I've been in this "vital industry" for about 30 years). The indie approach is very suitable and the graphics perfectly match the game's purpose. I believe that now you only need to move forward on two points: (1) campaigns and storytelling and (2) creation of more gadgets to use the characters. Oh, I almost forgot, more evil alien species, please! That aside, great job, guys!

The review title sums up the dev's original vision for this game during the initial crowdfunding campaign. I haven't played Rimworld myself, but I've watched plenty of people playing it, so I think I have a rough idea of what he meant. I've been playing this game on and off for almost two years now, and while the pace of updates can feel a little slow at times, it is both stable and noticeably in active development. Every new alpha release adds some extensive new features. Off the top of my hat, some of the major additions since I first started playing include: - a whole new race of robot enemies that can infest both derelicts and your own ships - new weapons for your crew, and the addition of under-barrel addons for alternative fire modes - pilotable fighter craft (and flying enemies to combat with them, alongside the hazard of random asteroids) - a black market trading system - a new quest mechanic to transport cargo containers or prisoners, build a new starbase, free a slave or eradicate hostile factions from a star system - the wider world map no longer being as static as it used to be. Now NPC factions can battle their enemies and expand their sphere of influence without the player needing to be present in the same area. And while not directly related to the game, I've come to love the community in its Discord server, where the dev often pops up himself to answer some questions and/or give enigmatic hints about upcoming features. I have noticed a few bugs during my ~400 hours of gametime at the time of writing, but nothing game-breaking and only one abrupt crash to desktop that I can remember. The vast majority were minor glitches that disappeared after simply saving and reloading the game.