The Long Journey Home

Has a nice kind of retro-vibe and a good exploration-based playstyle. Seems to be loaded with easter-eggs and references, and generally quite funny... until your crew dies because you made a horrible mistake :) Flight-physics seem to be very realistic, most people will need some time to get used to it. If you have some prior Kerbal-experience though, you'll get it immideatly.

This game executes the idea of orbital space flight thorugh solar systems brilliantly, as well as the lander missions to planets, gas giants and moons. Crew options are interesting and amusing at times. The ship and lander options okay, but could use some tweaking. Overall there is a good balance to managing the ship, crew, orbital flights and travel, as well as lander missions, it is all just enough to feel like a simulation of space exploration. The game lets you go to dangerous planets as well as safe ones, which can be exciting and challenging, where as other space games, especially simulation ones, just don't let you go to dangerous planets or places. The game and the players chances of success however is too random, preventing much progress beyond the first couple of galexies towards home, even on the easiest difficulty. The gameplay loop feels too tedious for the small amount of progress rewarded for the efforts, it would feel better if at least a decent distance was achieved towards home before everyone dies and you start again. It perhaps needed a bit more tweaking prior to release. If you are after a challenging experience, as opposed to a relaxed one, then perhaps the settings are correct for that. However I like a good challeng myself so my game experience last longer, and I still argue that it feels your chances of success are still left to much to luck for even a challening experience to be 'successful'. Equipment modules are randomly damaged, and it is impossible to repair them yourself, even with an 'engineer' crew member, forcing you to rely on space stations to repair this for you... that is, if you have the credits. It would have been good if some sort of maintenance on modules was possible, either through crafting or use of resouces.

This game is made by people who clearly have a deep and abiding love of Star Control 2 and similar games. They also clearly have a deep and abiding failure to understand any of what made such games good. I love the ideas in this game - even the ideas behind some of the game mechanics. The Newtonian travel across the star systems, using gravity wells, is great idea - except totally inconsistent with the movement in asteroids and tactical combat: non-Newtonian and non-intuitive. You can play this game and do well at it, but you will need to be exactingly careful and slow the whole way through. You cannot ever relax. The 100th planet landing is just as frustrating and difficult as the first. The crew is drawn from a white progressive's social circle. There is zero imagination involved, and zero idea that some human beings exist outside the white progressive's experience. For example: no Chinese, and no Tom Swift. These are not believable astronauts, they are political statements. The game has a huge hard drive footprint with no justification based on the data being tossed around. Evidence of technical incompetence. Lander controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a game - and I've gotten pretty good at using them. I bought a heat shield,tried landing on a volcanic planet, none of the mineral or wreckage indicators were visible - they were yellow and red on a yellow and red background. My 1st mission had a time limit of 200 seconds and was in a star system I couldn't even see. Of course the limit passed before I ever found it. I wanted to heal a broken arm. I expect: select crew member, click medpack. No! Clicking crew member auto-uses the most recently colleced alien item: she eats the alien plant. WTF? It is not possible that they did any acceptance testing on this. At no point anywhere in this game did they stop and check how normal people would expect to interact with it or expect to play it. If they all lose their jobs, they deserve it.

Well this game could have been great if not for the flight controls being a very steep learning curve. Also the option to use a game pad just did'nt quite work or help either. Then having no voice acting and having to read all communicating made it not worth the effort to master the flight controls. With voice acting and better control this would be a really great game, however I played games in the late 1980's similar to this, so in 2022 for me its a no.

I got this game out of curiosity, and found it to be a lot of fun. I mostly prefer the space and planet exploration, but without the alien involvement you will never get home. A lot of strategy and luck in order to win, but it is the journey that makes this game great.