I still play this game every few years. It's one of the first games I remember discovering GOG had cleaned up for modern PCs. There's alot of depth to the ship design and combat that alot of other games that tried to replicate it have fallen short.
First thing off the game wouldn't fullscreen properly with Alt+Enter, and kept only filling part of the screen, then cursor disapeared and I could not get it to come back. Tried disabling desktop scaling with no luck..
I have enjoyed this game in short stints. It has some refreshingly unique mechanics. The combat is difficult to get a hang of though and spoils the experience occasionally.
Space around the generator or steam hubs is precious. Unless you go through a really tedious process to cheese the grid, many buildings will take up significantly more space depending on how the game rounds up the grid. It's done to maintain asthetics at the sacrifice of screwing you out of precious space. If they would just increase housing/worker capacity of these buildings based on how much extra space the building took up then it'd be fine. Scouts carrying precious steam cores who arrive a dreadnought which requies steam cores to enter safely, don't get the option because the cores aren't at your base yet. So they get sent to their death and you also lose the steam cores they're carrying. Very frustrating. Usually these things would be enough for me to flip the table and be done with it, but otherwise this is such a great game with relaxing gameplay I look past it. I usually don't care about sound or music, but this does both well. I love the art and the little bits of writing. It does a good job of creating an interesting backstory without being tedious or on the nose, something that many games try but don't quite get right.
This game's campaign/missions are pretty bland, but it makes up for it in other ways. I really loved the way damage would accumulate on the plane, and you'd actually feel the results of it. Landing a big bomber that is limping to the side due to large holes, having to control it without ailerons, and only one engine. That kind of thing in itself is a fun challenge. I've never played a flight sim as good as this one.
There's a lot of things in this game that are fairly non-intuitive that are important to know, else you'll get ruined. Why did this particular super powerful thing show up and kill me? Oh it is something to do with some hidden game logic because I killed too many of this one thing. I can appreciate that they were trying to make you consider the consequences of your actions and balance your survival techniques, but they take it to such an extreme that I'm constantly having to look stuff up. Not my kind of survival game. It's like watching a movie with non-nonsensical plot twists.
