Offworld Trading Company

You never "own" the game, you only rent a license to buy more DLC. And it doesn't have all of the DLC they're trying to sell you. Unfortunate marketing.

So many DLCs and no option for complete/GotY/ultimate edition (like other stores offer, at a hefty discount). Nickel & dime GOG customers because they can. Easily the worst publisher.

Offworld Trading Company is an interesting game. It is, fundamentally, a competitive basebuilder, but the competitive is very important. The limited number of hexes you're allowed to "own" requires strategic thinking and not a small amount of micro. The automatic market mechanism helps prevent you from entering a death spiral from forgetting some crucial element of your economy (by comparison, consider the similar Surviving Mars, where you can easily say run out of Machine Parts, and now your Machine Parts factory can't function anymore, and your drones can't function anyway, and you're out of money, and...). Games are relatively short and somewhat streamlined. What sets it apart from most base-builders is that it's competitive. While your assaults on other factions are limited to a small number of espionage-style dirty tricks, you're always trying to outcompete the other faction(s) to the goal of buying them out. I found the AI decent (but then I'm the kind of guy who plays games on Normal), but the game is clearly meant to shine in multiplayer, and it does - though I suspect you'll have poor luck finding anyone to play with that isn't your friend. There is a reasonably-well executed single-player campaign including a Risk-style map, but it's clearly secondary. All in all, Offworld Trading Company provides an interesting spin on the basebuilder genre, and executes it well. I also like that each individual game is fairly short, so I don't lose hours and hours to it like many games of this type. I'm not sure what could raise it to 5 stars for me. It's a great game, but somehow just lacks that bit of vital spark that keeps me coming back to it over and over. I do think it's criminally underplayed, though. And don't be put off by all the DLC; absolutely none of it is necessary to have a fun, complete game.

I like this game. It is essentially a base-building simulator on Mars that has you balancing mining, resources, and markets in hope of acquiring enough money to buy out the competition. It's fun for a while, and games are short. The AI is pretty good, and on higher difficulties can micromanage things better than the average player ever could. There is a solid tutorial, and the campaign is fairly decent. I even like the music, and the graphics are suitable for this kind of top-down city-builder game. There are only a few shortcomings. First, this can get boring fast once you realize that you are just following market prices and clicking frantically to buy and sell stuff before your opponents can. Thankfully, the game has a fair amount of tension and competitiveness in the typical skirmish, and you can tweak a number of settings to add variety. It's not the kind of game that's going to keep the average player engaged for days or weeks on end, but it is easy and interesting enough to pick up and play once in a while.